Hauk, Minnie (1851–1929)

American dramatic soprano, the first international opera superstar to emerge from the U.S., who was particularly celebrated for her Carmen. Name variations: Minnie Hauck. Born Amalia Mignon Hauck in New York City, on November 16, 1851; died at Villa Tribschen, Switzerland, on February 6, 1929; daughter of James Hauck; married Baron Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.

The first full-fledged, internationally acclaimed operatic prima donna to be produced by the United States, Minnie Hauk was born Amalia Mignon Hauck (she later chose to drop the c) in New York City during 1851. She was the only child of a German-born father, a carpenter who had fled Germany after the failure of the 1848 revolution, and his American wife. The Hauck family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where at the age of five, Minnie attended her first theatrical performance while seated on her mother's lap. She later reminisced about this experience, recalling that after returning home she did not even look at her dolls, "sitting in a row near my bed. I had seen at the theatre much larger, much finer ones." Stagestruck, the young girl became obsessed by Jenny Lind , "the Swedish Nightingale." She owned many pictures of the singer, read a biography of Lind "at least once a week," and named her dogs and cats Jenny.

In the late 1850s, the Hauck family moved again, this time to the frontier town of Sumner City, north of Kansas City and situated on the Missouri River. With her father working as a boatbuilder and her mother running a boarding house, Minnie was often on her own. She took advantage of her freedom to stroll across the prairies, often winding up in a nearby Native American camp. As she recalled, "The Indians would call me their 'Prairie flower'; they would give me fruit, carry me in their arms, and take me for a ride on their little ponies. Their children would show me how to string a bow and shoot an arrow, would dance or have a sham battle or a pony race for my amusement, and, towards evening, they would accompany me a good distance on my homeward way." Alarmed by their wandering daughter, the Haucks sent her off to a girl's seminary in nearby Leavenworth. Here, her irrepressible spirits quickly got her expelled.

After a fierce flood on the Missouri River virtually destroyed Sumner City, the Haucks again decided to move on. James Hauck built a boat, loaded it with his small family and all their worldly possessions, and they set sail for New Orleans where life would be easier. Just south of St. Louis, however, their houseboat was rammed by a steamboat and demolished. As Minnie and her parents floated in the water, clutching debris from their vessel, they watched everything they owned sink into the mighty Mississippi. The steamboat's captain rescued the shaken family and took them free of charge to their destination. By the time the Haucks arrived in New Orleans, the Civil War had begun, the city found itself blockaded, and economic life was at a virtual standstill. Soon, however, Minnie's parents were able to find employment and a modest lifestyle was enjoyed by the family. Minnie attended the Belleville School and took singing lessons from a European basso, Gregorio Curto.

Before long, she was facing an audience, singing in the city's grand opera house at a charity concert to raise money for wounded soldiers.

Convinced of her talent, Minnie's parents again relocated. In late 1862, with the Civil War still raging, they sailed from New Orleans to the Florida Keys, and from there to New York City. In Manhattan, Minnie soon became a musical sensation, regularly singing in the homes of the social elite, including Naval Commodore Ritchie, August and Caroline Perry Belmont , and racetrack entrepreneur Leonard Jerome, father of Jennie Jerome (Churchill) . After a brief but intensive course of study with Achille Errani, who had gained fame as a teacher of a number of successful American sopranos, Minnie made her operatic debut, singing in La Sonnambula at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on October 13,1866. A month later, she made her Manhattan debut at the Winter Garden, singing the role of Prascovia in Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'Étoile du Nord. The New York Times' assessment of her performance was highly enthusiastic, noting that she was "an artist who in time will rank among the foremost. Her power is quite equal to her brilliancy, and experience will beyond a doubt develop in her an artist quite equal, if not superior, to any we have yet heard."

Youthful and supremely confident, Minnie Hauk quickly emerged as a prima donna, adding major roles to her repertoire at a dizzying pace. The only component left to secure her career was a trip to Europe, and funds for this undertaking were provided by the music publisher Gustav Schirmer, whose confidence in Hauk's talents was repaid quite literally with interest soon after her first engagements on the Continent. Traveling with her mother—who would serve as Hauk's best friend, constant companion and closest adviser—the young soprano's first stop was London. Although no engagements materialized in the British capital, Hauk attended the opera, made a number of important connections, and carefully studied the singing techniques of several of the city's reigning singing stars including Adelina Patti and Christine Nilsson . In Paris, however, she secured an engagement in the role of Amina in La Sonnambula. Hauk became the instant darling of the French public not only because of her vocal and dramatic talents, but also because her colorful American frontier background provided great copy for the local newspapers, which described her in fantastic terms as a half-civilized Pocahontas figure who in the wilds of the New World was accustomed to riding a mustang bareback.

Within months of her Paris debut, Hauk was singing in the major opera houses of London, The Hague, and Russia. In Russia, she appeared in both Moscow and St. Petersburg's imperial opera houses, and it was during these Russian engagements that she began to earn a reputation for displaying a fiery stage temperament. A simmering artistic jealousy between Hauk and Désirée Artôt , then one of the leading sopranos on the Russian operatic scene, came to a head during a performance of Don Giovanni. Artôt's husband, Mariano Padilla, jerked Hauk's hand at the end of their duet in Act I. Convinced that Padilla was intentionally trying to cause her to break a high note, Hauk slapped him in the face. The audience, entranced by the events, gave both singers such an ovation that the entire duet had to be repeated.

Hauk's Russian successes made her an internationally recognized singing sensation. For the next decade, she would sing mostly in Vienna and Berlin, making her Viennese debut in May 1870. She quickly mastered the German language both to meet the requirements of daily living and because the non-German operatic repertory was customarily sung in German. At the time of her first appearance in Vienna in the role of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust, Hauk had not yet completely mastered the complexities of German. A slip-up she made in performance served to endear her to Vienna's music enthusiasts: responding to Faust, she told him she intended to go home ungekleidet (undressed) instead of the correct word, unbegleitet (unaccompanied). The sophisticated Viennese audience was delighted by the imperfect German of the American girl from the Wild West, and she became an immediate star. She enjoyed a comparable success at the Berlin Opera, where she starred in, among other popular operas of the day, Goetz's Taming of the Shrew.

Despite her late and rather sketchy vocal training, Minnie Hauk was a quick study and mastered not only the German language, adding dozens of roles to her repertory in a brief period, but also learned roles in exotic languages. In Budapest, for example, she sang the role of Maria in Ferenc Erkel's Hunyadi László in the original Magyar, even though she never learned a sentence of conversational Hungarian and learned the words, as she would later note, "like a parrot." Now a world-class artist, Hauk met many of the composers of operas she starred in including Richard Wagner whom she met after a Budapest performance of Der fliegende Holländer. On that occasion, she told him that she always made an effort to "act in accordance with the symphonic indications of the orchestra." A grateful Wagner replied, "That is right, that is right! Thank goodness! Here is an artist who knows how to act and sing according to my intentions."

Always willing to sing in contemporary operas that were fresh to the ear and even controversial, Hauk was glad for the opportunity to sing in Bizet's Carmen. In May 1878, when that opera was only three years old, she sang in the starring role at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. Her performance was a huge hit, at least in part because in order to totally master her role she had immersed herself in the French language, read the Prosper Mérimée short story the opera was based on, and took dancing lessons from the Monnaie's ballet master. On June 22, 1879, Hauk performed Carmen in London, singing it in Italian, the operatic language favored by British audiences of the day. Here, too, it was an immense success. Although she married the wealthy Austrian journalist and globetrotter Baron Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg in 1881, Hauk had no intentions of abandoning her immensely successful singing career, which by the 1880s had made her name as well-known in the United States as it had become in Europe during the previous decade. She toured constantly in the United States and Canada, and was invited by President Chester A. Arthur to perform at the White House.

Fearing that her success as Carmen might doom her to being seen as a one-role artist, Hauk was constantly searching for, and mastering, new roles, which included Hector Berlioz' rarely performed La Damnation de Faust. Among other novelties, Hauk introduced Massenet's Manon to the United States in December 1885. She sang at New York's Metropolitan Opera during the 1890–91 season, and her appearance in Carmen on April 2, 1891, marked her final New York performance. As a last hurrah for her fans, she founded the Minnie Hauk Grand Opera Company in mid-1891 to make an American tour. During this tour in Chicago on September 30, 1891, she appeared in Mascagni's sensational new opera Cavalleria Rusticana, in what was one of its earliest American performances. With the death of her mother in 1896, Minnie Hauk retired from the hectic but stimulating life of an operatic prima donna. She and her husband retired to their Swiss villa outside of Lucerne, the same Tribschen that Richard Wagner had occupied at the time he composed his masterpieces Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and the mighty Ring cycle of music dramas. Here, she and her husband lived an idyllic existence until World War I destroyed their Austrian investments. After her husband died in 1918, Hauk became virtually destitute, a situation she attempted to remedy by dictating her memoirs, even though she was enfeebled and blind. Fortunately, operatic star Geraldine Farrar and the Music Lovers Foundation raised sufficient funds to make Hauk's final years financially comfortable. Minnie Hauk died at Villa Tribschen on February 6, 1929.

sources:

Davis, Peter G. The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Adventures of America's Great Singers in Opera and Concert, from 1825 to the Present. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1997.

——. "Ball of Fire: The Sizzling Life and Times of Minnie Hauk, America's First International Opera Superstar," in Opera News. Vol. 61, no. 13. March 22, 1997, pp. 14–19, 27.

"Hauk, Minnie," in Dumas Malone, ed. Dictionary of American Biography. Vol. 8. NY: Scribner, 1932, pp. 399–400.

Hauk, Minnie. Memories of a Singer. Reprint ed. NY: Arno Press, 1977.

John Haag , Associate Professor, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia