Louise Gunning

Louise Gunning (April 1, 1878 – July 24, 1960) was an American soprano who performed on Broadway from 1898 to 1913, appearing in Edwardian musical comedy and comic opera. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she later lived in Brooklyn, New York, where her father served as a Baptist minister. Her mother, Mary Gunning, was a choir director who also trained silent film actress Lucille Lee Stewart. Gunning began her stage career as a chorus singer in a Frank Daniels production and subsequently performed as a solo act singing Scottish ballads.

Her early professional work included a New York production of The Circus Girl in 1897, followed by appearances in three Charles H. Hoyt farce comedies: A Stranger in New York, A Milk White Flag, and A Day and a Night. In the fall of 1899 she sang in The Rogers Brothers in Wall Street at the Victoria Theatre in New York. In 1902 she performed It Seems Like Yesterday in the Isidore Witmark and Frederic Ranken musical comedy The Chaperons at the Cherry Blossom Theatre in Washington, D.C. The following year she appeared at the Herald Square Theatre as Arabella in Mr. Pickwick, a musical drawn from Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. By the fall of 1903 she was touring with Frank Daniels's company as Euphemia in The Office Boy by Engländer and Smith, and in 1904 she appeared at the Broadway Theatre as Laura Skeffington in the Stang and Edwards musical comedy Love's Lottery.

In February 1906 Gunning played Pepi Gloeckner in The White Hen by Gustave Kerker and Roderic C. Penfield at the Casino Theatre, and later that year starred in the light opera Véronique in vaudeville with the Shubert organization. November 1907 brought her role as Sophia in the comic opera Tom Jones at the Astor Theatre, and in October 1908 she took the title role in the Frank Pixley and Gustave Luders comic operetta Marcelle, also staged at the Casino Theatre. In February 1911 she first appeared as Princess Stephanie of Balaria in The Balkan Princess at the Herald Square Theatre, continuing the run the following week at the Casino Theatre before embarking on a lengthy tour — a role for which she became particularly well remembered. That same May she played Josephine in a two-month revival of H.M.S. Pinafore at the Casino Theatre. In March 1913 she portrayed Annabel Vandeveer in The American Maid, a short-lived comic opera by John Philip Sousa and Leonard Liebling, at the Broadway Theatre. In May 1914 she guest starred as Mary in Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway with the stock company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Gunning had reportedly planned a European tour in 1914 but was forced to return to America when war threatened the continent. Beginning in 1915 she undertook a series of vaudeville singing engagements that continued into the early 1920s, marking the close of her performing career.

In October 1903 Gunning married Frederick Pitney, owner of a New York cab company. Almost exactly two years later she gave birth to a daughter, Louise Adelaide Pitney. The marriage ended before the middle of the following decade. By 1915 Gunning had purchased a ranch in Sierra Madre, California, which she maintained for the rest of her life. On July 7 of that year she married German-born concert violinist Oskar Seiling, a native of Munich born on July 7, 1880, the son of Jakob and Elizabeth Seiling. Seiling had studied at the Royal Academy of the Art of Music in Munich, at the University of Munich, and under Joseph Joachim in Berlin, and had performed extensively in Germany and England before emigrating to America at approximately age 26. In the United States he performed in concerts and with chamber music groups before moving into teaching, holding the position of head of the Violin Department at the University of Southern California from 1907 to 1912 and the same role at the University of Redlands for seven years beginning in 1913. He later taught privately in Los Angeles and organized the Los Angeles Brahms Music Society. Gunning and Seiling were known for hosting outdoor music events at their Sierra Madre ranch that attracted music enthusiasts from across California.

Oskar Seiling died on December 7, 1958. Louise Gunning died on July 24, 1960, at Sierra Madre at the age of 81. Both are interred at the Sierra Madre Pioneer Cemetery.