Alice Nielsen

Alice Nielsen (June 7, 1872 – March 8, 1943) was an American operatic lyric soprano and Broadway performer whose stage career spanned from 1897 to 1917. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, she was the daughter of Rasmus Nielsen, a Danish troubadour originally from Aarhus, and Sara Kilroy, an Irish musician from County Donegal. Her parents had met in South Bend, Indiana, where Sara studied music at St. Mary's, an institution later affiliated with Notre Dame. Following Rasmus's injury in the Civil War, the family settled in Nashville before relocating to Warrensburg, Missouri when Nielsen was two years old. After her father's death, her mother Sara moved the four surviving children to Kansas City.

Nielsen's musical gifts surfaced early in Kansas City, where she sang on downtown streets as a child. Her voice caught the attention of wealthy meat packer Jakob Dold outside the Kansas City Club, who invited her to perform at his daughter's birthday party. Dold subsequently arranged for her to represent Missouri at a musicale held at the Grover Cleveland White House. Following that appearance, she was cast in a regional tour with Jules Grau's opera company, and upon its conclusion joined the choir at St. Patrick's Church. She married the church organist and had a son, but after the marriage turned violent she departed for San Francisco, where she worked the vaudeville circuit alongside Arthur Pryor and performed with Burton Stanley and Pyke Opera. In San Francisco she became a soloist at St. Patrick's Church, appeared at The Wig-Wam, and achieved local stardom in Balfe's Satanella. She then joined the Tivoli Opera Company, where she trained under Ida Valegra and performed approximately 150 roles over two years. In 1895, The Bostonians, a prominent light opera company, hired Nielsen and brought her to New York City, where she gained national recognition in 1896.

Nielsen's Broadway career took shape through her association with composer Victor Herbert. She starred in Herbert's operetta The Serenade, which he had written as his sixth operetta specifically for her and her newly formed Alice Nielsen Opera Company. The company toured North America for three years, with Nielsen drawing standing-room-only audiences across some 40,000 miles of touring annually between 1896 and 1901. She subsequently appeared in The Singing Girl and The Fortune Teller, the latter reaching London in 1901. Following business conflicts that led her to dissolve her company, Nielsen turned her focus to grand opera, studying the Italian repertoire under Enrico Bevignani, who had previously coached Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson.

Nielsen's operatic career brought her to London's Covent Garden in the spring of 1905 for performances in several Mozart operas. That fall she joined the San Carlo Opera Company, then a touring arm of the Teatro di San Carlo of Naples under director Henry Russell, for a guest season at Covent Garden alongside Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti. Their production of La bohème was regarded by critics as a masterpiece of ensemble performance. When the San Carlo Opera Company subsequently reorganized as an independent entity based in Boston, Nielsen continued with the company through its annual North American tours. In the summer of 1906, she joined Eleonora Duse and Emma Calvé in a program at the Shuberts' Waldorf Theatre, where Duse performed Camille on alternating evenings with Nielsen's performances of Traviata. That fall she toured America with the company presenting a condensed version of Donizetti's Don Pasquale.

In the winter of 1907, Nielsen returned to America with Lillian Nordica, Florencio Constantino, and a full company for a season at New Orleans' French Opera House, after which critics on the subsequent North American tour judged the ensemble superior to the touring Metropolitan Opera company. Performances of La bohème and Faust at Boston's Park Theatre in March 1908 prompted music patron Eben Jordan to offer funding for a new opera house. The result was the Boston Opera Company under Russell's direction, which opened the Boston Opera House on November 8, 1909, with a performance of La Gioconda featuring Nordica. Nielsen and Nordica served as the company's two leading sopranos throughout its six years of operation from 1909 to 1915. Nielsen also debuted at the Metropolitan Opera and the Opéra de Montréal during this period.

Following the closure of Boston Opera amid the disruptions of World War I, Nielsen embarked on Chautauqua tours, traveling by rail from Florida to Chicago under a touring tent circuit. She was the highest-paid performer on the circuit, and the week-long Redpath Chautauqua series concluded each engagement with a designated "Alice Nielsen Day." During the 1910s she also performed joint concerts with John McCormack and other artists at Carnegie Hall and on national tours, presenting programs of art songs and arias followed by Celtic and parlor song encores. Her recording career ran from 1898 to 1928, producing seventy tracks issued primarily on the Victor and Columbia labels in sessions conducted by Arthur Pryor. Her most successful recordings included "Home! Sweet Home!," "Un bel dì," "Killarney," and "The Last Rose of Summer."

Nielsen returned to Broadway in 1917 in Kitty Darlin', a Belasco musical with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse, who was dismissed from the production three weeks before its New York opening. Following that short-lived engagement, she married surgeon Le Roy Stoddard and moved to Bedford, New York. Her touring schedule diminished significantly by 1920, and her last appearance with the Boston Symphony took place in 1922. In 1925 she sang with a reunited Alice Nielsen Company at the Victor Herbert memorial concert organized by ASCAP. She and Stoddard divorced in 1929. In her later years Nielsen owned a home in Far Rockaway, Queens, near her brother, who served as parish organist at St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church. She continued performing occasional concerts until shortly before her death on March 8, 1943, and is buried in the cemetery of St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church. Her autobiographical series Born to Sing was published in Collier's magazine in 1932.