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Adelina Patti, Queen of Hearts, by John Frederick Cone; pp. xxi + 400. Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994, $39.95.
"Who was Adelina Patti?" Mr. Cone's substantial biography, the first published in English since 1920, poses this question on the first of its 400 pages and promises to seek an answer in an impressive array of old and new sources on the life and career of the Gilded Age's greatest diva. With journalistic clarity and thoroughness Cone documents where and what Patti sang and what people said about is from her 1851 New York debut at the age of eight to her final London concert in 1914. Along the way he reports developments in her personal life: the succession of three husbands; the much-publicized adultery and divorce; the acquisition of wealth; the purchase of a secluded Welsh estate where she presided over an everchanging population of visitors, and performed nightly in her own "Adelina Patti Theater." constructed on the premises. Patti's history, Like her voice, was extraordinary, and certainly merits critical exploration and interpretation.
But unfortunately Cone's book stops short of such interpretation; ultimately he does not answer, "Who was Adelina Patti?" but only "Where was she?" and "When was she?" Perhaps unwilling to break with...