Word: marcella
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...singers is Baritone Lawrence Tibbett who, besides his Metropolitan Opera and radio performances, is giving 66 concerts. As he was last year, he will be the season's biggest moneymaker. Baritone John Charles Thomas, now touring California, has 64 dates. Soprano Dusolina Giannini, whose teacher was the late Marcella Sembrich (see below), went sadly to Detroit last week. The increasingly popular Lotte Lehmann sang at the Metropolitan, then in Washington and Princeton. Mary Garden was resting in Manhattan before her last Debussy recital. After a two years' absence big Basso Feodor Chaliapin will come zooming back...
When in 1909 plump little Marcella Sembrich sang her farewell to opera, Manhattan's Metropolitan built her a throne on the stage, fairly swamped her with flowers, gifts, eulogies. Operagoers that bleak February night cheered themselves croupy while tears ran down many a wrinkled old cheek. But why was this great singer retiring at the peak of her career? "Because I like the sun best when it is high." Last week in Manhattan Death came to Marcella Sembrich who, save for Schumann Heink and Calvé, was the last survivor of an age which produced Patti, Lilli Lehmann, Melba...
...Marcella Sembrich was 76 when she died. She said her operatic farewell at 50 when her voice was still young, clear, phenomenally high. But at 50 Sembrich had already lived a long life as a public performer. Her Polish father, one of a tanner's 14 children, left a military band to marry. Sembrich, christened Praxede Marcelline Kochanska, was plopped up on a piano bench at the age of four. At six she was studying the violin. At twelve she played at local dances in the family quartet. She was the pianist, her brother the first violinist, her mother...
...rich with singers, poor in discipline. Gatti could have boasted rightfully of his business prowess. In the Opera's palmy days had he not made performances pay for themselves in addition to providing a $1,000,000 nest egg? He could have recalled many historic scenes: plump little Marcella Sembrich making her operatic farewell; Enrico Caruso singing his last, as the bearded Jew in Halévy's La Juive; Geraldine Farrar appearing in Die Königskinder with a flock of real, live geese (TIME, Nov. 12); Maria Jeritza giving her first breath-taking Tosca; Marion Talley...
...hires the best instructors, takes only talented students, charges no tuition. Hence rare honor went with the 78 diplomas distributed among the graduates of the first ten years. Honorary Doctor of Music degrees, the Curtis's first, went to Hofmann's friend Leopold Godowsky and to Marcella Sembrich. The Curtis's plump, frizzy-haired little vocal professor sat on the platform and beamed when Director Hofmann reminded the audience that she was an accomplished pianist and violinist before she became the Metropolitan Opera's prize coloratura. The day Mrs. Bok proudly distributed diplomas her son Curtis...