Marie Brema - Early Career

Early Career

On 10 October 1891 (aged 35), taking her stage name from her father's birthplace, she made her opera debut in the first English production of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, as Lola, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London. (This was under Arditi, and opposite Francesco Vignas as Turiddu: the new opera was a sensation.) She achieved a success, and followed it with a greater one in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice later in the same year. Shaw witnessed some early appearances in London, for instance in May 1892 an encored performance of Welsing's setting of Love's Philosophy, and in July in a Miscellaneous Concert (with David Bispham, Ellen Terry, Josef Hollmann, etc.) where she sang Schubert's Erlkonig and won Shaw's admiration. However he found her insufficiently versatile, over-specialized, with a fixed vocal colour owing to over-emphasis of the dramatic lower register: and recommended that she should permit instead the simple beauty of sound in the upper part of her voice to be heard, when she should take high rank as a singer.

In February 1893, at a Royal Albert Hall performance of Gounod's Redemption, he thought she sang 'While my watch I am keeping' 'with a gentler vocal touch and a nearer approach to purely lyric style than I had heard from her before', saying she might now become the successor of Mme Belle Cole. In April 1893, at a Philharmonic concert (also featuring Sapellnikoff in Chopin's E major concerto), "happening to be tremendously in the dramatic vein, she positively rampaged through a Schiller-Joachim scena and through Beethoven's Creation Hymn, scandalizing the Philharmonic, but carrying away the multitude."

Shaw, who did not admire Brahms, praised Marie Brema's introduction of the Harzreise im Winter in March 1894, for though he thought Goethe's words had been 'dehumanized' (by Brahms) and that she sang 'without twopenn'orth of feeling', she had 'a thousand pounds' worth of intelligence and dramatic resolution. She has of late made a remarkable conquest of the art of singing.' He had once thought her voice would not last five years, but admitted that now it might last for fifty. The signs of wear and tear had vanished, and 'the sustained note at the end was a model of vocal management. In any reasonably artistic country,' he added, 'Miss Brema would be pursuing a remarkable career on the lyric stage instead of wasting her qualities on the concert platform.' His recommendation was not wasted.

In 1894 Brema created the part of the Evil Spirit in Sir Hubert Parry's King Saul at the Birmingham Festival. During the operatic career which followed, she continued to sing frequently at concerts and oratorios at the music festivals in Great Britain.