Famous Prima Donnas. Lewis Clinton Strang
life, nearly all of which show indications of the spirit and strength of character that have done so much toward pushing her forward. The following anecdotes, told by a member of St. Patrick's Church choir, were published in the "Kansas City World":—
"I was in a grocery store near Twelfth and Locust streets with Alice one day, when she was about fifteen years old, I should judge. A couple of boys of her age were plaguing her. She took it good-naturedly for awhile, but finally warned them to let her alone. They persisted. Then becoming exasperated, she picked up an egg and threw it, hitting one of her tormentors squarely in the face. Of course the egg broke, and the boy's countenance was a sight for the gods. I understand she apologized afterward. This may be recorded as her first hit.
"She joined the choir of St. Patrick's Church, Eight and Cherry streets, eleven years ago, and sang in it about five years, or until she left Kansas City to begin her operatic career. It was there she met Benjamin Neutwig, the organist. A great many persons were jealous of her vocal talents, nor were certain members of the church itself entirely exempt from twinges of envy. Indeed, a no less personage than she who was at that time choir leader manifested symptoms of this kind to a pronounced degree.
"I remember one Easter service, Alice, then a girl of probably eighteen, was down to sing a solo in Millard's Mass. The leader was angry: she thought the solo should have been assigned to her. Alice knew of the hostility, and it worried her, but she rose bravely and started in. Scarcely had she sung the first line when the choir leader turned and gave Alice a hateful look.
"It had the desired effect. The singer's voice trembled, broke, and was mute. She struggled bravely to regain her composure, but it was useless—she could not prevail against that malevolent gaze from the choir leader. This, I believe, was the first and only time Alice Nielsen ever failed in public.
"It is a wonder, in the face of petty jealousies of this kind, coupled with the poverty of her mother, which seemed an insurmountable barrier to a musical education, that Alice's talents were not lost to the world. For every influence tending to push her forward, there seemed a dozen counter influences tending to pull her back. As a child, I have seen her many a time on the street, barefooted, clothing poor and scant, running errands for her mother. Later in life, when she was almost a young lady, I have known her to sing in public, gowned in the cheapest material, and she would appear time after time in the same dress. On such occasions she was often wan and haggard, as if from anxiety or overwork. But once in a while she received the praise which she so richly merited.
"One day Father Lillis received a letter from a travelling man who was stopping at the Midland, in which he asked the name of the young woman who sang soprano in the choir. He had attended church the day before, he said, and had heard her sing. 'It is the most wonderful voice I ever heard,' he wrote. 'That girl is the coming Florence Nightingale.' I don't know whether the letter was ever answered or not, but Alice came to know of the incident, and it pleased her.
"Both before and after she joined the choir, Alice appeared in amateur theatricals and in church concerts. She was always applauded and appreciated, but it was in the character of a soubrette in 'Chantaclara,' a light opera put on at the Coates Opera House by Professors Maderia and Merrihew, that she created the most decided sensation. This was but a few weeks before she left Kansas City."
Miss Nielsen bade farewell to Kansas City in 1892, going away with an organization that styled itself the Chicago Concert Company, and which planned to tour the small towns of Kansas and Missouri. This, her earliest professional experience, ended in disaster, and Miss Nielsen was stranded in St. Joseph, Missouri, before she had been out a week. It was an eventful week, however, and Miss Nielsen vividly recalls it.
"We got out somewhere in far Missouri," said Miss Nielsen, "with the thermometer out of sight and hotels heated with gas jets and red flannel. Nobody had ever heard of us. I don't think that in some of the towns we struck they'd ever heard anything newer than the 'Maiden's Prayer,' and that was as much as they wanted. They called me 'the Swedish Nightingale,' and you can imagine how I felt—a nightingale in such a climate, and Swedish at that. But I just sang for all I was worth and I tried to educate them, too. I sang the 'Angel's Serenade,' and they didn't like it, because when they tried to whistle it in the audience, they couldn't. We didn't carry any scenery; we just had a lot of sheets with us, and used to drape the stage ourselves.
"One 'hall' we came to, there was no dressing-room, so we strung a sheet in one corner, and some one put a table behind with a lamp on it. The 'ladies of the company' (myself and the contralto) occupied this improvised dressing-room. Suddenly we discovered that we were unconsciously treating the audience to a shadow pantomime performance. There was only one way out of the difficulty—we women must shield each other. So I held my skirts out while the contralto dressed, and she did the same for me.
"I remember in one place we had managed to excite the hayseeds into coming to hear us, and the hall was quite full. We were giving a little operetta. Somehow or other it didn't seem to please the public, and they were in a mood to be disagreeable—yes, restless. They wanted their money's worth; they were mean enough to say so.
"We held a consultation behind our sheetings, and the tenor suddenly remembered that once upon a time, when he was a school-boy, he used to amuse his comrades with tricks. 'Could he do them now?' we asked. He would do his best, he said. So he got a wooden table, hammered a nail into it, bent it a little, and slipped a curtain ring on his finger.
"The trick was to lift the table with the palm of the hand, the ring and nail being invisible. Just in the middle of the trick the nail broke. Well, I believe that audience was ready to mob us. The bass, seeing the situation, made a dive for the money in the front of the house, and we escaped. It was a packed house, too. There must have been as much as eight dollars."
"Did you ever have to walk?"
"Yes, indeed. We walked eight miles once to a town—snowballed each other all the way. It was lots of fun. When we got there the local paper had an advance notice something like this: 'We are informed that "the Swedish Nightingale" and others intend to give a show in the schoolhouse to-night. Any one who pays money to go to their show will be sorry for it.'
"The local manager, an Irishman, asked us to sing a little piece for him when we arrived. After we had done so, he said he had never heard anything so bad in all his life. As to the nightingale, he would give her three dollars to sing ballads, but the rest of the troupe were beneath contempt. His language was a dialect blue that was awful. I tell you it was hard luck singing in Missouri."
In St. Joseph Miss Nielsen was fortunate enough to secure an engagement to sing in a condensed version of the opera "Penelope" at the Eden Musée. She received seventy-five dollars for her services, and this money paid the railroad fares of herself and some of the members of the defunct concert company to Denver, Colorado. There her singing attracted the attention of the manager of the Pike Opera Company, which she joined and accompanied to Oakland, California.
Her first part with a professional opera company was that of Yum Yum in "The Mikado." The Pike Opera Company later played in San Francisco, and in that city she was heard in "La Perichole" by George E. Lask, the stage manager of the Tivoli Theatre, which was, and is still, I believe, given over to opera after the style of Henry W. Savage's various Castle Square Theatre enterprises in the East. Miss Nielsen was engaged for the Tivoli Company. She sang any small parts at first, but gradually arose until she became the prima donna of the organization. In all, she is said to have sung one hundred and fifty parts at the Tivoli, where she remained for two years.
While she was singing Lucia, H. C. Barnabee of The Bostonians, which organization was then playing in San Francisco, read of her in the newspapers and went to hear her. The result was the offer of an engagement, which she accepted. Her first part with The Bostonians was Anita in "The War Time Wedding." Then she was given the small part of Annabelle in "Robin Hood." She also sang in "The Bohemian Girl" and was Ninette in "Prince Ananias." The next season she created Yvonne in "The Serenade," and was the hit of the opera—so much of a hit, indeed, that nothing remained for her but to go starring in "The Fortune Teller."
CHAPTER II
VIRGINIA EARLE