Mainers witness to singer’s return

Going to the opera was a grand event of near religious proportions a century ago. That helps explain the effusiveness bordering on worship that greeted Madame Lillian Nordica, the internationally renowned diva from Maine, when she came to sing in Bangor on April 6, 1904.

It was perhaps the greatest musical event in the city’s history. Daily promotional briefs began appearing in the Bangor Daily News a month before the performance, touting everything from Nordica’s voice to her gowns and jewelry. But more than anything they proclaimed the great diva’s love of her birth state, a place whose virtues she never tired of extolling on her journeys around the world.

Nordica was “the pride of Maine and the greatest vocalist that America has ever produced,” the paper proclaimed. Yet Nordica’s popularity in Bangor is hard to gauge. We never are told the size of the crowd – except that is was large – that attended the concert at City Hall that night. The building, located at Columbia and Hammond streets, seated more than 1,700. And on the morning of the event there still were good seats left, according to the BDN. They sold for between $1 and $2, the latter worth about $40 in today’s currency.

There was no mention in the local press accounts of her well-publicized domestic state or her health, which was affecting her voice.

The woman born in 1857 on a farm in Farmington and baptized Lillian Norton – Nordica was her stage name – was in the midst of a messy divorce, her second. The proceedings had been made final in February, but a little more than a week after the Bangor concert, her ex-husband, Zolton Doeme, a Hungarian tenor and ex-army officer, filed fraud charges and a judge reopened the case. Doeme claimed he had been trapped into making certain statements leading up to the divorce. Nordica had accused him of spending all her earnings since 1896, leading “a whole life of infidelity” and threatening to murder her if she divorced him.

As if this melodrama wasn’t stressful enough, Nordica had a bad case of bronchitis. Her vocal efforts during the tour were distressing, causing her great anguish, according to biographer Ira Glackens.

Nordica and her party arrived by train in Bangor at 3:15 a.m., remaining in their sleeping car until 7, when they

headed to the Bangor House for breakfast. In the forenoon, she went out for a brief drive around the city, returning shortly before dinner, after which she remained in her room for most of the day.

“She had a number of callers,” according to a brief Bangor Daily News account. What the BDN reporter didn’t mention was that one of those callers was a reporter for the rival paper, the Bangor Daily Commercial, who was granted a personal interview.

The interview is a light affair, but the opera star emerges as a charmer whose romance with her home state persisted.

“Do you know I am thinking very seriously of coming to Maine this summer and taking a rest among the woods and streams?” she said with much enthusiasm.

“Then you wouldn’t go to Bar Harbor,” ventured the reporter, well aware of the glittering assemblage of wealthy socialites who gathered there each summer.

“Oh, no,” she said, with much emphasis. “I don’t want to go there at all. I want to get away where it is quiet and where I can see all of nature that is possible.”

She wanted to go fishing, she explained, although it would not matter whether she caught a fish. She knew something about fishing too. She had heard that the first salmon of the season had been caught in the Bangor Salmon Pool just a few days before.

“I hope it was caught legitimately. They did not use a net did they?” she asked.

The Nortons had left Farmington when Lillian was 7. She had been raised in genteel poverty, still managing to attend the New England Conservatory of Music. But she had never, in all those years since, summered in Maine.

That night Nordica’s performance was greeted with unbounded appreciation, “which belied the traditional coldness of a Bangor audience.” Her program ranged from “Call of the Valkyrie” to “Coming Through the Rye.”

“The hall swayed with applause and the air grew white with waving handkerchiefs” when she entered. Her voice had “matured” since her last Bangor performance in 1897. Her singing was “marvelous’ and “majestic” and “passionate.” Five encores were demanded.

“Certainly it has never been the privilege of a Bangor audience to hear a singer who reached greater heights of artistic success than did Madame Nordica Wednesday night and the pleasure which she afforded will long be remembered,” said the Commercial’s review.

The next day Nordica’s entourage paid $200 for a private parlor car on the afternoon train so they could avoid getting up to leave on the 3:45 a.m. train to Saint John, New Brunswick.

An incident at the train station showed Nordica’s “democratic spirit and her true womanliness,” according to the reporter for the Commercial. A man, his wife and two children bound for Winn were ordered off the special car and sent to coach for the rest of their journey. As they were about to depart, Nordica invited them to remain as her guests, conversing with them as far as their destination where she shook their hands and bade them farewell. Events such as these, along with her powerful voice and her Maine roots, made her a hero to many Down Easters.

While concertgoers doubtlessly continued to bask in the warm fury of Wagnerian opera tunes, Main Street merchants were a bit disappointed. As part of the buildup for the concert, a short BDN piece had urged shopkeepers to be on the lookout for the great singer. She liked to shop, it had been reported in the press. In Minneapolis she had paid $2,000 for a string of 200 “sweet water pearls of the Mississippi” 28 inches long.

Alas! In Bangor she bought only “a lot of ribbon of exclusive design” at the Nichols Co. She was in other stores too, where she was most amiable to those who waited upon her, but no purchases were reported.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.