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How to choose the right teacher; developing calmness, s...)
How to choose the right teacher; developing calmness, self-control, and confidence; overcoming self-consciousness and stage fright; and numerous other important skills that help a singer toward success constitute the valuable lessons of this remarkable book. Its author enjoyed worldwide fame in the course of her 36-year career, amassing the wealth of priceless experience shared here.
Yankee Diva: Lillian Nordica and the Golden Days of Opera; Hints to Singers
(Lillian Nordica (1857 - 1914) was an American opera singe...)
Lillian Nordica (1857 - 1914) was an American opera singer who had a major stage career in Europe and her native country. Nordica established herself as one of the foremost dramatic sopranos of the late 19th century and early 20th century due to the high quality of her powerful yet flexible voice and her ability to perform an unusually wide range of roles in the German, French and Italian operatic repertoires. Nordica possessed an extremely big, agile and pure-toned soprano voice which she was prepared to use unstintingly. An adventurous artist, she embraced an enormously varied repertoire which included, among many other works, Aida, Wagner's Ring Cycle (as Brünnhilde), Tristan und Isolde, Lohengrin, La traviata, Il trovatore, La Gioconda, Faust, Les Huguenots, Mignon and Le nozze di Figaro. She established her worldwide reputation as an opera singer of the first magnitude despite facing powerful competition during her career from a number of other outstanding dramatic sopranos. The mid-to-late 19th century was a "golden age" of opera, led and dominated by Richard Wagner in Germany and Giuseppe Verdi in Italy. The popularity of opera continued through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera through to Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss in the early 20th century. As many of her competitors of that time (mostly European, such as Lilli Lehmann), Nordica led a flamboyant lifestyle. However, her successful operatic career contrasted with her disastrous personal life. Nordica wed and divorced three times.
Three American Sopranos: Lillian Nordica, Ada Adini & Olive Fremstad
(Disc 1 and the first two bands of disc 2 feature the reco...)
Disc 1 and the first two bands of disc 2 feature the recordings of Lillian Nordics: Arias La Gioconda , Il Trovatore and Die Walkure among others, popular songs and the Mapleson Cylinders . The remainder of Disc 2 features the records of Ada Adini (Massenet Herodiade , Verdi Aida , etc), Olive Fremstad featured in songs, and arias of Wagner Verdi Puccini Thomas.
Lillian Nordica was an American singer. She may be regarded as one of the very great Wagnerian sopranos.
Background
Lillian Nordica was born on May 12, 1859 in Farmington, Maine, United States. She was the daughter of Edwin and Amanda (Allen) Norton, and the grand-daughter of a well-known revivalist preacher, familiarly known as "Camp-meeting John Allen. " Her parents were talented and she was reared in a musical atmosphere.
Education
Nordica studied with John O'Neill at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Career
Nordica made her concert début at Madison Square Garden in New York City as the soprano soloist with Patrick Gilmore's band. In 1878, after two years of successful concert work, she accompanied Gilmore's band on a European tour in the same capacity and sang in London and in Liverpool, and at the Trocadéro in Paris. But in Germany her objection to open-air singing led her to sever her connection with Gilmore and study operatic rôles with the famous singing-master Antonio San Giovanni of Milan, who gave her the stage name by which she is known.
On April 30, 1879, she made her début as an operatic soprano as Brescia, in La Traviata, with immediate success. After singing in Genoa, Danzig and Berlin, she first appeared as prima donna at the Grand Opera in Paris as Marguerite in Gounod's Faust, on July 21, 1882, scoring an instant success in a part in which her coloratura work was considered inimitable.
Her husband accompanied her to the United States where, at the New York Academy of Music, she appeared for the first time in opera in America, November 26, 1883, in the same rôle that had won her success in Paris. For a time she withdrew from the stage.
She resumed her activity as a prima donna in 1887, appearing at the Covent Garden Theatre, London, where, until 1893, she continued as one of the stars of the London operatic season.
In the latter year she first sang at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York as a member of an Italian company managed by Henry Eugene Abbey and Maurice Grau, and which included Melba, Calvé, Eames, Plancon, and the de Reszkés. But she was not content to remain an exponent of French and Italian operatic rôles. Her ambition was fixed upon Wagnerian opera, and after studying the rôle of Elsa with Julius Kniese and Cosima Wagner, she sang it at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1894 with outstanding success.
Her successes in Germany, France, and England were achieved in Wagnerian rôles.
She sang at the Metropolitan Opera House until 1907. During the season of 1907-08 she was a member of Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera Company, but thereafter her operatic appearances were only occasional, and she devoted herself chiefly to extended concert tours.
She made use of her repertory of forty operas, as when she sang Isolde and Brünnhilde in Paris (1910), and Isolde (1912) with the Boston Opera Company.
Her last concert tour, which began in 1913, was to have taken her around the world. But as a result of exposure after the grounding of the Tasman on Bramble Cay in the Gulf of Papua in December 1913, she contracted pneumonia and died in Batavia, Java, on May 10 of the following year.
Nordica was a singer rather than an actress. She had a voice rich in tone, notable coloratura range, and consummate artistic ability.
Lillian Nordica's Hints to Singers, containing also many letters written by Nordica and her mother, was published in 1923 by William Armstrong.
In 1882 Nordica married Frederick A. Gower, scientist and inventor. Her marriage had not been happy and in 1886 when legal steps were being taken to secure a separation, Gower vanished into oblivion in a balloon.
In 1896 she married in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Hungarian tenor, Zoltan Döhme, from whom she was divorced in 1904.
On July 29, 1909, she married American banker George W. Young in London.