The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  These are the words of someone who has long lost touch with reality. The truth was otherwise. In those late sixties she cultivated Sullivan just as she did Clay and Julius Benedict because she was contemplating a dramatic change of direction. It began to form in her mind that she should cross the chasm that separated the amateur from the professional. She would open an Academy of Singing.

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  There was in Victorian England an enormous and apparently unquenchable interest in choral music of all kinds. A pious and churchgoing public was still in the full grip of oratoriomania, which had begun with Handel in the previous century and showed no sign of abating. The year she met Harry there was a representative newspaper account of a concert organized in Bristol: “The Harmonic Union performed the greater part of Judas Maccabeus . . . under the able direction of Mr. Philip J. Smith. The whole of the music was sung by members of the Society, both the solos and choruses, which speaks well for the continued prosperity of the Society. The body of the hall was nearly filled by the vocal and instrumental members, leaving but a limited space for visitors.”

  This happy scene, in which members of the public were mere visitors or spectators, was often repeated in London and throughout the provinces. Choirs were huge. On even average occasions at Crystal Palace or provincial festivals the audience could count on an orchestra and chorus of more than a thousand. The music critic Ernest Walker, who was born the year Georgina conceived her idea of opening her own school of music, described this hunger for the English form of oratorio and how it skewed the works of composers:

  They set, with apparently absolute indiscrimination, well nigh every word of the Bible; and when they were not writing oratorios of their own, they were still making them out of the mangled remains of other men’s music. Operas of Handel, masses of Haydn, instrumental music of Mozart and Beethoven—all were fish to the net of this insatiable oratorio-demanding public; and most English composers devoted the greater part of their energies to satisfying it in one form or another. From the middle of the 18th century down to the renascence which is the work of men still in their prime, English music is a darkness relieved by the wandering lights of talents that in happier circumstances might have been geniuses.

  It was into this darkness that Georgina wished to plunge. Two things came together to push her plans forward. The first may have been a startling act of chance, or it may have been sublime opportunism. She met Sir William Alexander, who was Attorney General to the Prince of Wales. There was a very slight family connection, for as a young man Alexander had been of great assistance to the Thomas family when Morgan’s sister and her young husband had been drowned in the Pyrenees on a honeymoon boating trip. The lawyer, who happened to be on vacation in the same region, had handled all the legal problems arising out of the accident. This was enough for Georgina to describe him as “a dear friend,” though this tragedy took place when she was nine. In fact, in another part of her Mémoires, she had to be prompted by the medium Desbarolles even to remember the death of her aunt. As Georgina discovered, Alexander, now laden with honors, was charged by the Earl Marshal with some reorganization of the College of Arms. With the artless energy for which she was famous, she asked him to make a place for Harry when one should become available. Her own interest in heraldry stood as guarantee for what must have seemed to Alexander a long shot. Captain Weldon, as he had taken to calling himself at the Garrick Club in London, was not armigerous, had little formal education, was a man who had sold his commission after only two years in the 18th Hussars, and lived more than two hundred miles from London in a terrace cottage. He had never before evinced the slightest interest in genealogy.

  The Duke of Norfolk was sounded out and proved unsympathetic to Harry’s candidature. This was hardly surprising (she told her French readers the reason for this was that Harry was not a Catholic, but it is not difficult to think of other objections). Then a strange thing happened. Alexander completed the work for which he had been commissioned and, when offered a £500 fee for his services, waived it in return for the favor she had asked. After some hasty coaching from Georgina, William Henry Weldon was appointed Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, with rooms in the exquisite seventeenth-century College building below St. Paul’s. He succeeded the immensely scholarly Cockayne. The new Garter king of arms was Albert Woods, who was knighted in November 1869 and continued as Garter until his death in 1904.

  This was a privileged and select club to which Harry had found himself admitted, for in addition to the grant of arms that was the bread and butter of the job, the Pursuivants and Heralds represented the sovereign at foreign investitures. During the last three years of his tenure, Cockayne had been to Portugal, Russia, and Italy, and Woods (as Lancaster Herald) to Denmark, Belgium, and Austria. The post carried a small honorarium but immense kudos: Harry was nominally a member of the court. Of the society that Morgan had so desperately wished to join, Harry was now an honored record keeper and custodian. The man whose correspondence had been answered by Morgan’s butler ten years earlier was now besought by families ten times higher in the land than a mere Treherne. Georgina’s pleasure in the appointment was focused on one point, which may have been her purpose all along. Henceforth the Weldons must live in London in accommodation suitable to their position.

  The second impetus for an academy of singing originated in Beaumaris. Harry’s godmother had a friend, Mrs. Jones, a rector’s wife in the remote parish of Llangwyfan in Denbighshire. The Reverend John Owen Jones and his wife had ten children, of whom one, seventeen-year-old Gwendolyn, was in their opinion possessed of a wonderful voice. Mrs. Jones went begging for advice to Beaumaris and found to her astonishment that the answer to her prayers was right there in the town—none other than the highly connected and prestigious “musical oracle,” Mrs. Weldon. Introductions were effected and Georgina reviewed the problem with characteristic aplomb. “I knew all the singing teachers in vogue—Benedict, Deacon, Campana, Pinsutti, Vera, Randegger. They were all my devoted admirers. My word was their command, and they would have gone to any trouble to have the honour of accompanying me.”

  This was astounding news for Mrs. Jones and the nervy Gwendolyn. What they brought to Beaumaris was a dream, the faintest of hopes, a cry from the very depths of obscurity. Nowhere could be more hidden away from society than Llangwyfan, and yet now, suddenly, they found their lives bathed in light. One did not have to know too much about London music circles not to know that between them the men Georgina mentioned so casually were at the heart of public music education and had as their private clients some of the greatest names in opera. And could they really help Gwendolyn? Georgina left them in no doubt. Something could be easily arranged if the trembling ingenue could be brought up to scratch. She set the young singer a regime, of practicing only a few notes over and over, while she herself set off for a spa trip to the Rhine. When they met again, Georgina remarked loftily, “I had gained a great deal. She had become aware of her own defects.” The rectory at Llangwyfan was further convulsed when Mrs. Weldon began to muse that she herself might be persuaded to take up one or two more of the Jones girls, if suitable premises could be found in London.

  The illustrious Alberto Randegger and his colleagues were soon enough dropped from the discussions: what was envisaged was an academy of which Mrs. Weldon would be the principal. The methods of voice production and training were to be of a revolutionary character, and the object was to produce concert artists of international caliber. The pupils would live within the academy and pay board. Drawn from the very best families (which should have sent a warning shot across Mrs. Jones’s bows), they would sing at the best of amateur concerts; but the intention was to send them out into the world as recitalists and opera stars. This was a process that might take five years. There was a final dramatic flourish to the plans: did the Joneses know that Captain and Mrs. Weldon had taken up a lease on Dickens’s old house in Tavistock Square?

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  Tavistock Square was developed in 1824 by Thom
as Cubitt, who had a happy relationship with Bloomsbury’s principal landowner, the Duke of Bedford. As can be seen today, the uniform high quality of the Cubitt designs gave a character to this part of London which, though it was never fashionable in the same sense as the Grosvenor Estate in Belgravia, was considered highly respectable. On the east side of Tavistock Square (which was gated until the Act of 1893) was Tavistock House, one of three large houses set in generous grounds. Tavistock House boasted particularly fine mulberry trees. When Dickens and Wilkie Collins passed the returning Thomases on the road to Florence, the greatest of all Victorians had been in occupation of this house for three years. Dickens bought the run-down property leasehold from the Bedford Estate and set about extensive renovations with his usual energetic pernicketiness. In November 1851, pacing up and down for inspiration in his new home, with the builders still at work, he began Bleak House. (An early working title was The Bleak House Academy.) But in 1855 he learned that Gadshill Place in Rochester was on the market, a house he had dreamed of owning as a child. He sold Tavistock House in 1860 at a dark time of his life. An old lady took up the leasehold, followed by the Weldons.

  In many ways the house was perfect for Georgina’s purposes, for one of the many alterations Dickens had made, and which still stood, was the creation of what he used to call “the smallest theatre in London,” where he indulged his taste for amateur dramatics. Bloomsbury was famous even then for its society of artists and writers, taken together with a strong leavening of lawyers. In many ways it was an inspired purchase for the Weldons. As an address it suited Harry, and as a site for the projected academy of singing it could hardly have been bettered. Dickens himself died at Gadshill in June 1870, four weeks after the Weldons moved into Tavistock House.

  The new owners came to London with Gwendolyn Jones and two of her sisters. Georgina was in a frenzy of excitement. There must be an inaugural fund-raising concert for her academy, and it must take place immediately. Nothing else would do. She wrote Clay an excruciatingly facetious note enlisting his help. He himself would perform, along with a comic singer named Arthur Blunt, but the centerpiece was to be her own debut as a professional.

  Tavistock House had grown frowsty since the Dickens days, and the Weldons were strapped for furniture on the scale the house required. Georgina at last admitted that the concert could not be held there. But something must be done! After some setbacks the new Lady Dudley offered Dudley House as a location. (She was the second wife to that same Lord Ward who had been caught with Georgina in Watts’s studio twelve years earlier.) The date was set for July 5. Another society acquaintance, Sim Egerton, was given the task of publicizing the event. In the end he rounded up 250 people, including a bemused Ferdinand de Lesseps, engineer of the Suez Canal. Twelve years later Georgina confessed that she expected £3,000 in donations and subscriptions from this one concert: this was the chance for her society friends, as she perceived them, to pay their dues. She could not command their respect, but she believed she had earned it. They would do the right thing.

  She drove away that night with the distraught Jones girls and total receipts of £199. The concert had been a complete fiasco. She had been betrayed by overexcitement and a lack of planning. But much more than an artistic and financial fiasco, it was a social rebuff. The Welsh girls might wail that they had been made to look fools, had sung badly, worn the wrong dresses, but Georgina knew that something even more disastrous had taken place. She had suffered the kind of snub from which there was no way back. Nothing had been said, but what she considered her own class had spoken. It was Little Holland House all over again. The favor she had asked of Lord Ward, now the Earl of Dudley, had not helped her, but ruined her. The 250 invitees had not even contributed a guinea a head. Many had given nothing at all. Worse than that, in the way that these things worked, within the week theirs would be the only opinion that mattered in London. The all-powerful engine of society gossip had doomed her. She wrote:

  Entering the profession is the most disagreeable and humiliating thing you can possibly imagine, but it is no more humiliating in my opinion than the way people fight to get to one party or another in Society and the way Dukes and Duchesses are run after for no reason or object in life that I can see. I always hated Society and its mean ways and never have I asked to go to a party in my life. Whatever I go through now is for a purpose, and in my opinion as well as many other good persons, a good one . . .

  Not given to reflection and often unable to distinguish between what she would like to happen and what was going to happen, Georgina crossed over on that one disastrous evening from fantasy into brutal fact. Turning herself into a professional musician required far more planning and much greater talent than she possessed. She had the support of Benedict and Clay—though not for much longer. She did not have Sullivan, whom she suspected of having set people against her. But even if he were innocent of any malice, she knew in her heart that something had happened for which there was no remedy. It was not that people did not know her: they knew her all too well. All the gaffes and little pieces of spite she had so liberally strewn in conversation, all the reckless flirtations, had been remembered. The truth was that society, which she pretended to reprehend, had already made a judgment, long before she stepped before her audience at Dudley House. The world, which she so freely judged, had now judged her. By the weekend, when she had a chance to find out by cautious inquiry what the full reaction had been, she realized she was not even a notoriety. She was a nothing.

  Georgina had no business sense and no desire to learn it either. She had rushed into a promotional concert with a poor program and little groundwork. What had let her down more than all this was basic human weakness. Her dreams were bigger than her abilities. It is cruel to add to her anguish, but it happens there was another more glorious story of singers and singing entrancing London at exactly the same time and indeed in the same place. Comparison with Georgina’s professional debut is painful but serves to show up the enormous gap she was trying to bridge.

  As a young girl, the rich Bostonian Lillie Greenough had persuaded her mother to bring her to London to learn singing. She auditioned for Manuel García, who heard with a sinking feeling her party piece “Three little kittens took off their mittens to eat their Christmas pie.” García asked her how long she had been singing, and Mrs. Greenough answered for her daughter. “Since she was a little girl, monsieur.” “I thought so,” García commented. But within the year, Lillie had married the American banker Charles Moulton and gone to Paris, where she was considered one of the finest sopranos of the Second Empire. It was true that Moulton made her rich beyond the dreams of most people, but she was also dedicated. She befriended Liszt and Auber, sang for the Emperor and Eugénie, and in June 1870, on a whim, came back to London. She and her husband took rooms in Park Street and left cards. Within days they were inundated with invitations, one of which was to a matinée musicale at Dudley House. Lillie sang for her hosts only a few days before Georgina’s ill-fated concert. “The piano was in the beautiful picture gallery,” she wrote, “all full of Greuze’s pictures bought from the Vatican: it has the most wonderful acoustics and the voice sounded splendidly in it. Lady Dudley is a celebrated beauty . . .”

  The engagements continued: dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, then with the Rothschilds, who pressed her to stay for Ascot week; an at-home with Lady Anglesey, an audience with the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Covent Garden diva Adelina Patti was fetched to meet her, and Sullivan followed her around like a dog, entreating her to sing in his operetta, The Prodigal Son, which he was getting up for Lady Harington. At the Ascot races she joined Delane of the Times at the open table he kept for a hundred guests, come who may. On her birthday Lady Sherbourne took off a diamond ring and gave it to her. At Twickenham she dined with the Comte de Paris and the entire Orléans family. It was not just that Mrs. Moulton was rich, nor were her hosts exhibiting a group hysteria in vying with each other to hear her sing. They were res
ponding, as best they knew, to excellence. Georgina had never sung as an amateur to audiences such as this, nor could she begin to hope for support from them in her professional career. The two sopranos were worlds apart, not just in connections but in talent.

  Lillie Moulton’s trip ended with a garden party at Chiswick, as guest of the Prince and Princess of Wales once again. The three little princesses rolled around the lawns “like three fluffy pink pincushions, covered in white muslin.” Huge Japanese sunshades had been set up to shelter the company from the sun as they strolled and chatted, or drank their sherbets at little tables set on the terrace. Lillie found herself talking to the Prince of Wales, who asked her where she had dined last. She mentioned the Comte de Paris.

  “What day did you dine there?”

  “On the 17th, Your Highness.”

  “Are you sure it was the 17th?”

  She explained that she remembered the date well, because it was the day before her birthday. The Prince of Wales asked whether it was a large dinner and nodded when told that all the Orléans family had been present.