Emma Abbott

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emma Abbott

Emma Abbott (born December 9, 1850 in Chicago , Illinois , † January 5, 1891 in Salt Lake City ) was an American opera singer with a soprano voice .

Life

Emma Abbott came from a poor family of musicians originally settling in New England . Her paternal grandfather, Dyer Abbott, was an inn owner and director of a church choir in Boscawen , New Hampshire . Her parents, the singing teacher and violinist Seth Abbott and his wife Almira Palmer, lived in various cities in Illinois, including Chicago, where Emma, ​​who also had several siblings, was born. In 1854 Emma's family settled in Peoria , where her father was only able to attract a few music students.

Seth Abbott nurtured his daughter Emma's singing talent when she was a child. The girl gave her first appearance as a singer and guitar player when she was nine years old in Peoria. From then on she made a contribution to alleviating the financial difficulties of her family through local concerts organized together with her father and her brother George, who was also musical. In 1866 Emma toured several US states with the Lombard Concert Company and, after this group broke up, performed in hotels, among others. a. in New York .

With a musical performance she gave in Toledo (Ohio) in 1867 , Emma Abbott fascinated the well-known singer Clara Louise Kellogg , whereupon she was able to receive lessons from the Italian opera singer Achille Errani in New York in 1870 . In this city she made her concert debut on December 12, 1871. In preparation for an opera career, she went to Europe in 1872, where she studied with the famous singing teacher Antonio Sangiovanni in Milan , then in Paris with the German mezzo-soprano Mathilde Marchesi , the French tenor Pierre-François Wartel and the Italian baritone Enrico Delle Sedie .

Abbott entered into a childless marriage - which nevertheless kept her baptismal name - secretly in 1875 with the New York pharmacist Eugene Wetherell. She had her first opera appearance on May 2, 1876 at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London as Marie in Gaetano Donizetti's La fille du régiment . In the fall of 1876 she returned to the USA with her husband, where she stayed for life. Here in her home country she made her operatic debut on February 23, 1877 in New York, where she sang the role of Marie in La fille du régiment , as in London . In 1878 she founded the Emma Abbott English Opera Company and toured with them until the end of her life through the United States, where she became very well known in her day. As the manager of the opera company, her husband took care of business matters, while she was the artistic director herself, ordering expensive costumes from important French fashion designers and selecting conductors.

As the prima donna of their company, Abbott appeared in lavishly staged operas, so u. a. as Juliette in Roméo et Juliette by Charles Gounod , also as Marguerite in Faust by the same French composer, in the title role of the romantic-comic opera Martha by the German composer Friedrich von Flotow and as Virginia in Paul et Virginie by Victor Massé . Initially practiced pious reticence in her ideas, she later partially abandoned it. Her passionate “Abbott kiss” was famous and she also sang Violetta in La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi - a role that she hadn't wanted to play during her stay in Europe because of the alleged immorality of the opera - now, of course, in one of them the moral standards of their audience.

Many music critics were offended by the fact that Abbott, who had a pure soprano voice of great flexibility and considerable length, often performed operas of shortened length, whose scores changed at random, and popular songs such as Nearer, My God, to Thee in Lowell Mason's version inserted into them. Furthermore, she always had French and Italian operas performed in English translation. Despite the negative attitude of the music critics, Abbott remained en vogue with her winning character with the simpler American audience, became quite wealthy with a fortune of about a million dollars and contributed significantly to the popularization of English-language opera performances in the United States.

In 1889 Emma Abbott became a widow and took over the agendas of her various husband. During an opera tour in December 1890, she caught a cold in an unheated locker room in Ogden, Utah , which led to pneumonia , of which she died unexpectedly in Salt Lake City in early 1891 at the age of only 40. Her urn was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Gloucester, Massachusetts . She left her fortune u. a. Foundling houses and several churches. Her close friend Sadie E. Martin wrote a biography ( The Life and Professional Career of Emma Abbott , 1891).

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Abbott, Emma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American opera singer with a soprano voice
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH January 5, 1891
Place of death Salt Lake City