In 1880, after her mother and beloved sister died, Nellie Melba became responsible for running the household. David Mitchell had opposed music as a career for his daughter, and the future opera star’s rise began in a family that expected its eldest daughter to serve it.
Historian Leigh Boucher said Melba’s story involved “negotiating gendered restrictions in celebrity culture.” Those pressures came from home, marriage and the elite opera world she worked to enter—not from some abstract stage drama.
A voice under family rule
Born Helen Porter Mitchell in 1861, Melba was the eldest of 10 surviving children. Her father, David Mitchell, was a building contractor whose fortunes were rising and a conservative Presbyterian who opposed music as a career for his daughter. Her mother encouraged her early musical interests. At eight, Melba performed publicly for the first time; an audience of 700 demanded three encores. Boucher said, “She already had a reputation as this growing colonial gem.”
Mitchell sent her to a boarding school for young women. Boucher called it “more of a finishing school rather than a robust, rounded education” and said Melba was expelled for misbehaviour. She later studied music and received a broader education at Presbyterian Ladies College. After her mother and sister died, the family moved to Mackay, Queensland. Mitchell ran a sugar mill, and Melba had to run the household.
Melba joined Mackay’s amateur music scene and married Charles Nesbitt Frederick Armstrong in 1882. Armstrong was the son of an Irish baronet who had been sent to the colonies for being a troublemaker. The couple had a son shortly afterwards. Boucher described Armstrong as a wild man with aristocratic heritage and said Melba may have escaped one patriarch only to choose another. She raised their child mostly on her own and rarely performed.
The price of entering elite culture
Back in Melbourne, Melba trained in the bel canto style with a new vocal coach and made her professional debut at Melbourne Town Hall in 1884. Her father later financed her singing classes and took her to Europe, where he was working; Armstrong travelled with them. Boucher said accounts described Melba arriving at breakfast on the boat to London with bruises on her face, and that Armstrong tried to exert control over her during the journey.
Her 1886 audition at Covent Garden went badly. Boucher said Melba was abused by her husband, hampered by nerves and lacked the right clothes or accent. In Paris, she studied with Mathilde Marchesi while caring for her son and barely scraping by. Marchesi recognised her talent, improved her vocal technique, taught her European etiquette and encouraged her to adopt a stage name. Boucher called the change “not really a rebranding, I think, but a rebirth.”
Melba made her opera debut in Brussels in 1887 and established herself at Covent Garden by 1890. Armstrong used her affair with Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, as grounds for divorce and took their son to Texas, where he had relocated. Melba didn’t see her son for 12 years. “She was not destroyed by the divorce, and she was not destroyed by the loss of her son. In fact, she sunk herself into work,” Boucher said.
Applause, work and a brutal end
Melba returned to Australia for a successful tour in 1902. Crowds filled Melbourne’s streets to welcome her. Boucher said her success in European elite culture showed Australia was “not a crass colony, but in fact a place of modernity.” One source described travelling with her as like “travelling through France with Marie-Antoinette.”
Back in London, after the press claimed she had been replaced, Melba stood in the wings and out-sang a rival at the Royal Opera House. Boucher said “an emerging celebrity culture just got the better of her.” Melba regained her place at the top of opera, won the royal family’s affection and had her own dressing room at Covent Garden.
During World War I, Melba raised money for the war effort with a US tour and reunited with her son. The tour was plagued by accidents; Boucher said Melba became convinced Germans were targeting her because she was useful to wartime morale. By the 1920s, she’d decided to retire, and her many farewell concerts gave rise to the phrase “doing a Melba.”
Melba died suddenly in Sydney in 1931 from septicaemia. Boucher said that, in a time without antibiotics, the “facial surgery” reported by the press was probably an early face lift. “A brutal end to an incredible life,” she said. Fans and newspapers around the world mourned Melba; the New York Herald Tribune called her “the last of those soprano empresses of song.”