For the impetus of his 1999 book, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, Wayne Booth, a prominent American literary critic, recalled how in his sixties he stumbled over the hurdles of trying to master the thumb position down toward the cello’s bridge. An amateur musician, Booth already had been playing for more than 30 years. “Even when amateuring does not produce minor disasters, it always reveals this one major difference from all the other kinds of loving play: the amateur works at it, or at least has done so in the past, aspiring to some level of competence or mastery or know-how or expertise,” he wrote. “The amateur wants more of it not just because it brings more pleasure. More ice-cream will almost always give me more pleasure, but loving to gorge on ice-cream does not make me an amateur; working hard to earn more money to buy more ice-cream or a bigger yacht does not entitle the lover to membership in our unsecret society.“
Eighty years after she died, Florence Foster Jenkins has not fallen into obscurity. Famous for her public concerts in New York City as a soprano who performed some of classical music’s most popular vocal masterpieces madly out of tune, Jenkins secured her spot as one of history’s greatest musical jokes. Her story has been the subject of two films, documentary, a biography and reissues of the vanity recordings she made at the Melotone Recording Studio in Manhattan during the 1940s.
Jenkins’ story is resplendently captured in a glittering jewel of a Utah premiere of Stephen Temperley’s Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins by the Pioneer Theatre Company. Directed by Wes Grantom, this exceptional two-hander features Linda Mugleston as Jenkins and Bob Walton as Cosmé McMoon, her accompanist who eventually becomes her most trusted friend and protector.
Souvenir, the second PTC production to be presented in the new Meldrum Theatre at the University of Utah, is perfectly suited to this venue which opened last March. The theater accommodates handsomely the outstanding musical gifts of both actors. Recreating the conceit of Jenkins’ unforgettably campy, out-of-tune performances requires consummate musicianship. To rise to the challenge of never landing precisely on any note, Mugleston has to consciously fight against her innate gifts of superb intonation and ignore everything she is hearing from Walton’s piano accompaniment. The convincing execution of this feat is mesmerizing. To appreciate this performance, listen to the show’s two instances when the Bach/Gounod version of Ave Maria is front and center.
Temperley’s treatment of Jenkins’ cultural footprint expands beautifully on the strengths of the spiritual experience and intelligence we gather from music’s presence in our lives. He accomplishes this by positioning the narrative through the lens of Cosmé, the accompanist who hesitates mightily at first because he worries that his professional musical colleagues will ridicule him for agreeing to participate in a potentially embarrassing display on stage. While he realizes that Jenkins’ gig means that he can stay current in his rent, he gradually is drawn closer to his client’s absolutely solid faith in her musical abilities. She is utterly oblivious to audience members who have become regulars because they do not want to miss any train wreck of a performance she might give.
The second act is like a highlight reel recreating her famous 1944 Carnegie Hall recital, which turned out to be Jenkins’ last major public appearance before her death that occurred just weeks later. The costume changes from one aria or song to another are as spell-binding as Mugleston’s performance. Indeed, it was that performance when Jenkins’ oblivious shield finally crumbled and in her distress of being seen as a laughing stock, Cosmé comforted her with the grace of a genuine friend.
After early encouraging responses to Souvenir, the London-born Temperley made his first connection with PTC when he acted in the company’s production of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. During his off time in Salt Lake City, he reworked Souvenir’s script and songs that Cosmé would sing. As Temperley recalls in a program note, “So here I was, on the one hand dealing with the foggy horrors of London while waiting to hear if my own play [titled Musicale then] … would have a life. At a lunch for the PTC Guild, supporters of the theatre, I told them how the work done at Pioneer, and at other theaters, keeps us going, gives us hope and opportunity. I’m not sure they altogether believed me that their actions could prove so vital. Meanwhile in New York, as I was speaking, managers and producers were meeting to work out a budget. Good news is they succeeded. So the play I worked on while I was at Pioneer would have a life and now it’s returned in its finished form.”
In its two decades of life on stage, Souvenir has journeyed from off-Broadway to Broadway and has enjoyed a continuous string of productions in the U.S. and Europe, which includes a revival next year in Paris. Among the numerous creative projects about Jenkins’ life, Souvenir has perhaps one of the most constructive and illuminating epiphanies on the question of just how oblivious Jenkins might have been about her singing. Was it a joke? Or, was she wholly unaware of the limits of her musical ability? Or, was she an amateur whose sincere love of great music was boundless and unconditional? A wealthy socialite, she was well known for supporting aspiring classical singers. Some observers speculated that because she was taking drugs for long-term syphilis, a side effect might have been tinnitus, which would have made it difficult to hear pitches accurately. Meanwhile, others, including Marilyn Horne, one of the best known American mezzo-sopranos in contemporary times, have found it difficult to believe that she was that smart strategically to have framed it as a joke.
Music history is full of stories about composers and musicians who have carved out a niche for making musical jokes. There is Mozart’s A Musical Joke, K. 522. A gifted composer in his own right, Peter Schickele won four consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album with recordings of music he wrote as a parody, claiming that it was by P.D.Q. Bach, the fictional last child of the great composer who was considered the weirdest of the family. Jenkins’ audaciousness spawned a sizable lot of other musical jokes. One example: In the 1950s, Jo Stafford, a singer who undeniably had perfect pitch, teamed up with her husband, who also was her accompanist, to record a series of hugely popular recordings of unmistakably terrible performances that were released under pseudonyms.
Photo Credit: BW Productions.
Mugleston’s performance captures just how startling it must have been to hear Jenkins attempt the warhorses of the operatic repertoire. One great example is Der Hölle Rache from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night aria that is iconic in debates among opera lovers around the world trying to make their case from whom they believe is the greatest singer. Jenkins’ performance was unquestionably awful but the fact that she would have even attempted such an aria that many sopranos in their own right would pass over in their repertoire is as astonishing as the experience of hearing Jenkins fall woefully short of the infamous string of staccato F6 notes above the soprano’s high C.
Souvenir’s script refers to many of that fated Carnegie Hall recital’s historical details. Cole Porter, Gian Carlo Menotti, Lily Pons and Andre Kostelanetz attended as did Tallulah Bankhead. In the 2016 film based on her story, which starred Meryl Streep as Jenkins, a review by a New York Post columnist characterized the recital as “one of the weirdest mass jokes New York has ever seen.” The film suggests the review led swiftly to her death the following day. In fact, as Temperley’s script indicates, Jenkins had a heart attack days afterward when she was shopping for scores in the New York City store of G. Schirmer, the famous music publisher, and she died a month after her Carnegie recital.
Souvenir is marvelous holiday season fare. Face it: Amateurs love belting out traditional carols and pop hits of the season at parties or community sing-alongs, regardless of whether or not they are in tune. Social media platforms and reality television series bring out trained and untrained singers who think they could snatch a break at fame, including those who do not know how to read music or who would need a lot of production and auto-tune help. From details in her biography, Jenkins was an energetic devotee and patron of the arts and aspiring singers of her time who benefited from her support spoke warmly about her. And, as Booth suggested in his book, it is this special love of music that opens the door to rescuing and elevating the word ‘amateur’ from its corrupted usage of pejorative dismissiveness.
The production continues through Dec. 21. For tickets and more information, see the Pioneer Theatre Company website.