Florence Foster Jenkins. She was a wealthy heiress, New York
socialite, avid patron of the musical arts … and possessed the most
excruciatingly unmusical singing voice ever heard on the stage of Carnegie
Hall. I first heard that voice around
1960, coming from the grooves of a 78 rpm record owned by my violin
teacher. By that time, less than twenty
years after her death, her story was already laden with legend and myth.
The recordings were played for comedy
value. The picture that emerged of the
singer was that of a deluded coloratura wannabe, rich enough to buy her way
into a recording studio and ultimately into Carnegie Hall. But it is perhaps precisely because she was
so stupendously awful that interest in her has never waned. Eight of the nine songs that she recorded in
the Melotone Studio, including the one that I heard at my teacher’s home, were
released on vinyl in 1962 and later on CD.
Several of those songs are now available on YouTube.
