• Opera Autographs
• Autographed Photo of Opera Singer Marjorie Lawrence (1907-1979)
• Autographed Photograph of Opera Singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936)
• Vanity Fair Prints of Musicians

This month's July Music Auction is particularly rich in books on composers of all periods, classical music, opera, and biographies of opera singers. If you have ever been meaning to build up the music section of your private library, this sale can provide you with a perfect opportunity to acquire key works on Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Handel, Mozart, Dvorzak and others. There are choice volumes on special musical interests such as the history of violin making, jukeboxes, and sheet music, plus selected "how-to" books on playing the piano, guitar and even the gramophone. Several lots provide excellent sourcebooks surveying the history of music in general, and various musical styles in particular including sonata forms, chamber music, the history of opera in America, Russian opera, Spanish piano music, jazz and blues, country and western, ballads, rock-n-roll, and the French lyric opera. The auction also includes a small but fine selection of autographs of opera stars, an original bar of music penned by Rossini, and four choice Vanity Fair chromolithographs of musicians.

Opera Autographs

The Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini occupied an unrivalled position in the Italian musical world during the first half of the 19th century. Like many exceptional musicians, he grew up in a musical household. His father was a horn player and his mother an opera singer. As a boy he had direct experience of operatic performance, both in the orchestra pit and on stage. Consequently it was no surprise that his earliest musical successes were in the genre of opera, or that opera became his lifelong artistic forte (although he also composed both church and chamber music).

Rossini wrote over three dozen operas in all, among them his most famous work, Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), a treatment of the first play of the Figaro trilogy by Beaumarchais on which Mozart had drawn thirty years before in Vienna. Other well known comic operas by Rossini include La Scala di Seta (The Silken Ladder), Il Signor Bruschino, L'Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy), La Cenerentola (Cinderella) and La Gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie). More serious subjects were tackled in Otello, Semiramide, Mose in Egitto (Moses in Egypt) and the French Guillaume Tell (William Tell), his final opera based on the play by Schiller.

Rossini achieved great renown both in his native Italy and in France. Unfortunately the revolution of 1830 prevented him from fulfilling a number of French royal theatrical commissions. He divided his time between Italy and Paris, and died in the French capital in 1868.

This bar of music, written with pen and ink in Rossini's spirited hand, is most certainly from one of his operatic scores.

Autographed Photo of Opera Singer Marjorie Lawrence (1907-1979)

Marjorie Lawrence

World-renowned Australian opera singer, dramatic soprano Marjorie Lawrence, has been recognized as "one of the truest Wagnerian interpreters of our time, unchallenged for the stirring magnificence of her Brunnhilde and the tender simplicity of her Sieglinde, or the stately loveliness of her Elsa and the compelling malevolence of her Ortrud." She had a truly powerful and beautiful voice-a rare combination and one of the finest of the 20th century.

Her biography is one of tremendous triumph and tragedy-both in the personal and professional realm. At the height of her operatic career, Lawrence contracted Polio while touring South America. How she fought the resulting debilitation, and actually made a stunning comeback after being severely crippled by the disease, became the stuff of legend. Just six years after she wrote her autobiography, "Interrupted Melody" (1949), Hollywood made her story into a film of the same name (1955, 106 minutes, Eastman Color & CinemaScope, produced by Jack Cummings and produced by Curtis Bernhardt). Eleanor Parker starred as Marjorie Lawrence, and the Metropolitan Opera's Eileen Farrell sang Parker's dubbed vocals. The film also starred Glenn Ford as Lawrence's husband Thomas King, Roger Moore (Cyril Lawrence), Cecil Kellaway (Bill Lawrence), and Ann Codee (Madame Gilly). Eleanor Parker received an Academy Award Best Actress Nomination for her role, while the film won two Academy Awards for Best Story and Screenplay Musical.

Born at Dean's Marsh, Victoria in 1907, Marjorie Lawrence first studied voice in Melbourne from 1926 to 1928 with Ivor Boustead. In 1929, after winning an operatic contest sponsored by the Melbourne Sun, she left Australia to train in France. There she studied with Madame Cecile Gilly for three years and made her operatic debut at the Monte Carol Opera in January 1932 as Elisabeth in Tannhauser. The following year she made her debut at the Paris Opera as Ortrud in Lohengrin. She was shrewd in her choice of Ortrud's music at her Paris audition, well aware that there were very few singers in the French capital capable of handling those arduous passages. Throughout her career, in fact, Lawrence was undaunted by professional challenges, and would relearn an entire role in another language if she had the opportunity to sing it in another venue.

The autographed photo

Lawrence made her Metropolitan Opera debut in New York on December 18, 1935 as Brunnhilde in Wagner's stirring Die Walkure. On the evening of January 12, 1936 she succeeded in astonishing the most seasoned Metropolitan opera goers by riding a horse straight into the flames in the last scene of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. In doing so, Lawrence became the only soprano in history to carry out Wagner's specific stage direction to the letter. (Usually the buxom prima donnas had led ancient nags across the stage by the bridle!) She did so against the advice of absolutely everyone connected with the performance. The success of her bold venture is chronicled proudly in the first chapter of her autobiography.

Shortly after marrying the American doctor Thomas King in 1941 (with whom she had a turbulent relationship), Lawrence was stricken with polio. It was some eighteen months before she re-appeared in a public performance. During the war, she participated in the USO and entertained troops in the South Pacific in 1944 and in occupied Europe in 1945 and later in 1948. She exhibited her incredible fortitude when she returned to the Met as Venus in Tannhauser, a role which allowed her to remain prone for the duration of her performance. The fact that she sang Wagner from a couch, absolutely brilliantly, has become even more legendary than her stunts on the horse.

She retired from public performance in 1951, and began teaching voice. From 1957-60 she taught at Tulane University, and from 1960-73 she taught at Southern Illinois University where she also directed the Opera Workshop and various opera productions, and where a large Marjorie Lawrence archive is housed. In 1974 she joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where she spent the remainder of her life.

The autograph Lot 46

The autographed photo in this auction is dated 1938-just three years before she contracted polio.

(With special thanks to David V. Koch, Associate Dean, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University)

Autographed Photograph of Opera Singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936)

This photograph depicts the colorful Austrian-American contralto, Ernestine Roessler Schumann-Heink, who was born in Lieben, Austria (now part of Prague, Czech Republic). She sang with the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City from 1899 until 1932, and this photo, which was autographed in 1902, dates from her earliest period with the Met. She inscribed this photo just a few years before deciding to become a naturalized US citizen. Her rich, powerful voice and extraordinary range made her one of the foremost singers of her time. Many operatic historians have hailed her as "the world's most outstanding contralto."

Her rags to riches story-and her forceful personality-are quite evident in her photograph. She was a short stocky woman who had strong opinions and of whom people had strong opinions. On stage she was regal and imposing, leading Composer Richard Strauss to refer to her as "the Heink" while impresario Maurice Grau called her a friendlier "Heinke." She was married three times.

She started singing in public at age 15, having been encouraged musically by her Jewish grandmother-Leah Kohn-who purportedly taught young Ernestine the Czardas (the national dance of Hungary). Her teachers at the Ursuline convent in Prague chose her to sing tenor parts in the Mass. Not knowing how to read music she sang exclusively by ear. While living for a time in Graz, her deep contralto voice so impressed retired-singer Marietta van LeClair that she gave young Ernestine free lessons for four years. At the age of 14, she saw her first opera, Il Trovatore, with Marianne Brandt as Azucena, a role in which Schumann-Heink was later to excel. At 15 she sang the contralto part in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the Akademischer Gesangverin in Graz.

The autographed photo

Her "break" came when she was 17 years old and was given the
opportunity to try out for the Dresden Opera. She sang the
demanding "O mon fils" from Le Prophete (Meyerbeer) and
"Brindisi" from Lucretia Borgia (Donizetti), and the Director
van Platen engaged her for $900 a year. To supplement her meager
income, she sang in the choir of the Dresden Cathedral. Because she
was still unable to read music, she sang her powerful parts off key.
The wife of the distressed conductor, contralto Madame Krebs-Michalesi, discovered young Ernestine's problem and taught her to read music.

One particularly striking illustration of Schumann-Heink's sheer perseverance occurred in August 1887. Boetel, a tenor, asked Ernestine to sing without compensation at a benefit in Berlin. She left her three children in her neighbor's care, and pregnant with her fourth child Hans, traveled all night in third class. Arriving early in the day in Berlin, and unable to afford a hotel, she sat under trees at the Tiergarten (zoo) until rehearsals began. Her performance of the tormented gypsy Azucena in the evening, sharpened by her own sufferings, was a sensation.

Eventually Schumann-Heink was awarded the position of the Hamburg Opera's leading contralto. From 1887 to 1898 she regularly performed a host of significant roles in Europe-something made possible by her highly impressive three octave vocal range (low D to high B). In 1893, at the age of 31, she divorced Heink and married Paul Schumann, actor and director of the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg. With him she had more children.

Schumann-Heink debuted in the United States in Chicago, November 7, 1898, as Ortrud in Lohengrin. A year following the death of her husband, Paul Schumann in 1904, she remarried her third and last husband, a Chicago lawyer William Rapp, Jr. who was 13 years her junior. The marriage lasted only a year, although the bitter divorce dragged on until 1915. In January 1910, while touring the pacific coast she fell in love with San Diego, and eventually made her home there.

The autograph Lot 48

Vanity Fair Prints of Musicians

Lot 143

Lot 144

Lot 145

Lot 146

The Print Category in this month's Music Auction contains four outstanding chromolithographic caricatures from the celebrated British magazine, "Vanity Fair". For nearly fifty years, spanning the Victorian and Edwardian periods (from 1868 to 1914), "Vanity Fair" was the premier society magazine in England. With its news of current events and gossip columns, book and play reviews, serialized novels and word games, and in particular its outstanding color caricatures and character portraits of many of the most fascinating personalities of the day, "Vanity Fair" was the most successful society magazine in the history of English journalism. It was written for and by the Establishment, and everyone "in the know" read it religiously-with curiosity, envy, delight and anger!

Although contemporary readers found it particularly thrilling to turn the pages of "Vanity Fair" waiting to discover which poor soul was ruthlessly caricaturized that week, readers from the 21st-century still prize the magazine and its deadly accurate caricature portraits. These were drawn by a skillful group of nineteenth-century talents, who frequently used pseudonyms: Sir Leslie Ward ("Spy), Carlo Pelligrini ("Ape"), and Max Beerbohm. Of the four "Vanity Fair" chromolithographs in the current auction, three are by "Spy" and one is by "Ape".