Lina Abarbanell

Lina Abarbanell (January 3, 1879 – January 6, 1963) was a Berlin-born soprano who built a career spanning grand opera, light opera, and musical comedy across Germany and the United States. Born in Berlin to Paul and Marie Abarbanell, she was the daughter of a well-known Berlin musical director whose family was of Sephardic Jewish and Bulgarian descent. Abarbanell trained under her father and at schools in both Berlin and Vienna, making informal stage appearances as early as age six or seven.

Her professional career began in earnest during the mid-1890s. At the Deutsches Theater in Berlin she appeared alongside Josef Kainz in an 1896 revival of Johann Nestroy's farce Lupaci Vagabundus, or the Good-For-Nothing Clover Leaf. Following additional musical training, she joined the Grand Opera in Poznań, then part of the German Empire, where her roles included performances in Les Huguenots, Hänsel und Gretel, The Geisha, and the role of Hadvig Ekdal in Ibsen's The Wild Duck. She subsequently appeared as Adele in Die Fledermaus at the Royal Opera House in Berlin and undertook a tour of opera houses across Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, and the Netherlands. In 1900 she achieved success in the title role of a German-language adaptation of A Runaway Girl by Seymour Hicks and Harry Nicholls at the Neues Königliches Opernhaus.

Heinrich Conried, manager of both the Irving Place Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera House, brought Abarbanell to New York in 1905. That October she made her American debut at Irving Place in the Josef Strauss operetta Frühlingsluft, followed a month later by the role of Lt. Von Vogel in the comic opera Jung Heidelberg. On November 25, 1905, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Hänsel opposite Bella Alten's Gretel in Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, a production that marked the Met's first staging of that opera. After developing her English-language skills, Abarbanell made her English-speaking stage debut on Christmas Day, 1906, as Lisa in the musical comedy The Student King at the Garden Theatre, marking the beginning of a Broadway career that would extend to 1934.

In March 1907 she began touring in The White Chrysanthemum but departed before the month's end following a dispute over dressing room arrangements with co-star Edna Wallace Hopper. That October she took on the lead role of Sonia in Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow at the Colonial Theatre in Chicago. The production, running simultaneously in Chicago and New York, generated an estimated one million dollars in its first year. The New York staging at the New Amsterdam Theatre starred Ethel Jackson until illness sidelined her in March 1908, at which point Abarbanell stepped into the role. Following a national tour of The Merry Widow, she replaced Elgie Bowen as Nellie Vaughan in the romantic musical The Love Cure at the New Amsterdam in October 1909. The following August at the same venue, she played the title role in the musical comedy Madame Sherry, which ran for 231 performances before moving to a national tour.

Abarbanell continued performing on Broadway and in road productions for more than two decades, appearing in productions including The Geisha, Flora Bella, Miss Princess, and Happy Go Lucky. Among her most prominent later Broadway engagements was the role of Mademoiselle Martinet in The Grand Duke, a comedy by Sacha Guitry produced by David Belasco at the Lyceum Theatre. The production ran from November 1921 through March 1922 and subsequently toured. Her final Broadway stage appearance came in late January 1934 in the short-lived play Theodora, the Quean.

In 1900 Abarbanell had married Eduard Goldbeck (April 21, 1866 – April 25, 1934), a German political writer who had studied at university in Berlin and served seven years as an officer in the Prussian Army before relocating permanently to the United States in 1911, where he contributed commentary on current events and literature to the Chicago Tribune. His published works included Krieg in Sicht! (1906), Deutschlands Zukunft die Nationaldemokratie! (1907), Politische Plaudereien (1908), and Briefe an den Deutschen Kronprinzen (1908). Goldbeck died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1934 at their residence in the Hotel Somerset on West Forty-Seventh Street in New York. The couple had one child, the writer Eva Goldbeck (1901–1936), who married composer Marc Blitzstein in 1933.

Following her husband's death in 1934, Abarbanell left the stage but remained professionally active. That same year she served as chorus director for The Chimes of Normandy, Arthur Guiterman's adaptation of a Robert Planquette operetta, which opened the 1934 summer season at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, with Helen Ford and George Meader in the lead roles, Lawrence Langner as stage director, and Gene Martell as choreographer. In 1938 she returned to Broadway as an assistant to producer Dwight Deere Wiman on the musical comedy I Married an Angel, and she continued working in various capacities on Broadway productions for nearly the rest of her life. Her only known film credit was as a casting consultant on the 1954 musical Carmen Jones. Abarbanell died following a heart attack on January 6, 1963, at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York.