Death of a Diva

When in 1909 plump little Marcella Sembrich sang her farewell to opera, Manhattan's Metropolitan built her a throne on the stage, fairly swamped her with flowers, gifts, eulogies. Operagoers that bleak February night cheered themselves croupy while tears ran down many a wrinkled old cheek. But why was this great singer retiring at the peak of her career? "Because I like the sun best when it is high." Last week in Manhattan Death came to Marcella Sembrich who, save for Schumann Heink and Calve, was the last survivor of an age which produced Patti, Lilli Lehmann, Melba, Nordica, Nilsson and the two de Reszkes.

Marcella Sembrich was 76 when she died. She said her operatic farewell at 50 when her voice was still young, clear, phenomenally high. But at 50 Sembrich had already lived a long life as a public performer. Her Polish father, one of a tanner's 14 children, left a military band to marry. Sembrich, christened Praxede Marcelline Kochanska, was plopped up on a piano bench at the age of four. At six she was studying the violin. At twelve she played at local dances in the family quartet. She was the pianist, her brother the first violinist, her mother the second, her father the cellist. When she nodded at the keyboard her father roused her with a tap on the shoulder with his cello bow. Because the family was too poor to buy their music, they borrowed it. And often after playing until midnight 12-year-old Marcelline sat up into the morning to copy the parts by candlelight.

Because a singer heard her and liked her playing, Marcelline Kochanska was admitted to the Lemberg Conservatory where her teacher was a Wilhelm Stengel whom she married in 1877. When she was in her teens Stengel took her to see Franz Liszt who said: "Kleine, you have three pairs of wings on which to fly to fame. You can become a great pianist, a great violinist or a great singer." Sembrich chose to sing and took her mother's maiden name. Her debut was in Athens in 1877.

Sembrich did her flawless trills in Lucia di Lammermoor at the second performance given in the Metropolitan Opera House. (Downtown at the old Academy of Music Adelina Patti was singing.) Sembrich sang with Caruso when he made his U. S. debut in 1903. She was with the Metropolitan when it visited San Francisco at the time of the great fire. Caruso, who was shaken out of bed, would never sing in San Francisco again. Sembrich was frightened, too. But she stayed to give a concert, earned over $10,000 which she divided between the choristers and the orchestra players who lost their instruments. When Sembrich sang her farewell three years later the orchestramen, remembering her generosity, gave her a silver loving-cup.

For seven years thereafter Sembrich continued to give recitals. On one program she sang folksongs in a dozen different dialects. After 1917 she devoted herself to teaching. And as a teacher she was peerless. Paderewski, Sembrich's compatriot, once called her "the most musical singer he had ever known." The late Henry Edward Krehbiel, for 43 years critic of the New York Tribune, described her style as "exquisite and plainly the outgrowth of a thoroughly musical nature.'' In the New York Sun William I. Henderson, dean of U. S. music critics, said last week: "That her name will be placed in the catalogue of great singers of all time cannot be doubted. Her voice was of superlative loveliness and her art was as close to perfection as vocal art can be."

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