Talk:Ellen Beach Yaw

Assessment

This article should be assessed at "B". There is little other information available about this singer. -- Ssilvers 14:00, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Errors in information and sources regarding Yaw's opera career

Hi, Ssilvers. I've found problems with some of the information in this article and the citations used to support it, and I'm going to try to explain here the changes I've made, and why I've made them. Since the problematic passages were all added by you when you created the article in 2006, and since you obviously still have an active interest in it (as indicated by your edits just yesterday), I'm addressing this to you in particular, although of course anyone else is free to chime in as well. Here are the principal problems that I've found so far:

• In the second paragraph of the "Early life and career" section, you wrote that "She also sang several opera roles in the late 1890s, including Ophelia in Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet in Nice in 1897", and you cited Walters's quotation of an interview in The Strand in June 1899 as support for this sentence. I don't have access to Walter's book, but it's not necessary to rely on Walters for this: the Strand interview is available in its entirety here, and it does not say this. On p. 734, it says only that, after her visit to Paris in the winter of 1897, she "received an offer to join an opera company at Nice". It says nothing about the date of the actual performances in Nice, and it does not specifically mention that Thomas's Hamlet was the opera performed. Your conclusion (or Walters's conclusion) that she performed Hamlet in Nice in 1897 is directly contradicted by Yaw's own statement in an interview with the New York Times in 1908, on the occasion of her debut at the Met, in which she says "I made my operatic debut in Nice in 1904 in Hamlet". If this performance in 1904 was indeed her operatic debut (by which she evidently meant "grand" opera, excluding lighter works like Rose of Persia), it also contradicts the claim that "she sang several opera roles in the late 1890s", and I have not been able to find any other evidence that she did so. Concert performances, in which she performed operatic excerpts among other things, are a different matter; she was certainly doing those in the 1890s. But complete operatic roles on the stage? Again, I don't have access to Walter; if, as you say, he quotes a bunch of press clippings, perhaps he has evidence of something earlier than 1904. But given the inaccuracy of his reading of the Strand interview (if it is in fact his error, rather than an accidental confusion on your part), I'm not sure I trust anything he has to say without independent confirmation. In the meantime, absent any other hard evidence, I think we have to go with Yaw's explicit statement in the Times interview that she first performed Hamlet in 1904, and that it was her first (grand) opera performance.

• The other passage in the WP article where you have cited Walter's quotation of the Strand interview is the statement about Yaw's teachers; there you list her mother, followed by Bjorksten's wife Torpadie, followed by "Ernesto delle Salle." The interview does indeed mention her mother and Torpadie ("Mme. Bjorksten"), but as far as I can see it says nothing about "Ernesto delle Salle", and searches of Google, the Internet Archive, and various newspaper archives turn up no trace of any singer or voice teacher of that name. I suspect this is an error for Enrico delle Sedie, who is mentioned (last name only) at the bottom of p. 732 of the Strand interview. Again, I'm not sure if the error is yours or Walters's, but it doesn't encourage confidence in any of the information that you have attributed to the Strand article.

• In the list of performances following the first Lucia in Rome in 1905, you have included "Catalonia". No source is cited for this (unless the citation of Walters at the end of the next sentence applies to this sentence too), but I strongly suspect that it is a mistake for Catania (in Sicily). The presence of "Catalonia", a region in Spain, in a list that otherwise consists of cities in Italy is suspicious, and there are other sources that report that Yaw performed in Catania in 1905, like this short article by Antonio Altamirano, who had access to her unpublished memoirs.

• Finally, regarding the caption of the marvelous photograph of Yaw as Ophelia, which I had dated to "c. 1895": You changed this to "1897", citing the Strand interview, apparently on the assumption that the photo must have something to do with the performance in Nice (whenever that performance took place). But that's a mistunderstanding. The photo was taken not in Nice but in New York, by the photographer Otto Sarony, who did a lot of celebrity photos of actors and musicians. It was common in the age of cabinet card photographs for singers to have their portraits taken in the costumes of favorite roles (and Yaw said many times that Ophelia was her favorite), but that does not mean that such photographs are contemporary documents of specific performances. The reason I dated it ca. 1895 when I uploaded it to the Commons was because it belonged to the Boston music critic Philip Hale, who wrote "1895?" on the back of it (you can see the original source photo, including the back, here). Hale's notations are not always accurate, but without any evidence to the contrary, I accepted that date as roughly correct. Now that I've looked more deeply into Yaw's career, however, it also seems possible, and perhaps more likely, that it was taken around 1908, the date of her debut at the Met. But that's just speculation on my part, and an earlier date (like 1896, when she was in New York for her Carnegie Hall concert) are certainly possible, since she had been singing the mad scene from Hamlet for years before she ever performed the entire role on stage. The main point here is that there is nothing to connect the photo specifically with the Nice production (and if there were, the date would likely be 1904, not 1897, for the reasons given above).

• With all of this in mind, I have made the following changes to the article:

1. In the second paragraph of the section on early life and career, I've replaced "Ernesto delle Salle" with Enrico Delle Sedie in the list of her teachers, and cited the Strand article directly, not Walters's quotation of it.
2. In the same paragraph, I've removed the reference to the 1897 performance of Hamlet in Nice, along with the claim that she sang several operatic roles in the 1890s.
3. I've revised the subsection on opera and concerts to state that her operatic debut was in Hamlet in Nice in 1904, citing the Times interview in 1908.
4. I've changed "Catalonia" to Catania in the list of performances in Italy that followed the 1905 Lucia in Rome, and cited Altamirano as the source. If you actually do have a different source that confirms that she sang in Catalonia as well (presumably in the Liceo Opera House in Barcelona), by all means add it back.
5. I've removed your date of "1897" from the caption of the Ophelia photo, but rather than reverting to my original date of "c. 1895" or changing it to "c. 1908", I just decided to leave it dateless. That way, at least, we're not providing misinformation.

Sorry to bombard you with such a long wall of text, but as I said, it's your information I'm changing, and I can see that you're still interested in the article, so I figured I owed it to you to explain my edits and my reasons for them clearly. If you have other evidence, from Walters or elsewhere, that can help to clarify the chronology of Yaw's career on the opera stage (as opposed to her concert performances), I'd be delighted to see it, since at the moment that one Times interview is carrying a lot of weight on its own. And if you prefer some other solutions to the problems than the ones I've adopted, that's fine too; I'm happy to collaborate on a version of the text that we can both agree on.

Cheers, Crawdad Blues (talk) 14:54, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

I'm very pleased with all your changes, except that I have removed some minor unnecessary stuff from your citations. I don't want to throw Walters under the bus, but I blame it all on Walters. I would suggest dating the Ophelia photo caption to 1908, or, if you are not confident, then c. 1908. Also, the citaiton to the album with Altamirano seemed useless. I have added a cite there, but do you see a better one? See this. -- Ssilvers (talk) 22:09, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh, good, I'm glad you're happy with it. Since you prompted me to look at the section on recordings, I've revised that as well, using information from Altamirano's article and from the online Discography of American Historical Recordings at UCSB, which is based on the company records and lists all the Victor and Edison matrices (several of which are available for streaming). I don't think there's any need to single out the Pearl CD for mention, since it's just one of several reissues of her recordings over the years on various historical labels. It came out as an LP before it was reissued on CD -- I remember seeing it in Tower Records in San Francisco in the 80s. (Altamirano did not narrate it, by the way; he simply wrote the liner notes.)

I may come back to the article briefly after the holidays, since in my search for information on the dates of opera performances I accumulated a few other sources that might usefully be added.

Best wishes, Crawdad Blues (talk) 19:05, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Merry Christmas! -- Ssilvers (talk) 23:38, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Relatives

I am a cousin of latk ellen and I have a 78 record of hers that was passed down to me in the family. 2601:601:9781:4BB0:B511:48C2:DC07:D7B4 (talk) 00:30, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Taught singing?

The Lead says that she taught singing for decades, but the Later life section doesn't really say that. Can we clarify? -- Ssilvers (talk) 02:16, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

None of the sources I have seen suggest that she gave formal voice lessons, and a few of them explicitly say that she did not. I'm thinking in particular of the 1912 Out West article, which says (on p. 218) ""While Miss Yaw takes no pupils, there is scarcely a week passes that young girls and women do not come to sing to her to have her give judgement upon their voices. Out of this number she has chosen three whom she calls her proteges. To these she has turned over her Nest and she hears them sing every day, criticising, suggesting and directing them in their studies and exercises." Does that count as "teaching singing" or not? Depends on how you define "teaching", I guess. When I revised that section of the article, I tried to finesse the question by saying that her home was a center of musical activity, and that young women came regularly to sing for her and receive her advice. You shortened this to simply "sought her advice", which is fine, it's less wordy and more economical and I have absolutely no problem with it. But there was a reason I phrased it the way I did: I was trying to follow the source as closely as I could, and to indicate that she didn't just serve tea and give advice, she actually listened to them sing and gave feedback. And especially with her "proteges", it was clearly more than a one time thing. But on the other hand, the author of the article says explicitly that she "takes no pupils", which makes it hard to say that she gave singing lessons when you're using him as a source! Anyway, the Out West piece is only one article, and her practice could have changed over the years, but I don't recall seeing any source that specifically said "taught voice lessons" vel sim. In 1934 she established her "School of Out-of-door Singing" in the Lark Ellen Bowl, but what does that mean, exactly? The LA Times article doesn't say. It almost certainly wasn't formal singing lessons; probably more like getting a bunch of kids together in the great outdoors and having them wail away for a bit.

TLDR: There's a reason why the body of the article doesn't actually say that she taught singing or gave voice lessons. She may have, and if we had her memoirs this (like a lot of other things) might be clearer. But I don't think we can say that she did so on the basis of the sources I have looked at, so I have edited the lead accordingly. You now know as much as I do, so feel free to tweak things as you see fit. Cheers, Crawdad Blues (talk) 23:28, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Good. No need to worry about many details of this "Out West" source, I think, because it is fairly puffy stuff. What kind of feedback she gave is anybody's guess, and this interviewer seems to have been taking Yaw's description of things very uncritically. As you say, her practice could have changed, may have been exaggerated, and it's not terribly encyclopedic anyway. Unless there is an independent observer who can vouch for all of that, I think it is best to keep it short. The "proteges" are not notable persons, or we would name them. As for teaching voice, we don't know of any famous/successful students who studied with her, so who really cares. -- Ssilvers (talk) 03:26, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I am shocked, SHOCKED, that you do not consider Antonio Altamirano a notable person. We refer to him in the article as her student, but in the liner notes for the Pearl CD he describes himself as "Antonio Altamirano, Protégé and Record Manager of Ellen Beach Yaw". She had been dead for more than 30 years, but he was still inordinately proud of his one brush with greatness ... Crawdad Blues (talk) 13:59, 14 March 2023 (UTC)