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:
“How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“A prince must be prudent enough to know how to escape the bad reputation of those vices that would lose the state for him, and must protect himself from those that will not lose it for him, if this is possible; but if he cannot, he need not concern himself unduly if he ignores these less serious vices.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
“The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man’s general expense, as it does upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all. A man, for instance, who should give a servant four shillings, would pass for covetous, while he who gave him a crown, would be reckoned generous; so that the difference of those two opposite characters, turns upon one shilling.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)