(A collection of Irish, Scots and popular songs by the fam...)
A collection of Irish, Scots and popular songs by the famed American soprano, now restored from 1909 acoustic recordings. Her mother was an Irish musician, her father a Danish troubadour. Nielsen rose from a child street singer to the heights of Broadway before amazing America by jumping to grand opera. Boston Opera was built for her in 1909. She also sang at The Met, Covent Garden and Chicago opera. Nielsen was famed for artistic integrity and unmatched song styling.
1-Oh! I'm not myself at all 2-My Laddie 3-Bendermeer's Stream 4-Low-Backed Car 5-Annie Laurie 6-Barney O'Hea 7-Kilarney 8-Kathleen Mavourneen 9-Last Rose Of Summer 10-Bonnie Sweet Bessie 11-Darling Nellie Gray 12-Home Sweet Home 13-Sweet Genevive 14-Old Folks At Home
15-Love's Old Sweet Song 16-Believe Me If Those Endearing Charms 17-Old Black Joe 18-The Day Is Done
Biography: Alice Nielsen and the Gayety of Nations, dall wilson. Available at Amazon.
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Alice Nielsen was an American operatic soprano and concert singer. Her successful career in light opera was followed by a second one in grand opera.
Background
Alice Nielsen was born on June 7, 1870 in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Her father, Erasmus Ivarius Nielsen, was Danish; her mother, Sarah (Kilroy) Nielsen, was an American of Irish extraction. Reports of Alice's childhood are vague and conflicting. Her father is said to have been a soldier in the Union Army and to have died when Alice was still a small child. The family, which included several other children, lived for a time in Warrensburg, Missouri, but after the father's death moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where Mrs. Nielsen opened a boardinghouse. According to her own account, Alice, who reportedly inherited her musical talent from her father, began singing in the streets for pennies and small coins when she was about eight.
Education
Alice attended St. Teresa's Academy. She also took lessons from a local music teacher, Max Decsi.
Career
Alice joined the choir of St. Patrick's Catholic Church. Her first stage experience came about 1885 when she sang the role of Nanki-Poo in a juvenile production of The Mikado that toured small Missouri towns for some seven weeks.
Alice Nielsen left Kansas City in 1892 as a member of a concert company that was eminently unsuccessful. Struggling through Omaha, Denver, and Salt Lake City, she arrived in Oakland, California, where in 1893 she sang Yum-Yum in The Mikado as presented by the Burton Stanley Opera Company. In San Francisco, her goal of the moment, she sang at the Wigwam, a carefree music hall, and then at the Tivoli (for two years), where she found a voice teacher of considerable ability, Ida Valerga.
When the Bostonians, the best and most famous light opera troupe in America, came to San Francisco, she determined to join them. Successful in her drive to the top, she quickly became one of the company's leading ladies and toured with it for two seasons, ultimately singing the part of Maid Marian in the operetta Robin Hood by Reginald De Koven. The wife of another composer, Victor Herbert, after hearing Alice Nielsen sing, insisted that she be the heroine of her husband's The Serenade. Opening in Cleveland on February 17, 1897, and in New York on March 16, 1897, this proved immensely popular. Herbert, delighted with Miss Nielsen's charm, spirit, and ability, then wrote for her one of his operetta masterpieces, The Fortune Teller. By this time she headed her own opera company, managed by Frank L. Perley. She appeared in one more Herbert operetta the following year, The Singing Girl. Of Herbert's various prima donnas, Alice Nielsen proved the best. Taking The Fortune Teller to London in 1901, where it ran for about three months, she was heard by the well-known teacher and impresario Henry Russell, who advised her to study for grand opera in Italy. This she did, a wealthy patroness of the arts, Mrs. Lionel Phillips, financing her studies in Rome.
Miss Nielsen made a successful debut as Marguerite (in Faust) in Naples at the Teatro Bellini on December 6, 1903. The following month she sang at the famous San Carlo in Naples, then returned to London, singing the roles of Zerlina, Susanna, and Mimi at Covent Garden. When Henry Russell became manager of the New Waldorf Theatre in London, he engaged Miss Nielsen as prima donna. During this period she twice returned to the United States on tour: in 1905-06, when she made her American grand opera debut in Don Pasquale, and in 1907-08 with the San Carlo Opera Company.
In 1909 Alice Nielsen joined the Boston Opera Company, with which, on March 3, 1911, she created the role of Chonita in the opera The Sacrifice, by Frederick S. Converse.
She was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company (1909 - 13), singing Mimi, Norina (Don Pasquale), and Nedda. With this company, however, her appearances were rather infrequent. In 1917 she briefly returned to light opera, singing in Kitty Darlin', a musical version of a play by David Belasco, Sweet Kitty Bellairs, with music by Rudolf Friml. This was not successful and was abandoned after a few weeks at the Casino in New York. The final years of her professional career were devoted chiefly to concert appearances; her last public performance was in Symphony Hall, Boston, in 1923.
The last twenty years of her life were spent in relative seclusion in New York City, where she died in 1943.
Achievements
Nielsen's greatest success was in Victor Herbert's operettas The Fortune Teller (1898) and The Singing Girl (1899), both written for her.
Alice Nielsen was vivacious, zestful, intelligent, and sometimes temperamental.
Connections
On May 7, 1889, in Kansas City, she married Benjamin Nentwig, organist of St. Patrick's, who helped her develop her voice. Although the couple had a son, Benjamin, they soon separated and were divorced in 1898.
On December 21, 1917 she married LeRoy R. Stoddard, a New York surgeon, also ended in divorce.
