Months ago, I posted here to share news about a documentary that is in the works about Florence Foster Jenkins, the society matron and patron of the arts, whose singing was so appallingly off-target as to achieve a kind of eccentric sublimity of its own. The documentary’s reenactments are to feature Joyce DiDonato. I marveled that there would be three films about Jenkins coming out in so brief a span. (A fictionalized French film, “Marguerite,” obviously inspired by Jenkins, was released in the states earlier this year.)
The post generated surprisingly little interest, but since the Meryl Streep film has taken wing, if you will, Jenkins pieces have been appearing regularly in periodicals and online. Here’s something that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this week. It’s not the first piece to posit that Jenkins may not have been as oblivious as all that; rather, she may have been in on the joke, a kind of Margaret Dumont of the recital circuit.
Of course anyone who has heard her recordings, collected on the album “The Glory (????) of the Human Voice,” is familiar with the outlandish name of her accompanist, Cosmé McMoon. Who was this man? And what kind of surname is that? You can learn more about him here. (If you’re REALLY interested, there’s more in the reader comments at the bottom of the page.)
Truly, there are enough enigmas surrounding Jenkins to inspire the kind of insatiable fascination generally reserved for the Kennedy assassination and the Loch Ness Monster.