Alice Nielsen
Alice Neilsen's Production of
The
Fortune Teller
Alice Nielsen (June 7, 1872
- March 8, 1943) was a Broadway
performer
and operatic soprano
who had her own opera company and starred in
several Victor Herbert operettas.
Background
Her
father, Ramsus, was a Danish troubadour from Aarhus
.
Her
mother, Sara Kilroy, was an Irish musician from Donegal
.
Rasmus and
Sara met in South Bend,
Indiana
where Sara studied music at St. Mary's, now part of
Notre
Dame
. After Rasmus was injured in the Civil War, the couple moved to Nashville,
Tennessee
where Alice was born. The Nielsens moved to
Warrensburg,
Missouri
when Alice was two. Rasmus died a few years
later.
Sara moved to Kansas
City
with four surviving children.
Early Career
Alice Nielsen roamed downtown Kansas City as a child singing.
Outside Kansas City Club she was heard by a wealthy meat packer
Jakob Dold and invited to sing at his daughter's birthday party.
Alice was a hit.
Dold sent her to represent Missouri
at a
musicale at the Grover Cleveland
White
House
. On her return, she was cast in a regional
tour with Jules Grau's opera company for a season. When it ended,
Nielsen joined St. Patrick's Church choir. She married the church
organist and had a son.
When the marriage turned violent she left for
San
Francisco
on the
vaudeville circuit, joined by Arthur
Pryor, performing with Burton Stanley and Pyke Opera. In
San Francisco she became a soloist at the St. Patrick's, singing at
The Wig-Wam and becoming a star in
Balfe's
Satanella. Joining the Tivoli Opera Company, trained by
Ida Valegra, Nielsen played 150 roles in two years.
In 1895, Nielsen was
hired by The Bostonians, a leading light opera company, which took
her to New York
City
and national fame in 1896.
Broadway
Alice Nielsen in 1900, age about 25, was America's biggest
box-office draw. "We love our Nielsen, and proud she is an
American," said the press. Touring 40,000 miles a year in North
America between 1896 and 1901, her shows were Standing Room Only.
In New York City, Nielsen became a Broadway star in Victor
Herbert's
The Serenade.
Herbert had written his sixth operetta for prima donna Alice
Nielsen and her newly formed Alice Nielsen Opera Company. Nielsen
toured North America for three years before reaching London in 1901
in
The Fortune
Teller. Pushed by business conflicts, Nielsen abandoned
her Company and left to study
grand
opera, coached in the Italian repertoire by Enrico Bevignani,
who had coached
Swedish operatic soprano,
Christine Nilsson.
Opera
Two years
later in 1905, Nielsen returned to London's Covent Garden
where she sang Mozart operas
that Spring then joined the Covent Fall season of Naples
' San Carlo
Opera with Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti. Their
La
Bohème was regarded as a masterpiece of ensemble
performance.
In summer 1906, Nielsen joined
Eleonora
Duse and
Emma Calvé in a joint
program of related operas and dramas to open the Shuberts'
Waldorf Theatre. One night Duse would act
Camille, the next night Nielsen woud sing
Traviata. That fall, Nielsen returned to America, touring
in opera concerts featuring a cut-rate version of
Donizetti's
Don Pasquale.
After a difficult
debut in New York
City, she became a strong hit by spring in Chicago
, San
Francisco, Los Angeles
, Dallas
and Columbia .
In winter
1907, Nielsen returned to America with Lillian Nordica, Constantino and a full company for a season at
New
Orleans
' French Opera
House. During their subsequent North American tour, the
group was considered by critics as superior to the touring Met
Company, which had preceded Nielsen in LA, Chicago and Boston.
Their
Chicago season was sponsored by the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Association
.
At the
end of the tour, in Boston's Park Theatre during March 1908, a week
of nightly grand opera performances featuring Nielsen and
Constantino La Boheme and Faust at Park Theatre
created such a sensation that Boston's music patron Eben Jordan
offered to build the Boston Opera House
for Alice Nielsen and her Company. The plan
was quickly realized. In 1909 Nielsen opened the 2,750-seat
Boston Opera and debuted at The
Metropolitan Opera and
Opéra de Montréal. Her artist
allies for the project included
Loie
Fuller,
Josef Urban and
Pavlova. Within six years, however, Boston Opera
folded amid the turmoil of
World War
One.
The magnificent building, designed by the
team which created Symphony Hall, was located across from New England
Conservatory
's Jordan Hall and has since been
demolished.
Tour
After Boston, Nielsen began a series of popular
Chautauqua tours. These outdoor concert took
place under a big tent, moving from town-to-town by rail.
The
circuit ranged from Florida
to Chicago. Nielsen was the highest-paid
performer on the circuit. The week-long Redpath Chautauqua series
closed in each town with "Alice Nielsen Day."
During
the 1910s, Nielsen sang in joint concerts with John McCormack and other artists at
Carnegie
Hall
and in national tours. Her concerts
consisted of art songs and arias, followed by dozens of encores of
popular Celtic and parlor songs. A typical program was,
Later Years
Nielsen was a popular recording artist in sessions conducted by
Arthur Pryor. She recorded seventy
tracks between 1898-1928, most of the recordings made about 1910.
Her big hit record was "Home, Sweet, Home," followed by "Un bel
di," "Killarney" and "Last Rose of Summer." "I only sang the songs
I wanted to sing," she stated in
Colliers Magazine which
published her autobiographic 1932 series
Born To
Sing.
After a brief return to Broadway in 1917's short-lived
Belasco musical
Kitty Darlin, with lyrics
by
P. G. Wodehouse,
who was fired three weeks before the NY opening, Nielsen married
surgeon Le Roy Stoddard and moved to
Bedford, NY. By 1920, Nielsen's touring schedule
was light. She last appeared with
Boston
Symphony in 1922. She sang with a reunited Alice Nielsen
Company at the
Victor Herbert
memorial concert staged by
ASCAP
in 1925. In 1929 she divorced Stoddard. Nielsen continued singing
occasional concerts until shortly before her death.
In later years, she
owned a house in Far Rockaway, Queens
near her brother, who was the parish organist for
St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church. Its cemetery is her final
resting place.
Critical response
- Eleonora Duse— "Her voice makes
one dream and forget the realities of life."
- San Francisco
Chronicle— She is chic and vivacious and filled with
indefinable magnetism.
- NY World— At the present moment she has no rival in
her field.
- NY Evening World— America's greatest lyrical
soprano.
- Chicago Post— Miss Nielsen is thoroughly a great
singer, and showed clearly that she has attained the high place she
holds in the musical world through sheer merit.
- Musical Courier— It is difficult to imagine a more
perfect Mimi than Miss Nielsen, who sings with a lovely lyric
beauty of a voice that has not its counterpart anywhere.
References
- Prima Donnas and Soubrettes of Light Opera and Musical
Comedy in America (Lewis Strang, Boston: L.C. Page & Co.,
1901)
- Florencio Constantino, 1869-1919, el hombre y el tenor
( Julio Goyén Aquado. Ayuntamiento de Bilbao. 1993)
- Boston Opera (Quaintance Eaton, New York:
Appleton-Century. 1965)
- Born To Sing (Alice Nielsen, Colliers
Magazine. Jun 25, 1932 - July 2, 1932)
- We Love Our Nielsen (Pat McNamara. January 9,
2009)[1]
Primary Sources
- Wilson, Dall Alice Nielsen and the Gaiety Of Nations (
"Mu Phi Epsilon", January 1, 2006)
- Wilson, Dall Alice Nielsen and the Gayety Of Nations
(dall wilson. 2008)
- McHenry, Robert, ed. Famous American Women (Dover
Publications New York. 1980)
Related Reading
- Gould, Neil Victor Herbert: A Theatrical Life (Fordham
University Press. 2008)
External Links
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