Memoirs of a Prima Donna
By Clara Louise Kellogg
(Mme. Strakosch)
8o. With 48 Illustrations.
Clara Louise Kellogg, who is now Clara Louise Strakosch, was the first American prima donna to win recognition abroad. After making her début in opera at the Academy of Music, in New York, in 1861, she appeared in opera in London and later in Berlin, Vienna, and Saint Petersburg. In every country she was received with acclaim and returned to her native land covered with honors showered upon her by the best audiences that the old world affords.
Miss Kellogg created the rôle of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust in this country, and of Mignon in Ambroise Thomas's opera of that name. After winning laurels in Italian opera she organized an English opera company of her own, which sang for several seasons in New York and the principal cities of the United States. While at the head of her own company she produced Wagner's Flying Dutchman for the first time in America, creating the rôle of Senta, and she was the first prima donna to sing Aïda and Carmen in English. Miss Kellogg was famous not only for the beautiful quality of her voice but for her marvelous musical ear. It is said that there were over forty operas that she could sing on twenty-four hours' notice, and that never once in the course of her operatic career had she been known to sing a fraction of a tone off the key.
These Memoirs are filled with anecdotes of the interesting people whom she met, on and off the stage, and contain a fund of information about voice culture and the study of music that no one interested in the subject can read without profit.
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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