11 Facts About Mabel Riegelman

Mabel Isabel Riegelman was a popular American operatic soprano.

Mabel Riegelman's father was born in Ohio to German immigrants, and her mother was born in Australia to English Jews and immigrated to the United States as a teenager.

Mabel Riegelman's family moved to California when she was a child.

Mabel Riegelman was "discovered" in San Francisco by Johanna Gadski, opera diva from Stettin.

Gadski and the two Riegelman sisters traveled to Stettin under Gadski's tutelage.

Mabel Riegelman made her American operatic debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, singing Gretel in Englebert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, which became her signature role.

Mabel Riegelman was connected with the Chicago Grand Opera Company and Boston Opera Company.

Mabel Riegelman promoted municipal opera houses across the United States: "We should do as well by our opera houses as we do by the movies," she told an Oakland newspaper in 1918.

Riegelman gave benefit concerts to support war relief during World War I Her brother Carl Robert Riegelman was injured in a 1919 train accident in France, while serving in the United States Navy.

Mabel Riegelman was burned and injured by an electrical shock when a lamp in her home malfunctioned in 1928.

Mabel Riegelman died in December 1967, in her late seventies, in Burlingame, California.