LA Sheridan Adorable Diva: Margaret Burke Sheridan Irish Prima Donna, 1889-1958

by Anne Chambers

Book by Chambers, Anne

222 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1990

About the author

Anne Chambers is an Irish biographer, novelist and screenplay writer who lives and works in Dublin. She is best known for her biography of the 16th-century Irish Pirate Queen, Gráinne (Grace) O'Malley.

Reviews

[Aidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful tribute to a magnificent Prima-Donna opera singer.
This is an enchanting well researched book and surely a labour of love for the author.
Anne Chambers has pulled an all but forgotten giant of her time into the limelight, perhaps one last time.
The ghost of Margaret Burke Sheridan will be well pleased with Anne Chambers whose deep affection for her Diva shines like a beacon throughout the book. It is also worth noting she, Anne Chambers has amassed the largest collection of Sheridan memorabilia known, and believes it should also be available to the public at large, in an appropriate setting of course.
Margaret Burke Sheridan was adored in Italy and still is, while over time has been neglected for the most part, in her native Ireland, and surprisingly by people in the classical music world, for some reason.
It appears in later life in Ireland she was considered by some a “difficult” person, but then she was a Diva for goodness sake, a Prima-Donna after all!. Of course she might be “difficult”.
It truly was a shame she flourished in a world before the advent of the modern media communicating techniques …
As a Mezzo-Soprano those deep tones and registers she was capable of are so emotional and enduring across the years, even to this day.
She sung “with a tear in her voice” it is said. Listening to her old recordings I believe she did just that…

[Annemarie Neary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched account of a fascinating life. Sheridan was that rare creature, a non-Italian to 'make' it at La Scala in early fascist Italy. At times, the drama of her own life competed with the travails of the operatic heroines she played Reputedly Puccini's favouite Butterfly, Sheridan rowed with Toscanini, faced hostile audiences in xenophobic Cremona, conducted doomed affairs, even suffering the public suicide of one rejected admirer during a performance. Chambers presents a warm, witty, ultimately courageous woman. She makes it clear, too, that Sheridan possessed a skill almost as essential as her artistry - the ability to cultivate figures as diverse as Marconi, the Courtaulds and the Cunards who had the wherewithal to support her career. Her last days, as a faded former diva tottering down Grafton Street in full stage make-up and the Milanese fashions of twenty years before, are poignant - though it seems she retained her wit and charm (if not her voice) to the end.