emma eames bemberg "chanson des baisers"

Part 5.
Emma Eames (1865-1952), soprano;
Bemberg "Chanson des Baisers"
Sung in French

Her voice and recordings

During her prime, Eames possessed an opulently beautiful, aristocratic and expertly-trained voice. It began as a pure lyric-soprano instrument but increased in size over time, enabling her to sing parts as heavy as Aida, Sieglinde, Santuzza and Tosca in large auditoriums. Music critics occasionally took her to task, however, for the coldness of her interpretations.

Eames was reportedly unhappy with the way that she sounded on the commercial recordings she made prior to World War I for the Victor Talking Machine Company. In 1939, however, she appeared on a radio broadcast and selected some of her better recordings to play to listeners, speaking with little modesty about them. Eames' voice also was captured live at the Met in 1903 on primitive recordings known as the Mapleson Cylinders. She sings (impressively) fragments of Tosca on the cylinders. They can be heard on CD reissues, as can all the gramophone records which she cut for Victor in 1905-11. (Romophone CD 81001-2.)

In addition to Tosca and Romeo et Juliette, her repertoire featured a comparatively small but stylistically diverse group of operas, ranging from works by Mozart through Verdi and Wagner to Mascagni. They included, among others, Aida, Otello, Il trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, Die Walküre, Faust, Werther, Cavalleria rusticana, The Magic Flute, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni.
[edit] Personal life
Emma Eames (1909)

Eames was a handsome-looking woman who grew stout with age. She married twice, first to a painter, Julian Story, and then to the famous concert baritone Emilio de Gogorza, with whom she made some records of duets. Both marriages ended in divorce and much bitterness. She had no children, but in her autobiography admitted that she was pressured into a certain "medical procedure".

Paris was Eames' main place of residence during the 1920s and early '30s. She moved to New York in 1936, where she gave vocal tuition. She was fond, too, of attending Broadway shows. Eames died in 1952, after a protracted illness, aged 86. She is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Bath, Maine. Her niece, Clare Eames, was the first wife of the noted playwright and screenwriter Sidney Howard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Eames

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