A Diva’s Carnegie Hall Debut
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The Carnegie Hall debut of American coloratura soprano Florence Foster Jenkins was sold out weeks in advance. Her October 25 concert was the musical event of the 1944 season. Scalpers demanded up to $20 a ticket. This was only a year after a cab accident, which had, Jenkins claimed, enabled her to sustain “a higher F than ever before,” revealing a somewhat flexible concept of pitch. For more than 30 years, Jenkins, a socialite and philanthropist, had performed to raise funds for charity. Those recitals, too, had been overwhelmed by fans. Police had to fight off gatecrashers.
Jenkins was serenely confident of her talent – indeed, her greatness – as a singer. Her long-time accompanist, Cosme McMoon, said, “When it came to singing, she forgot everything. Nothing could stop her. She thought that she was a great artist.”
Yet not even McMoon shared her belief. The Daily News said that Jenkins “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.” Other critics said that “she clucked and squawked, trumpeted, and quavered,” or called her “the first lady of the sliding scale.’ Newsweek insisted that “…Mrs. Jenkins sounds as if she was afflicted with low, nagging backache.” None of this mattered. Jenkins loved to sing and to share her happiness in song.
Born in 1868 to a wealthy family from Wilkes Barre, Pa., Jenkins inherited a fortune in 1909, enabling her to pursue the singing career that her family and ex-husband had long discouraged.
After studying with an anonymous instructor, rumored to be a great opera star willing to keep quiet and take her money, she gave her first concert for charity in 1912. As Jenkins underwrote production expenses, her recitals raised considerable amounts of money for her causes, particularly the support of starving artists. She soon performed regularly in Newport, Washington, Boston, and Saratoga Springs. Famously generous and modest in all things save her musical career, Jenkins, as a friend said, “…only thought of making other people happy.”
Her annual recitals had seen about 1,000 people jammed into the Ritz-Carlton’s ballroom. She battled through the great soprano arias, such as “Queen of the Night” from “The Magic Flute” and “The Bell Song” from “Lakme,” in lavishly staged events requiring at least three costume changes.
“Angel of Inspiration,” composed for her by McMoon, opened with her spot-lit advance downstage through a forest of potted palms, her body sheathed in silk, tinsel, and tulle with full, feathered wings sprouting from her shoulders. For her showstopper, Joaquin Valverde’s “Clavelitos,” she wore a huge red flower in her hair and a vivid Spanish shawl and flung rosebuds from a wicker basket toward the audience while fluttering an enormous fan. Occasionally, when carried away, she tossed the basket and the castanets as well. As the roaring crowd demanded an encore, McMoon would scramble about, collecting the petals so she could do it again.
Some audiences sat in complete silence – if not shock. Others stifled their laughter by stuffing handkerchiefs in their mouths. Some surrendered, howling until tears rolled down their cheeks. Occasionally, not even Jenkins could overlook the guffaws, but she insisted that the laughers were hired by jealous rival singers. Critics attended her recitals as well. Most overcame their professional horror to write reviews of charitable ambiguity.
The Carnegie Hall debut crowned Jenkins’s career. She gave the audience her all, although McMoon, some claim, performed behind a screen. A few reviewers noted that “her singing was hopelessly lacking in semblance of pitch” and that “she was undaunted by… the composer’s intent.” Others were gentle. “Everyone had a pleasant evening,” one wrote. Another found “a certain poignancy to her delivery.” A third wrote, “Her attitude was at all times that of a singer who performed her task to the best of her ability.” Robert Bager of the “World-Telegram” perhaps put it best: “She was exceedingly happy in her work. It is a pity so few artists are. And her happiness was communicated as if by magic to her listeners who were stimulated to the point of audible cheering, even joyous laughter and ecstasy by the inimitable singing.”
A month and a day after her apotheosis, Jenkins died at age 76.
Her voice, as heard on a Naxos compact disk, “Murder on the High Cs,” was spectacularly awful: quavering, relentlessly off-key, only occasionally hitting the right note as it wanders the scale.
What, then, did this otherwise sane woman hear when she played her own recordings? No doubt sheer loveliness. Jenkins’s dreams of grace and beauty were her reality. And the woman’s brave defiance of her own helpless ineptitude still has a certain magnificence.
As she once said, “Some may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can say I didn’t sing.”