NIELSEN, ALICE

born June 7, 1870?, Nashville, Tenn., U.S. died March 8, 1943, New York, N.Y. American singer whose successful career in light opera was followed by a second one in grand opera. Nielsen grew up in Warrensburg and then Kansas City, Missouri. She sang in a church choir and received some voice instruction from a local teacher. About 1886 she had the opportunity to sing in a touring juvenile production of The Mikado. Her marriage to Benjamin Nentwig in 1889 was short-lived. In 1892 she and three other singers formed the Chicago Church Choir Company, and, after an unsuccessful tour through Missouri, she joined the Burton Stanley traveling opera company. In Oakland, California, she appeared as Yum-Yum in the Stanley production of The Mikado in 1893. The next year, after a period at the Wigwam, a San Francisco music hall, she joined the Tivoli Opera Company, with which she made her grand operatic debut in Lucia di Lammermoor. In 1896 Nielsen won a position with the Bostonians, a leading light opera company, and gradually worked her way up from understudy and ingenue roles to the female lead in Reginald De Koven's Robin Hood. Her success in Victor Herbert's The Serenade in 1897 induced her to form the Alice Nielsen Comic Opera Company. Her greatest successes with her own company were Herbert's The Fortune Teller (1898) and his The Singing Girl (1899). In 1901 Nielsen took The Fortune Teller to London, and during its successful run there she was encouraged by the impresario Henry Russell to study for grand opera. Financed by an English patroness, she studied in Rome for two years and made her debut in December 1903 at the Bellini Theatre, Naples, in Faust (according to most sources, although she herself later remembered it as La traviata). She made her London debut in the spring of 1904 in a Covent Garden presentation of Don Giovanni. Subsequently she sang there in Le nozze di Figaro, La Bohme, and Rigoletto, and in 1905, under Russell's management, she also sang Il barbiere di Siviglia and Don Pasquale. In 1909, after two successful tours of the United States, Nielsen joined the Boston Opera Company, with which she remained for five years. There she sang in the American premiere of Claude Debussy's L'Enfant prodigue in November 1910 and the world premiere of Frederick S. Converse's The Sacrifice in March 1911. During that period she also sang occasionally with the Metropolitan Opera Company. Her last appearances were a series of concert recitals with the Boston Symphony Orchestra between 1921 and 1923.