Word: sembrich
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...prima donna roll-call were taken this week there would be no answers from the great singers of 50 years ago. The last to die, at a rich old age, was plump little Marcella Sembrich (TIME, Jan. 21). Of the living singers no longer singing there remains mountainous Luisa Tetrazzini who in Italy squabbles publicly over money with her 34-year-old husband. In France there is old Emma Calvé, proud with the assurance that her Carmen has never been surpassed. In a walk-up studio in Bronxville (N. Y.), great Olive Fremstad lives grimly surrounded by her operatic...
...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...
...Wilhelm Stengel whom she married in 1877. When she was in her teens Stengel took her to see Franz Liszt who said: "Kleine, you have three pairs of wings on which to fly to fame. You can become a great pianist, a great violinist or a great singer." Sembrich chose to sing and took her mother's maiden name. Her début was in Athens...
...Sembrich did her flawless trills in Lucia di Lammermoor at the second performance given in the Metropolitan Opera House. (Downtown at the old Academy of Music Adelina Patti was singing.) Sembrich sang with Caruso when he made his U. S. debut in 1903. She was with the Metropolitan when it visited San Francisco at the time of the great fire. Caruso, who was shaken out of bed, would never sing in San Francisco again. Sembrich was frightened, too. But she stayed to give a concert, earned over $10,000 which she divided between the choristers and the orchestra players...
...seven years thereafter Sembrich continued to give recitals. On one program she sang folksongs in a dozen different dialects. After 1917 she devoted herself to teaching. And as a teacher she was peerless. Paderewski, Sembrich's compatriot, once called her "the most musical singer he had ever known." The late Henry Edward Krehbiel, for 43 years critic of the New York Tribune, described her style as "exquisite and plainly the outgrowth of a thoroughly musical nature.'' In the New York Sun William I. Henderson, dean of U. S. music critics, said last week: "That her name will...