Ernestine Schumann-Heink (15 June 1861 – 17 November 1936) was a Bohemian-born Austrian-American operatic dramatic contralto of German Bohemian descent. She was noted for the flexibility and wide range of her voice. Heink and Schumann were her two husbands' surnames.
She was born Ernestine Amalie Pauline Rössler on 15 June 1861 to a German-speaking family at Libeň (German: Lieben), Bohemia, Austrian Empire, which is now part of the city of Prague, Czech Republic. She was baptized in her father's Roman Catholic faith five days later. Her father, who called his daughter "Tini", was Johann "Hans" Rössler. Before working as a shoe maker, he served as an Austrian cavalry officer. He had been stationed in northern Italy (then an Austrian protectorate), where he met and married Charlotte Josepha Goldman, who was Jewish and with whom he returned to Libeň. Her maternal grandmother, Leah Kohn, was of Hungarian Jewish descent and first prophesied Ernestine's successful career.
When Ernestine was three years old, the family moved to Verona. In 1866, at the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian War, the family moved to Prague, where she was schooled at the Ursuline Convent. At war's end, the Roesslers moved to Podgórze, now part of Kraków, where she attended convent school. The family moved again to Graz when Ernestine was thirteen. Here she met Marietta von LeClair, a retired opera singer, who agreed to give her voice lessons.
In 1876, Ernestine gave her first professional performance (at age 15) as alto soloist in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Graz. Her operatic debut was on 15 October 1878 at the Dresden Royal Opera House, where for four seasons she played the role of Azucena in Il trovatore, and served as principal contralto when she was 17.
In 1882 she married Johann Georg Ernst Albert Heink (1854–1933), secretary of the Semperoper, the Saxon State Opera Dresden; this violated the terms of their contracts, and both had their employment abruptly terminated. Heink took a job at the local customs house and was soon transferred to Hamburg. Ernestine remained in Dresden to pursue her career, and eventually rejoined her husband when she secured a position at the Hamburg Opera. She went on to have four children with Heink: August, Charlotte, Henry and Hans.
Ernest Heink was again thrown out of work when Saxons were banned from government positions, and departed to Saxony to find work. Ernestine, pregnant, did not follow him; they were divorced in 1892 when Ernestine was thirty-one years old. She came to the United States to make a brief foray into Broadway theatre, playing in Julian Edwards' operetta Love's Lottery, in which her performance was noted for the fact that she often broke off to ask the audience whether her English was good enough. She left the production after 50 performances and soon returned to opera.
Her breakthrough to leading roles came after an argument between prima donna Marie Goetze and the director of the Hamburg opera, when he asked Ernestine to sing the title role of Carmen instead, and without rehearsal, which she did to great acclaim. Goetze angrily quit the role of Fidès in Le prophète, to be performed the following night, and was again replaced by Schumann-Heink who for a third time replaced Goetze as Ortrud in Lohengrin the following evening, one more time without rehearsal, and was offered a ten-year contract.
In 1887, Schumann-Heink sang Johannes Brahms' Alto Rhapsody under the direction of Hans von Bülow in a concert in Hamburg, with Brahms in attendance. She was then engaged by Bülow to sing in a cycle of Mozart performances later that year. However, she had to withdraw from these performances due to the birth of her fourth child, Hans, in November 1887. This withdrawal angered Bülow, and their relationship did not continue.
After the divorce from her first husband, she married Paul Schumann, an actor and director of the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 1892. She acquired a stepson, Walter, and had three more children with Paul: Ferdinand Schumann, Marie Theresa Schumann, and George Washington Schumann. This last boy was born in New York City, named by his good-humored mother with suggestion of the doctor who delivered the baby. One of their children, Ferdinand (1893–1958) was a prolific, though mostly unbilled, Hollywood character actor.
Paul Schumann died in Germany on 28 November 1904. While fighting a legal battle in Germany over her husband's estate, she filed her United States naturalization papers on 10 February 1905, and became a U.S. citizen on 3 March 1908.
Schumann-Heink performed with Gustav Mahler at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, during the Hamburg company's London season in 1892, and became well known for her performances of the works of Richard Wagner, forging "a long and fruitful relationship with [the Annual] Bayreuth [Wagnerian music Festival]" that "lasted from 1896 to 1914".
Schumann-Heink's first appearance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City was in 1899, and she performed regularly there until 1932. She recorded the first of her many musical gramophone performances in 1900. Several of these early sound recordings originally released on 78 RPM discs have been reissued on CD format. Although there are some imperfections in her singing, her technical brilliance still leaves a deep impression on listeners.
On 11 February 1905, Schumann-Heink became an American citizen. On 27 May 1905, aged 43, she married her manager William Rapp Jr., son of Wilhelm Rapp, in Chicago, Illinois. They lived on Grandview Avenue, North Caldwell, New Jersey in her Villa Fides from April 1906 to December 1911. They then moved to 500 acres (2.0 km2) of farm land located just outside San Diego, California, purchased by her in January 1910, where she would live for most of the rest of her life.
In 1909, she created the role of Klytaemnestra in the debut of Richard Strauss's Elektra, of which she said she had no high opinion, calling it "a fearful din". Strauss was not entirely captivated by Schumann-Heink either; according to one story, during rehearsals he admonished the orchestra, "Louder! I can still hear Madame Schumann-Heink!"
She separated from her husband on 10 December 1911. She filed for divorce in 1913. They divorced in 1914 and the appeals court upheld the lower court decision in 1915. In 1915, she appeared as herself in the early documentary film Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World's Fair at San Francisco directed by Fatty Arbuckle, who appears as himself in the film.
Around the time of filming the documentary, on July 30th 1915, Mme. Schumann-Heink was stopped and cited for speeding in Santa Ana, CA. The San Francisco Chronicle published the story titled: ‘Outrage,’ Says Diva Nabbed for Speeding.
Charitable work and community support
While living at North Caldwell, Schumann-Heink became interested in efforts to honor President Grover Cleveland. The future president was born in 1837 in nearby Caldwell, New Jersey, where his father, Rev. Richard Cleveland was minister of the First Presbyterian Church. On 10 September 1912, Schumann-Heink performed a benefit concert at the church to raise money to purchase the adjacent Presbyterian manse, Cleveland's birthplace. In 1913, the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Memorial Association (GCBMA) purchased the manse and opened it to the public as a museum.