1. Lillian Nordica was an American opera singer who had a major stage career in Europe and her native country.
24 Facts About Lillian Nordica
1. 2.
Lillian Nordica had a powerful yet flexible voice and the ability to perform an unusually wide range of roles in the German, French and Italian operatic repertoires.
3.
Lillian Nordica Allen Norton was born in 1857 in a small Cape Cod style farmhouse built by her grandfather on a hill in Farmington, Maine.
4.
Lillian Nordica trained as a singer in Boston, graduating from the New England Conservatory in that city at the age of 18.
5.
Lillian Nordica later studied in New York City with Emilio Belari.
6.
Lillian Nordica convinced her that European opera-goers would not tolerate a diva with a plain sounding, Anglo-American name.
7.
Lillian Nordica achieved a high rank among the international prima donnas of her era, appearing in many major musical venues in Western Europe and Russia.
8.
Lillian Nordica sang for example at the Royal Opera House, London, from 1887 to 1893 and performed at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 1894 as Elsa in Lohengrin.
9.
Lillian Nordica sang at the Met from 1891 until 1910, with some breaks in between.
10.
Lillian Nordica established her worldwide reputation as an opera singer of the first magnitude, despite facing powerful competition during her career from a number of other outstanding dramatic sopranos.
11.
Lillian Nordica made a number of acoustic discs for Columbia Records.
12.
Lillian Nordica's best known record is probably that of a demanding aria from the Hungarian opera Hunyadi Laszlo by Ferenc Erkel, which she cut in 1907.
13.
Lillian Nordica can be heard briefly in some of the Mapleson Cylinders that were recorded during actual performances at the Metropolitan Opera House during the first few years of the 20th century.
14.
Lillian Nordica took the title role in Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival in 1894.
15.
Lillian Nordica spoke out against the pay gap between male and female singers.
16.
Lillian Nordica raised funds for the Women's suffrage movement by giving concerts.
17.
Lillian Nordica spoke from an open streetcar in San Francisco, encouraging women to vote, one day before the vote for the women's right in California.
18.
In 1910, Lillian Nordica wrote a full page article for The New York Times.
19.
Lillian Nordica nearly missed the ship departing Sydney after her 1913 Australian concert tour, but wired the captain asking him to wait for her.
20.
The Tasman hit a coral reef, where it remained for three days, and Lillian Nordica suffered hypothermia, from which she never recovered.
21.
Lillian Nordica was taken to Thursday Island, Queensland, where she was hospitalised for some time.
22.
Lillian Nordica was well enough on Thursday Island to make a new will, which disinherited her husband.
23.
Lillian Nordica lingered for months, seeming to improve, only to fail again.
24.
Lillian Nordica died of pneumonia on May 10,1914, in Batavia.