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WINCHESTER SOPRANO KEPT AUDIENCES SPELLBOUND
By Ellen Knight1
Early in her career, she was called “the sweet blind singer of Winchester.”2 And so she was, though it was not simply a sympathetic presence which garnered her popularity and admiration but rather her sublime artistry.
Whether billed as Gladys Perkins Fogg or Mme. Rhadeska, a name coined by her manager and soon discarded by the artist, “The spell her singing cast over us all was one of suppressed rapture,” pianist Milo Benedict wrote.3
As her husband, he might not be considered impartial, but Boston and New York critics, fellow singers, and the public alike considered her one of the greatest concert singers within her sphere (New England and New York) during the early 20th century.
Over a 30-year career, praises ranged from Boston critic Benjamin Woolf’s declaring her coloratura soprano voice to be “exquisite,” to the great Dame Nellie Melba declaring “I’ve never heard a more beautiful voice,”4 to the enthusiastic applause which burst forth from audiences wherever she sang. Gladys Fogg Benedict (1881-1930) Added to which, she was viewed as a figure of courage.
BEGINNINGS
Fogg was a descendant of a 17th-century New Hampshire family of whom her father wrote in 1903, “We are an unostentatious, common-place people, with about the general New England average of representatives in the learned professions. No great single names overshadow us and irritate us with incentives to live up to their standard. We can boast of no multi-millionaires or trust magnates; and we are not called on to blush for any conspicuous criminals.” 5 He did not yet foresee how both his daughter and son (an aviator) would both contradict what he called “our record of mediocrity.”
Fogg was not always blind and not always a resident of Winchester. But she always had a gift, and everyone knew it. As early as kindergarten, her teachers recommended vocal training. In addition to tutelage from her mother, who sang and played piano, Fogg began professional lessons. An illness at age 15 (1896) left her blind, requiring courage and fortitude to fulfill her ambition to become a concert singer. Resolutely she continued her studies. Fortunately, she was matched with the perfect teacher. Tenor Wilhelm Heinrich (1865-1911) of Boston was also blind. “It was with the utmost conscientiousness that Mr. Heinrich applied himself to the training of the little sightless girl,” his biographer Edith Lynwood Winn wrote. “It was no superficial singer Mr. Heinrich proposed to put forward.” 6
His teaching was rigorous. In addition to training her in vocal technique, Heinrich drilled her in four foreign languages, gave her daily reading assignments in music literature and history, and also taught her how to play her accompaniments. It is probable he taught his blind pupils to use the same method for learning music that he used himself. First, by Gladys Fogg at age 5 himself Heinrich studied the straight melody written in the music when she began notation system invented by Louis Braille. Phrase by phrase, the music lessons accompaniment would be played for him, which he repeated by ear, mastering each phrase step by step so completely that he could remember it.7
“By means of the Braille point system and her mother’s reading,” the Boston Globe stated, “Fogg committed words and music at the rate of four or five pages a day.” Possessed of a remarkable memory, she mastered the principal operatic arias and songs by European and American composers while in her teens.
Although Fogg’s first appearances were in New Hampshire where her family had a summer home, it was in Boston in April of 1900 at age 19 that she first faced a critical audience when she and Heinrich gave a public recital in Association Hall. Woolf declared that, though suffering from a cold, “she sang courageously against this trying disadvantage,” and pronounced her voice exquisite, charming, and marked with brilliancy and bird-like fluency.8
WINCHESTER
For the next several years, Fogg appeared in concert not only in Boston and New Hampshire but also Winchester, to which the Fogg family moved during 1900.9
George Fogg was remembered as “a man of unusual character.”10 He had managed a ticket agency in Boston, been a partner in an insurance company, organized an expedition to the Klondike during the gold rush (1896-99), and maintained a trading company in Alaska for a year before moving to Winchester. He was again a ticket agent when the family took up residence in Winchester. His last business venture locally was as manager of the Winchester Ad for George Fogg’s auto business, Automobile Company. apparently a father-son enterprise
Fogg’s first public recital in Winchester was held in Town Hall in January 1901. “With the opening bars [from La Traviata],” The Winchester Star proclaimed, “it was plain that Miss Fogg was no ordinary singer. Her voice is light, clear, flexible, with an extensive range upward, sweet and of excellent quality—all in all an unusual, even a remarkable voice.”11
After her next recital in Town Hall in November 1901, the Star declared, “Her voice, birdlike and perfect, is wonderfully flexible with a purity of tone which reaches the heart, bringing inspiration of joy and peace to all, as it thrills in afterthought.”12
There soon came, however, a threat to her progress and, in fact, to her very life. In August 1902, “A Heroic Winchester Girl” headlined a story from New Hampshire which revealed that Fogg had undergone surgery for an ailment which had been troublesome since February—appendicitis.
Commending her “indomitable courage and wonderful equanimity” as well as her faith in her ability to overcome the utmost physical handicaps, the reporter commented on her unfailing optimism. “I cannot help saying that in the face of so much that has been cruel and unutterably difficult to bear, her fortitude and cheerfulness prove that one may have a spirit too bright and exalted ever to be embittered.”13
The family returned to the Winchester home in December. Fogg returned to the concert stage. In Winchester she gave three more annual recitals, the Town Hall concerts attracting an audience from surrounding towns as well as Winchester. At the end of 1905, it was announced she would assist at the recital by blind pianist Frank Vigneron Weaver, also in Town Hall.14
As success came to Fogg, so also did romance. In 1901, Fogg met Milo Benedict at a music festival in New Hampshire. He volunteered to act as her accompanist and kept that role for the rest of their lives. They were married at the Weirs, Lake Winnipesaukee, in August of 1904. Both having busy concert calendars, their reception at the Foggs’ Highland Avenue home was delayed until October.
CAREER
Fogg did not enter upon the operatic stage, appearing rather in concert halls.15 She sang with Heinrich and various instrumentalists. She sang German lieder, French chansons, Italian arias, and new music from American composers.
She appeared in Boston and various towns in New England, at churches (including Winchester’s Unitarian Church), schools such as Vassar, Amherst, and the Perkins Institute for the Blind (to which George Fogg donated tickets for her 1905 Town Hall concert), music clubs, and other venues. Later, she also gave radio recitals in Boston and New York.
As her popularity increased, she took on a manager. There being a general sense that American musicians were not on a par with Europeans,16 he gave her an exotic stage name and booked her, as Mme. Rhadeska, on a tour in 1912 with the New York Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch. “I recall,” Benedict wrote, “that at Danbury, Conn., the singer received so great an ovation after her aria, ‘Una voce poco fa,’ the orchestra showed signs of embarrassment, and Mr. Damrosch, checking his encouragement of the soloist out of consideration for his men, called the audience to silence by beating upon his music rack with his baton and setting the men to work upon the next number on the program.”
Another highlight of the Rhadeska era was a concert tour during 1912-13 with Alesandro Bonci, a star of the Metropolitan Opera. Their first appearance was at Boston’s Symphony Hall. “She did not know,” Benedict wrote, “that her singing was going to create what is termed ‘a sensation,’ but before she could finish the ‘Prayer’ from Tosca by Puccini, the audience broke into overwhelming applause, compelling her to pause.” The same thing happened in Buffalo.
Critics appeared to vie for superlatives like “superb” technique, “infinite sweetness,” and “almost supernatural quality that fairly makes the fiction of angel’s singing a reality.”17
During World War I, Benedict wrote, Fogg attempted to go overseas to sing for the soldiers, but “rigid war regulations made the project impossible.” So, she organized the Benedict Trio with her husband and his violinist niece Pauline Remick and performed at cantonments, fortifications, workshops, and hospitals.
Of their 200 concerts, 67 were scheduled for Camp Devens. Arriving at one of the Y huts there, they were warned that audiences often walked out (due to the frequent “cheap vaudeville” quality of the acts).
However, when the Trio performed, the audience gained in number with many more standing at the entrance. At the beginning, one of the enlisted men was initially and audibly The Benedict Trio skeptical of the singer’s ability to sing Verdi. But as she sang, “his countenance changed…he studied the singer…grew animated, and nudging his neighbor he said, ‘Listen boy! This IS something.’” He followed the singing with intense interest, and when the singer had finished he stood up and shouted “Bravo! Bravo!” as they received a standing ovation. After the program, the Trio learned the intent listener was a member of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.18
AT HOME
Although the Benedicts first divided their time between Winchester and New Hampshire, ultimately they settled in Concord, N.H. There she put up preserves, made dandelion wine, and enjoyed gardening and other homely pleasures. Two of her favorite activities were mountain climbing and flying, often going up with her brother, to savor the atmosphere.19
Fogg’s connection with Winchester apparently ended with her parents’ deaths. Her mother, hard of hearing and heedless of any danger, was killed when she walked into the path of a train in Winchester center in 1914. Her father gave up his business in 1917 and, once his son was discharged from the military, sold the Winchester home. He died in 1924 in Maine.
Five years later Fogg sang at the Fogg Family Association reunion at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, belying her father’s assessment of the family’s mediocrity. Her final concert appearance occurred in Concord, N.H., in front of a filled hall.
Fogg died in 1930 from tubercular meningitis. Summing up her artistry, Benedict wrote, “Nothing was lacking. There was impeccable mastery and finish in all her work.”
From first to last she enchanted audiences with her voice, charm, her quality of repose and lack of mannerisms, granting the music its sovereignty. “Her song was a transport,” Benedict wrote.
During her lifetime, other writers remarked also on her optimism, resolve, and other strengths of character. As for her blindness, Benedict noted, “She wanted no extra praise for her determination. If her progress cost her more effort she did not wish it to be noticed.”
But the portrait of Gladys Fogg Benedict which Boston Globe (above) and Boston Herald (below) emerges from all who witnessed her life and art feature stories attest to Fogg’s success and reveals a life of noticeable triumph. reputation as a “one in a million” singer 0
Notes
1 This article © 2021 by the author is a revision of an earlier article by Ellen Knight published in the Daily Times Chronicle on May 14, 2021. This revision supersedes all previous articles 2 Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 1903. 3 Milo E. Benedict, Musical People in Retrospect. Concord, N.H., 1931. The photographs of Mme. Rhadeska, Fogg at age five, and the Benedict Trio were published in this volume. 4 Boston Globe, Dec. 6, 1903. Marcella Sembrich and Adelina Patti also considered Fogg’s voice to be exceptional. 5 Fogg Family Third Reunion, Aug. 31, 1904, Portland, ME. 6 Edith Lynwood Winn, Wilhelm Heinrich: Musician and Man. Boston, 1914 7 According to Winn, Heinrich taught Fogg the Braille system of writing English, but she did not comment on how he taught her music. Heinrich, she noted, used the Braille system for reading music when he was a student of Junius
Hill in 1884. The description of how Heinrich learned new music was communicated in a letter, quoted in full by Winn, by Emily Wardwell Russell, who had first-hand experience playing accompaniments for Heinrich. 8 Boston Herald, Apr. 12, 1900. Fogg’s voice was frequently compared with birdsong, so often, Benedict said, it became a jest with the artist. “Can a bird sing “The Jewel Song”? she would ask. 9 Fogg’s mother, Mabel Perkins, had been a classmate of Samuel and Ella McCall in New Hampshire, but whether these illustrious residents influenced the Foggs’ move to Winchester is unknown. Fogg and Heinrich sang at a March 1900 meeting of teachers and alumni of New Hampton College at which Sam McCall was chosen as an officer. 10 Obituary, The Winchester Star, Sept.26, 1924. 11 The Winchester Star, Feb 1, 1901. 12 The Winchester Star, Nov. 22, 1901. 13 The Winchester Star, Aug. 29, 1902. 14 The concert was announced in The Winchester Star, but no post-concert report appeared. 15 An exception to her custom of not appearing in full operas was Gauzita, a fairy opera composed for children by Milo Benedict, in which she starred as the fairy queen. Its first performance in Concord, N.H. in April 1907 was apparently its last. It was announced in Boston and New Hampshire papers, but no review has been found. 16 Among others, Benedict noted this, writing, “There has been a strong tendency in America to underrate American artists.” 17 Quotations gathered by Benedict; many similar sentiments may be read in reviews printed in the various Boston newspapers. 18 A friend in the audience overheard this incident, which Benedict included in his story. 19 Robert S. Fogg (1897-1976) was an early aviator who became one of the best known pilots in New England. After service as a flight instructor during the World War I, he went barnstorming across the county. After leaving Winchester for New Hampshire, in July 1920, Winchester Star readers learned he created a new record, making the flight of 600 miles between Toronto and Concord, N.H., in five hours. Arriving in Concord 1920 to start an aviation business, he had the first privately owned airplane in New Hampshire. He was the original owner of the Weirs Seaplane Base from which he gave aeroplane rides to the public. In 1925, he was granted the country's first RFD airmail service contract. Among his adventures, he hosted Charles Lindbergh in Concord during the latter’s tour of the country in The Spirit of St. Louis which followed his historic transatlantic flight and he piloted First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.