Emma Calvé and Queen Victoria were friends. Emma sang every season at Covent Gardens in London and would be invited to court. In Chapter eleven of "My Life" Emma speaks very fondly of Queen Victoria. " She was impressive, dominating, a real presence, in spite of her short stature and plain exterior." Emma claims and goes on to say that the Queen used to call her a child of nature because of Emma's inability to remember the rules of etiquette. Emma recounts how it was through these performances at Windsor Castle that she met many interesting personalities including the Czar and Czarina of Russia, the King of Bavaria, the King of Sweden and Greece and the Empress Eugenie.
Emma also recalls in her book that she was accidently locked in her room before her first performance at the castle. There had been a death of one of the staff and she had been forgotten. They only noticed Emma missing when she did not show up on stage for her performance. Emma also performed at Balmoral. The Queen's fondness for Emma Calvé is still on display in the Victoria Room at Windsor Castle. The Queen had a bust of Emma sculpted by the Countess Théodora de Gleiken with Emma assuming the role of Santuzza in "Cavalleria Rusticana".
Emma was known to be a good friend of Jean Richepin. Jean (1849-1926) was a french poet, novelist and dramatist. I have not been able to get much information to date about how close their friendship was but will keep digging. I have been able to find some great info on Jean though, through a fabulous website www.jeanrichepin.free.fr. It is said that no woman could resist Mr. Richepin, who was of a bohemian nature. Eric Mie, a wonderful French artist in his own right, is a great fan of Richepin, and I believe the author of the Richepin website I have recommended.
It doesn't surprise me that Emma would be friends of such a wonderful character as Richepin. They were both very outspoken individuals and deeply involved in the dramatic arts. It would have been a hoot to be able to sit in on one of their conversations.
I would also like to thank Eric Mie for all his work in bringing together the life of Jean and wish him great success in his career.
My favourite Richepin quote: " One may live without bread, not without roses." Now what girl wouldn't swoon over that?!
Emma had the pleasure of meeting Swami Vivekananda during one of her U.S. tours. She seems to have been quite impressed by the Swami's abilities and remained a friend and admirer through her life. She speaks about him for several pages in her autobiography "My Life" ( pages 185-194) which is surprising as she does not give too many other people this much attention in her book. She doesn't talk about Jules Bois at all, and he is acknowledged in many circles as being very close to Emma for a considerable length of time. Vivekananda also refers to her in his writings. There is a great website that carries the writings of Vivekananda.(www.vivekananda.net) It is well known that Emma was very generous with her money and in this manner of generosity invites Vivekananda as her guest on a trip to Egypt, Turkey and Greece. They are accompanied by Jules Bois, Miss McLeod, Father Hyacinthe ( Mr. Loyson) and his wife. Father Hyacinthe left the priesthood to marry and there is a story that Emma and his new wife got into an argument over this fact. It seems Mrs. Loyson made a comment about Emma sleeping with Jules Bois out of wedlock with Emma replying that at least she had not stolen a beloved priest from his people!
I just spent Friday and Saturday rereading Emma's book "My Life" 1922. It never ceases to amaze me when rereading some book or article all the information I have missed initially. I have to admit I enjoyed it much more this time around. I remember feeling for her a bit the first time I read her autobiography. Her writing skills left a lot to be desired as far as I was concerned. This time round I was less harsh and much more aware of the reality of her skills. To find the time to even write the book should be enough to impress, and I must admit, having tried my hand at writing this past summer, I have acquired an empathy and a deep respect for anyone who attempts to put pen to paper. It is not easy!
I am putting a timeline together to be able to decipher when Emma was in many of the places she speaks about. I am interested in her year long recovery from a terrible incident in her life and also the week she spent in Italy waiting for a letter to arrive that contained information that could end hope in an area of her private life. Emma stays away from anything that may allude to her personal life, she never mentions Jules Bois, even when she speaks about the trip with Swami Vivikananda to Turkey and Egypt, where Jules is known to have travelled with them. Emma does give enough information, I hope, to be able to piece together some idea of her personal life. I am confused by her not acknowledging knowing the Czar and Czarina of Russia. She doesn't even admit to meeting them. She says she had been summoned to the palace to sing but was placed behind a screen separating herself from her audience. I have to believe that she may not have known them. She does not have a problem telling us about her relationships with other famous or Royal people, why would this one not be added if she had known them on a more personal level. Also....... something very interesting is she admits in the book that her spiritual life was the most important aspect of her life, but she never offers any idea of the foundation of her spiritual beliefs. There is a reference to her putting a crucifix in the hand of a deceased operatic friend when he passed away on stage during a performance,and there is a cross over one of the beds in the Chateau de Cabrieres ( her home). She also lets us know she considered Vivekananda a spiritual advisor, one of two great souls that she had encountered. She leaves us wondering who may have been the other.( she does say one or two)
All in all this woman is a powerhouse. Raising $100,000 at a fundraiser in New York to help in the war and she has also been given credit for helping to convince the US to enter the war to help free France.
I love this photo. A cropped photo of Emma which may be of her laying on the grass near her Chateau de Cabrieres or a studio shot. Her beauty is undeniable, her heart shaped face full of sorrow at this moment in time. One can't help but wonder what she could have been so unhappy about. Unless you were in Emma's skin one can only speculate on such matters. Her mascara runs down her cheeks as she peers into the lens of the camera. I'm wondering who she would have trusted enough to allow to take her picture at such a vulnerable time.( see photo on this blog on right hand side of blog page) On November 2, I discovered this picture( shown above) and of Emma with no mascara running down her cheek. Although this is still my favourite photo of her, it has obviously been cropped and toyed with to suggest things that may not have been so. It is a good lesson in understanding that not everything you see or read on the internet is fact. We must be very careful to dig deep when looking for truth and have several confirmations from various sources to back up our stories. So I have left the original and the tampered photographs for you to see. I'll be more careful next time.
When visiting Rennes le Chateau last spring I paid my six(?) euros and was admitted to the mini museum of the church. There was a wonderful collection of church relics, wax figures of Berenger himself and his faithful servant Marie Denaraud, and a collection of personal articles that had belonged to Francois Berenger Sauniere. What was surprising to me were copies of Emma Calvé's touring schedules and a photo of her in costume as a nun. As I have said earlier there is no proof to date that these two wonderful characters ever met, and one has to wonder if these items ever belonged to Berenger or if they had been added to this collection as an after thought or were intended to provoke thought. Either way, I took some photos and have added them to this blog. There have been several attempts at linking Emma and Berenger including the infamous heart in cement with the inscription E. Calvet 1891 found at the lovers font in Rennes le Bains. It has since been chipped out of the stone that it had been poured into and remains another mystery in the story of Berenger Sauniere.
This is one of the best summaries I have read on the internet about Emma Calvé. It is from the Fédération du Patrimoine website. Enjoy!
On the occasion of the 50th death anniversary of the singer Emma Calvé, whose family lived in Bourg-la-Reine, we wished to share with our readers our admiration for this star of the grande époque. Rosa Emma Calvé, born on August 15, 1858 at Decazeville had a scintillating career as a singer in the 1900s, when the opera had reached its zenith. Formerly a salesgirl for gloves, at Millau, she could neither read music nor play the piano. With hard work and a strong determination to progress in her efforts, she very quickly got rid of her accent, which was marked with sonorités rourgates*, in order to develop a voice of prima donna assoluta, which she devoted almost entirely to singing, notably in the role of Bizet's Carmen, which she was to play more than 1300 times! She became the driving force behind famous composers such as Massenet and Reynaldo Hahn. A grateful nation awarded her with the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. As a pioneer of the impressive shows in the style of Barnum, touring the world from Paris to New York via Rome, she became the idol of public passion and won the admiration of the most famous personalities of the period. Queen Victoria considered her to be a friend and invited her to Windsor. She even had a marble bust of her effigy sculpted to adorn a vestibule in her castle.After a banquet, Grand Duke Nicholas, without the least hesitation, spread out his fur-coat in front of her, on the snow, setting the example for the dignitaries of his escort so that she could walk to her vehicle without getting her feet wet! * intonations from the region of Rouergue.
Driven by an insatiable curiosity she studied spiritualism, Yoga, Hinduism and Buddhism. One finds her immoderate passion reflected in a baroque, medieval castle in Cabrières, which swallowed up a good part of her wealth. She is believed to have had several love-affairs; however, after a marriage to an Italian tenor, which ended in divorce, the only true love of her life was Henri Cain. This brilliant young man, who belonged to the smart set of Paris, was a writer and portrait painter who eventually married Emma's partner-singer in Massenet's Navarraise. If the name of Emma Calvé sounds familiar to some of our fellow citizens, it is because they can take pride in the fact that she who was called "the greatest diva of the Belle Epoque" was part of our local history. In fact, after the tiring tours in the United States, undertaken with the dual intention of convincing the Americans to join the war, as well as to collect funds for the Red Cross, an exhausted Emma Calvé came to Bourg-la-Reine in 1914, to take rest at her mother Léonie's place, at 2 rue Brun (formerly known as rue du Potager). In 1919, on her return from a course of treatment at Contrexeville, she stayed for a while at rue Dispan in l'Hay-les-Roses, in a convalescent home run by Dr. Gaston Maillard whose son was a pharmacist in Bourg-la-Reine. This woman of strong personality liked to think that even her dog knew how to sing! Nonetheless, she never forgot her modest beginnings; striking workers near Porte d'Orleans, who stopped a tramcar in which she was travelling, were taken by surprise when she encouragingly yelled out to them, "I too am the daughter of a worker!"
Emma Calvé died on January 6, 1942 following a hepatic illness. Two days before her death a radio journalist from the Office de radiodiffusion managed to record her last words: "It is time to leave, I have no strength left." She was buried in the cemetery of Millau, her grave marked by a simple tombstone, forgotten by all.... It was at Bourg-la-Reine that Emma Calvé faced her most tragic experience, with the dying of her nephew Elie, the son of her brother Adolphe who lived at 27 Avenue Galois. The young man died on July 2, 1929, felled by a stroke the very moment he heard that he had been awarded the prize for the best actor, by the Conservatoire de Paris, for his role as the "natural son" of Diderot. In order to prevent the body from being transferred to the morgue the doctor present certified the death to have taken place due to "serious illness".The actor was therefore transported to L'Hôpital de la Pitié. In her memoirs entitled "Sous tous les ciels, J'AI CHANTE", Emma writes: "..........Cruel Grief. Paris, July 2, 1929. My nephew, my son, my child, because I was his second mother, has just been taken away from us by a jealous God. He left home at noon, filled with hope, to compete at the Conservatory. While kissing me he said: 'You'll see, godmother, what a lovely first prize I'm going to bring you. I, too, shall be an artiste. Do not come to the hall, neither you nor mother, you will make me nervous.' Looking at his mother and sending her a flying kiss, he said, 'I take you with me in my heart.' At 3 o'clock we were informed that he was dead! He died of an embolism in the brain, the very moment his master informed him of his success. Died of emotion, died of joy! The cries, the tears of his poor parents: the mother filled with horror, the father utterly dismayed. Words cannot describe this catastrophe. Our only child, our only joy, he who was so good and so handsome, to see him never again! My voice has left with him. I feel I will henceforth never be able to sing again......."
Born in Aurillac (Cantal) on July 20, 1904, Elie - an extremely sensitive boy - was, for a while, treated by the psychiatrist Babinski. A friend of Cornelissen (Dutch revolutionary journalist who lived in Bourg-la-Reine), he wrote poems for Le Bleuet - the magazine of Lycée Lakanal. He was admitted to the Conservatory of Paris in October 1928. His master Mr. Leitner as well as the renowned artiste Mademoiselle Bartet had predicted a brilliant career for him. In the calm cemetery of Bourg-la-Reine, the tombstone of the one who shared the same fate as Molière's, is marked by the words: "Do not grieve for me, I died out of joy." His father and his mother were laid to rest close to him. Bibliography : - Contrucci Jean, Emma CALVE, la Diva du siècle. - Girard Georges, Emma CALVE, la cantatrice sous tous les ciels. - Calvé Emma, Sous tous les ciels, J'AI CHANTE - Chaplain Philippe, "Emma CALVE", Bourg-la-Reine Magazine, February 1992. - Cussac Jean, Souvenirs d'Elie CALVE, December 1935. Interviews : - Annie BESNIER, historian, l'Hay-les-Roses. - Suzanne DISPAN, friend of Emma Calvé, l'Hay-les-Roses. - Marcelle ROLLET, former Secretary to the Mayor, Bourg-la-Reine. - Suzanne SIMONA, friend of Marguerite PUECH, mother of Elie CALVE, Bourg-la-Reine. [Photo]
My interest in Emma Calvé started several years ago after watching Henry Lincoln's documentary on the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau and its enigmatic priest Berenger Sauniere. There was a very small snippet in the documentary about this woman Emma Calvé, (Rosa Emma Calvet) a world famous opera singer from France, who may have had some form of relationship with the priest Francois Berenger Sauniere.( There is no proof to date that they even knew each other) Drawn to the story and the possibility that Emma was a part of the whole Rennes-le-Chateau mystery, I took it upon myself to do a little digging, and eventually ended up visiting Rennes-le-Chateau, Millau, Mirepoix, Carcassonne and points in between. This blog will bring you on one not so famous woman's journey into the life of a quite famous woman. You will meet other woman and men who are also fascinated by Emma and her life, and I will keep you up to date on my findings.
