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Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West
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Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.
Ladies and gentlemen, Madame Adelina Patti,
The President’s Opera Star
Among the many stars that performed at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada in the late 1870s was a beautiful soprano by the name of Adelina Patti. Adelina was a highly acclaimed 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with her near contemporaries Jenny Lind and Theresa Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history, owing to the purity and beauty of her lyrical voice and the unmatched quality of her bel canto technique. Bel canto is a lyrical style of operatic singing using a full rich broad tone and smooth phrasing.
During an American tour in 1862, she sang John Howard Payne’s Home Sweet Home at the White House for the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and his wife Mary. The Lincolns were mourning their son Willie, who had died of typhoid. Moved to tears, the Lincolns requested and encore of the song. Henceforth, it would become associated with Adelina Patti, and she performed it many times as a bonus item at the end of recitals and concerts.
Patti’s career was one of success after success. She sang not only in England and the United States, but also as far afield in mainland Europe as Russia, and in South America as well, inspiring audience frenzy and critical superlatives wherever she went. Her girlish good looks gave her an appealing stage presence, which added to her celebrity status.
To learn more about
Adelina Patti’s career and her performances in America read
Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the
Old West.
