Historic Opera

Aimé Dupont: First official photographer of the Metropolitan Opera.

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Row 1:
Johanna Gadski.
Johanna Gadski.
Maria Gay.
Ernst Kraus.

Row 2:
Lilli Lehmann.
Eugenia Mantelli.
Jeanne Maubourg.
Victor Maurel.


Row 3:
Lillian Nordica.
Lillian Nordica.
Lillian Nordica.
Lillian Nordica – Census.

Row 4:
Pol Plançon.
Giacomo Puccini.
Ernestine Schumann-Heink.
Marcella Sembrich.

Row 5:
Marcella Sembrich.
Camille Seygard.
Susan Strong.
Sophie Traubmann.


Row 6:
Anton van Rooy.
Anton van Rooy.

To see Marcella Sembrich and her jewels the average country woman will ride miles over a railroad … and sit in a crowded and insufferably hot hall without her dinner. When she has seen Sembrich and taken in the details of her gown and her diamonds she is ready to hear the prima donna sing. And she does not wish to hear her sing Mozart, though she can sing that as no other living singer can. What the country woman desires is to be astounded by the agility of her execution and by the peal of some wonderful high note. And, no matter how Sembrich sings, the country woman will probably be disappointed because she will not be able to tell the difference between this art and that of some such singer as Ellen Beach Yaw. But she can say that she has seen the famous Polish prima donna who gets any number of thousands of dollars a night at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. And that is something to live for. W.J. Henderson. New York Times, 17 Sep 1899.


Lillian Nordica, who is a woman of brains as well as of voice, recently filled a page of one of the San Francisco papers with a plea for musical schools on a larger scale than anything we have yet had in this country….Nordica would like to see American conservatories, under private endowment …. Certainly she, Clara Louise Kellogg, Annie Louise Cary and several other American artists know as much about singing as any foreign teacher and far more about the requirements of opera singing as a whole than half the teachers anywhere. If some musical enthusiast could persuade some of our artists to take conservatory positions in this country, and then could induce American girls to stay at home and study with them, he would break up one of the most pernicious nuisances which afflict our girls ambitious for musical careers. Brooklyn Eagle; Nov 14, 1900.

Mme. Eugenia Mantelli, who has for several seasons figured as the leading contralto in the Grau opera company, and who is to be married to Fernando Ernest de Angelis next Sunday, arrived in [New York] yesterday on the steamship Kaiser Wilhelm II. Mme. Mantelli’s marriage to Signor de Angelis, who is better known in the musical world as Prof. Ernest Damico, will take place at St. Agnes’s Church, on East Forty-third Street. After spending a few days in this city, they will visit Colorado, returning here to take their departure for Lisbon, where Mme. Mantelli will fill a professional engagement….

Mme. Mantelli is a native of Florence, and, during her engagement in this city with the Abbey-Grau Company three years ago, she received word of the death of her husband in Italy. New York Times, 21 Sep 1900.


They still keep saying that Sophie Traubmann is 21 years old. She was about of that age when she was in the National Opera Company in 1886. She is promising, though, and when she is 22 she may be a great singer. Brooklyn Eagle 19 Jan 1890.


Susan Strong: They are having Wagner’s operas in English at Covent Garden, London, and among the sopranos is Susan Strong, daughter of the late Demas Strong of Brooklyn. Here is what the musical Courier’s correspondent writes about her: “Another American soprano of whom America has good reason to be proud is Miss Susan Strong. My readers will be interested to learn that Miss Strong is a native of Brooklyn, and was educated musically by Francis Korbay, the Hungarian composer, who last November took up his residence in London, where she followed to continue her studies. This was Miss Strong’s first appearance before any public, as she had never sung previously in either concert or opera, and her success as Sieglinda was, considering this, most extraordinary. She has a very pleasing dramatic soprano voice, and her histrionic ability is exceptional.” In my humble opinion, this artist has every quality, and her performance is a complete one. She has warmth, passion, abandon, delicacy, power, sentiment and colossal virtuosity. That she occasionally misses a note does not count for anything. Brooklyn Eagle; 3 Nov 1895

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