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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781574670196 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2003 |
| Series: | Amadeus , #9 |
| Pages: | 534 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.33(w) x 9.16(h) x 1.50(d) |
| Lexile: | 1220L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
Wait Till You Hear Her!
In the annals of the Metropolitan Opera, the second week of November 1918 has more than a passing significance.
On Monday, a performance of Samson et Dalila, with Enrico Caruso and Louise Homer in the title roles, opened the Metropolitan's thirty-fifth season. The date of that performance (11 November 1918) also came to occupy, in the words of the late Irving Kolodin, "a place in history of other sorts than musical." Earlier that day, news of the armistice ending World War I touched off patriotic celebrations on two continents. Even the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House was no exception to the celebrating: after the final curtain for Samson et Dalila had rung down, it was soon raised again--revealing Caruso, Homer, and the other cast members waving British, French, Italian, and American flags, and leading the cheering audience in an impromptu medley of patriotic songs.
Of the five operas scheduled during that opening week, four were familiar to most Metropolitan Opera audiences. The opening-night work, Samson et Dalila, had been revived for Caruso in the 1915-16 season; it was the thirty-first role the great tenor had assumed at the Metropolitan since his debut in 1903. The second opera on the roster, Madama Butterfly, had been in the repertory since the winter of 1907, when Puccini himself had come to New York to attend the Metropolitan premiere. Aida, the third work scheduled, had been heard at the Metropolitan practically since its doors had opened in 1883. During the 1918-19 season-opening week, however, the significance of the Aida performance lay chiefly in the Metropolitan debut of Giulio Crimi, a Sicilian tenor whose "instrument [of] beauty, power and compass" would soon be heard in the upcoming Metropolitan premieres of Puccini's Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi.
Following the Wednesday evening Aida, a performance of La fille du regiment--a production that had been revived chiefly for soprano Frieda Hempel a year earlier--was to take place on Thursday. And for Friday evening, 15 November, the roster announced the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Verdi's La forza del destino--a work that had been in the repertoire of many European opera companies since its premiere in Russia in November of 1862, but which had not been heard by a New York City audience since an Academy of Music performance nearly forty years earlier.
Coupled with the continuing celebration of the armistice, which went on throughout the week, the publicity surrounding a Verdi premiere at the Metropolitan made it unlikely that the debut of a young American-born soprano would attract unusual attention from the New York press. And, on balance, it didn't--notwithstanding the mostly favorable reviews the young Rosa Ponselle received from the critics, and the future promise they heard in her surprisingly mature voice. But in the ensuing nineteen seasons, as this youthful promise unfolded into a first-rank career, the date of 15 November 1918 came to be associated more with the debut of Rosa Ponselle than with the Metropolitan premiere of La forza del destino.
On the afternoon of 9 December 1971--more than a half-century after her Metropolitan Opera debut, and six weeks before she would celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday--Ponselle relaxed in the library of her expansive home in the rolling hills of the Green Spring Valley near Baltimore, Maryland. The design of the home, as Francis Robinson once wrote, "might have been lifted bodily out of Tuscany; and while the Maryland landscape bears no resemblance whatever to Fiesole, neither the white stucco mansion nor its Italian name--Villa Pace--is in the least out of place."
From its name to its cross-shaped design, the home was an enduring testament to the significance of La forza del destino in Ponselle's personal life. The name came from the fourth-act aria "Pace, pace, mio Dio." On one of the two columns bordering the villa's main entrance, the first four notes of the aria were etched in the shape of roses. The floor plan of Villa Pace, a cruciform of four separate sections, each with an ambience and function all its own, had been inspired by the crimson cross that adorned her fourth-act costume in Forza.
On this brisk December 1971 afternoon, Villa Pace was being readied for the Christmas season, in anticipation of a steady stream of visitors from one to nine o'clock in the evening during each of the twelve days of Christmas. In the library, on a loveseat bordering the fireplace, Ponselle sat in front of a microphone. Seated near her was Hugh Johns, a long-time admirer who lived in nearby Pikesville. Across the room stood William Seward, who donned headphones momentarily as he made a final check of the sound levels on a Tandberg recorder. A few minutes later, at the behest of the Columbia Records division of CBS, Seward would begin recording a special interview with Ponselle, intended for inclusion on a commemorative LP he was preparing for release on Columbia's Odyssey label.
Seward, a New York-based record producer and writer, had first come to Ponselle's attention through Bidu Sayao, the celebrated Brazilian soprano with whom Seward enjoyed a close working relationship after reissuing some of her radio performances and recordings. As a courtesy, Bidu Sayao had sent Ponselle a copy of a Traviata broadcast Seward had issued as a limited-edition LP. In return, Ponselle had written a highly complimentary thank-you letter, expressing her delight not only with the performance but also with the sound quality of the recording itself. Soon this led to an exchange of letters with Seward, at his initiative as the album's producer.
In time, Seward became a consultant to Columbia Records, which retained him to produce five albums of historic recordings for a newly planned "Legendary Singers" series. One of the five albums was to be devoted to the earliest Verdi-repertoire recordings by Ponselle. When Seward sold Columbia's executives on the novel idea of recording the singer's personal recollections for inclusion on the new album, he approached her for permission to record an interview with her at Villa Pace. After she consented, Ponselle drew Hugh Johns into the discussions to help finalize the arrangements.
Like William Seward, Hugh Johns was not a professional musician but had acquired a formidable knowledge of opera and of opera singers through years of self-study. A public-school teacher, Johns was the son of prominent Baltimore-area physicians. He had become acquainted with Ponselle shortly after World War II, when he was a teenager. As with Seward, who was approximately his age, Johns had nurtured a boyhood admiration for the legendary singers of Caruso's era.
Because he lived in a community close to the Green Spring Valley, where Villa Pace was located, Johns' admiration for Ponselle was heightened by an occasional opportunity to glimpse her from a respectful distance. When he had discovered, at age fifteen, that her telephone number was listed in the Baltimore directory, he gathered the boyish courage to call her--and to his pleasant surprise, he found her approachable. Three years later, he was delighted to see that his idol had begun attending the same Catholic church to which his family belonged. After Mass one Sunday, he approached her gingerly and asked if he might escort her to her car; after a while he did this regularly, and on these brief occasions he would ask her questions about her career. Impressed by the scope of his knowledge, especially in light of his young age, Ponselle took an interest in him, and even arranged for him to study voice with Romano Romani, her mentor and coach. In time, Hugh Johns became a "regular" at Villa Pace, and was usually asked to sit in on interview sessions when Ponselle granted them--including the interview that William Seward was now preparing to record.
Seward, who had just turned forty, had already witnessed the fanfare surrounding one of Ponselle's infrequent interviews. She did not grant interviews readily, and in no case would she agree to be interviewed anywhere but Villa Pace--a self-made rule she would not suspend even for The New York Times' Harold C. Schonberg when he came to interview her. On the relatively infrequent occasions when she would agree to any interviews at all, she would ask that they be scheduled no earlier than four o'clock in the afternoon, to accommodate her penchant for sleeping through the morning hours after watching television late into the night.
On such an afternoon, between four and five o'clock, the door of Ponselle's second-story bedroom would swing open, leading to the long staircase in the foyer of Villa Pace. In an instant, a bevy of perfumed and coiffed poodles would begin a raucous race from her bedroom to the bottom of the stairs; their shrill barking would startle the four or more Persian and Siamese cats, the singer's other favored pets, which silently roamed the villa's lower level. Soon Ponselle's very recognizable face and form would be seen on the balcony that bordered the foyer, and in a few moments she would reach the top of the steep staircase. Then, one by one, she would take the tiled steps in a calculatedly slow gait, her guests awaiting her below. If a guest happened to be someone she knew and valued, it would not be unusual for her to sing a few measures of "I Love You Truly," inserting the guest's name into the words of the ballad.
Her appearance, even late in life, tended to belie her age. Although her waistline had gradually thickened as her capacity for the vigorous exercise of her younger days had lessened over the years, her supple skin, dark hair, large brown eyes, and flawless, pearl-like teeth kept her reasonably young-looking. Her hair color, she would concede privately, had retained its coffee color "with the help of a little touching-up now and then," and her diminished eyesight caused her to rely on a pair of large, black-framed glasses for reading. On most days, however, she confined her daily reading to a cursory scan of two or three newspapers. At no point in her life was she an intensive reader. Usually, she preferred to have whatever she considered important read to her aloud.
Perhaps more than her appearance, Ponselle's energy, attentiveness, and animated ways made her age seem irrelevant. Even at seventy-nine her spiritedness made Luciano Pavarotti think of "a young spring chicken" when he first met her. "Friends told me that she was still a young person," the tenor said after spending an afternoon with her at Villa Pace in 1976. "But I tell you, I wasn't expecting this. She was a young person. She was my age--maybe even younger."
In her relatively few formal interviews Ponselle tended to give measured answers to questions, but almost always in a lively tone of voice. Like her sense of usage and phrasing when she spoke, the sound of her speaking voice, which could range from a mezzo-soprano's to a baritone's depending on her spirits, gave little hint of her unique dramatic-soprano voice and her insightful musical phrasing. Her vocabulary was an amalgam of slang, especially the show-business jargon of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, and a requisite amount of cultivated English. The style she favored could change abruptly in an interview. "Yeah" might be preferred to "yes," "no" might yield to "nah," the tempo of an art song might be described as "snappy," and a major operatic triumph might be labeled "a big hit."
Her speech patterns could also be unpredictable, depending on whether she was thinking in English or in Italian. When discussing a particular Italian opera or when listening to a Metropolitan Opera broadcast, she could summon her prodigious memory and recite in a pure Tuscan accent the text of most any section of a libretto, regardless of the character to whom the lines happened to belong. At other moments, when she was relaxed and engaged in fireside or poolside conversations with friends, she might anglicize her Italian pronunciation, making "Verdi" rhyme with "wordy."
Interviewers who came to Villa Pace expecting to find her music room and library overcrowded with recordings, scores, photographs, and other memorabilia were surprised to find no abundant evidence of her past surrounding the once-famous celebrity. Of the three largest oil paintings that adorned the first floor, two were of family members: her sister and her mother. The third, a full-length portrait of Ponselle in a concert gown--frequently mistaken for one of her Traviata portraits--did not entirely please her. "It's nice, but look at the first finger of my left hand," she would remark. "It's way too long." Only a small number of signed photographs--of Caruso, Antonio Scotti, and two or three others--hung in her library, but they were mounted in a paneled alcove and could not be seen from other parts of the room.
The alcove also housed a sound system that friends and advisors had updated for her since the early 1950s. Beneath the turntable and amplifier were a small number of compartments for storing recordings. First-time visitors usually found it strange that the shelves contained very few of Ponselle's own recordings; she neither owned many of them, nor seemed to have much enthusiasm for listening to any recordings at all. "Don't ask me to listen to records," she would protest. "I have to work when I listen to them."
On the infrequent occasions when she could be coaxed into a listening session, she would demonstrate what she meant by having to work. First, she would reach into the drawer of a nearby end table to retrieve an A'-440 tuning fork. Rapped sharply on the underside of the table, the fork would enable her to determine the key in which an aria or ensemble was being performed. Then she would listen to every note with a focus and precision not unlike a scientist viewing a specimen under a microscope.
Ponselle's memories of her career, like those of many other celebrities, tended to be purposely selective. Dates and sequences of events tended to elude her, as any interviewer soon learned when asking her such questions as whether Il trovatore entered her repertoire before or after Andrea Chenier, or how many times she sang with Titta Ruffo, Feodor Chaliapin, or some other illustrious colleague. Interviewers found it an advantage to bring original programs of her performances, photographs of her and her colleagues, or original pressings of her early recordings. Holding those artifacts in her hands, she seemed able to transport herself backward in time.
But as her interviewers also discovered, Ponselle's memories of the emotions she experienced during critical points in her life--especially her memories of painful events--could be so clear and intense that while recounting them she seemed to experience them all over again. Late in life, this eidetic recall of deep-seated emotions could reduce her to tears, abruptly ending an interview.
William Seward knew how to accommodate Ponselle's idiosyncrasies. In his interview for Columbia, he intended to use the same format that Hugh Johns had favored in a considerably longer session he had recorded with her in the summer of 1968. As Johns had done, Seward wanted merely to prompt her memory by asking a few brief questions that he hoped would invite lengthy and detailed answers on her part. His plan was to record a monologue, not a dialogue, which he and Columbia's recording engineers would edit to fit the opening band of the new LP of her earliest recordings. At approximately four o'clock on an afternoon in October of 1971, Seward completed the last of his equipment checks. Moments later, the reels of the recorder began to turn, and the interview was underway.
The Interview
From interviews of Rosa Ponselle by William Seward (October 1971), by Hugh M. Johns (June-July 1968), and by Fred Calland (1977, precise date unknown), supplemented by the author's interviews (March 1973, June 1975), with minor editing.
Can you tell us a bit about your debut? How was--
Oh, I wouldn't know where to start! Just to think about it, I shiver all over. All I can say is that it was a miracle.
How was it that you were given a Verdi premiere as your debut role, when you had never even been on an opera stage before, let alone the stage of the Metropolitan?
Well, I guess the title of the opera says it all: La forza del destino, the force of destiny. That was my destiny, apparently, to sing Verdi with Caruso at the Metropolitan. I don't know how to explain it any other way.
But wouldn't you agree that destiny seems to work through a willing subject, someone who not only accepts this destiny but also wants it and is prepared to do all the hard work to achieve it?
Yes, I would agree with that. Geraldine Farrar once paid me a very lovely compliment. When she was asked how a person could have a voice like Rosa Ponselle, her answer was, "Only by a special arrangement with God." But in the very next breath she said, "And then you have to work very, very hard indeed." You get her point. Believe me, I worked hard, so hard that I never really had a life of my own in all the years I was singing. You also have to be somebody who is willing to suffer, to feel the pain that goes with all of it. Caruso used to say to all of us, "It's necessary to suffer in order to be great."
Was it Caruso who got you the opportunity to audition at the Metropolitan?
Yes. My sister Carmela and I were coaching with a very prominent teacher and manager, William Thorner, and he was friendly enough with Caruso that he was able to get him to come to the studio to hear us. We had been in vaudeville--in bigtime vaudeville, [on] the Keith Circuit. We were making big money, but we had decided to leave vaudeville and try to get into grand opera. You see, in vaudeville our act was really twenty minutes of big opera arias and duets.
Did you just coach with William Thorner, or did you actually study with him?
No. Thorner never taught me a single thing--I wouldn't let him touch my voice. I didn't coach with him either. I coached all my early roles with Romano Romani, who took Carmela and me under his wing when we were still in vaudeville. Thorner, you see, was really a manager and an agent. But he had very good connections with the Metropolitan, and he was friends with a lot of the singers. And to give the devil his due, he did persuade Caruso to come and hear us.
Obviously, Caruso liked what he heard. But did you know that at the time?
Oh, yes. After I finished singing, he walked over to me and said to me in a very matter-of-fact sort of way, "You'll sing with me." Well, you could've knocked me over with a feather. I said, "Sing with you? Where? When?" All he said was, "Maybe in a year or two, maybe later, but you'll sing with me at the Metropolitan." Then he sat down next to me--I was as nervous as a kitten--and he said, pointing to his throat, "You have it here," meaning that I had the voice it would take to sing with him at the Met. Then he pointed to his heart, and he said, "And you have it here," which was his way of saying that I had the quality of emotion, the depth of feeling, that it would take to be an artist. Then he raised his hand to his head, and tapped his temple with his finger. He said to me, "And whether you have it up here, only time will tell."
At that point, then, was it Caruso who spoke about you to Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera?
That's right. Caruso went back to Gatti-Casazza and told him about these two sisters from vaudeville, and that one of them (he probably said "the fat one," because I was as big as a telephone booth in those days) had just the right voice for Leonora in La forza del destino. You see, they had this big premiere coming up, and it was wartime so they didn't have any of the great European sopranos over here to sing Leonora.
How did Gatti-Casazza react?
Gatti said to him, "This young girl who has only heard two operas in her life and is out of vaudeville is going to come and do Leonora with you? You must have your head examined!" Caruso said, "Wait till you hear her, and you'll change your mind." And then Gatti said, "Well, I'll tell you this: if this American makes good, every door will be open to American potentials from that moment on. And if she doesn't make good, Signor Gatti takes the first ship back to Italy--the first ship back to Italy--and America will never see me again!" But Caruso said to him, "You wait. You won't have to take that ship back to Italy."
Did Gatti-Casazza engage you on Caruso's word, or did you have to audition?
Well, after we sang for Caruso, Carmela and I had two auditions at the Met. The first one was a formal thing--it was only a couple of days after Caruso heard us at Thorner's studio. A lot of the big stars at the Met came to that audition. Giovanni Martinelli was there, and Pasquale Amato, Adamo Didur, Frieda Hempel, Margarete Matzenauer, and Caruso came too. The second one, that was about two weeks later, [was] just for Gatti and some of the executives. That time, I didn't do so good.
Why not?
I fainted. Isn't that the limit! Here I am, a kid looking for the big break, and when it comes, what does Rosa do? Rosa passes out on the floor. What happened was, Gatti had asked me to prepare the "Casta diva" from Norma. I had never even heard of the opera (I didn't know Norma from Wagner in those days), but Nino Romani helped me prepare it. Gatti asked how long I would need to learn it, and Romani told him two weeks. So, at this final audition with Gatti I was asked to sing the "Casta diva," and I got through it fine, right up to the last few measures. Then, all of a sudden, I keeled over. The next thing I knew, Carmela was leaning over me with smelling salts. I don't know what caused it--nerves, maybe a touch of the flu, or maybe I just ran out of breath. But I was sure I had lost my chance. I mean, why would the Metropolitan take a chance on somebody like that? Yet the next thing I knew, Gatti took me into his office, opened the drawer of his desk, pulled out this piece of paper, and handed it to me. I said, "What's this?" He said, "It's a contract. You're going to sing here with Caruso." Well, I didn't know the first thing about a contract! I was just a kid, barely twenty-one, and this was all new to me. I signed the contract, and from then on, as I said before, it was the force of destiny.
How long did it take you to prepare Forza del destino, and where did you prepare it?
You see, I had several other roles that I was supposed to prepare for that coming season. We worked on Forza first, because that was going to be my debut role.
You worked with Romano Romani throughout the summer?
Yes. I rented a place at a beach not far from my hometown [in Connecticut], and Romani rented a cottage there too. Carmela and Edith [Prilik], who became my secretary, stayed with me in my place, and my mother also stayed with us for a time. But I had to keep away from the kitchen while she was there. You see, I made up my mind to lose a lot of the weight I was carrying around.
Did you follow a particular regimen?
A very good friend of ours from vaudeville--his name was Al Herman, a comedian--gave me a book called Eat and Grow Thin. When Carmela and I were starting out in vaudeville, Al Herman used to follow our act. We got to know him pretty well, and we knew each other's act from start to finish. One time, he thought he needed a new opener for his act, so he asked me if he could open with a joke or two about our act. He said he wouldn't even think about doing it if it would hurt my feelings, because the joke was going to be on me. He would come onstage and say, "You know those two sisters who were just out here singin' to you? Don't let'em fool you! They ain't sisters at all. The big one is the skinny one's mother! Why, that mamma is so big she can't even get into a telephone booth. And if you can't get into a phone booth, well there's no use talkin'!" You see, he felt so guilty about using that joke, even though it did get a lot of laughs, that he bought me a copy of Eat and Grow Thin. So I followed it, and I did a lot of exercising that summer--swimming, golf, tennis, and long, long walks--and sure enough, I was a lot lighter when I showed up for my debut.
The week of your debut was a history-making week. Were you at the Metropolitan on Armistice Day, when Caruso sang Samson?
No, but I heard about it, of course. People were celebrating everywhere! I had an apartment at that time (it was on Ninety-seventh Street near Riverside Drive), and there were parties going on day and night. But I was too busy rehearsing, too preoccupied with being ready for my debut, which was to be on that Friday.
You say that you were preoccupied. Would you say you were also worried?
Not at all. At the dress rehearsal, which was on Wednesday, I had no such thing as nerves. I was showing off, really.
How do you mean, "showing off"?
Well, I was a pretty good sight-reader, and in those days, if you sat me in front of a keyboard I'd give you a pretty good show. I was kind of brash, a brazen kid, kind of fresh and full of herself, so at some of the rehearsals I showed off a little to impress the conductor, Gennaro Papi. Oh, I would sight-play eight or ten pages of the orchestral score on the piano. And if I wanted to get Caruso going, all I had to do was run to the nearest piano and play my own arrangement of the Tomb Scene from Aida--in ragtime, like Scott Joplin would've written it. It used to drive Papi crazy, but it would always break up Caruso, who liked to have fun and who had an ear for popular music too.
Did you have another rehearsal on Thursday, or did you try to rest that day?
You know, that whole day is a blank for me. There was a luncheon for me after the dress rehearsal. That was on Wednesday. But on Thursday, the day before Forza, my world caved in on me. My mother was staying with me, and she made me a big breakfast that morning. My secretary, Edith (she lived with Carmela and me at that time) had bought some of the newspapers that morning because we wanted to see how the Aida had gone the night before. You see, a very famous tenor from Italy had made his debut at the Metropolitan that Wednesday night.
You're referring to Giulio Crimi?
Well, I wasn't going to say his name because the critics just tore him to pieces. Let's just say that he was a great artist, and I sang with him later, but they didn't like him and they gave him very bad reviews. Anyway, those newspapers were on my tray. If I hadn't read those reviews, I think I might have been just as bold at my debut. But after I put those newspapers down I thought to myself, what have I gotten into? If this is what the critics can do to an experienced artist--and here am I, with no operatic experience and fresh out of vaudeville? Why, they'll cut me to pieces! From that day on, I didn't know what peace was.
How were you faring on Friday, the day of your debut?
Well, I knew before I left the house that there was some voice there, but I said, "I'm going to die, so what difference does it make?" I was sure I was going to die on the stage. So, on the way down to the theater I saw my favorite color in all the windows and everything: any stray paper on the streets or sidewalks was purple, lavender, the color of orchids, which is my favorite color.
Probably from bunting and paper flags because of the armistice celebrations?
That's right. From the celebrations. I said, "Well if this is any omen, I'm going to live in spite of it all." By the time I got to the theater, I was motionless. I couldn't even raise my arms to put my makeup on--they had to put the makeup on me. My dressing room was all upholstered--it was thickly upholstered, with carpets and heavy draperies. No one warned me not to vocalize in your dressing room, but to go out in the corridor where it's all cement floors and nice high ceilings, and where you can get a real true assessment of what voice you're in. Well, I vocalized in my dressing room, and my whole voice was absorbed by all the draperies and upholstery. "Well," I said, "it's all over now--I've lost my voice!" I couldn't hear any of the overtones, but I didn't know at the time what caused it. I had no voice. I couldn't hear myself.
Once you were onstage, how did your voice feel?
I had a great deal of singing to do in the first act. I had a big aria, "Me pellegrina ed orfana," which is part of the dialogue between Leonora and her maid. And before that, I had the little duet with the father, the Marquis. Then Caruso, as Alvaro, made his entrance through the big casement window. He sees Leonora and sings to her, making love to her with his words. Then he sings, "Ciel! che t'agita?"--in English, "What are you so afraid of?" Well, in the midst of all this love-making--and these are very fast exchanges, back and forth--I said under my breath, "I'm dying! I'm dying"--"Sto morendo! Sto morendo!" And he would say in between these quick passages, "Coraggio! Coraggio! Io ti sostengo!" He was telling me that he would sustain me, that he would get me through this thing somehow. But he was dying in his own tracks, so it was the blind leading the blind.
Did you realize at that moment that Caruso was nervous too?
Well, I didn't know that Caruso also suffered to such an extent at every premiere, but I found out that night. I didn't even think of him that night because I thought I was going to die. And he was trying to give me help because I was his protege, you know, so he felt a double responsibility. He didn't come to wish me well or anything, but I was too nervous to realize that he hadn't come near me before the performance. He was having his own traumas in his dressing room. The room, they said, was filled with smoke, because he smoked cigarettes incessantly (that's how the nerves reacted with him). But, luckily, that never showed in that God-given voice of his.
You survived the first act, and then you had the second act to challenge you.
Table of Contents
| Preface | 7 |
| CHAPTER ONE Wait Till You Hear Her! | 11 |
| CHAPTER TWO I Never Really Have Grown Up | 43 |
| CHAPTER THREE Kid, You Won Your Bet! | 65 |
| CHAPTER FOUR An Overnight Prima Donna | 93 |
| CHAPTER FIVE Flashes of the Grand Manner | 135 |
| CHAPTER SIX A Perfect Voice | 181 |
| CHAPTER SEVEN Sleepless Nights | 219 |
| CHAPTER EIGHT A No-Come-Back Girl | 261 |
| CHAPTER NINE Some Enchanted Evening | 311 |
| Postscript | 350 |
| Notes | 355 |
| A Rosa Ponselle Bibliography by Andrew Farkas | 399 |
| A Chronology of Ponselle's Appearances by Thomas G. Kaufman | 407 |
| Discography by Bill Park | 447 |
| Index | 487 |
| Photographs follow page | 240 |