They called her the most beautiful woman in the world and, in a sense, it was beauty that killed her.
One February morning in 1944 Lina Cavalieri was at home in her villa outside Florence when the air raid sirens began to sound. The domestic staff made immediately for the shelter in a nearby park with Cavalieri and her husband Arnoldo Pavoni about to join them when Cavalieri paused.
Her jewels.
The opera star had quite a collection of precious stones, gathered over her extraordinary lifetime. Many were priceless, most had sentimental value. That such items should be forced to endure something as vulgar as a war was too much, she thought, and the risk of leaving them behind too great. Cavalieri and Pavoni dashed upstairs, retrieved the jewel boxes and hurried towards the shelter beneath the ominously increasing roar of aircraft engines.
They were out in the open when the bomb landed that killed them both instantly.
For most of her 69 years Cavalieri had borne the title “the most beautiful woman in the world”. Her career as one of the world’s leading operatic sopranos often came second to gushing entreaties to her ravishing appearance. “The highest expression of Venus on Earth,” Gabriele d’Annunzio called her, an opinion arguably borne out by the 800 marriage proposals Cavalieri claimed to have received during her lifetime. The legend of her pulchritude endured even as she advanced into middle age and beyond.
“Maturity was the keynote of feminine beauty,” wrote Cecil Beaton of the age in which Cavalieri had lived, “and Cavalieri had the air of sorrow and experience that comes only with years of living.”
Sorrow and experience were two words certainly appropriate to the life of Lina Cavalieri, a story riddled with drama, opulence, artistic brilliance, scandal and, ultimately, needless tragedy. Indeed, her biography could plausibly have formed the libretto of a dramatic opera in itself.
Cavalieri’s was a true rags-to-riches tale, one in which she rose from impoverished obscurity to being feted and courted by royalty in a career that took her from the backstreet cafes of Rome to the Folies Bergère to the opera houses of La Scala and Covent Garden.
The daughter of a labourer and a seamstress from Viterbo, outside Rome, Cavalieri sold flowers on the streets as a young girl, singing popular songs to attract custom. A local music teacher regarded her fledgling talent as promising enough to justify free singing lessons, which led to her supplementing her daytime floristry income with evening performances in cafes.
Before long, word of Cavalieri’s rare combination of talent and beauty prompted bookings at some of Rome’s most popular music halls, after which she moved first to Vienna and then in 1895, at the age of 21, to Paris.
Lina Cavalieri was made for the Belle Époque and she took full advantage, filling music halls, gracing the city’s finest boutiques and falling in love with a Russian aristocrat, Prince Alexander Baryatinsky. It was Baryatinsky who told her she was wasted in cabaret and made the prescient suggestion that she pursue a career in opera instead.
After vanishing from the stage in favour of three gruelling years of training in Paris and Milan, Cavalieri’s operatic debut in Pagliacci, by Leoncavallo, in 1900 was a disaster, the production closing on its second night amid audience riots. Undeterred by this tumultuous beginning, within five years her talent had made her the toast of Paris and St Petersburg with enough wealth to buy a mansion on Paris’s exclusive Rue de Messine while still in her 20s.
Her fame spread across the Atlantic in 1906 when she starred at the Metropolitan Opera in New York opposite Enrico Caruso in Umberto Giordano’s Fedora.
“A brilliant and fascinating picture on the stage,” the New York Times called her, “an artiste of a beauty whose praises have not been exaggerated.”
Wringing every ounce of emotion from the role, on one occasion Cavalieri became so engrossed in a scene that climaxed with her and Caruso embracing “that I fell into his arms, and while the curtain was falling, I passionately kissed his precious lips”.
The “Kissing Prima Donna” they called her for that, but for Cavalieri it was all part of her transformation into the archetypal operatic diva.
“An emotional part to me means suffering and pain,” she said after her New York debut. “I cry much upon the stage; I suffer exquisite agony.”
An appropriately operatic scandal followed. In 1910 she began a relationship with the artist Robert Winthrop Chanler, one of the wealthiest men in New York and a grandson of John Jacob Astor. When Cavalieri sailed to Paris after her season at the Met that spring, Chanler proposed by telegram. Cavalieri accepted by the same method, the couple wed in a small civil ceremony in Paris in June 1910 but barely a week later Chanler was sailing back to New York alone, the marriage over.
“The bridegroom has put the broad Atlantic between himself and the bride,” said one newspaper, noting drily how “the wealthy Prince Baryatinsky of Russia has been constantly attentive to Mme Cavalieri.”
“Robert gave me all he had as a present: jewels, works of art, money,” said Cavalieri of her divorce settlement, also mentioning “the three mansions I had acquired.”
She may have done well materially from her whirlwind marriage but the scandal all but ended her relationship with the Met. Her career in Europe remained undimmed, however, where she starred in a number of films, her beauty luminous on screen despite the primitive technology.
Cavalieri retired from the operatic stage shortly before her 40th birthday to focus on the string of exclusive beauty salons she had opened across France, her legendary pulchritude making a success of a line of cosmetics she designed, a perfume named Mona Lina and a bestselling book, My Secrets of Beauty.
There is a line to be traced from Lina Cavalieri to modern, image-obsessed celebrity. For all her impassioned performances on the stage and the voice that made her famous, it was her looks that counted.
Beauty is a fleeting, superficial thing, but one that Cavalieri managed to maintain all her life. She represented an ideal of timeless perfection on which dreams could be projected, perfection that her dramatic life and violent death could never sully.
“The real tragedy of people is always lived out in time,” wrote Cecil Beaton. “What irreconcilable deserts of years lie between the opulent New York that feted this beautiful diva and the impossible rubble of the second world war under which Lina Cavalieri was killed.”