Often, the voice of Florence Foster Jenkins is introduced with a single, somewhat sarcastic sentence to entice the listener and nothing else, letting the recording sing for itself. Metropolitan Opera soprano Lucine Amara tells the story of preparing Marietta's Lied from "Die tote Stadt" with its composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. After their session, he told her he wanted her to hear "this wonderful singer." She sat at his feet as she listened in horror. After it was finished he asked what she thought. She then said, "Well, it was most interesting" which absolutely broke him up. It was only then she realized he had been joking all along. In a similar way, Marge Champion, Alfred Hubay and Daniel Pinkham knew next to nothing about what they were to experience at Carnegie Hall in 1944.
When I met the noted author and collector Gregor Benko, he told me bits of information and stories about Jenkins that were extremely intriguing. His personal collection of materials about Jenkins was vast and extensive: over the years, he had acquired parts of the collections of Jenkins' accompanist Edwin McArthur and former Opera News editor Gerald Fitzgerald, plus twenty years of detailed off-and-on research, creating a chronological database of Jenkins' life and career. This also included dozens of extremely rare images that had not been seen for almost sixty years. Benko also gave me access to a tape recording made by the Australian pianist Bruce Hungerford. In 1970, Hungerford realized that he was acquainted with three people who knew or interacted with Jenkins: Kathleen Bayfield, the second wife of Jenkins' second (common law) husband; Adolf Pollitz, a friend of Jenkins and participant in her club activities, and the sculptress Florence Darnault, from whom Jenkins commissioned a bust. During this conversation, the three subjects reminisced candidly without censure and told personal anecdotes about Jenkins. In addition, Ms. Bayfield reads from her memoirs the chapter concerned with Florence Foster Jenkins.