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| Nicolini, by August Weber |
Died at the Hôtel Gassion, Boulevard du Midi, Pau, France, on 18 January1898.
Obituary syndicated in the Manchester Evening News on Wednesday 19 January 1898
DEATH OF M. NICOLINI
M. Ernest Nicolini, properly Nicolas, formerly and for a considerable number of years the leading tenore robusto of the European stage, succumbed yesterday at Pau to a malady which he suffered without intermission for nearly twelve-month.
He was the second son of a Breton aubergiste, or innkeeper, resident at Dinard, and was born at Tours on February 23rd, 1834.
As during his boyhood he displayed a strongly-marked taste for music, his father, being sufficiently well-to-do to indulge the lad's predilections without inconvenience, entered him as a pupil at the Conservatoire, where he studied harmony, the pianoforte and singing with conspicuous success, taking a prize for pianoforte-playing in 1853, and gaining two years later an “accessit” in comic opera.
Shortly after his connection with the great Parisian school of musical and dramatic training had terminated, he was engaged by management of the Opéra Comique, on the establishment of which he was retained from 1855 to 1859, though without making any special mark either as singer or actor.
Early in the latter year he assumed the professional surname of Nicolini, and went to Italy, where he sang at Milan, Florence, Turin, and in several other provincial capitals, and soon established himself solidly in public favour.
In 1862 he returned to Paris, and was promptly re-engaged at the Salle Ventadour. It was not until the season of 1866 that he made his debut at Covent Garden Theatre as Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (May 29), on which the agreeable impression created by his superb voice and remarkable good looks, reminding the London operatic public of its favourite Mario when in the prime of manhood, and was somewhat modified by his vibrato method of production, which been expected from distinguished élève of the Paris Conservatoire.
Hence his reception by the audience of the Royal Italian Opera House and the comments passed upon his initial performance by the metropolitan press proving to certain extent unsatisfactory, he did not revisit London until April, 1871.
He then appeared as Faust at Drury Lane—under the management of Colonel Mapleson—and sang several times in the course of the season, making a brilliant hit in the part of Raoul de Nangis, the hero of immortal Meyerbeer's immortal opera Gli Ugonotti Thenceforth he was engaged as "absolute first tenor" at Covent Garden for several successive seasons, and attained a high degree of popularity by his efficient and impressive rendering of such heroic roles as Lohengrin and Radamis.
Starring engagements at the Imperial Opera Houses of St. Petersburg brought M. Nicolini into a close and enduring artistic connection with Adelina Patti, shortly after her marriage to her first husband, Henri de Roger de Cahusac [Louis Sébastien Henri de Roger de Cahuzac], Marquis de Caux, from whom she was subsequently separate and ultimately divorced.
At the time of his operatic association with Madame Patti, Ernest Nicolini was also married to a lady of some professional notoriety, by whom he had two sons—one of whom is at present an officer in the French army—and three daughters. In the long run, however, his marriage proved an unhappy one, like that of Madame de Caux, and was eventually dissolved under the divorce law passed by the French Chambers during the second decade of the Third Republic.
In the early spring of 1886 Adelina Patti also succeeded in obtaining a legal divorce from her husband, and as soon as the decree had finally been finally confirmed was united en seconde noces to the eminent vocalist who had shared her countless artistic triumphs in Russia, Austria, Germany, and the United States during a good many years of her transcendently brilliant career.
The wedding was celebrated, amid popular rejoicings, on August 10, 1886, in the parish church of a Welsh village near estate of Craig-y-Nôs, in the acquisition of which it stated that the diva had been mainly inspired by a desire to gratify M. Nicolini's predilections in the direction of field-sports.
Like Albert Niemann, long the principal robust tenor of the Royal Opera House at Berlin, Ernest Nicolini was an expert and assiduous fisherman, devoted to the practice of the "gentle art", and Castle Craig-y-Nôs, a reddish-grey old chateau nestling in a bight of the Swansea valley, offered exceptional facilities for sport to the skilled angler.
A well-stocked trout-stream, the Tawe, runs through its spacious grounds, and the Usk, a teeming salmon-river, the fishing on which could be rented without difficulty by the owner of "The Rock of Night," is conveniently within a mile or two of the castle gates.
These inducements proved irresistible to Madame Patti, who purchased Craig-y-Nôs with a view to making it her permanent home, and laid out large sums of money upon improvements which have converted it into one of the most picturesque and commodious country residences in the United Kingdom.
In the course of the past twelve years she has added two handsome wings to the massive corp-de-logis, as well as a tastefully decorated theatre capable of accommodating an audience some three hundred strong. All the main buildings and annexes are brilliantly illuminated by electric light, and the original acreage of the estate appertaining to te case has been more than tripled by Madame Patti-Nicolini's successive acquisitions of woodland tracts, on which she keeps up a large head of game.
