My life story begins not in the New Zealand city where I was born and about which I remember nothing at all, but 23 years later, on the rainy night of December 7, 1908, which was the night when I faced my first American audience.
‘RIGOLETTO – with a new Gilda, Mademoiselle Frances Alda. With Caruso, Amato, Didur and Madam Homer.’
That was how the papers announced my debut.
Not that Gilda and I were new to each other. I had sung the role of the hunchback’s daughter many times – at La Monnaie in Brussels, at Convent Garden (also with Caruso – strange prophecy), in Warsaw, in Buenos Aires, and – highest honour of them all – in Parma, at the annual Verdi festival.
But what set this performance apart from all others before and after it, was that the Metropolitan and I were meeting for the first time. I hadn’t the ghost of an idea of it then, but in the 22 years ahead of me its draughty stage was to become as familiar as my own drawing room. Its affairs, from the chronic toothache of the eldest stagehand and the squeaky high note of the trombone player to the weakness of certain of its trustees for certain types of singers and premiere danseuses, were to form my horizon. All the feuds, jealousies, successes, failures, envies, ambitions and despairs that can breed in the fertile soil of the world’s biggest company of operatic temperaments were to season my daily life with joy, tragedy, bitterness or humour.
