Florence Foster Jenkins and the leftist war on standards

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Today’s Western world sets its standards, not by the best, but by the delusional worst. Exhibit A: Florence Foster Jenkins versus “Sophie Rebecca.”

I first learned about Florence Foster Jenkins in the early 1980s, thanks to Stephen Pile’s delightful 1979 The Book of Heroic Failures: The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. (That book is now out-of-print but you can buy an updated 2-volume edition of Heroic Failures.) In the book, Pile celebrates people who are truly awful at what they do. One of those whom he celebrated was Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), a woman who adored opera and delusionally believed that she had genuine talent.

While Jenkins may not have had talent, she had money, which she used to pay for records and live performances, including at Carnegie Hall. Her very awfulness caught the public’s fancy, and she achieved a kind of stardom. Pile describes her this way:

La Jenkins was not apologetically low key in her badness, she was defiantly and gloriously dreadful. No one, before or since, has succeeded in liberating themselves quite so completely from the shackles of musical notation.

The American National Biography Online had its own take on Jenkins’s reach for the stars:

When Jenkins’s father died in 1909, she inherited enough money to begin taking voice lessons. Undiscouraged by the uniform criticism of her inability to carry a tune, her uncertain sense of rhythm, and her complete failure to reach the upper registers in pitch, she vigorously undertook a professional career, staging the first of a series of annual recitals in the foyer of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in New York City in 1912. Her mother died in 1928, giving her control of a considerable family fortune and freeing her to expand her range of performance venues to regular concerts in Newport, Rhode Island; Washington, D.C.; Boston; and Saratoga Springs, New York.

Because I learned about Jenkins in 1982, I never imagined that I would one day be able to hear her sing and see her perform. The internet changed that, and now you, too, can get a feel for the gaping chasm between Jenkins’s self-image as an opera diva and the reality:

Jenkins became famous because, as Stephen Pile noted, there is something almost heroic about that lack of self-awareness. The same American National Biography article linked above, in addition to a few words about her repertoire, elaborates on the fans Jenkins attracted:

[Despite her lack of talent] She nevertheless performed the most challenging arias and lieder, specializing in work by Mozart, Verdi, and Brahms. She occasionally lightened her repertoire with her own modest compositions and those of her accompanist McMoon, and a favorite encore was Joaquín Valverde Sanjuán’s “Clavelitos,” a Spanish song about carnations, after which she would throw handfuls of rosebuds into the crowd. An additional source of amusement for the audience was the ornate self-designed costumes she wore for her appearances, the most famous being an elaborate confection of tulle and tinsel with huge golden wings attached, in which she identified herself as “the Angel of Inspiration.”

Apparently she never doubted the excellence, and indeed the continuing improvement, of her performances. Francis Robinson, assistant manager of the Metropolitan Opera, wrote that after an accident in a taxicab in which she was riding in 1943, she stated that she could sing “a higher F than ever before” and that she was so pleased that she rewarded the driver with a box of Havana cigars. The fact that no one else could hear the note did nothing to diminish her conviction. The enthusiasm of her audience, including professional musicians, supported her confidence in her ability. The journalist Brooks Peters wrote that Cole Porter never missed one of her concerts and even composed a song for her; Jenkins’s other ardent fans included the opera stars Lily Pons and Enrico Caruso and the British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.

To be clear, Jenkins had a fan base because she was awful, not because she set or exceeded the standards for opera.

I thought of Jenkins the other day when I wrote a post about the decline of Britain’s Royal Academy of Dance, one of the world’s premiere dance institutions. The RAD was established in 1920 to standardize the highest expectations for what classical ballet should look like. When it came to women, that expectation has developed over the years to encompass incredible grace, musical timing, speed, and a certain weightlessness that comes from strength and endless practice:

And then there’s the man who calls himself “Sophia Rebecca,” who always dreamed of being a ballerina. Theoretically, he could have gone on to fame a la Florence Foster Jenkins, but that’s not how our world works. Instead, Mr. Rebecca passed a RAD exam.

If you look at Mr. Rebecca’s dancing abilities, you understand instantly that he could never have passed that exam were he a woman who danced so badly. He passed because the RAD was willing to degrade itself to elevate a rather pathetic, mentally-ill man who thinks that he’s a woman:

Mr. Rebecca is to dance what Flora Foster Jenkins was to opera: He’s awful at it, but his self-image is so warped he’s unable to see that. In the first part of the 20th century, people understood that this could be a source of humor. If the delusional person insisted on taking center stage, they were willing to enjoy the entertainment value of the resulting performance. One would hope they weren’t openly cruel to, but a person with an oversized ego in inverse proportion to actual talent deserves to be laughed at.

I do, however, blame the Royal Academy of Dance, an institution established to set ballet standards. It’s enjoyed a 100-year-long worldwide reputation because of its association with those standards. And yet, for political correctness’s sake, the RAD threw away its standards and blasted its reputation. We know now that it will accept any kind of performance, so matter how awful, to appease the gods of wokeness. That makes suspect everything it does or says going forward.

I really don’t know what the epitaph is for a society that willing abases and debases itself before the altar of mediocrity…and worse. I just know that, unless we can halt this freefall, the west is dead. Xi Jinping doesn’t need to bring troops to Europe and America to destroy us. We’ll do it ourselves, thank you very much.

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