{"id":102955,"date":"2016-09-22T12:13:19","date_gmt":"2016-09-22T16:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=102955"},"modified":"2016-09-23T09:25:30","modified_gmt":"2016-09-23T13:25:30","slug":"black-pearls-swine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/22\/black-pearls-swine\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Pearls Before Swine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Florence Foster Jenkins is remembered as a failed opera singer. What can we learn by listening to her today?<\/em><\/p>\n

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Florence Foster Jenkins.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Florence Foster Jenkins made her self-financed public debut as a singer\u2014in October 1944, when she was seventy-six\u2014she sang \u201cClavelitos,\u201d crying \u201cOl\u00e9!\u201d and flinging carnations at the audience in Carnegie Hall. For her encore, she had the carnations collected\u2014and then pelted the crowd again. \u201cOl\u00e9!\u201d they roared back. Her friends cheered, hoping to drown out the screams of hilarity and derision.<\/p>\n

Born in 1868 to a wealthy family in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Jenkins had been a talented child pianist. She eloped with, then separated from, a man\u00a0from whom she contracted syphilis, transforming herself into a working woman who supported herself with piano lessons; an heiress; and a socialite, arts patron, and founder of the musical Verdi Club. By 1944, she may or may not have known that her invitation-only recitals and vanity recordings of operatic arias had attracted a cult following. \u201cPeople may say I can\u2019t sing, but no one can ever say I didn\u2019t sing,\u201d Jenkins famously (maybe apocryphally) said.<\/p>\n

But soon after reading the New York Post<\/em>\u2019s damning assessment of her Carnegie Hall debut (\u201cshe can sing anything but notes\u201d), Jenkins suffered a heart attack and, within weeks, died. Today, her notoriety endures in five plays and three films, including a new Meryl Streep<\/a> movie, and in a tradition of private entertainments reminiscent of Jenkins\u2019s own soirees: at midcentury critic and photographer Carl van Vechten\u2019s parties<\/a>, \u201cOften the evenings were spent innocently, writhing on the floor in laughter at Florence Foster Jenkins.\u201d Streep first heard her at a theater students\u2019 gathering. Even I heard first Jenkins\u2019s \u201cQueen of the Night\u201d over digestifs at a New York dinner party.\u00a0<\/p>\n