To graduate Florence needed to perform before a neutral board of examiners. The course laid stress on conquering difficulty. In 1905 students had to present three Chopin études, a concerto, ‘a difficult Beethoven sonata’, a prelude and fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier as well as four other pieces from a list of difficult compositions, pass a course in theory, attend a year of sight-singing classes plus ensemble or symphony classes, and finally perform a difficult piece at the graduates’ concert.
Florence’s success was such that, a year after graduating, in the summer of 1889 she performed at one of Philadelphia’s vast Sängerfests. The annual music festivals were a tradition brought over from Germany in the late seventeenth century by settlers who founded Germantown in Philadelphia. The first civic concerts, involving huge numbers of singers and instrumentalists, took place in 1835. A year later, women were allowed to participate in what evolved into public entertainments on an epic scale, always on a German theme. Appropriately, Florence chose German composers, and as a public performer was accorded for the first time the grand title of Madame Florence Foster Jenkins.
She warmed up for her appearance with a Fourth of July soirée in Wilkes-Barre where ninety guests listened to five soloists singing and performing on the piano. Florence undoubtedly practised what she would be unleashing on the Sängerfest in a few days. On 9 July in the cavernous auditorium of the Armory she walked alone onto a stage decorated with a few pot plants, and sat down at a Hardman grand piano to perform Schumann’s Novelette No. 7. It was a ringing, forthright piece ideal for overcoming the intimidating conditions and a loud hubbub at the back. A twelve-strong male choir appearing just before her had struggled to make themselves audible and so did Florence. ‘Most of the audience could not hear the finer effects at all,’ recorded the Wilkes-Barre Record, ‘although the artiste had a strong touch. Just as everyone was ready to listen the delightful music ceased.’
Florence had her chance again in the cooler evening concert when the audience had swollen to 2,500. She was on straight after one Madame Praetorius, a soprano from Buffalo who charmed both audience and reviewer (‘she is said to be as lovely in private life as she appears to be when before the public gaze’). This time Florence’s home-town reporter forgot to call her Madame, though he remembered to remind readers who her father was. In the first reported instance of Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins singing in public, she kept in mind that precept ingested at the Academy to aim high: she selected an excerpt from Die Walküre. Her Wagner was not a success. ‘Mrs Jenkins could not entirely conceal a slight embarrassment at appearing before so large and critical a gathering,’ it was said, ‘but her performance was unmarred by a single break.’ Afterwards she was showered with bouquets. Although intimidated by the occasion, Florence could be optimistic for the future. Her studies had made her ‘an artist of great promise and she well deserved the plaudits and flowers accorded her’. (She was followed by a tenor from New York who elicited loud cheers of ‘Bravo!’ and many encores.) When years later she remembered performing nervelessly in front of ten thousand as a child, it seems likely she was alluding to her Sängerfest appearance in front of an audience a quarter that size when she was twenty-one. She went straight home to recover in Wilkes-Barre, where her father took his wife and daughter on a replenishing drive to Glen Summit, a local beauty spot.
The question arose, as for many a young woman, of what to do with a musical qualification if she was not to be a concert performer. The answer came in the less intimidating environment of the domestic musicale, a mainstay of American society in which, as the new decade dawned, Florence now found a niche. She gave an entertainment at her Philadelphia home in March 1890, then three months later another for guests of her parents back in South Franklin Street. She played Bach and Rubinstein (the paper didn’t specify which of the two Rubinstein brothers, Anton or Nikolai) and delighted the audience ‘with some excellent piano playing’. The presence of an accompanist suggests that Florence also sang. Florence (‘the accomplished pianist’) visited Wilkes-Barre again the next month. In 1891 her parents gave another musicale ‘in honor of their daughter’. She played a Maskowsi minuet ‘with fine delicacy and finish’ to warm appreciation. This time she did not sing, but a married couple and a Miss Nellie Williams did. It was a long evening for early January; Mrs Foster served up refreshments at midnight.
But between these opportunities to perform Florence had to make a living. According to McMoon she put up with ‘great hardships and privations’ while St Clair Bayfield said she endured ‘the life of La Bohème’. It seems possible that in later life Florence exaggerated the indigence of her twenties. But she did have a marketable skill to call on, and for much of the 1890s worked as a piano teacher in Philadelphia. This was an increasingly common pursuit for American women. In the first four decades of Florence’s life there was a sharp rise in the proportion of women to men employed in music. By 1910 the figure stood at 66 per cent. The year before, the American journal The Etude published an article entitled ‘Who’s Who Among Famous Women Pianists and Violinists’. Most of them, far from famous, toiled in the shadows. Announcements and advertisements from the same title allude to composers, concert pianists, movie pianists and accompanists, but also lecturers, teachers of all levels, tuners and women working in music shops. There was little shortage of potential customers. In America in the 1890s there were thought to be more pianos than bathtubs. In the following decade the sale of sheet music soared.
While Florence was a regular visitor back home throughout the early 1890s, she started to explore her independence by taking holidays elsewhere, doubtless in the company of other Philadelphians. She spent Easter in 1890 by the sea in Atlantic City, where she was one of hundreds of ‘prominent sojourners’, spotted by the Times of Philadelphia, who flocked to its many hotels to enjoy ‘a tidal wave of festivity’. Excitements included euchre card parties, impromptu quadrilles and waltzes and, for one nature-seeking group of New Yorkers, wild-flower picking on the mainland. Florence was one of several Philadelphians staying at the ‘home-like’ (as in budget) Irvington. For the Fourth of July 1891, in the same month as Frank’s nephew Thornton Jenkins Hains went on trial for murder, she was one of several ‘interesting visitors’ checking in at the Florida, ‘a delightful little hotel’ where there was an artistic chef and singing guests were encouraged. There was another holiday next month at Jamestown, Rhode Island, a honeypot for Philadelphians elbowed out of the neighbouring Newport by millionaires from New York. She was back there two years later in the same summer as her father-in-law’s death and her brother-in-law’s disgrace in San Francisco. In 1895 she stayed at the newly built Laurel-in-the-Pines in Lakewood, New Jersey, a resort set back from the ocean which was sufficiently fashionable in the 1890s for the New York Times to begin publishing a weekly dispatch in the summer season.
She also travelled in greater style with her parents. In October 1895 Florence accompanied them on a southern tour which took in the Atlanta Exposition in Georgia. The previous month the Exposition played host to a famous speech by African-American leader Booker T. Washington. The organisers were worried about giving him a platform but calculated that his appearance would throw favourable light on the South’s racial progress.
Back in Pennsylvania, Charles Dorrance Foster pondered another tilt at political office, this time for Congress. Asked by a Democratic journalist if he would stand, he gnomically quoted from David Copperfield: ‘Barkis is willin’.’ The Wilkes-Barre Evening News described him as ‘a formidable antagonist’. His oratory in this campaign was less inspiring than Booker T. Washington’s. As the election loomed, he made a speech to an audience of five hundred at a Republican rally but was entirely upstaged by a fiery young speaker, aged only twenty-one, who attacked the Democrats on free trade and was ‘cheered to the echo’. Foster failed to attract enough votes to be nominated for Congress.
Meanwhile Florence was becoming embedded in the musical life of Philadelphia. In January 1896
she and a Mrs Arthur Cleveland hosted an afternoon meeting of the Germantown Music Club. There were half a dozen participants, four men and two women. It’s not clear that she sang, but this was the first time a newspaper reported her programming a musical gathering outside her or her parents’ home. And while she taught, Florence was still learning. At some point she attended the Madame Kutz School in Philadelphia, perhaps to learn French – St Clair Bayfield would later say that one of her great strengths was an ability to sing in foreign languages. In 1896 she enrolled at the Heyl Dramatic School for a year’s training. When she graduated in May 1897 her parents came to Philadelphia to attend. Florence was described as ‘a talented elocutionist’ by the Philadelphia Inquirer, which noted with approval her appearance in a shortened version of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. The performance took place in the drawing room of the New Century Club, one of the first women’s clubs in the US, founded in the wake of the 1876 Centennial Exposition to support and promote science, literature and art. Florence did her bit for the cause in the character of Lady Teazle, a spendthrift young bride whose older husband fears being ‘ruined by [her] extravagance’. The paper praised Mrs Jenkins’s ‘brilliant success’ in greater detail three days later: ‘her acting was easy, graceful and telling, while she read the lines with rare appreciation of their true meaning’. Did this cheekily imply that the actress understood what it meant to run through a husband’s fortune? The paper certainly knew all about her family background: in the report Foster’s career as a Wilkes-Barre attorney and active Republican in Luzerne County politics was detailed. It concluded with a further encomium for Foster’s daughter: ‘Besides her elocutionary gifts,’ it said, ‘she is a highly accomplished singer.’ Back in her home town the Evening News picked up the story of her ‘quite remarkable’ talent, adding that her ‘musical ability has been generally noted by her Wilkes-Barre friends’. She left the Heyl School in possession of something called the Murdock Prize.
As she entered her thirties there was a change in Florence’s fortunes. Although she seems not to have known about it, her father made her the major beneficiary of a new will drawn up in 1898. He bequeathed her not only half of his considerable fortune but also his diamond stud and piano. This was hardly the act of a man who wished to thwart his daughter’s music-making. In September 1899 she embarked on her most ambitious holiday yet, a summer trip to far-flung Halifax in Nova Scotia; she returned via the Adirondacks in upstate New York, where she went camping. Her mother took Florence under her wing too. In April 1900, just after a trip home to Wilkes-Barre, she accompanied Mrs Foster to a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Atlantic City. The organisation, which that year celebrated its tenth anniversary, was set up in 1890 by a group of women after they were refused entry to the Sons of the American Revolution. Its aim was to raise funds for historic and patriotic preservation projects. Mary Hoagland Foster was a committed representative of the New Jersey chapter of the D.A.R. Florence and her mother were eligible to attend because they could trace their American lineage back to 1776.
Florence outstripped herself in August 1900 when she finally sailed for Europe. Presumably her father paid to have Florence conveyed in splendour across the Atlantic aboard the SS Deutschland, a newly commissioned steamship from the Hamburg America Line which that year broke the much-coveted record for the fastest ever Atlantic crossing. The luxury was nonpareil: the high-windowed first-class dining saloon was all caryatids and colonnades, stucco and gilt.
‘For those desiring to cross the Atlantic as quickly as possible and with the greatest degree of comfort and luxury,’ trumpeted a 1905 brochure, ‘there can be no better choice than the great flyer of the Express Service.’ This boast was not entirely borne out by the experience of those who nicknamed the Deutschland the ‘cocktail shaker’ owing to its tendency to vibrate at high speeds (causing part of its stern to fall off in 1902). The 23,000-ton, 37,500-horsepower, 200-metre leviathan delivered its passengers to Plymouth (for those wishing to alight for London) just over five days after leaving America. There is no record of Florence’s itinerary once she arrived in Europe. Her other disembarkation options were Cherbourg or Hamburg. Given her later devotion to the world of Italian opera, and support for the Italian Red Cross, it seems certain her European sojourn included a trip over the Alps to the home of Verdi. But she was apparently sick as a dog on both crossings. The experience terrified her and she never went near another ship for the rest of her life.
There were other signs of Florence’s improving social status. In 1899 she was one of many private subscribers underwriting a pair of recitals in Germantown, and soon after her return from Europe she became a sponsor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The life of Bohème was behind her. But much the most telling indication of her upward trajectory was her choice of holiday in the summer of 1902. Having kept away from the millionaires’ playground in Rhode Island a decade earlier and opted instead for the quieter Jamestown, Florence checked in to the Casino in Newport, the oceanside watering hole where American wealth and European aristocracy annually convened. It was ‘a town of paradoxes, contradictions, and amazing vanities and extravagances,’ explained Mrs John King van Rensselaer in The Social Ladder (1925), whose ‘chief industry … is the examination and appraisal of qualifications for Society’. Throughout the summer season the New York Times’s ‘News from Newport’ column gaily genuflected at the altar of new money as it commingled with old blood. Indeed the whole of America was kept informed of the comings and goings of various Vanderbilts and Astors, their arrivals and departures and even their routes to and fro – there were 1,600 daily newspapers in the US by 1900, consumed by twenty-four million readers. They were told who was throwing such and such a ball, giving lunch or dinner or a reception for whom, who was staying in which ‘cottage’, which was really no such thing. There being very few actual hotels in the town, the millionaires stayed instead in so-called ‘cottages’, which were vast edifices set in their own grounds. Up to the early 1900s these houses were simply transported in from elsewhere, and might be seen rolling along the street. Admiring descriptions of the bountiful table decor were meticulously vouchsafed. A slightly earlier version of the resort’s golden era would later be memorialised by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence, published in 1920.
Into this world Florence boldly stepped on 22 August 1902. She was named in a list of people newly registered at the Casino, a rustic ivy-clad residence thrown up in 1880. Hotels were increasingly being built to cater for the fashionable women from up and down the East Coast who descended on Newport every summer but didn’t have their own cottage. Greedy for social recognition, they greatly outnumbered the men. Florence arrived on the same day as two other married women. Also checking in were Viscount de Villeneuve Bargemon (spelled Bargemont in the Times), a couple of polo players, and Oliver Belmont, a vastly wealthy socialite known for a dissolute youth and a short-lived marriage, who was briefly serving as a Democrat in Congress. The day’s round-up of news for eager readers took in a number of automobile speeding violations, a game of cricket proposed for Alfred G. Vanderbilt’s nearby farm at Portsmouth, and a colonial ball to be hosted by Mrs Stuyvesant Fish in which members of the diplomatic corps would join in a minuet dressed in costumes of the Revolution. And the paper reported that ‘the Dutchess [sic] of Marlborough appeared at the Casino to-day during the tennis match between the Englishmen and the Americans, and received a hearty reception from the large number of her friends who were there’.
The Duchess was a hugely symbolic figure in the westerly drift of power and influence across the Atlantic. She was the only daughter of railroad millionaire William K. Vanderbilt and had been more or less press-ganged by her formidably manipulative Alabaman mother into a loveless marriage with the ninth duke, Charles Spencer-Churchill, who until the month before Florence’s visit had been Paymaster General in the government of Lord Salisbury. The duke, like many English aristocrats of the period, had married an Ameri
can heiress on a strictly mercenary basis. His reward for making Consuelo a duchess was $2.5 million in railroad stock. Her charms had a greater impact on others, including the author of Peter Pan. ‘I would wait all night in the rain,’ J. M. Barrie once uttered, ‘to see Consuelo Marlborough get into her carriage.’ The duchess’s mother had since divorced Vanderbilt and married his good friend, the aforesaid Oliver Belmont who was staying at the Casino. Later that week the Tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Boris of Russia was in town.
At America’s most exclusive resort, Florence found herself among this highfalutin nexus of US millionaires and European blue blood, all attended upon by elegant bounty hunters and fast-moving social climbers, of whom she was perhaps one: a free agent in a social milieu where marital collapse was more common and better tolerated than in the regular round. But it required persistence. ‘It is an axiom of Newport that it takes at least four years to get in,’ advised Mrs John King van Rensselaer. Alexander Graham Bell took many holidays there but he was ignored by Society. If Florence had ever been to Newport before for the season, the Times’s social correspondent hadn’t noticed. Nor was she important enough for her departure to be reported.
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