Reputation
Sir Thomas Beecham once said, jokingly, of Butt that: "On a clear day, you could have heard her across the English Channel".
Indeed, not all serious musicians admired her booming contralto voice, which can be mistaken for a man's on some recordings, or her rather 'populist' approach to her art. In his autobiography, conductor Sir Adrian Boult recounts an anecdote about two young music students going for a bicycle ride one afternoon. After a while they stopped and sat making idle conversation on a piece of grass. One rider looked at his bicycle and mused 'I am going to call it Santley because it is a Singer'. (Sir Charles Santley, a veteran baritone, was the most noted British singer of the day, and Singer was the maker of the bicycle.) The other responded 'I am going to call mine Clara Butt because it is not.' He then noticed as they rode home that a frosty atmosphere had developed. He realised the reason for the frostiness when, a short time afterwards, he read in the press that his "companion," Robert Kennerly Rumford (1870-1957), was engaged to Clara Butt.
Read more about this topic: Clara Butt
Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
“My reputation is a media creation.”
—John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)
“From the moment a child begins to speak, he is taught to respect the word; he is taught how to use the word and how not to use it. The word is all-powerful, because it can build a man up, but it can also tear him down. That’s how powerful it is. So a child is taught to use words tenderly and never against anyone; a child is told never to take anyone’s name or reputation in vain.”
—Henry Old Coyote (20th century)
“This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)