Arabella Goddard

ARABELLA GODDARD IN AUSTRALIA

"We have had the foundation stone of a temple to Apollo laid by one of the greatest of his high priestesses."

The Melbourne Argus, September 25, 1874 -
referring to the laying of the foundation stone of Ballarat's Academy of Music.

On an overcast September day in 1874, with rain threatening, 1500 people gathered in Lydiard Street, Ballarat, opposite Craig's Royal Hotel, to witness the laying of the foundation stone of Ballarat's new theatre, the Academy of Music. Hoardings, decorated with flags of many nations, screened the building works from the street as the stone hung ready for the ceremony.

The architect, George "Diamond" Browne, had called on visiting British pianist Madame Arabella Goddard in her rooms at Craig's Hotel and asked her to officiate at the ceremony. The lady graciously consented and Browne had a presentation silver trowel engraved for the event.

Early Life

Madame Goddard had been born in France, in 1836, to Thomas Goddard, heir to a Salisbury cutlery firm, and his wife Arabella Ingles. Her family were members of the considerable community of English expatriates living in fashionable St. Servan, a suburb of the historic port city of St. Malo in Brittany. Later in life, Goddard was very proud of her French background and identified with French culture, her conversation being interspersed with French phrases.

Little Arabella was the darling of the family, ten years younger than her only sister, Ann. She was taught piano from an early age and became a child prodigy, playing for Queen Victoria and the French royal family. When Thomas Goddard suffered business reversals and had to leave France at the time of the 1848 February Revolution, the family found themselves in difficult circumstances. The talented young Arabella was put on the concert platform to save the family fortunes. She found a champion and mentor in J.W. Davison, influential music critic and teacher, who guided her musical taste away from Thalberg and popular Victorian composers and moulded her into a notable performer of the classical repertoire, most notably Beethoven sonatas.

Marriage

Davison married his young protege in 1859. According to the famous pianist Hans von Bulow, Goddard "tyrannized over London for years....Davison would not allow any other pianist than his wife to exist."

James William Davison was son of a popular actress, Miss Maria Duncan. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music and was a very minor composer. At one point, he published a version of Rossini's "Stabat Mater," arranged by himself as a dance tune, a gaffe which was to cause embarassment to a generation of English musicians visiting Italy. He was also a teacher, publisher and editor of a journal, The Musical World, and became music critic for The Times in 1846, from which position he attempted to dictate England's musical taste until 1878.

He was a very difficult man, notorious for his conservatism and extreme opinions, and he refused to endorse any composers after Mendelssohn. Wagner was one of his pet hates. There is also strong evidence that he received bribes in return for favourable criticism. He is credited with having inhibited, single-handed, the development of British musical taste for many years.

Davison is also reputed to have been very difficult in private life, and after the birth of two sons, Henry and Charles, Goddard separated from him.

An entertaining biography of him by Charles Reid, The Music Monster, was published in 1984, much of it based on Music of the Victorian Era, a 1912 reminiscence of his father by Davison's son Henry, a minor poet.

On Tour

Madame Goddard was in Ballarat for three nights as part of a three-year long world tour prior to her retirement from the concert stage. The tour, between 1873 and 1876, took her to Australia, India, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Java and back to Australia, then to New Zealand, California, New York and Canada.

The response to her concerts in the Australian colonies was adulatory. Local entrepreneur R.S. Smythe, who was managing the Australian leg of her tour, was skilful in whipping up support, and she had profitable seasons in Melbourne and Sydney before she left for India and the European colonies of the Far East.

Shipwreck

On the evening of June 20, 1874, on the return trip from Java, her ship, the RMS Flintshire, was wrecked off Townsville and Madame Goddard spent a night of torrential rain in an open boat, which she shared with the Great Blondin, also in the middle of a world tour.

Both pianiste and tight-rope walker were stranded in Townsville for a week until the heavy baggage could be removed from the ship. Madame Goddard was particularly anxious about her magnificent iron-framed Broadwood piano, built for a recent Vienna Exhibition. The weight of the piano was holding the wreck stable, and it was feared that if it was removed, the vessel would sink. During the delay, the Malay sailors left on board ransacked the passengers' luggage, and all Goddard's mementoes and gifts presented to her so far on the tour were stolen.

Storm in Sydney

By July 1874, Madame Goddard was back in Sydney for a series of concerts at the School of Arts. The performances were so well received that the series was extended and transferred to the Royal Victoria Theatre, managed by John Bennett. In fact the public were so enthusiastic, and so clamorous for encores, that tensions started emerging as to the lady's willingness to satisfy the demands of the audiences. Some press commentators were evidently embarrassed by the crass behaviour of the Sydney audiences; others were critical of the lady for her cool demeanour.

However, these slight tensions were nothing compared to the trouble that erupted at the end of the concert series. The problem arose when Madame Goddard refused to share the bill for a projected tour to Bathurst and Orange with one Mrs Hilton. Mrs Hilton, a music hall singer also known as Miss Liddle, had recently been performing at Sydney's Café Chantant in York Street, later the Queen's Theatre. As one of Goddard's agents put it, Mrs Hilton was "selected from halls dedicated to acrobatism, human spiders, men fish and buffoonery."

After Goddard received threats that her final Sydney concert would be disrupted with "cabbages, carrots, turnips and eggs," and a riot caused, she decided that discretion was the better part of valour and took the next steamer for Melbourne. To quote the Evening Post of August 22, Madame Goddard "skedaddled from Sydney under suspicious circumstances." It was alleged that her passage on the SS Dandenong was booked in the name of Miss Christian, an Australian member of her touring party.

John Bennett, the disgruntled manager of the Sydney theatre, and organiser of the proposed country tour, announced her departure from the stage of the Royal Victoria on the evening of 20 August 1874. He read a letter supposedly written by Madame Goddard, which said in part: "I have received several anonymous letters intimating that I am to expect an unfavorable reception this evening, in consequence of my not having engaged native talent to assist me. I need not tell you…how much I admire the Australian people, but I was perfectly unaware that the natives of Australia were musical. The negroes of the Southern States of America are the only musical blacks that I ever heard of."

The letter caused howls of protest in Sydney. Madame Goddard indignantly denied ever writing it and signed a statutory declaration to that effect. In her haste to leave Sydney, however, she had been forced to leave behind her Broadwood piano, which Bennett held to ransom and allowed other performers to use. While her agent negotiated with the aggrieved manager, Goddard was lent a substitute for the remainder of her Australian concerts.

Earlier Tensions

The incident in Sydney recalled an earlier occasion in the tour back in August 1873, when Madame Goddard had appeared at the Geelong Mechanics' Institute. Tour manager Smythe had taken exception to some comments published in the magazine The Pivot critical of certain members of the company. He then took the unusual step of printing them in the concert programme, presumably in a spirit of defiance. During the first half of the concert, a row had erupted backstage with the two artists criticised, Mrs Cutter and Signor Susini, wanting to know why the comments had been reprinted.

Madame Goddard had become hysterical, a doctor had been summoned from the audience, and the great pianiste had been driven home in her carriage. Not only were the Geelong public deprived of her second appearance in the concert, but she was still not sufficiently recovered to appear at a concert scheduled for the Melbourne Town Hall next day: a concert the Melbourne Herald had described as "'Hamlet' without the Prince of Denmark."

When it came to Goddard's problem with Sydney, Melbourne Punch suggested that the problems arose because of the "fulsome adoration" Madame Goddard had encountered earlier in her visit:
"If you had had the good fortune to be 'let alone,' the name of Goddard would not be known through the length and breadth of these 'fair countries' as a signal for disputes and wranglings, but as a clever, undoubtedly great artiste; and your reminiscences of the Australias would have been confined to o'erflowing coffers, and enthusiastic welcomes and regretful farewells."
She was evidently a "tall poppy" of the 1870's.

After the Sydney furore, Goddard was welcomed back to Melbourne with open arms, with some element of inter-city rivalry no doubt coming into play. The Weekly Times felt that the reception she received at one of her Melbourne concerts "should compensate for a whole wilderness of Sydneys." There were even suggestions that Smythe, the agent, had orchestrated the whole affair as a way of ensuring Madame Goddard a warm reception in Melbourne. Eventually The Argus refused to publish any more correspondence on the subject.

A successful concert series was organised, including visits to Ballarat, Geelong and Castlemaine. Fortunately, the laying of the foundation stone of Ballarat's new Academy of Music went smoothly, the celebrated pianiste gave the building her blessing, and then the official party retired over the road to Craig's Hotel, where toasts were drunk with celebratory bumpers of champagne.

Later Life

After a visit to New Zealand, Goddard took ship for San Francisco. She had an extended stay in California, and she even considered moving there. She made her New York debut in October 1875, under contract to impresario Max Strakosch, who presented her at Steinway Hall in a double bill with the singer Mdlle Theresa Titiens. Her 3 month contract with Strakosch reportedly delivered her $15,000, gold. After a visit to Canada, she evidently returned to the States for a visit to the 1876 Centennial Exposition before coming home to England in the summer of 1876.

On Madame Goddard's return to the London stage in October 1876, a critic in the press posed the question whether her powers as a musician had suffered from "ministering to the tastes of a comparatively uncultured public." It was felt some deterioration had occurred, but that "the ground will be made up, just as a plant, affected by removal to an uncongenial climate, recovers when again breathing its native air."

After her retirement from perfoming, she taught for some time and eventually died at her house in Boulogne in 1922.

Tragic Family

Tragedy dogged Goddard's descendants. Her elder son Henry Davison had three sons and two daughters: two sons were killed in the First World War, and the third died soon after from his experiences at the Front, and one daughter, an artist, died of consumption at around the same time. Her younger son, Charles Davison, was killed when the Boulogne house was bombed by the Allies in 1940, and his widow was interned in Troyes for the rest of the War.

Much of Davison and Goddard's collections of music, books and memorabilia were destroyed during the Second World War. Her last surviving grandchild, Marie Davison, after a brief career as a music hall singer, devoted her life to working with the poor of London's East End. When she died, any surviving Goddard-Davison memoribilia were inherited by the Kenney family, relatives of Henry's Davison's wife Laura Kenney.

The silver trowel presented to Goddard by George Browne is 1874 has been donated to the Theatre's archive collection by the Kenney family, along with a small collection of Goddard's scrapbooks, music and photographs, and the remnants of Davison's collection of letters and autographs.