Alice Nielsen

File:AliceNielsen dallwilson2.jpg

Alice Nielsen

Alice Nielsen (1872-1943) was a Broadway performer and operatic soprano who had her own opera company and starred in several Victor Herbert operettas.

Early life and career

Alice Nielsen in 1900, about 25, was America's most famous singing star. "We love our Nielsen, and proud she is an American," said the press. Touring 40,000 miles a year in North America between 1896 and 1901, her shows were Standing Room Only.

Her father, Ramsus was a Danish troubadour. Her mother Sara Kilroy, was an Irish musician from Donegal. Rasmus and Sara met in South Bend, Indiana where Sara studied music at St. Mary's. After Rasmus was injured in the Civil War, the couple moved to Nashville, Tennessee where Alice was born about 1874. The Nielsens moved to Warrensburg, Mo. when Alice was two. Rasmus died a few years later. Sara moved to Kansas City with four surviving children.

Alice Nielsen roamed downtown Kansas City as a child singing to human face. Outside Kansas City Club she was heard by a wealthy meat packer Jakob Dold and invited to sing at his daughter's birthday party. Alice was a hit. Dold sent her to represent Missouri at a musicale at the Grover Cleveland White House.

At fifteen, Nielsen joined St. Patrick's choir. She married the church organist and had a boy. The marriage turned violent. She left for San Francisco on the vaudeville circuit, joined by Arthur Pryor with Burton Stanley and Pyke Opera. In San Francisco she became a soloist at the St. Patrick's and a star in Balfe's "Satanella." Joining the Tivoli Opera Company, trained by Ida Valegra, Nielsen played 150 roles in two years. In 1895, Nielsen was hired by The Bostonians, America's greatest musical group of that era, who took her to New York and national fame in 1896.

Broadway and later career

In New York City, Nielsen became a Broadway star in Victor Herbert's The Serenade. Forming her own production company, Nielsen toured North America for three years before reaching London in 1901 in The Fortune Teller. Pushed by business conflicts, Nielsen abandoned her Company and left to study grand opera, coached in the Italian repertoire by Enrico Bevignani, who had coached Christine Nilsson, the reputed inspiration for "Phantom Of The Opera."

Two years later in 1905, Nielsen returned to London's Covent Garden where she sang Mozart operas that Spring then joined the Covent Fall season of Naples' San Carlo Opera with Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti. Their La Bohème was regarded as a masterpiece of ensemble performance.

In summer 1906, Nielsen joined Eleonora Duse and Emma Calvé in a joint program of related operas and dramas to open the Shuberts' Waldorf Theatre. One night Duse would act Camille, the next night Nielsen woud sing Traviata. That fall, Nielsen returned to America, touring in opera concerts featuring a cut-rate version of Donizetti's Don Pasquale. After a difficult debut in New York City, she became a hit in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

That winter she returned to America with a full company for a season at New Orleans' French Opera House with Lillian Nordica and Constantino. During their subsequent North American tour, the group was considered superior to the touring Met Company, which preceded Nielsen in LA, Chicago and Boston.

In Boston's Park Theatre in March 1908, a week of nightly grand opera performances featuring "La Boheme" and "Faust" at Park Theatre created such a sensation that music patron Eben Jordan offered to build the Boston Opera House for Alice Nielsen and her Company. The plan was quickly realized.

Boston Opera House opened in 1909 and folded in 1915 amid the domestic turmoil of World War One. In 1909 Nielsen opened Boston Opera and debuted at The Met and Montreal Opera
.

After Boston folded, Nielsen began a series of popular Chautauqua tours. Nielsen was the highest-paid performer on the circuit. The week-long Chautauqua series closed in each town of the Redpath circuit with "Alice Nielsen Day." She traveled in a private train car.

During the 1910s, Nielsen sang in joint concerts with John McCormack at Carnegie Hall.

She was a popular recording artist in sessions conducted by Arthur Pryor. She recorded seventy tracks between 1898-1928, most of the recordings made about 1910. Her big hit record was "Home, Sweet, Home," followed by "Un bel di," "Killarney" and "Last Rose of Summer."

"I only sang the songs I wanted to sing," she stated in her 1932 Collier's autobiography "Born To Sing."

After a brief return to Broadway in 1917's short-lived Belasco musical "Kitty Darlin'," with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse, who was fired three weeks before the NY opening, Nielsen married surgeon Le Roy Stoddard and moved to Bedford, NY.

By 1920, Nielsen's touring schedule was light. She last appeared with Boston Symphony in 1922. She sang with a reunited Alice Nielsen Company at the Victor Herbert memorial concert staged by ASCAP in 1925. In 1929 she divorced Stoddard.

Nielsen continued singing occasional concerts until shortly before her death in 1943.

Critical response

Eleonora Duse— "Her voice makes one dream and forget the realities of life."
San Francisco Chronicle— She is chic and vivacious and filled with indefinable magnetism.
NY World— At the present moment she has no rival in her field.
NY Evening World— America's greatest lyrical soprano.
Chicago Post— Miss Nielsen is thoroughly a great singer, and showed clearly that she has attained the high place she holds in the musical world through sheer merit.
Musical Courier— It is difficult to imagine a more perfect Mimi than Miss Nielsen, who sings with a lovely lyric beauty of a voice that has not its counterpart anywhere.

<ref>Wilson, Dall. "Alice Nielsen and the Gayety Of Nations," biography published 2008.