It probably would not work, any more than saintly bishops or verecund politicians are attainable, especially when (as with one of these books) the subject has acquired a mythological status. In the Preface to her Melba biography, a partial Thérèse Radic professes to solve these problems and to justify yet another Melba book (they have proliferated to match the legendary farewells) with a flourish of serious questions. But having asked them, like Pontius Pilate she leaves them well alone thereafter. ‘What was the skill she possessed? Did it die with her or have we received it as a cultural heritage? … Is [the art she served] largely the melodramatic product of male sexual fantasy … was Melba really some kind of geisha in the service of the composers?’ I wonder if she wrote that before or after the rest of the book. In fact, she does not even address more serious questions about the role that art and music play in a society or the significance of the social changes of Melba’s lifetime.

Even more problematical – for me at least – is the continuity of the book. If I am to gain any valuable overview of a biography, it needs to be well-indexed (this one is patchy) and of a lucid sequence. When I have wanted to consult particular points, I have found it extremely difficult to do so. Melba’s visits to Australia, for example, are presented with a remorseless cinematic cross-cutting technique, across several chapters and often using extracts from undated letters, so that I frequently had no idea whether I was in 1902, 1907, 1909, 1911 …

It is also quite extraordinary that a book about an Australian singer (which lays some emphasis on Melba’s self-proclaimed Australianism), by an Australian author, published in Australia, has ignored the opportunity to provide us with clear and comprehensive details of her Australian performances. It is worse than extraordinary. It is cultural cringing to have detailed appendices of ‘What Melba sang at the Met’, ‘What Melba sang at the Manhattan’, ‘Melba’s appearances at Covent Garden’, ‘The provincial tour of Great Britain with Jan Kubelik 1912–13’, ‘The American-Canadian tour with Jan Kubelik 1913–14’, but absolutely nothing about Australia. Why, indeed, have another book without that information?

We do learn a good deal about her early musical training and performances in Melbourne, but it is odd that there is no mention of James Edward Neild, the eminent forensic pathologist and critic who ‘claimed to have been the first to recognise the brilliance of Melba’s voice, advising her to forsake her studies of the piano’ (Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 5). Further, despite all the Krafft-Ebing stuff in the Preface, and a fairly discreet chapter on her affair with Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, Melba’s romantic life is kept under close wraps. What really were her relations with her flautist-manager John Lemmone, or with Fritz Hart, the gifted Director of the Albert Street Conservatorium? Hart is, in fact, written about at some length, but not so cogently as to avoid the impression that it is padding. (He is not the only instance of that in either book.) The impression is that he was far more than the accomplished lieutenant who held the fort in Melbourne, but Radic leaves the matter unpursued.

The book does, however, provide us with an abundance of evidence of the contradictions of Melba’s large-scale personality. She fawned on royalty and the aristocracy in the worst colonial manner (and not simply because they could enhance her career), but expected to be treated the same way. Both characteristics were expedient and instinctual: she was sycophantic and patrician by turns. Much of her public utterance (at least as reported by the press) we can see to be tendentious humbug but some was sincere belief (though it is likely to remind the modern reader of Queen Victoria’s remark that Gladstone spoke to her as if she were a public meeting). She was deeply moved by the early death of the forthright Sydney singer, teacher, and critic James Griffen Foley, who is unmentioned by Radic (just as he was omitted from both of the books of the vindictive Arundel Orchard). ‘He was an inspiration,’ Melba said. ‘When I read what Griffen Foley had to say about me, I used to feel as though he had, in some subtle way, thrown a new light on my own interpretations. He was, indeed, a creative artist … ’

At the risk of adding to Radic’s ire about the plethora of Melba fables, I am reminded of the occasion when Griffen Foley asserted in a review in the Sun that Melba’s pitch had been less than faultless in a concert. The other papers sensed a story and sent their reporters to find and confront her. Eventually she was located in her large suite at the Hotel Australia and the breathless young men asked their questions: had she seen what the critic had had the temerity to write? She asked them to read it to her. The reporters hoped for an explosion; instead she replied quietly, ‘Gentlemen, if Griffen Foley said that I sang out of tune, then I undoubtedly did. Good morning.’ When he died, she cabled to his widow, ‘My deepest sympathy for you. I had the greatest admiration for your dear husband.’ She then organised a benefit concert for his family.

Like Melba, Bernard Heinze emphasised his Australian character but was clearly ambivalent about the real value of an Australian career compared with an overseas one. This xenophilic yearning and devaluation of the indigenous is surely the counterpart of our much-deplored ‘cut the tall poppies’ attitude. The fact is that, whether it was a flaw in his gifts or the force of such circumstances as World War II, his career remained essentially an Australian one and that fact makes him of far greater importance than Melba in this country’s musical history. His first biography is, therefore, of greater significance and interest than the Melba book. To take a single example: the development of the ABC and, in consequence, of all of its orchestras, is inextricably bound up with the life and times of Bernard Heinze. He was clear-sightedly ambitious and opportunist. He was pompous yet, as is clear from what Barry Jones, Felix Werder, and Radic herself (a Heinze student at Melbourne University) write in this book, he was capable of provoking the most affectionate dedication and loyalty.

This biography has a great deal of absorbing information about the way he juggled his diverse musico-political schemes, about his dedication to his favourite composers, especially Sibelius and Shostakovitch, and his support for many Australian composers, the expatriate Grainger amongst them. There were, however, significant gaps in his sympathies and judgements: Nigel Butterley and Richard Meale go unmentioned in Radic’s text and Heinze is quoted (from a press report) as detesting ‘the fashion for Stravinsky, Schoenberg or the French Six’. He was, in fact, often quoted in the press and was probably Melba’s superior in attracting favourable publicity (which was no mean achievement). Radic makes good use of these quotations in her well-documented book but has remarkably little to say about his personal life – about what it was that provoked his enormous drive, or about the quality of his music-making. I heard him only in his latter years and did not see much of ‘the sting of biting urgency’ that one Canadian critic found in his baton. It had, rather, a vast, ambiguous, circular sweep. There is a story that he was once asked at a rehearsal, ‘Sir Bernard, are you beating two-in-a-bar, three-in-a-bar or an omelette?’ – though I later heard him tell that story on the radio about another conductor.

Radic fondly describes Heinze as ‘a man in a time-warp where it was always 1938’. For Melba it would have been closer to 1905. For ABC concert audiences it is – despite Heinze’s best efforts – probably about 1850, but the continued existence of those concerts and the orchestras which so diligently provide them is his great memorial.