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More about this book
2 Questions for your reading group
5 Further reading
6 Who’s Who of Opera in Ida and Louise’s world
10 Further listening
QUESTIONS FOR YOUR READING GROUP
Early in Safe Passage, Ida recounts a conversation with her eighty-nine-year-old mother. “I’ve never seen you cry,” Ida says, wonderingly. “What do you mean?” Mrs Cook says, “I never had anything to cry about. I didn’t ask very much, but I had everything that mattered.” What does Mrs Cook’s comment say about the expectations of that time and place? What values were emphasised in Ida and Louise’s childhood? Do you share them?
Ida attends her first operatic performances at Covent Garden in London in 1924. She reflects on their impact and describes how raw enthusiasm can lift one out of the ordinary world to the “golden heights” of loving admiration. Discuss the idea of “hero worship” as the Cook sisters experience it. Do you see a distinction between Ida’s adora tion of opera singers and the fascination with celebrities that pervades contemporary popular culture? How is fandom different today from what it was in the 1920s and 1930s?
What was your familiarity with opera before reading Safe Passage? Does Ida’s passion raise your own level of interest? What is appealing about the world and experiences she describes as an opera fan?
After two years of scrimping and planning, Ida and Louise set sail for New York to hear their favourite performer sing at the old Metropolitan Opera House in 1926. What does the story of their years of “skimpy lunches, cheese-paring and saving” say about Ida and Louise’s characters and priorities? Have you had a similar experience in your life where you sacrificed day-today pleasures forsome distant reward? Was the result as satisfying as Ida describes?
What qualities shine through Ida’s narrative “voice”? To what do you credit her sense of humour and unfailing optimism even in the face of great tragedy? At what points in the memoir does Ida seem most shaken?
In 1934, Ida and Louise assist music lecturer Mitia Mayer-Lismann and her family in leaving Austria and finding refuge in England. Over the next five years, until England formally declared war on Germany on 3rd September, 1939, the Cook sisters raise consciousness and funds in England and make daring rescue missions throughout Central Europe. Discuss some of Ida and Louise’s “cases.” Do any of the images and stories in Safe Passage resonate with your own family history?
Ida’s entry into refugee work coincides with her success as a romance novelist. “So at the very moment when I was making big money for the first time, we were presented with this terrible need… It was much the most romantic thing that ever happened to us.” Do you think Ida and Louise are unusual in viewing self-sacrifice as “romantic”? What did they gain by directing every spare resource towards saving lives?
Were you aware of the Nuremberg Laws and the Kindertransport before reading Safe Passage? Share your knowledge and thoughts about how the Cook sisters’ story fills in or intersects with historical background you’ve learned through books, movies, or conversation with people who lived through those dark times.
Ida’s account of her refugee work is not without glamorous elements and lighter moments. What manner of quick-thinking and deception proved necessary on her trips to Germany and Austria? How did she use her passion for opera as a cover for her refugee work?
Discuss Ida’s portrait of London during the Blitz. In what ways does she celebrate the courage and perseverance of the British people? What aspects of Ida’s vivid account of “shelter life” were most terrifying to you? Which incidents or stories were the most uplifting?
In 1965, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority in Jerusalem bestowed on Ida and Louise Cook the honour of “Righteous Among Nations,” listing the sisters alongside Oskar Schindler and others who saved Jews from Nazi persecution. Discuss the ways in which Ida and Louise’s story is one of everyday individuals standing up to tyranny. Why is it important that such stories get told?
As a prolific romantic novelist, Ida Cook, writing as Mary Burchell, created close to one hundred and fifty heroines. Do you think Ida would describe herself as a heroine? Do you consider her one? If so, why?
FOR FURTHER READING:
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Night Watch, Sarah Waters
The Heat of Day, Elizabeth Bowen
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark
Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald
Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and
Loving Opera, Fred Plotkin
Opera Anecdotes, Ethan Mordden The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the
Holocaust, Martin Gilbert Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During
the Holocaust, Eva Fogelman
WHO’S WHO OF OPERA IN IDA AND LOUISE’S WORLD
Who were Ida and Louise’s “Stars”?
When Ida and Louise Cook first began to haunt the gallery of Covent Garden, opera was in the midst of a golden age. Giacomo Puccini had only just died when the sisters started attending their first performances and major composers and conductors like Richard Strauss and Arturo Toscanini could be seen on the international concert circuit. While Ida’s friend Maria Callas remains well known, many of the singers most dear to Ida and Louise have all but passed out of memory. Here is some background on those great and colourful figures:
Amelita Galli-Curci (Italian, 1882–1963)
Born to an upper-middle-class family in Milan, Amelita Galli was a gifted pianist. At age twenty-three, she was offered a prestigious professorship at Milan’s conservatory, but with the encouragement of a family friend, she began to pursue a singing career. Amelita made her operatic debut in 1906 at Trani, as Gilda in Rigoletto, and her fame quickly spread. In 1908, she married Marchese Luigi Curci, but the marriage did not last and Galli-Curci would eventually marry her accompanist, Homer Samuels, in 1921. That same year, she debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Violetta in La Traviata. Galli-Curci remained at the Met until her retirement from the operatic stage in 1930. She continued to give performances, but throat surgery in 1935 is thought to have permanently damaged her voice. She retired to California where she died at the age of eighty-two.
Rosa Ponselle (American, 1897–1981)
Born Rose Melba Ponzillo to Italian immigrants in Meriden, Connecticut, Ponselle began performing in vaudeville at the age of seventeen. It was Enrico Caruso who recognised her great talent and arranged an audition for her at the Metropolitan Opera House. Ponselle made her Met debut in 1918 in Verdi’s La forza del destino, opposite Caruso. Maria Callas called Ponselle “the greatest singer of us all,” but the mental and physical exhaustion of constant performing and touring took its toll. Ponselle retired at the relatively young age of forty and lived out her days at Villa Pace, her home outside Baltimore, Maryland. She continued to sing, privately, and to teach. Among the singers Ponselle coached in later life are Beverly Sills, Sherrill Milnes, and Placido Domingo.
Ezio Pinza (Italian, 1892–1957)
Born Fortunato Pinza in Rome, this charismatic opera star showed promise as a professional cyclist, but ultimately chose a career in music instead. Pinza made his operatic debut in Bellini’s Norma in Cremona, Italy in 1914. He served in World War I and afterwards returned to Italy to resume his operatic career, performing at La Scala in Milan under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. The dashing Pinza was so closely associated with his most famous role, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, that music critic Virgil Thomson wrote: “It is doubtful whether without him the opera would be in the repertory at all.” Pinza’s daughter, Claudia, the little girl whose picture Ida took outside Covent Garden, would also become an acclaimed opera singer. After retiring from opera in 1948, Pinza had a successful second career on Broadway. In 1949 he appeared as Emile de Becque in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pa
cific. Pinza would also make appearances in films and on television. He died at age sixty-four in Stamford, Connecticut.
Elisabeth Rethberg (German, 1894–1976)
Born Lisbeth Sättler in Schwarzenberg, Germany, Rethberg was best known for her roles in operas by Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner. She made her operatic debut in Dresden, Germany in 1915, but moved to the United States in 1922 and was a fixture on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera for the next twenty years. Arturo Toscanini hailed Rethberg’s voice as “the most beautiful in the world” and many believed her to be the greatest soprano of her day. Her chief rival for this title was Rosa Ponselle, who possessed a bigger, warmer voice. Rethberg retired from the stage in 1942 and died in Yorktown Heights, New York.
Viorica Ursuleac (Romanian, 1894–1985)
Ursuleac was Richard Strauss’s favourite soprano and she sang in world premieres of four of his operas. Strauss called her “the truest of the true.” In 1924, Ursuleac heard that renowned conductor Clemens Krauss was assuming directorship of the Frankfurt Opera and needed a soprano. She asked for an audition, but was rejected by Krauss who was contemptuous of Balkan singers. Ursuleac then submitted her request under a false name. When Krauss discovered her attempt to trick him, he hired her anyway and thus began a legendary collaboration and a long, mutually devoted marriage. It is said that recordings of Ursuleac do not do justice to the magic of her performances. She was widely regarded as a great musician and actress and died in Austria at the age of ninety-one.
Clemens Krauss (Austrian, 1893–1954)
Krauss was born in Vienna to Clementine Krauss, an actress and singer. As a boy, he attended the Vienna Conservatory and began conducting regional orchestras in 1913. He travelled to the United States in 1919, conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Among numerous appointments, he was a regular conductor at the Salzburg Festival from 1926 to 1934. In 1935, Krauss became director of the Berlin State Opera. He continued to conduct throughout the Nazi era. After the war, Krauss came under scrutiny from colleagues and the Allied authorities for his close ties to Nazi officials. As a result, he was banned from public performance, but when officials discovered that Krauss had, in fact, aided numerous Jews in their escape from Nazi persecution, the ban was lifted and he resumed conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. He died while on holiday in Mexico in 1954.
FURTHER LISTENING
To experience the artists and music beloved by Ida Cook, listen to the following recordings on CD:
Amelita Galli-Curci: “Lo, Here the Gentle Lark” (Pearl, 1999)
Galli-Curci: Prima Voce (Nimbus, 1992)
Bellini: The Supreme Operatic Recordings (Pearl, 2001)
Includes performances by Ezio Pinza, Rosa Ponselle, Maria Callas, and Amelita-Galli-Curci, among others.
Rosa Ponselle: “Casta Diva” (Pearl, 1996)
Rosa Ponselle: The Columbia Acoustic Recordings (Pearl, 1993)
The Golden Years of Ezio Pinza (Pearl, 1992)
Le Nozze di Figaro, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Idi, 2002)
The complete opera featuring Ezio Pinza as Figaro. Recorded live 1937 in Salzburg, Austria.
Lebendige Vergangenheit: Elisabeth Rethberg (Preiser Records, 1994)
Der Rosen kavalier, Richard Strauss (Guild 2004)
Selections from the Strauss opera featuring soprano Viorica Ursuleac and conductor Clemens Krauss.
Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss (Preiser Records, 1996)
The complete opera, featuring soprano Viorica Ursuleac and conductor Clemens Krauss, recorded in 1935 in Berlin, Germany.
John McCormack: Great Voices of the Twentieth Century (Castle Pulse, 2005)
This compilation of recordings by the great Irish tenor includes “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.” Ida Cook writes: “Among my own list of great performances… I must place that strange and moving occasion when two hundred Cockneys sang “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” in the cellar of a London factory and forgot that overhead bombs were falling.”
Anna Bolena, Gaetano Donizetti (EMI Classics, 1998)
The complete opera featuring soprano Maria Callas in the title role. Recorded live in 1957 at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy.
La Traviata, Guiseppe Verdi (EMI Classics, 1997)
The complete opera featuring Maria Callas as Violetta. Recorded live in 1958 at the San Carlos Theatre in Lisbon, Portugal.
Norma, Vincenzo Bellini (EMI Classics, 1998)
The complete opera featuring Maria Callas in the title role. Recorded in 1960 at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B. V./S.à. r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
MIRA is a registered trademark of Harlequin Enterprises Limited,
used under licence.
First published in 1950 by Mills & Boon Limited
under the title We Followed Our Stars
Revised edition 1976. Second printing 1978. Third printing 1979.
Fourth printing 1979. Fifth printing 1983. This edition 2008.
MIRA Books, Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road,
Richmond, Surrey, TW9 1SR
Copyright 1950, © Ida and Louise Cook 1976
ISBN: 9781408906712
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