Arduinna

Miura Tamaki was born in 1884 in Tokyo, where her father was a notary and her grandmother had once been called “the nightingale” for her beautiful singing voice. Her maiden name was Shibata. In high school Tamaki’s teachers recognized her own vocal abilities and encouraged her to go on to conservatory; her father was intent on marrying her off to an army physician called Fujii Zen’ichi, but Tamaki managed to bargain her way to graduating conservatory first. She entered the Tokyo School of Music as an engaged woman in 1900, while Fujii was posted to Beijing. Commuting by bicycle, she became famous as “the beauty on the bike” and received stacks of love letters, even more so after her “jewel-like voice” became known; among her teachers was Koda Nobu. In 1903 she sang the lead role in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, the first Western opera to be performed in Japan by Japanese singers, and scored a huge success. In the same year she performed at court for Empress Haruko.

After graduation, she became an instructor at her alma mater, where her students included Sekiya Toshiko as well as the composer Yamada Kosaku, Tsuneko Gauntlett’s little brother. Although her husband was twelve years older than she and they had little in common, they got along well; however, he was posted to Sendai in northern Japan in 1909, and when Tamaki insisted on remaining in Tokyo to further her career, they agreed to divorce, an almost unheard-of situation at the time. She was shortly remarried to Miura Masataro, a lecturer at the Tokyo University School of Medicine. In 1911, when the Imperial Theater opened, she became its prima donna. The story behind both these events is complicated and potentially apocryphal: after their divorce, Tamaki and Fujii met once for a night together at what we would now call a love hotel. A reporter called Chiba Shuho caught them at it and published a gossip article on the topic, except that he misidentified Fujii as Miura. In contrast to Fujii’s distress, Miura reacted calmly and offered to marry Tamaki to solve the problem. However, the scandal meant that both of them lost their teaching jobs; Miura went to work in Singapore and Tamaki, having improbably enough taken Chiba as a lover, allowed him to set her up at the Imperial Theater and arrange a successful performance of Cavalleria Rusticana opposite the Italian tenor Adolfo Sarcoli; their recording is considered the first Western classical record made in Japan. By 1913, she could no longer stand Chiba and found herself taking refuge in Singapore with Miura. (Chiba apparently followed them as far as Europe and died away from home in Lausanne.)

Regardless of the factual background of all this, we know that in 1914 Tamaki and Miura set off to tour England and Europe, regardless of the Great War currently in progress. The following year, after making herself known to the conductor Sir Henry Wood by writing letters of introduction one after the next until he read them, she sang at the Albert Hall with Adelina Patti (her program included “Caro nome” from Rigoletto as well as the folksong “Sakura sakura”). Next she made her debut at the Royal Opera House, becoming the first Japanese singer to perform Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. The performance was marred by Zeppelin bombings, but Tamaki continued to sing even while the audience took shelter, and found herself lauded in newspapers around the world, thus rehabilitating her reputation in Japan as well. She went on to sing Cio-Cio-San in opera houses throughout America, while Miura studied medicine at Yale, and then went as far as Egypt, Brazil, and any other country with an opera house.

In 1920 Tamaki performed in Rome, where Puccini himself visited her backstage and told her she had realized his ideal. Having sent her husband back to Japan, she became (we are told) involved with her accompanist, Aldo Franchetti, who wrote the opera Namiko-San for her. Other theoretical lovers includeSessue Hayakawa and Noguchi Hideyo. She retired from international performance in 1935, upon her 2000th Cio-Cio-San, and returned to Japan, where she visited the grave of her husband, who had died in 1929 while they were apart.

By then Western opera was becoming the music of the enemy in Japan; Tamaki was unable to perform during the war. She gave one more concert after the war, singing Winterreise at the end of 1945, and died the following year at the age of sixty-two.

Sources
Nakae
Mori 1996
Shimamoto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2K5aM4E6e4&list=OLAK5uy_k864_zAqzvSyWN1AhFlk5CgfzHPwnoTKc&index=2 (recordings of Miura Tamaki singing Japanese folksongs and Western opera arias)
https://www.suac.ac.jp/opera-en/miuratamaki/ (English) Many photos of Tamaki in performance
https://www.bgf.or.jp/bgmanga/viewer.php?id=193&dir=112&lay=double (Japanese) Adorable manga about Tamaki and her husband in London