Tryphosa Bates-Batcheller (April 14, 1876–1952), born Tryphosa Duncan Bates, was an American socialite

Socialite

A socialite is a person who participates in social activities and spends a significant amount of time entertaining and being entertained at fashionable upper-class events....

, club woman and concert singer

Singing

Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of both tonality and rhythm. One who sings is called a singer or vocalist. Singers perform music known as songs that can be sung either with or without accompaniment by musical instruments...

. She is often mentioned in the same context as Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkins was an American amateur operatic soprano who was known, and ridiculed, for her lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability.-Early years:...

: both are apt to be criticised as people who were publicly tolerated and even celebrated as singers due to their wealth and social position, despite a lack of talent.

Background and education

Tryphosa Duncan Bates was born the only child of Theodore Cornelius and Emma Frances (Duncan) Bates. Her father was a manufacturer, proprietor, and a Republican

Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

 politician of English ancestry. She was named after her maternal grandmother, Tryphosa (Larkin) Duncan. She came from a family of some means and pedigree, and was privately educated in France and the United States, graduating from Radcliffe College

Radcliffe College

Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...

 in 1899. According to the Biographial Cyclopedia of U.S. Women, her family was prominent in the Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

 area, and her ancestor Joshua Bates

Joshua Bates

Joshua Bates was an American educator and clergyman. He was the third president of Middlebury College.Born in Cohasset, Massachusetts, he was the son of Zealous and Abigail Bates. Bates graduated from Harvard College in 1800. He became a special student in divinity at Phillips Academy, serving as...

 gave $50,000 in 1853 and later 30,000 volumes to the city of Boston toward the establishment of the Boston Public Library

Boston Public Library

The Boston Public Library is a municipal public library system in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was the first publicly supported municipal library in the United States, the first large library open to the public in the United States, and the first public library to allow people to...

. Apparently the idea of the modern library, where books could be taken from shelves by readers and then returned, was his, and the Boston Library was the first in the world to do this; its main reading room is called Bates Hall.

Musical career

Tryphosa believed she had a good singing voice and was encouraged by friends and relatives, eventually studying classical singing with several famous teachers, including Giovanni Sgambati

Giovanni Sgambati

Giovanni Sgambati was an Italian composer.Born to an Italian father and an English mother, Sgambati, who lost his father early, received his early education at Trevi, in Umbria, where he wrote some church music and obtained experience as a singer and conductor...

, Blanche

Blanche Marchesi

Blanche Marchesi was a French mezzo-soprano and voice teacher best known for her interpretations of the works of Richard Wagner...

 and Mathilde Marchesi

Mathilde Marchesi

Mathilde Marchesi was a German mezzo-soprano, a renowned teacher of singing, and a proponent of the bel canto vocal method.-Biography:...

, Sir George Henschel

George Henschel

Sir George Henschel , was a British baritone, pianist, conductor, and composer of German birth....

, B. T. Lang, as well as Veda, Bimboni, and Giraudet. In 1904 she married the wealthy shoe manufacturer Francis B. Batcheller and thereafter retained her maiden name as the first half of her hyphenated married name. The couple left their native North Brookfield, Massachusetts

North Brookfield, Massachusetts

North Brookfield is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 4,680 at the 2010 census.For geographic and demographic information on the census-designated place North Brookfield, please see the article North Brookfield , Massachusetts.- History :North Brookfield...

 home and set up home in an apartment in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, France.

Her wealth and social position seems to have papered over any doubts teachers, managers and critics had about the dismal quality of her actual singing, and she appeared in many private concerts and benefits, sometimes with the composer Jules Massenet

Jules Massenet

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...

 accompanying her. Her wealth enabled her to appear on the cover of America's Musical Courier

Musical Courier

The Musical Courier was a 19th and 20th century American music trade publication which began publication in 1880 and became noted as preeminent in its field....

magazine twice, in 1904 and 1906. A relentless social climber who chased after aristocrats and royalty, Bates-Batcheller was hampered in this by her own Catholicism

Catholicism

Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

, and was thus prevented from assaulting the important Protestant court of England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. Her aggressive pursuits in this area are chronicled in the four books of memoirs and one novel she had published.

In 1941 she returned to the United States and, shortly after, recorded two sides for the same vanity record label (Melotone) in New York as Jenkins. These recordings lay unnoticed in the collection of the musicologist and record collector Larry Holdridge until they were published in 2004 on a compact disc entitled "The Muse Surmounted" (Homophone 1001), the booklet for which contains a biography of Bates-Batcheller, as well as recordings and information about Jenkins and others of the same style, along with photos of each and other information. The recording presents a compilation of the history of this kind of singing on record, and the writer, musicologist Gregor Benko

Gregor Benko

Gregor Benko is an American writer, lecturer, record producer, and collector-historian whose primary focus is classical piano performance documented on recordings from the Romantic Era...

, states his opinion that Bates-Batcheller was an even "greater" bad singer than Florence Foster Jenkins. A review of this compilation stated that "Bates-Batcheller's contribution to music ranks with William McGonagall

William Topaz McGonagall

William Topaz McGonagall was a Scottish weaver, doggerel poet and actor. He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of or concern for his peers' opinions of his work....

's to poetry".

Works

• Glimpses of Italian court life; happy days in Italia adorata, Doubleday, Page & company, New York 1906.
• Italian Castles and Country Seats, Longmans, Green & Co., New York 1911.
• Royal Spain of today, Longmans, Green & Co., New York 1913.
• France in sunshine and shadow, Brentano's, New York 1944.