Chapter Nine
Storm Clouds Gathering

The years 1936 to 1939 were a period of consolidation for Marjorie, but unfortunately as her career consolidated the world in which she moved began to disintegrate. A few weeks after Marjorie returned to Paris, German forces marched into the Rhineland, which had been under French control since the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Mussolini’s army was in the process of conquering the African kingdom of Abyssinia and by mid-year bitter civil war would erupt in Spain.

From the safety of her apartment in Paris these events must have seemed distant to Marjorie, but France shared borders with Germany, Italy and Spain and the trickle of Jewish musicians leaving Germany for Paris, which had earlier included Felix Wolfes, had become a flood. The French were still confident that their sovereignty was inviolable and Parisians optimistic that the lights of their city would never again be dimmed, but the signs of the gathering storm were unmistakable.

Marjorie returned to the Paris Opéra and to more performances of roles she had already sung there, her reputation enhanced by her success in New York. Lubin still held sway as the pre-eminent dramatic soprano and when Rouché persuaded Marjorie to sing Brangäne to Lubin’s Isolde in a series of nine performances of Tristan und Isolde, she must have felt some misgivings.

Marjorie did not leave us any recollections of those performances, but records show that she withdrew after the second one. That may have been because she felt the role of Brangäne lay uncomfortably low for her voice at the time, but Pierre Lalo’s comments in his review of the opening night, refute that:

Mademoiselle Lawrence possessed the fullness and richness of tone for Brangäne and her voice did wonders in the prophetic warning to the lovers from the top of the tower.1

It seems most likely that friction with Lubin was the cause of Marjorie’s withdrawal, as she promptly took herself off for a break at the old town of Pomponne, east of Paris, and did not return until rehearsals began a month later for a series of performances of Les Huguenots, with Marjorie as Valentine and Georges Thill as Raoul. These performances were extraordinarily successful and Marjorie was proud to provide a pair of deluxe tickets for Ivor Boustead and his wife when her former teacher came on a visit to Paris.

Marjorie also continued to appear in the French provinces. As she commented in Interrupted Melody, many of her Paris colleagues spurned the provincial theatres after they had established themselves at the Opéra, but she did not, finding them useful places to try out roles she would later sing in Paris or abroad. The conditions were more primitive in the provinces than in the capital, however, and Marjorie had a fund of stories about mishaps on stage in places like Marseilles, Nice, Lille and Lyon.

Some of these were amusing, like Grane’s tail extension falling off during the Immolation Scene in Götterdämmerung in Marseilles, and the occasion Marjorie was nearly immolated in the wrong opera:

I recall, not without anguish, a performance of Die Walküre at Nice for which a mobile steam-engine parked outside the theatre provided the ‘magic fire’ for the last act. Something or other went wrong with the mechanism, with the result that when I lay on Brünnhilde’s rock, I felt more like a hamburger than a daughter of the gods. Escaping steam had made the ‘rock’ as hot as a gridiron and many days were to pass before I could sit with any degree of comfort.2

Performances in the provinces also gave Marjorie the opportunity to sing with some distinguished artists who were not at the Opéra, including the veteran tenor Cézar Vezzani, with whom she sang Sigurd in Marseilles and Lyon, while another engagement took her to the old Roman amphitheatre in Orange, where James Joyce had wanted her to sing Norma. In this vast open-air venue Marjorie sang Brünnhilde in one of the most memorable ‘Walküres’ she ever took part in. At the beginning of the third act, each of the Valkyries was given a white horse to ride and so the audience was treated to a genuine ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ as the magnificent steeds dashed across the stage, their white coats shining in the moonlight.3

Soon after her return from New York, Marjorie also received an offer to sing with the Chicago City Opera Company in the late autumn. The director Paul Longone offered her performances of Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, Elsa in Lohengrin, and two Verdi roles, Aida and Desdemona in Otello, at $600 per performance, the same figure Buenos Aires had agreed to. Marjorie discussed this offer and the one from the Teatro Colón with Rouché. As always the directeur-général was supportive of his protégé and gave his blessing to her accepting both offers. As this meant Marjorie would be away from Paris for eight months—first in South America, then Chicago, followed by New York for her second Met season—it was mutually agreed that her permanent contract with the Opéra would not be renewed and that in future when Marjorie sang at the Opéra it would be as a very welcome guest artist.

Marjorie signed the contract from Buenos Aires and mailed it back to Señor Palma. She also contacted Longone, informing him she would be delighted to sing in Die Walküre, Tannhäuser and Aida, but declining the other roles, saying Elsa and Desdemona were no longer in her repertoire. Desdemona had of course never been in her repertoire, but Marjorie didn’t mention that. Longone, who was struggling to re-establish opera in ‘the windy city’ following the financial collapse of the old Chicago Civic Opera, was happy to take whatever he could get.

Before embarking on this North and South American odyssey Marjorie gave a recital in Geneva, Switzerland, which was an historic turning point in her career. It was both her first solo recital and also her first lieder recital. Marjorie had begun studying German lieder as a way to improve her command of the language and had received encouragement from Lotte Lehmann, Felix Wolfes and Heinz Friedlander in New York. Over the preceding months she had built up a repertoire of about thirty songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and, at Wolfes’s suggestion, Hans Pfitzner, sensibly avoiding songs which required a lighter and fleeter voice than hers and concentrating on those that allowed her to give expression to her dramatic ability. The result, as the Geneva critics observed, was a certain monotony in her program and a surfeit of ‘melodrama’ which was at odds with the intimacy of the liederabend.

Lieder became an integral part of Marjorie’s concert repertoire for the rest of her career and she sang certain songs (including some very difficult ones) with appreciable authority, but some of the finer points of lieder interpretation always eluded her—as they did Flagstad and Lubin. She also developed the habit when singing lieder of dropping out of character as soon as she had sung the last note and, if she felt she had sung well, beaming at the audience, while her frustrated accompanists tried to maintain the mood of the song through the piano postlude.

Marjorie did make wonderful sounds in songs like Strauss’s Des Dichters Abendgang and Pfitzner’s Stimme der Sehnsucht and we have recordings to prove it. Her impeccable diction also served her well, and had she devoted herself more to the study of lieder she might have become a great lieder singer. As it was, she most often sounded like what she was—an opera singer making a conscientious and valiant attempt to make music that was at odds with her musical training and her singing style.4

After another short holiday in an isolated cottage twenty miles west of Fontainebleau during which she, Cyril and Mimi explored Chartres Cathedral and motored around the chateaus of the Loire Valley, the three packed their trunks for South America. From Paris they travelled to Naples via Milan and embarked on an Italian liner bound for Buenos Aires.

The Teatro Colón season was to comprise a total of twenty-seven performances and Marjorie was contracted to sing in fourteen of them. She had agreed to sing Ortrud and three roles she had not sung previously—Kundry, Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer and Minnie in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West. Ortrud required no preparation, but five years had passed since she had studied Kundry with Cécile Gilly, so Marjorie had to dust off her score of Parsifal and effectively relearn the long and difficult role of Kundry.

For Der Fliegende Holländer and La Fanciulla del West, Marjorie had to buy the scores and learn the roles from scratch. Like Flagstad and several other noted Wagnerians past and present, Marjorie found little about the character of Senta she could emphasise with, but the music fitted her voice comfortably. Puccini’s spunky, soft-hearted saloon keeper, on the other hand, appealed enormously to Marjorie the moment she opened the score of La Fanciulla del West. Minnie reminded Marjorie of her own grandmother and she had no difficulty drawing parallels between wayside taverns in the Victorian gold rush and Minnie’s ‘Polka’ saloon in California. Minnie’s music—which anticipates the title role in the same composer’s Turandot—also fitted Marjorie’s voice like a glove and she hoped that Puccini’s ‘horse’ opera, as some detractors called it, might also give her further opportunities to show off her riding skills.5

Other singers making their Teatro Colón debuts that season included Tiana Lemnitz, and two of Marjorie’s Paris Opéra colleagues—Martial Singher and José Luccioni. Returning to Buenos Aires for the season were Hina Spani, Marcel Wittrisch, Alexander Kipnis, René Maison and Germaine Hoerner. The conductors were Ettore Panizza, principal conductor of the Italian repertoire at the Met and the revered Fritz Busch, another refugee from Nazi Germany. Busch’s twenty-two-year-old son Hans was the stage director.6

On arrival in Buenos Aires just twelve days before she was to open in La Fanciulla del West, Marjorie was informed that Luccioni, who was to sing the tenor lead in the opera, was ill and the production had been cancelled. Palma offered Marjorie the role of Telaire in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux as a substitute and as she was not about to forfeit $1800 in fees she agreed to sing the role in place of Minnie.

A greater contrast in operas or roles could hardly be imagined—Rameau’s opera was written two centuries before Puccini’s and the musical language belongs to a different age. Telaire is a proud, mythological princess and about as far removed from Puccini’s gun-toting Minnie as it is possible to be, but Marjorie found Telaire’s music fairly easy to sing and, with the help of one of the opera house’s repetiteurs, she learnt the role in eight days.7 Three days of intense rehearsal followed and Castor et Pollux opened the Colón season on 30 July.

Pollux was sung by Martial Singher, Hoerner sang the other female lead in the opera and Panizza conducted. To Marjorie’s surprise and delight the cameo role of the ‘Happy Spirit’ was sung by Hina Spani, the great Argentinean-born soprano who had been a favourite at La Scala since 1914. Spani was not in the least offended and in fact amused when Marjorie told her that she was the first great soprano she had heard when she attended her first opera in Melbourne in 1928. Wearing an eighteenth-century hooped gown and a tall powdered wig, Marjorie acquitted herself well in the Rameau opera, although after this season she never had the opportunity or the desire to sing it again.

Five performances of Lohengrin followed, with Marjorie as Ortrud, Marcel Wittrisch and René Maison sharing the title role, Tiana Lemnitz and Germaine Hoerner sharing Elsa, and Alexander Kipnis as King Henry. Telramund was sung by a German baritone with whom Marjorie would work a great deal in future years, Fred Destal.8 Marjorie made her stage debut as Kundry on 4 September and sang that role on three more occasions during the season, with René Maison as Parsifal, Kipnis as Gurnemanz, Singher as Amfortas, Destal as Titurel and the Austrian bass-baritone Fritz Krenn as Klingsor. Two weeks later she sang her first Senta, with Destal as the Dutchman, Kipnis as Daland and Maison as Erik. The conductor for each of these operas was Fritz Busch.

In line with a tradition—older than that of New York—several of the season’s performances were recorded and broadcast over the Argentinean national broadcasting network. These included four of Marjorie’s performances. Three survive and have been transferred to CD, allowing us to eavesdrop on her last performance of Ortrud on 17 September, her debut as Senta two nights later and her final Kundry three nights after that.9

The process used in Buenos Aires was similar to that in New York. Three fixed microphones were used, one above the orchestra and two above the stage. The signals from these microphones were captured on sixteen-inch lacquer-coated discs on a pair of turntables located in the basement of the opera house. The recording engineer could switch from one microphone to another and unfortunately did not always choose the right microphone at the right time, so occasionally a singer will sound as if they are singing in another building. The quality of the sound is, however, generally better than the broadcasts from New York, perhaps because the discs have not been played as often.

Marjorie sounds tired on the Lohengrin set and her performance is not nearly as exciting, vocally or histrionically, as in the Met broadcast of the previous year. This is not surprising, considering that it was the eleventh performance she had sung in nineteen days. Unfortunately, it is Maison and Hoerner we hear as Lohengrin and Elsa, rather than Wittrisch and Lemnitz. Maison’s voice is glorious but his singing is unidiomatic and Hoerner is no match for Lemnitz. The glory of the set is the noble and velvet tones of Kipnis as King Henry.

Kipnis is again a tower of strength as Gurnemanz in the Parsifal broadcast—the earliest complete recording of this opera—and Maison is a sensitive and lyrical Parsifal. For a singer who had sung her role for the first time just a few days earlier, Marjorie’s Kundry is remarkably mature and displays the full gamut of the character’s emotions without distorting the musical line—even her screams are musical—and she uses her solid ‘middle’ register to sound sad in the first act and alluring in the second. She also manages to give Kundry a sense of mysteriousness with undercurrents of danger that is entirely appropriate and quite unlike her bold Ortrud and her forthright Senta.

Marjorie’s assumption of the role of Senta is equally successful on the Der Fliegende Holländer discs. The chorus (singing in Italian, while the principals sing in German) sounds as if they have strayed in from a zarzuela, but the principals are uniformly excellent. Kipnis makes the most loveable of fathers and Marjorie the most youthful of daughters, singing freshly, excitingly and with rock-like steadiness. She produces some exquisite mezzo voce moments in Senta’s ballad and throws off scintillating top notes in the long duet with Destal. It is with great expectation that the listener waits to hear this Senta launch into her final outburst at the end of the opera, but being a ‘live’ recording the good comes with the bad. Marjorie begins ‘Wohl kenn’ ich dich!’ magnificently, but then gets a ‘frog’ in her throat and, although she gets through the final pages, fate robs us of what might have been one of the supreme moments among her recordings. However, singing three of Wagner’s most difficult roles—Ortrud, Kundry and Senta—in the space of three weeks is a remarkable feat for any dramatic soprano and to do them so differently and as proficiently as we know Marjorie did from these discs is Olympian.

Fritz Busch’s contribution to these broadcasts is also worth noting. He takes a much more relaxed and lyrical approach to Wagner than Bodanzky and this gives the singers more freedom, which in turn provides us with the opportunity to study Marjorie’s singing a little more closely than is possible on the New York discs. There are times, however, on the Busch discs when the excitement Bodanzky conjures up is sorely missed and when Marjorie sounds as though she would like to push ahead, while the conductor holds back.

Despite not wanting to go to the Argentine capital when first asked to, Marjorie enjoyed her stay and relished singing in one of the world’s most acoustically perfect and beautifully appointed opera houses. The enjoyment however, was not all musical. It will not surprise readers to learn that Marjorie acquired another ardent male admirer on this trip, and by her own admission she fell more deeply and more foolishly in love than ever before. With Heinz Friedlander in New York, the attraction had been athletic sex, but now with Pierre Delbée, it was love writ large.

Delbée was thirty-six, French, slight in build, delicately handsome and one of the leading designers at Maison Jansen, Paris’s leading interior decorators and furniture manufacturers. He had joined the same ship as Marjorie, Cyril and Mimi at Naples and introduced himself to Marjorie, explaining that he also was going to Buenos Aires, where Maison Jansen had a salon. At Algiers, where the ship stopped briefly, Delbée rushed ashore and bought Marjorie a huge armful of red carnations.

On the long voyage across the South Atlantic, Delbée courted Marjorie and she succumbed rapidly to his charms, earning Cyril’s approval just as rapidly with his descriptions of Maison Jansen’s aristocratic and diplomatic clientele. On arrival in Buenos Aires neither were disappointed to discover that they were booked into the same hotel—the luxurious Alvear Palace, opposite the local branch of Maison Jansen.

Marjorie sent Delbée off to ‘do his own thing’ as we would say today, while she learned her part in the Rameau opera and prepared for her debuts as Kundry and Senta, but by the end of their ten-week stay in the Argentine capital, Delbée had proposed marriage to Marjorie and she had accepted. Cyril was happy for his sister to amuse herself with Delbée but saw the prospect of another man entering their domestic arrangements as a threat to his position, while Mimi was furious. She made no secret of the fact that she still harboured the hope that one day Marjorie would marry her brother Henri and began to make all sorts of unpleasant comparisons between her ‘lovable’ and ‘devoted’ brother and ‘that slick furniture salesman’, as she described Delbée.

Marjorie for her part became angry with Mimi and, when Delbée suggested she should ‘ditch the Amazon’, Marjorie booked a passage for Mimi on the next boat back to Europe and, by an ironic coincidence, this was the same boat Delbée was to travel home on, so it was likely an unpleasant voyage for both. Before he departed, Marjorie promised to join her fiancée in Paris after the New York season, planning to marry there in the European summer. Before leaving Buenos Aires Marjorie wrote a long letter to Henri Grodet explaining that she had found a man she truly loved and wanted to marry but that Henri would always occupy a special place in her heart as a ‘brother’ and a friend. After posting the letter, she went out and bought herself six pairs of shoes made from exquisitely hand-tooled Argentinean leather.10

As Marjorie approached her thirtieth year she began to display a number of character traits that seem at odds with her simple country upbringing and which might be said to be typical of an opera diva. Marjorie’s confidence in herself, in her voice and in her ability to succeed at whatever she attempted were reaching their apex; along with that came a certain self-centredness that would not have been tolerated in Deans Marsh or Winchelsea. And yet despite this there was a lack of pretentiousness about her and a healthy pragmatism that was typically Australian. There was also an infectious sense of fun and a delight in living, as well as an ability not to take herself, her fellow human beings or life itself too seriously. Others found these characteristics endearing, with the occasional bout of self-centredness merely proving that ‘Marge’ was human. ‘I sang about gods and I pretended to be the daughter of a god on stage, but I tried always to keep make-believe and reality separate’, Marjorie told one of her students years later. It seems she succeeded—most of the time.

While at the Teatro Colón, Marjorie, Hoerner, Maison, Destal, Kipnis and Busch had been approached by Palma asking if they would consent to do one performance of Die Walküre at the opera house in Montevideo. All agreed. The performance took place on 29 September and was recorded and broadcast. The next day, Marjorie and Cyril sailed from Montevideo bound for New York.11

Before continuing on to Chicago for her next opera appearances, Marjorie gave three concerts in Carnegie Hall, appearing for the first time with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of John Barbirolli, making his second appearance in New York. Marjorie sang the Immolation Scene at each of these concerts, adding the great aria ‘Abscheulicher!’ from Beethoven’s Fidelio. Olin Downes found her singing of the Götterdämmerung finale just as spectacular as it had been the previous year at the Met, but concluded that the Beethoven revealed serious flaws in her technique, not realising that this was the first time Marjorie had ever sung the piece.12

Marjorie dropped the Beethoven from the third concert and, throwing caution to the wind, substituted Fiordiligi’s aria ‘Come scoglio’ from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. As this is an even more technically demanding piece than either the Beethoven aria or Donna Anna’s ‘Non mi dir’, which had brought her undone in Paris, one can only assume she tackled it for the first time, with Barbirolli’s consent, just to spite the critic. The audiences at the first two concerts had applauded her singing of the Beethoven aria unreservedly and after the Mozart, a third audience recalled her to the platform three times.13

A few weeks later Marjorie was soloist with a much less prestigious group: the National Orchestral Association, a New York-based training orchestra. This concert was notable only because it was broadcast and from it we have the first ‘live’ recording of Marjorie in concert. She sings Lady Macbeth’s aria ‘Vieni t’affretta’ from Verdi’s Macbeth, a role she never sang on stage but which might, had she done, been a spectacular vehicle for her extraordinary voice.14 This is the only recorded example we have of Marjorie in her prime singing Verdi.

Marjorie made her Chicago debut on 28 November as the ‘Walküre’ Brünnhilde with Melchior and Schorr and sang each of the other roles she had been contracted to, as well as a performance of La Juive with Martinelli. It was the first time Marjorie had sung Aida in America and the last time she sang Rachel anywhere. Before the year’s end she had also taken part in her first studio concert in the United States, as soloist with the Detroit Symphony under José Iturbi in the Ford Sunday Evening Concert Hour. With this engagement Marjorie discovered how lucrative radio work could be in the United States; for fifteen minutes of singing NBC paid her $1200.

Another significant engagement at this time earned her no fee at all, but Marjorie willingly undertook it. NBC Artists Services passed a letter on to her from the White House. President and Mrs Roosevelt, the letter stated, would be honoured if Miss Lawrence would consent to sing for their guests at a dinner honouring members of the United States Supreme Court Bench at the White House. Marjorie accepted this invitation more out of curiosity than a sense of duty and to earn the prestige that NBC Artists Services assured her would come from singing at the White House. When she met the Roosevelts she was charmed by them and a few years later when she was struck down by illness, ‘F.D.R.’ would become Marjorie’s hero and one of the major influences in the re-establishment of her career.

Marjorie returned to the Met on 8 January for the season’s second performance of Die Walküre. Flagstad had sung Brünnhilde at the first and now agreed to sing Sieglinde with Marjorie as Brünnhilde. As Howard Taubman observed in his review in the New York Times:

For Miss Lawrence this was as difficult a fashion to return to the company as could possibly be devised. In the minds of many persons in the audience must have been the thought that the Australian dramatic soprano shared the stage with the artist whose Brünnhilde had been unreservedly acclaimed. Invidious though comparisons may be, they probably suggested themselves to some listeners.15

Taubman then goes on to report that Marjorie gave no hint of preoccupation with anything but her job and sang with a voice that ‘soared clear and free and true in the trying top notes’. Five nights later she sang Ortrud with Flagstad as Elsa, and Taubman reported their scene together in the second act was ‘deeply moving’.16

Because she had arrived later than in the previous year, Marjorie sang less often in this Met season, but she did sing with the company outside New York for the first time, in Philadelphia as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre, with Flagstad again singing Sieglinde and with their regular colleagues, Melchior, Schorr and List. The splendid Swedish mezzo-soprano Kerstin Thorborg joined the company that season and sang Fricka in each of these performances of Die Walküre, with Marjorie and Thorborg taking an instant liking to one another and becoming firm friends.17

After completing her second Met season Marjorie sailed for Europe on the liner Hansa. Sailing across the Atlantic bound for Marseilles, she and Cyril and a group of hastily made friends celebrated Marjorie’s thirtieth birthday. However, before she could return to Paris and the arms of her impatient fiancée, Marjorie had opera engagements in Marseilles and Nice and the Monte Carlo concert referred to earlier, where she sang with the opera house orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Pierre Delbée was at the Gare de Lyon to meet her, but neither Mimi nor Henri. That suited Marjorie as she had decided (encouraged by Cyril) that she would sever ties with the Grodets and most of her other Paris friends and make a new life with Delbée, who moved in wealthier and more sophisticated circles. As part of this scene change Marjorie had allowed the lease on the apartment in Rue Baudin—where her friends were in the habit of dropping in—to lapse, and she now took another apartment in a quieter and more exclusive part of Paris. The new apartment was on Avenue Junot, at the top of Montmartre, overlooking the famous windmills. There were two apartments in the building and only the back one was vacant, so Marjorie took that on the understanding that when the front apartment became free she would move there.

Avenue Junot was (and still is) one of the most desirable addresses in Paris, but it was not chic enough for Pierre Delbée. He tried to persuade Marjorie to take a spectacular apartment on the Champs Elysées at 10,000 francs per month and when Marjorie refused, they had their first tiff. As he currently lived in one of the least fashionable parts of the city and expected Marjorie to take care of the rent wherever they set up house together, we might wonder whether it had begun to dawn on Marjorie that her fiancée was planning to take advantage of her wealth as well as love her. If it did not, that may have been because Marjorie was still deeply in love with Delbée and practising for her debut as Isolde—in opera’s greatest love story.

Marjorie had longed to sing Isolde for years but had wisely waited until she felt ready. As early as 1933 she had been offered the role by the Lausanne Opera and had signed a contract for two performances, but backed out.18 Listening to Flagstad sing the role in New York and singing Brangäne to Lubin’s Isolde had whetted her appetite and by 1937 Marjorie felt that the time had come for her to tackle the role. An offer came from the Lyon Opera and Marjorie grasped it, thankful for the opportunity to test the role in the provinces before, she hoped, singing it in Paris and in the United States.

Marjorie sang her first Isolde on 1 April 1937 with Victor Forti as her Tristan. The critic of Le Petit Provincial wrote that Marjorie was the best Isolde Lyon had ever heard or seen and lathered his review with adjectives like ‘superb’, ‘magnificent’, ‘velvety’ and ‘scintillating’.19 News of Marjorie’s success as Isolde travelled quickly and over the next few months she sang the role in other provincial opera houses. For two performances in the casino theatre at Aix-les-Baines, Brangäne was sung by Norma Gadsden (now launched on her own career) and Kurvenal by Gadsden’s future husband, Dominique Modesti.

Pierre Delbée travelled to Lyon with Marjorie for her debut as Isolde and instructed her she must immediately study Strauss’s Elektra and Puccini’s Turandot in preparation for singing these roles. Marjorie had occasionally considered these two roles and she was prepared to allow her future husband to manage their private life together, but the discovery that he also expected to take over her career came as a shock. Closeted away in Rue Junot, Marjorie had also missed her old friends and had sneaked back to Avenue Trudaine before leaving for Lyon to make her peace with Mimi.20 By this time also she had become heartily sick of Delbée’s aristocratic friends and their gin-swilling and boring bridge parties. In their hotel suite in Lyon after her last performance she tearfully told Delbée their marriage plans were cancelled and their romance was over.

Marjorie returned to Paris elated with her successful debut as Isolde and chastened and embarrassed about what a fool she had made of herself over the ‘slick furniture salesman’.21 The Grodets welcomed her back as their proxy daughter and Cécile Gilly was relieved that Marjorie would be able to continue her career as a free agent. Cyril was also relieved when the threat to his position as Marjorie’s manager was removed, but regretted the loss of the bridge parties.

Typically of Marjorie, she did not nurse a broken heart for long. When a replacement arrived for Delbée, however, he came unexpectedly and unsought by Marjorie. During their visit to South America, Marjorie and Cyril had met a promising young Argentinean architect named Armand d’Ans, but Marjorie had been too besotted with Pierre Delbée to do more than take note that d’Ans was two metres tall and darkly handsome in a typically Latin American way. Armand d’Ans turned up at Marjorie’s apartment on Montmartre one day, not long after Delbée had departed, explaining that he was in Paris to supervise the construction of the Argentine pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair and that he would like to take her out to dinner. Marjorie accepted and was soon launched on another passionate love affair, with more wedding plans.

Cynics might suggest that the best features of Heinz Friedlander and Pierre Delbée were combined in the young Argentinean. d’Ans was a giant of a man like Friedlander and just as handsome as Delbée, but he was less manipulative and more generous than either and when marriage was discussed he volunteered to give up his own career and devote himself to helping Marjorie with hers; helping it should be noted, not controlling as Delbée had planned to do. Marjorie respected d’Ans as much as she loved him and the only reason she did not marry him was out of consideration for the promising young architect’s own career.

At around the time Armand d’Ans came into her life, Marjorie made her long-awaited and longed-for debut in Britain. Soon after her return from America, she had received a letter from the London impresario Harold Holt offering to arrange and manage a recital for her in Grotrian Hall in June.22 Holt added that if Marjorie’s debut was successful then an offer to tour the United Kingdom would follow. Marjorie saw this as an opportunity to be heard by the musical powerbrokers of London and what she hoped would follow was an invitation to sing at Covent Garden.

Felix Wolfes was back in Paris at the time and happily agreed to accompany Marjorie. Holt had no objection to Marjorie bringing her own pianist and his publicity department put considerable effort into promoting Marjorie as ‘The great Australian soprano from the Paris Opera and the Metropolitan in New York’.

On 15 June Marjorie made her British debut singing a program comprising ‘Divinités du Styx’, ‘O don fatale’, the Immolation Scene and songs by Brahms and Pfitzner, concluding with a group of English and Scottish songs.23 Grotrian Hall was full, and among the audience were many expatriate Australians who gave Marjorie a wonderfully warm reception.

Next day the critics were generous in their praise, although discounting her experience in Paris and New York and writing about her as if she was a newcomer to opera. The critic of the Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘This brilliantly gifted singer brought to her performances youthful vitality combined with confident dramatic eloquence’ and The Times critic referred to her great brilliancy of tone, rich vitality and fine impetuosity. Both were justifiably critical of her lieder singing, but both also expressed the view that she was far short of being fully developed vocally and technically and might, one day become a great singer.24 Marjorie was not impressed and in later years preferred to forget her 1937 London debut and refer to her next appearance there, in 1945, as her first.

The desired invitation to sing at Covent Garden never came. On nights before and after Marjorie sang at Grotrian Hall, Flagstad and Melchior sang Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden and a week later Flagstad sang to an audience of 10,000 at the Royal Albert Hall. Frida Leider was still firmly ensconced in both the opera house and the hearts of Britons, and Germaine Lubin had also sung at Covent Garden this year, so Marjorie was forced to acknowledge that London simply did not need another ‘Brünnhilde’—especially one the critics had labelled as not yet a great singer. Had war and illness not intervened, Marjorie would certainly have achieved Covent Garden eventually, most probably after Leider’s retirement, but that was not to be. She was to sing on the stage of the Royal Opera House on one occasion some years later, but in recital not in opera.

Harold Holt claimed to be pleased with Marjorie after the Grotrian Hall recital but made excuses for the tour he had promised. By way of compensation he put on an extravagant farewell party for Marjorie before she returned to Paris. The party was held at the Savoy Hotel, where she, Cyril and Felix Wolfes had been staying. Among the guests was Kerstin Thorborg, singing Kundry and Fricka with both Flagstad and Leider at Covent Garden. To her new friend Marjorie confided, ‘I should have stayed a bloody contralto!’25