(Autobiography of the Baroness de Wartegg. Collated by Cap...)
Autobiography of the Baroness de Wartegg. Collated by Captain E. B. Hitchcock. Preface by A. M. Williamson. Facsimile reprint of 1925 edition. Illustrated with photos.
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Amalia Mignon Hauk was born on November 16, 1851, in New York, the daughter of a German carpenter who, when she was yet a child, moved first to Providence, Rhode Island, and then to Sumner City, Kansas, in a day when Indians still attacked the emigrant trains.
At Fort Leavenworth, where her father worked at his trade while her mother kept a boarding-house, Minnie went to school until, after another brief stay in Sumner, the family floated down the Missouri and the Mississippi in a houseboat to New Orleans. There the child studied with Curto, a well-known French singing teacher. Later she studied also with A. Errani. Albites, Moritz Strakosch.
Minnie Hauk made her first appearance in concert singing the “Casta Diva” from Norma and a florid air from Auber’s Crown Diamonds. The family then removed to New York where she made her début in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, October 13, 1866, as Amina in Sonnambula with pronounced success. Her New York début as Prascovia in L’Étoile du Nord occurred the same year. Now definitely launched on her career, in 1867 Hauk sang the part of Juliette in the first American production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. She also took part in the American premières of other important operas, among them Carmen and Manon.
In 1868 Hauk made her London début at the Haymarket as Amina; she sang in Paris, Moscow, and St. Petersburg; and in Vienna she was the primadonna assoluta of the Komische Oper (later Ring Theater), where she created the rôles of Javotte, in Delibes’ Le Roi l’a dit, and of Carlo Broschi in La Part du Diable. Later, at the Berlin Opera, she was a great favorite, notably as Katherine in Goetz’s Taming of the Shrew. She was acclaimed as Carmen in Brussels and as Violetta in London (1878) and sang every season in the last-named city until 1881.
During her concert tour of the United States and Canada, 1883-1884, Hauk sang at the White House for President Arthur. She retired in 1895. When she was left destitute by her husband’s death in 1918, Geraldine Farrar and the Music Lovers Foundation raised funds to make her last years comfortable. She died at her home, Villa Tribschen, on Lake Lucerne.
(Autobiography of the Baroness de Wartegg. Collated by Cap...)
Quotes from others about the person
New York Tribune: "Her appearance excited much interest, from the fact that she was nativeborn exceedingly pretty and gave undoubted promise of future eminence. "
In 1881 Minnie married the well-known traveler, author, and correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, Baron Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.
