Grete piece of gold
Grete Stückgold , nee Grete Schneidt (born July 6, 1895 in London ; died September 15, 1977 in Falls Village , Connecticut ) was a German-English-American opera singer (soprano).
Life
Grete Schneidt was born in London as the daughter of Ludwig Schneidt, director of the North German submarine cable works , and an Englishwoman and grew up in Nordenham and London. At the age of sixteen she made her concert debut in Bremerhaven . She came to Munich in 1913 to study singing with Jacques Stückgold (1877–1953). The two married and had their daughter Eva, born in 1919, the marriage was divorced in 1929, Grete was then still married to the baritone Gustav Schützendorf (1883–1937).
Schneidt made her debut in Nuremberg in 1915 and began a career as a concert and oratorio singer as Grete Stückgold. As the first she recorded two songs by Gustav Mahler for the record , Who came up with this little song? and I went out of Des Knaben Wunderhorn with pleasure .
In 1922 she received her first role at the Städtische Oper Berlin , from 1926 to 1929 she was permanently engaged there, and made her first guest appearance in Dresden in 1926 , in 1927 at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona . On June 8, 1929, she sang Laura in the world premiere of Neues vom Tage by Paul Hindemith under the direction of Otto Klemperer at the Kroll Opera .
She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera (The Met) in 1927 with Eva in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , where Gustav Schützendorf was Beckmesser. As a result, she was engaged at the Met for eight seasons with varying degrees of intensity until 1939 and sang first Octavian and then the role of Marschallin in Rosenkavalier , Agathe in Der Freischütz . Other roles at the MET were Aida , Elisabeth in Tannhauser , Sieglinde in Walküre and Elsa in Lohengrin .
In the USA she also made guest appearances in San Francisco , Philadelphia and Chicago . She later lived in New York - where her ex-husband had to flee from Nazi persecution. She was still taking singing lessons at Bennington College . Having outlived her Met audience from the 1930s, she was long forgotten when she died at the age of 82 in a Connecticut retirement home .
literature
- Large singer lexicon , CD-ROM, Directmedia, Berlin 2000, p. 23564 f.
Web links
- Literature by and about Grete Stückgold in the catalog of the German National Library
- Literature by and about Grete Stückgold in the bibliographic database WorldCat
- Grete Stückgold - Early Recordings , on Emilio's Blog, 2013
Individual evidence
- ↑ Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke GmbH & Co. KG, company history , at Albert Gieseler
- ↑ a b Newspaper obituary and other materials, illustrated and commented on at operaonpaper , blogspot, 2014
- ↑ Gustav Schützendorf , in: Großes Sängerlexikon , CD-ROM, Directmedia, Berlin 2000, p. 22096 f.
- ↑ Stony path to popularity , at operalounge
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Piece of gold, Grete |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Schneidt, Grete (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-English-American opera singer (soprano) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 6, 1895 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | 15th September 1977 |
| Place of death | Falls Village , Connecticut |