FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS Musical Snuffbox/Like a Bird/Bell Song MELOTONE 78 rare

Record is in Nice V+ condition, plays quite nicely over mostly light surface noise. Labels are good, scuffs, age toning.

FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS (Soprano) performing Bell Song (from the opera LAKME) / The Musical Snuff Box :: Like a Bird.

c. 1940 or 1941 issue

"Florence Foster Jenkins (born Narcissa Florence Foster; July 19, 1868 – November 26, 1944) was an American socialite and amateur soprano who was known, and mocked, for her flamboyant performance costumes and notably poor singing ability. Stephen Pile ranked her "the world's worst opera singer ... No one, before or since, has succeeded in liberating themselves quite so completely from the shackles of musical notation."

Despite (or perhaps because of) her technical incompetence, she became a prominent musical cult figure in New York City during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Cole Porter, Gian Carlo Menotti, Lily Pons, Sir Thomas Beecham, and other celebrities were fans. Enrico Caruso is said to have "regarded her with affection and respect".

The poet William Meredith wrote that a Jenkins recital "was never exactly an aesthetic experience, or only to the degree that an early Christian among the lions provided aesthetic experience; it was chiefly immolatory, and Madame Jenkins was always eaten, in the end." from wikipedia

"According to published reviews and other contemporary accounts, Jenkins's acknowledged proficiency at the piano did not translate well to her singing. She is described as having great difficulty with such basic vocal skills as pitch, rhythm, and sustaining notes and phrases. In recordings, her accompanist Cosmé McMoon can be heard making adjustments to compensate for her constant tempo variations and rhythmic mistakes, but there was little he could do to conceal her inaccurate intonation. She was consistently flat, sometimes considerably so. Her diction was similarly substandard, particularly with foreign-language lyrics.

The difficult operatic arias that Jenkins chose to perform—all well beyond her technical ability and vocal range—served only to emphasize these deficiencies. "There's no way to even pedagogically discuss it," said vocal instructor Bill Schuman. "It's amazing that she's even attempting to sing that music." The opera impresario Ira Siff, who dubbed her "the anti-Callas", said, "Jenkins was exquisitely bad, so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater ... She would stray from the original music, and do insightful and instinctual things with her voice, but in a terribly distorted way. There was no end to the horribleness ... They say Cole Porter had to bang his cane into his foot in order not to laugh out loud when she sang. She was that bad." Nevertheless, Porter rarely missed a recital". from wikipedia

Terrific and Scarce Comic Operatic 12-inch 78 in Nice V+ condition.

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