#town hall of sainte-hélène

[postcard-from-the-past]

Town Hall of Sainte-Hélène, Médoc region of France

French vintage postcard

[opera-ghosts]

D’ALTON, Helen [SHEA, Mary Ellen] (b South Terrace, Cork, c 1850; d 5 Curlew Street, Horsleydown, London 16 March 1893)

'One of the purest contraltos to which the sister isle ever gave birth' (The Standard, 1874).

Irish mezzo-soprano who found success as a ballad singer in the 1870s and 1880s.

Mary Ellen Shea was born in Cork, the daughter of John Shea, Esq., JP (b St John’s, Newfoundland 2 July 1803; d St Anne’s Hill, Blarney, Cork 9 October 1858), a merchant, magistrate and sometime mayor of Cork, and his wife Mary Agnes née Corbett (m 21 April 1836). Shea and his father-in-law, Dan Corbett ‘of South Mall, Cork), were leading lights in the organization of Cork’s National Exhibition of 1852, and Corbett was also known locally as a ‘jovial’ amateur actor and vocalist.

Mrs Shea ‘of Buckingham Place’ gave birth to a son, Henry John Francis on 14 June 1837, another on 24 May 1842, another on 18 July 1843, lost an Edward C (‘fourth son’) 5 October 1844 aged 2 1/2 … but doesn’t seem to have gone to the press with the birth of her ‘?only’ daughter.

Miss Shea studied singing with Mrs Charlotte [Sims] Reeves, and came out, for what seems to have been the first time, under the name of Mlle Hélène D’Alton (an improbable, but Irish high-society, surname), at an Ash Wednesday Concert at Drury Lane, 10 February 1869. She gave ‘Il segreto’, ‘O Rest in the Lord’ and joined the Doria sisters in the Athalie music. 

Later in the season (31 July), she sang at the Crystal Palace, alongside Christine Nilsson, Clarice Sinico, Vernon Rigby and Foli, and was favourably noticed as ‘a young lady with a very pleasing contralto voice who sang touchingly the devotional air ‘O Lord, Thou hast searched me out’ from The Woman of Samaria and ‘Gentle troubadour’. The Morning Post confirmed ‘[she] ‘sang her two airs most beautifully. She has a remarkably touching quality of voice and her style is polished and confident; her voice, a mezzo-soprano of unusual clearness, travelled to the extremity of the transept with brilliant effect’.

Mlle D’Alton was engaged to appear at George Wood’s Saturday Evening Concerts at Exeter Hall in the new year, alongside Reeves, Santley, Foli and Mlles Sinico and Monbelli (‘The Gipsies Home’, Barnett’s ‘Old Familiar Friend’), after which she accompanied Santley, Mlle Sinico and another pupil of Mrs Reeves, Annie Edmonds, to Ireland (‘the Santley concerts’) and on 17 February 1870 made her first professional appearance in her home town (‘The Gipsies' Home’, Levey’s ‘Baby Mine’ and ‘Come Home, My Sailor Boy’, Blumenthal’s ‘When we are parted’, ‘Sainted Mother’ with Miss Edmonds). The reviews paid homage to her late father, and Ireland confirmed: ‘This young lady has a voice of great richness, uncommon compass and fine free tone. She sings with judgement, proves a good education, and excited a genuine admiration. She is likely to be very successful.’ ‘She always sings with truth, has admirable restraint, never exaggerates, and is sure to please’.

Back in London, Miss Helen D’Alton was billed with another young Mrs-Reeves-trained vocalist, the Scottish Jane Allan Stephen, in Sims Reeves’s Benefit concert (18 March), and over the following seasons, the said Miss D’Alton would appear, on frequent occasions, on concert bills in which Reeves was starred, both in London and in the provinces.

In between, she appeared at the Crystal Palace (14 May 1870) with the stars of the Italian opera, at the Glasgow Saturday Evening Concerts (‘Scenes of youth’, ‘Rich are rare were the jewels’, ‘Looking Back’), and made a single Ash Wednesday appearance at the Boosey Ballad Concerts (22 February 1871, ‘The Blind Girl’s Dream’ with ‘genuine feeling and expression’, Hawes’s ‘I’ll speak of thee’ and ‘O’er shepherd’s pipe’ with Santley). She gave her ‘Blind Girl’s Dream’, alongside Reeves and Santley, at Leicester, and, on 29 April 1871, she sang the title-role, alongside Mme Lemmens-Sherrington, Reeves and Patey, in Roeckel’s cantata The Fair Rosamund at the Crystal Palace and, the following year, his The Sea Maidens ('Maiden Muriel'). At Mr Austin’s concert she sang ‘I dreamed I was in heaven’ from Naaman, and she ventured wholly into oratorio with a Messiah with the National Choral Society, the Rossini Stabat Mater at the Covent Garden proms, an Israel in Egypt with Reeves at the Sacred Harmonic Society and in Carter’s Evangeline at the Albert Hall.

The oratorio experience was evidently not wholly convincing. Over the years that followed, Miss D’Alton would appear, on occasion, in oratorio – from The Messiah (‘scarcely seemed equal to the contralto music’, Manchester, 'scarcely powerful enough for so large a hall' Birmingham) to The Light of the World and The Prodigal Son (Manchester, 7 February 1874), Judas Maccabeus at Bristol, Jephtha/Last Judgement at Cardiff  -- in the provinces, but her frequent London engagements were almost entirely in concert, where her evident speciality was modern ballad music. Pieces such as Mme Sainton-Dolby’s ‘He thinks I do not love him’, Sullivan’s ‘Golden Days’, The Distant Shore’, Looking back' and ‘Will He Come?’, Odoardo Barri’s ‘Mizpah’, ‘Love’s Golden Past’ and ‘The Shadow of the Cross’, Virginia Gabriel’s ‘A Shadow’, Gounod’s ‘Oh that we two were maying’, ‘Meeting Again’ by Cotsford Dick or Charles Salaman’s ‘Eva Tual’ and ‘Loved One’ were delivered in her ‘tuneful contralto voice and unobtrusive style’, her ‘excellent contralto voice and unaffected style’, to good effect. Very occasionally an operatic piece – ‘Ah! s’estinto’, 'Araby, dear Araby' or ‘Quando a te lieta’ – would appear alongside the new ballads, and the classic ones ('The Harp  that once through Tara's Halls, 'O, Erin my country', Samuel Lover’s ‘What will you do, love?’, 'John Anderson, my Jo', 'By the sad sea waves'), a little more frequently an item from oratorio (Hiller's 'Lord, whom my immortal soul'), but rarely did Miss D’Alton venture into the world of the dramatic. I spot her, in 1874, singing in a selection from The Bohemian Girl at the Albert Hall, in 1875, during a modest appearance at the Norwich Festival, as a late replacement, she sang in some pieces of a local operetta, The Science of Love, and in 1878 she took part in a concert performance of Il Trovatore at the Royal Aquarium.

Miss D’Alton, in fact, became quite a regular at the Royal Aquarium where, apart from ballads and the ephemeral operatic experience, she also sang several times in the Stabat Mater (alongside the fireworks and freak shows), and she became an equally familiar presence at the promenade concerts staged annually at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. She took part in these ‘proms’ as late as 1887. On several occasions, too, she appeared in the prestigious Boosey Ballad Concerts (‘My Love has gone a sailing’ by Molloy, Linley's ‘Primroses deck the bank's green side’, ‘The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington’), but without becoming a regular participant.

For a number of years, the 'clever and popular young vocalist' went on the road with Sims Reeves, in varying concert party combinations, alongside Gertrude Cave-Ashton, Foli, Agnes Larkcom et al – and again with Edith Wynne – but her name appeared, it seemed, most frequently on the ballad sheet-music which flowed from the various publishers’ lists: Cowen’s ‘The Better Land’, 'Love and Duty' and ‘A Song and a Rose’, Molloy’s ‘The Old Street Lamp’, ‘The Harbour Bar’, Ignace Gibsone’s ‘The Missing Ship’, Roeckel’s ‘Poppies in the Corn’ and 'A Midnight Song', Stephen Adams’s ‘In heart we both are young’, ‘The Children of the City’ and ‘True Hearts’, ‘I cannot forget’, Blumenthal’s ‘The Old, Old Story’ and ‘Lucy Gray’, Moulton’s ‘Beware’ and ‘I love my love’, Fanning’s ‘Something sweet to tell you’, Campana’s ‘Her Faithful Heart’, Milton Wellings’s ‘Young love that slumbers’, Owen Hope’s ‘In Happier Days’, Caroline Lowthian’s ‘Gates of the West’, Malcolm Watson's 'A Winter Story', as an adjunct to Antoinette Sterling on ‘The Lost Chord’ and to Mme Sainton-Dolby on a number of songs, and, latterly, on the songs of Isidore de Lara ('The Garden of Sleep', 'Once and For Ever'). As late as 1889, Miss D’Alton appeared on the bills of the Monday pops, with a new song by Maude Valerie White.

By the middle of the 1880s, however, she was appearing much less in public and, apart from the Covent Garden proms, largely in charity concerts and on fashionable society programmes. By the time, in 1889 (14 August), that she became the wife of Mr Fallon Percy Wightwick MD MRCS LRCP MB, a well-known medical man, she was appearing only a handful of times a season.

Helen D’Alton’ died just a few years after her marriage, and her obituary insisted that she was ‘a few years ago a highly popular contralto vocalist’. Which was more or less true. ‘Tuneful contralto voice and unobtrusive style’ had probably described her better.

It also insisted that she was thirty-eight years of age. Which was not true at all.She (vocalist, aged 20) and widowed mamma (52) can be seen lodging in Salisbury Street, Westminster in 1871 …

[wordacrosstime]

Beyond The Fringe : Compelling Theatre in Tehuantepec

[En La Casa de mi Madre (In The House of my Mother), by Marco Pétriz. Play - performed by El Grupo Teatral Tehuantepec (The Tehuantepec Theatre Group). April-May 2019] [Please note this article includes the plot and ending]

The early 2000s were a glorious time to be a Fringe theatre critic.  London was affordable (no really), and there was a website Fringe Report that would provide comp tickets AND publish the reviews.  But since then Fringe Report shut down and fringe theatre critics have fallen on hard times.  Some have moved further and further out toward the fringe of the fringe - some might even say Beyond The Fringe.

And so it was that on May 19, 2019, this critic-in-exile found himself in an obscure little town in the state of Oaxaca in the southern part of Mexico.  Tehuantepec is not large, and no tourists could be seen in the zocalo, the park in the center of town surrounded by crumbling, peeling old buildings with tile roofs.  The town is known as the historic capital of the Zapotec indigenous people.  Zapotec is spoken here alongside Spanish.  There is a museum here about the Zapotec, the Casa de Cultura, which has been closed since the cataclysmic earthquake in 2017.  Tehuantepec is known for its velas, neighborhood processions to carry statues of saints through the streets, and the elaborate embroidered traditional women’s blouses and skirts worn at these velas are said to have been the inspiration of much of the artist Frida Kahlo’s work.  Tehuantepec also styles itself “the spiritual capital of Istmo [this poor, devilishly hot & arid part of Oaxaca]”.  Perhaps that is why at night the facades of the several monumental colonial-era churches scattered around this little river valley are lit up like nightclubs;  at night this critic was disappointed to discover, after walking across town to one of these, that it was just an empty locked-up old church. (Beautiful though.)

This critic was in Tehuantepec merely because he had seen, in the nearby city, a poster for a live theatrical performance by a local theatre group.  The play was called En la Casa de mi Madre (“In the House of my Mother” - oh come on nobody does not know that).  The author/director is a member of something called the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, which sounds important.  The venue, the Casa Ensayo (whatever that means) was down a narrow street of more tile-roofed old 1-story buildings;  a cloistered courtyard lead to the performance space, a small room wide-but-shallow, with a row of folding chairs along the wall facing the performance space and two more rows of chairs, on risers, on each wing.  The space holds maybe 3 dozen audience members, and 30 were there on this night.  Entrance was 100 pesos (about 4 pounds).  The audience appeared to be a cross-section of the entire artsy crowd of this small town, with perhaps an overlap with the local LGBTQ community.  A toast to the patrons of the performing arts in Tehuantepec!

As we shuffled into the empty performance space, there was loud wailing and crying coming from the next room, which would continue until almost the very end.  There were three chairs along the back wall of the “stage” area (not raised), and some cardboard boxes and handbags scattered about.  A woman, obviously distraught, stalked into the room from stage right from where the wailing was emanating, and started to comb through and sort the boxes and other belongings in the room.  She was cleaning out the house of her mother, who had died just hours before and was being mourned in the next room. Soon she was followed by her adult sister and then her brother.  The rest of the play, which was in one act and lasted just under an hour, consisted of the three siblings insulting each other, crying, yelling at each other, sometimes even shoving and hitting each other - but also sitting together and crying and even laughing as they reminisced. 

Anyone, perhaps, can relate who has been in that situation.  This critic found himself thanking the Lord that, after his own mother’s death, his siblings no longer speak to him.  En la Casa de mi Madre hit all the pain points: who visited their mother more often, who did their mother love more, who leeched off their mother during her life and to whom did she leave her estate.  Who mourned their mother more sincerely.  Who wanted to take her expensive embroidered (traditional local) blouse, and who wanted her to be buried in it “like a queen”.  They fought over which one of them their mother wanted to have this or that sentimental heirloom, such as a fancy Mexican hand-fan.  They mocked each other, dredging up old incidents and resentments just to throw them in each other’s faces.  They cried over painful memories, such as when the son as a young boy told his mother that he was “un puto” because he liked men - and his mother said no, he was not a “puto” but rather “un homosexual”.

This critic does not understand Spanish all that well.  The play seemed thoroughly unpleasant, especially with the loud wailing continuing to come from the next room.  But sometime in the second half of the play the rest of the audience started to snicker and laugh.  The play was steeped in local culture, with references to the recent enormous earthquake as having traumatized the mother. Indeed when at the very end of the play the siblings storm into the next room to continue their fight over the corpse itself, and the mourner, their aunt, comes onto the stage alone and putters about the now-strewn belongings talking to herself, she seems to be talking to herself in Zapotec (since this critic did not recognize a single word).  Yet some in the audience must have understood because she left them chuckling.

The play ended, leaving this renegade fringe-reporter wondering “whither now?”  Perhaps the Zapatista rebels have good guerrilla theatre in their mountain jungle strongholds in the next-door state of Chiapas.  Where to find the very fringe-of-the-fringe?  Sigh.  For now there was nothing to do but return to his cheap hotel on the outskirts of town.  This critic chose to walk there through the darkest, most dubious neighborhoods, with the street food vendors staring at him in mild alarm, and finally across the river on a long abandoned railroad trestle as disco lights played on the facades of ancient churches along the valley.  Somewhere in this world is a cast party for our intrepid traveler.  But not tonight.  Not tonight.

Photo Credits top down in sequence: La Casa de mi Madre flyer (c) El Grupo Teatral Tehuantepec April 2019 // La Casa de mi Madre (c) Sergio Leyto / El Grupo Teatral Tehuantepec 10 May 2019 // Marco Pétriz and Company (c) from matutinazo.com 27 March 2017 // Frida Kahlo, 14 April 1939 (c) Associated Press // Sea in Tehuantepec (c) Sara Ivette Rojas Ruiz via minube.net // Tree in Tehuantepec (c) Hélène et Mathieu via minube.net // Transport in Tehuantepec (c) Hélène et Mathieu via minube.net // Tehuantepec (c) Google Maps 24 May 2019 // The Company’s Test House after the 7 September 2017 earthquake (c) El Grupo Teatral Tehuantepec 2017 // The Test House after restoration - architect José Carmona  (c) El Grupo Teatral Tehuantepec 2018 // El Grupo Teatral Tehuantepec (c) from istmo360.com 14 September 2018 // Ends

Bradley Hall

wordsacrosstime

24 May 2019