The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral

By Blanche Arral, Translated by Ira Glackens, William R. Moran, Editor.

Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon, 2002, hardcover, 14 illustrations, $24.95, 352 pages,
ISBN 1-57467-077-8

Reviewed in Good Reading, the Magazine for Book Lovers, ABN 38 003 750 150, May, 2005


Good Reading Magazine

Any opera lover or anyone who has enshrined their copies of Beaton’s "My Royal Life" and Dennis’ "Little Me" simply has to have this book. But, unlike the stories of Beaton’s faux family and Belle Poitrine's misadventures for love, this story is real. Blanche Arral really did grow up in a well to do Belgian home, become a famous opera star in the Paris of the Gay Nineties, sustain an international career for many decades, and die the wife of a New Jersey dentist in the 1940s.

"Extraordinary” hardly begins to describe her adventures. After becoming an opera star despite her family’s better intentions, she married a Russian Prince, held court in St. Petersburg, and lost her husband in a mysterious manner in the early stages of the Russian Revolution. While searching for him in Constantinople she was imprisoned by the Sultan and literally had to escape from the seraglio (does this sound familiar? Keep reading).

Having resumed her career on the international opera circuit she was rescued from opera - loving rebels in Latin America, stole Melba’s concert audiences in Melbourne by virtue of superior marketing and escaped a tsunami in Thailand by clinging to a Louis Quinze chimney piece. She eventually found haven in the USA where, while singing Carmen, she was literally stabbed by her leading man who used a real knife instead of the one with the collapsible blade.

After her hair was burned off in a freak accident she made some of Edison’s first voice recordings and took to wearing the loaf-like wig in which she concluded her "extraordinary" life in New Jersey.

More about this book

These are just some of her adventures. Only their impossible circumstances and the history of the manuscript (there are several prefaces, the result of an amanuensis’ draft being passed from one intergenerational protégé to another) lead to the delicious yet unfounded suspicions about this biography. 

If it were not for the existence of historically proven photograhs and recordings which support many of the extraordinary facts set out in this book it would be far too tempting to supect that Blanche is yet another fabulous creation of a clever and very funny mind.