KELLOGG, CLARA LOUISE

born July 9, 1842, Sumterville [now Sumter], S.C., U.S. died May 13, 1916, New Hartford, Conn. American opera singer, the first native American prima donna and the first to achieve success in Europe. Kellogg grew up in Birmingham (now Derby) in her parents' native Connecticut and from about 1855 in New York City. From about age 14 she studied music and singing privately and at the Ashland Seminary and Musical Institute in the Catskill Mountains. In 1860 she made an undistinguished concert and opera tour that ranged as far west as Detroit, Michigan. She made her New York debut in February 1861 in a production of Rigoletto at the New York Academy of Music, and a week later she achieved some success in a Boston production of Gaetano Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix. Despite the dampening effect of the Civil War, she managed to build a career in the next few years. In November 1863 Kellogg sang Marguerite in the New York premiere of Charles Gounod's Faust at the Academy of Music. The role was long identified with her, and in it she made her London debut in November 1867. From 1868 to 1873 she toured the major opera houses of the United States, in 1872 as costar of an opera company organized by her and the Austrian prima donna Pauline Lucca. During 187376 she headed her own English Opera Company, a pioneering effort at presenting opera in English in which she closely supervised every detail. She again toured as a solo artist in concert and opera performances, capped by a successful tour in Russia in 188081. Her career faded thereafter, owing perhaps to the inadequacy of her early training and the consequent early fading of her voice. In her prime, however, hers was a soprano of power and beauty. In 1887 she married impresario Carl Strakosch and shortly thereafter retired. In 1913 she published Memoirs of an American Prima Donna.