THE name of Clara Louise Kellogg is known to the immediate generation chiefly as an echo of the past. Yet only thirty years ago it was written of her, enthusiastically but truthfully, that "no living singer needs a biography less than Miss Clara Louise Kellogg; and nowhere in the world would a biography of her be so superfluous as in America, where her name is a household word and her illustrious career is familiar in all its triumphant details to the whole people."

The past to which she belongs is therefore recent; it is the past of yesterday only, thought of tenderly by our fathers and mothers, spoken of reverently as a poignant phase of their own ephemeral youth, one of their sweet lavender memories. The pity is (although this is itself part of the evanescent charm), that the singer's best creations can live but in the hearts of a people, and the fame of sound is as fugitive as life itself.

A record of such creations is, however, possible and also enduring; while it is also necessary for a just estimate of the development of civilisations. As such, this record of her musical past—presented by Clara Louise Kellogg herself—will have a place in the annals of the evolution of musical art on the North American continent long after every vestige of fluttering personal reminiscence has vanished down the ages. A word of appreciation with regard to the preparation of this record is due to John Jay Whitehead, Jr., whose diligent chronological labours have materially assisted the editor.

Clara Louise Kellogg came from New England stock of English heritage. She was named after Clara Novello. Her father, George Kellogg, was an inventor of various machines and instruments and, at the time of her birth, was principal of Sumter Academy, Sumterville, S. C. Thus the famous singer was acclaimed in later years not only as the Star of the North (the rôle of Catherine in Meyerbeer's opera of that name being one of her achievements) but also as "the lone star of the South in the operatic world." She first sang publicly in New York in 1861 at an evening party given by Mr. Edward Cooper, the brother of Mrs. Abram Hewitt. This was the year of her début as Gilda in Verdi's opera of Rigoletto at the Academy of Music in New York City. When she came before her countrymen as a singer, she was several decades ahead of her musical public, for she was a lyric artist as well as a singer. America was not then producing either singers or lyric artists; and in fact we were, as a nation, but just getting over the notion that America could not produce great voices. We held a very firm contempt for our own facilities, our knowledge, and our taste in musical matters. If we did discover a rough diamond, we had to send it to Italy to find out if it were of the first water and to have it polished and set. Nothing was so absolutely necessary for our self-respect as that some American woman should arise with sufficient American talent and bravery to prove beyond all cavil that the country was able to produce both singers and artists.

For rather more than twenty-five years, from her appearance as Gilda until she quietly withdrew from public life, when it seemed to her that the appropriate moment for so doing had come, Clara Louise Kellogg filled this need and maintained her contention. She was educated in America, and her career, both in America and abroad, was remarkable in its consistent triumphs. When Gounod's Faust was a musical and an operatic innovation, she broke through the Italian traditions of her training and created the rôle of Marguerite according to her own beliefs; and throughout her later characterisations in Italian opera, she sustained a wonderfully poised attitude of independence and of observance with regard to these same traditions. In London, in St. Petersburg, in Vienna, as well as in the length and breadth of the United States, she gained a recognition and an appreciation in opera, oratorio, and concert, second to none: and when, later, she organised an English Opera Company and successfully piloted it on a course of unprecedented popularity, her personal laurels were equally supreme.

In 1887, Miss Kellogg married Carl Strakosch, who had for some time been her manager. Mr. Strakosch is the nephew of the two well-known impresarios, Maurice and Max Strakosch. After her marriage, the public career of Clara Louise Kellogg virtually ended. The Strakosch home is in New Hartford, Connecticut, and Mrs. Strakosch gave to it the name of "Elpstone" because of a large rock shaped like an elephant that is the most conspicuous feature as one enters the grounds through the poplar-guarded gate. Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch are very fond of their New Hartford home, but, the Litchfield County climate in winter being severe, they usually spend their winters in Rome. They have also travelled largely in Oriental countries.

In 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch celebrated their Silver Wedding at Elpstone. On this occasion, the whole village of New Hartford was given up to festivities, and friends came from miles away to offer their congratulations. Perhaps the most pleasant incident of the celebration was the presentation of a silver loving cup to Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch by the people of New Hartford in token of the affectionate esteem in which they are both held.

The woman, Clara Louise Kellogg, is quite as distinct a personality as was the prima donna. So thoroughly, indeed, so fundamentally, is she a musician that her knowledge of life itself is as much a matter of harmony as is her music. She lives her melody; applying the basic principle that Carlyle has expressed so admirably when he says: "See deeply enough and you see musically."

ISABEL MOORE.

WOODSTOCK, N. Y.
August, 1913

Memoirs of
An American Prima Donna

I was born in Sumterville, South Carolina, and had a negro mammy to take care of me, one of the real old-fashioned kind, of a type now almost gone. She used to hold me in her arms and rock me back and forth, and as she rocked she sang. I don't know the name of the song she crooned; but I still know the melody, and have an impression that the words were:

She used to sing these two lines over and over, so that I slept and waked to them. And my first musical efforts, when I was just ten months old, were to try to sing this ditty in imitation of my negro mammy.

There is, after all, nothing incredible or miraculous about the fact, extraordinary as it certainly is. We are not surprised when the young thrush practises a trill. And in some people the need for music and the power to make it are just as instinctive as they are in the birds. What effects I have achieved and what success I have found must be laid to this big, living fact: music was in me, and it had to find expression.

One day he was standing by the piano in one room and I was playing on the floor in another. He idly struck a note and asked my mother:

"What note is that I am striking? Guess!"

"How can I tell?" said my mother. "No one could tell that."

"Why, mother!" I cried from the next room, "don't you know what note that is?"

"I do not," said my mother, "and neither do you."

"I do, too," I declared. "It's the first of the three black keys going up!"

It was, in fact, F sharp, and in this manner it was discovered that I had what we musicians call "absolute pitch"; the ability to place and name a note the moment it is heard. As I have said, this has often proved to be a very trying gift, for it is, and always has been impossible for me to decipher a song in a different key from that in which it is written. If it is written in C, I hear it in C; and conceive the hideous discord in my brain while the orchestra or the pianist renders it in D flat! When I see a "Do," I want to sing it as a "Do," and not as a "Re."

This episode must have been when I was about five years old, and soon afterward I began taking regular piano lessons. I remember my teacher quite well. He used to come out from New Haven by the Naugatuck railway—that had just been completed and was a great curiosity—for the purpose of instructing a class of which I was a member.

"Do play this for me!" I would beg. "Just once, so I can tell how it goes."

In spite of this early slowness in music reading, or, perhaps because of it, when I did learn to read, I learned to read thoroughly. I could really play; and I cannot over-estimate the help this has been to me all my life. It is so essential—and so rare—for a prima donna to be not only a fine singer but also a good musician.

There was then no idea of my becoming a singer. All my time was given to the piano and to perfecting myself in playing it. But my parents made every effort to have me hear fine singing, for the better cultivation of my musical taste, and I am grateful to them for doing so, as I believe that singing is largely imitative and that, while singers need not begin to train their voices very early, they should as soon as possible familiarise themselves with good singing and with good music generally. The wise artist learns from many sources, some of them quite unexpected ones. Patti once told me that she had caught the trick of her best "turn" from listening to Faure, the baritone.

My father and mother went to New York during the Jenny Lind furore and carried me in their arms to hear her big concert. I remember it clearly, and just the way in which she tripped on to the stage that night with her hair, as she always wore it, drawn down close over her ears—a custom that gave rise to the popular report that she had no ears.

and one part of it sounded exactly like the call of a bird. Sir Jules Benedict, who was always her accompanist, once told me many years later in London that she had a "hole" in her voice. He said that he had been obliged to play her accompaniments in such a way as to cover up certain notes in her middle register. A curious admission to come from him, I thought, for few people knew of the "hole."

Only once during my childhood did I sing in public, and that was in a little school concert, a song Come Buy My Flowers, dressed up daintily for the part and carrying a small basketful of posies of all kinds. When I had finished singing, a man in the audience stepped down to the footlights and held up a five-dollar bill.

"To buy your flowers!" said he.

That might be called my first professional performance! The local paper said I had talent. As a matter of fact, I don't remember much about the occasion; but I do remember only too well a dreadful incident that occurred immediately afterward between me and the editor of the aforesaid local paper,—Mr. Newson by name.

I turned on him in the wildest fury. I really would have killed him if I could.

"Laugh, will you!" I shrieked, beside myself. "Laugh! laugh! laugh!"

He said afterwards that I absolutely frightened him, I was so small and so tragic.

"I knew then," he declared, "that that child had great emotional and dramatic possibilities in her. Why, she nearly burned me up!"

Years later, when I was singing in St. Paul, the Dispatch printed this story in an interview with Mr. Newson himself. He made a heartless jest of the alliteration—"Kellogg's Kitten Killed"—and referred to my "inexpressible expression of sorrow and disgust" as I cried, "Laugh, will you!" Said Mr. Newson in summing up:

"It was a real tragedic act!"

Mr. Newson's description of me as a child is: "A black-eyed little girl, somewhat wayward—as she was an only child—kind-hearted, affectionate, self-reliant, and very independent!"

My childhood was very quiet and peaceful, rather commonplace in fact, except for music. Reading was a pleasure, too, and, as my father was a student and had a wonderful library, I had all the books I wanted. I was literally brought up on Carlyle and Chaucer. I must have been a rather queer child, in some ways. Even as a little thing I liked clothes. When only nine years old I conceived a wild desire for a pair of kid gloves. Kid gloves were a sign of great elegance in those days. At last my clamours were successful and I was given a pair at Christmas. They were a source of great pride, and I wore them to church, where I did my little singing in the choir with the others. By this time I could read any music at sight and would sit up and chirp and peep away quite happily. As I spread my kid-gloved hands out most conspicuously, what I had not noticed became very noticeable to everyone else: the fingers were nearly two inches too long. And the choir laughed at me. I was dreadfully mortified and sat there crying, until the kind contralto comforted me.

"I believe I could play that if I had one!"

My father, the dignified scholar, was horrified.

"When a banjo comes in, I go out," said he.

At last a friend gave me one, and I watched and studied the darkies until I had picked up the trick of playing it, and soon acquired a real negro touch. And I also acquired some genuine darky songs. One, of which I was particularly fond, was called: Hottes' co'n y' ever eat.

I really believe I was the first American girl who ever played a banjo! In a few years along came Lotta, and made the banjo a great feature.

Banjo music has natural syncopation, and its peculiarities undoubtedly originated the "rag-time" of our present-day imitations. There was one song that I learned from hearing a man sing it who had, in turn, caught it from a darky, that has never to my knowledge been published and is not to be found in any collection.

It began:

But this chapter is to be about my first notes, not my last ones.

In 1857, my father failed, the beautiful books were sold and we went to New York to live. Almost directly afterward occurred one of the most important events of my career. Although I was not being trained for a singer, but as a musician in general, I could no more help singing than I could held breathing, or sleeping, or eating; and, one day, Colonel Henry G. Stebbins, a well-known musical amateur, one of the directors of the Academy of Music, was calling on my father and heard me singing to myself in an adjoining room. Then and there he asked to be allowed to have my voice cultivated; and so, when I was fourteen, I began to study singing. The succeeding four years were the hardest worked years of my life.

To young girls who are contemplating vocal study, I always say that it is mostly a question of what one is willing to give up.

If you really are prepared to sacrifice all the fun that your youth is entitled to; to work, and to deny yourself; to eat and sleep, not because you are hungry or sleepy, but because your strength must be conserved for your art; to make your music the whole interest of your existence;—if you are willing to do all this, you may have your reward.

But music will have no half service. It has to be all or nothing.

In Rostand's play, they ask Chanticleer:

"What is your life?"

And he answers:

"My song."

"What is your song?"

"My life."

IN taking up vocal study, however, I had no fixed intention of going on the stage. All I decided was to make as much as I could of myself and of my voice. Many girls I knew studied singing merely as an accomplishment. In fact, the girl who aspired professionally was almost unknown.

I first studied under a Frenchman named Millet, a graduate of the Conservatory of Paris, who was teaching the daughters of Colonel Stebbins and, also, the daughter of the Baron de Trobriand. Later, I worked with Manzocchi, Rivarde, Errani and Muzio, who was a great friend of Verdi.

It is odd that in that most musical and artistic country, Italy, much the same prejudice exists to this day. I should never think of telling a really great Italian lady that I had been on the stage; she would immediately think that there was something queer about me. Of course in America all that was changed some time ago, after England had established the precedent. People are now pleased not only to meet artists socially, but to lionise them as well. But when I was a girl there was a gulf as deep as the Bottomless Pit between society and people of the theatre; and it was this gulf that I knew would open between myself and the friends of whom I was really fond as, in time, I realised that I was improving sufficiently to justify some definite ambitions. My work was steady and unremitting, and by the time I began study with Muzio my mind was pretty nearly made up.

A queer, nervous, brusque, red-headed man was Muzio, from the north of Italy, where the type always seems so curiously German. Besides being one of the conductors of the Opera, he organised concert tours, and promised to see that I should have my chance. It was said that he had fled from political disturbances in Italy, but this I never heard verified. Certainly he was quite a big man in the New York operatic world of his day, and was a most cultivated musician, with the "Italian traditions" of opera at his fingers' ends. It is to Muzio, incidentally, that I owe my trill.

No account of my education would be complete without a mention of the great singers whom I heard during that receptive period; that is, the years between fourteen and eighteen, before my professional début. The first artist I heard when I was old enough really to appreciate good singing was Louisa Pine, who sang in New York in second-rate English Opera with Harrison, of whom she was deeply enamoured and who usually sang out of tune. We did not then fully understand how well-schooled and well-trained she was; and her really fine qualities were only revealed to me much later in a concert.

Piccolomini arrived here a couple of years later and I heard her, too. She was of a distinguished Italian family, and, considering Italy's aristocratic prejudices, it is strange that she should have been an opera singer. She made Traviata, in which she had already captured the British public, first known to us: yet she was an indifferent singer and had a very limited répertoire. She received her adulation partly because people didn't know much then about music. Adulation it was, too. She made $5000 a month, and America had never before imagined such an operatic salary. She looked a little like Lucca; was small and dark, and decidedly clever in comedy. I was fortunate enough to see her in Pergolese's delightful, if archaic, opera, La Serva Padrona—"The Maid as Mistress"—and she proved herself to be an exceptional comédienne. She was excellent in tragedy, too.

Brignoli was the first great tenor I ever heard; and Amodio the first famous baritone. Brignoli—but all the world knows what Brignoli was! As for Amodio; he had a great and beautiful voice; but, poor man, what a disadvantage he suffered under in his appearance. He was so fat that he was grotesque, he was absurdly short, and had absolutely no saving grace as to physique. He played Mazetto to Piccolomini's Zerlina, and the whole house roared when they came on dancing.

I saw both Ristori and Rachel too. The latter I heard recite on her last appearance in America. It was the Marseillaise, and deeply impressive. Personally, I loved best her Moineau de Lesbie. Shall I ever forget her enchanting reading of the little scene with the jewels?—Suis-je belle?

The father of one of my fellow students was, as I have said before, Baron de Trobriand, a very charming man of the old French aristocracy. He came often to the home of Colonel Stebbins and always showed a great deal of interest in my development. He knew Rachel very well; had known her ever since her girlhood indeed, and always declared that I was the image of her. As I look at my early portraits, I can see it myself a little. In all of them I have a desperately serious expression as though life were a tragedy. How well I remember the Baron and his wonderful stories of France! He had some illustrious kindred, among them the Duchesse de Berri, and we were never tired of his tales concerning her.

I find, to-day, as I look through some of my old press notices, that nice things were always said of me as an actress. Once, John Wallack, Lester's father, came to hear me in Fra Diavolo, and exclaimed:

"I wish to God that girl would lose her voice!"

He wanted me to give up singing and go on the dramatic stage; and so did Edwin Booth. I have a letter from Edwin Booth that I am more proud of than almost anything I possess. But these incidents happened, of course, later.

That summer I took a rest, preparatory to my first season,—how thrillingly professional that sounded, to be sure!—and it was during that summer that I had one of the most pleasant experiences of my girlhood,—one really delightful and young experience, such as other girls have,—a wonderful change from the hard-working, serious months of study. I went to West Point for a visit. In spite of my sober bringing-up, I was full of the joy of life, and loved the days spent in a place filled with the military glamour that every girl adores.

West Point was more primitive then than it is now. But it was just as much fun. I danced, and watched the drill, and walked about, and made friends with the cadets,—to whom the fact that they were entertaining a budding prima donna was both exciting and interesting—and had about the best time I ever had in my life.

It is interesting to consider that West Point, at the time of which I write, was a veritable hotbed of conspiracy. The Southerners were preparing hard and fast for action; the atmosphere teemed with plotting, so that even I was vaguely conscious that something exceedingly serious was going on. The Commandant of the Post, General Delafield, was an officer of strong Southern sympathies and later went to fight in Dixie land. When the war did finally break out, nearly all the ammunition was down South; and this had been managed from West Point.

Jefferson Davis was then at West Point; and, as for "Mrs. Jeff"—I always believed she was a spy. She had her niece and son with her at the Point, the latter, "Jeff, Jr.," then a child of five or six years old. He had the worst temper I ever imagined in a boy; and I am ashamed to relate that the officers took a wicked delight in arousing and exhibiting it. He used to sit several steps up on the one narrow stairway of the hotel and swear the most horrible, hot oaths ever heard, getting red in the face with fury. Alec McCook, assistant instructor and a charming fellow of about thirty, would put him on a bucking donkey that was there and say:

"Now then, lad, don't you let him put you off!"

And the "lad" would sit on the donkey, turning the air blue with profanity. But one thing can be said for him: he did stick on!

Lieutenant Horace Porter, who was among my friends of that early summer, was destined to serve with distinction on the Northern side. I met him not long ago, a dignified, distinguished General; and it was difficult to see in him the high-spirited, young lieutenant of the old Point days.

"Do you know," he said, "Mrs. Jeff Davis sent for me to come and see her when she was in New York! Of course I didn't go!"

He had not forgotten. One does not forget the things that happened just before the war. The great struggle burned them too deeply into our memories.

As I have said, many of those attractive West Point boys and officers were killed in the war so soon to break upon us. Others, like General Porter, have remained my friends. A few I have kept in touch with only by hearsay. But throughout the Civil War I always felt a keener and more personal interest in the battles because, for a brief space, I had come so close to the men who were engaged in them; and the sentiment never passed.

Ever and ever so many years after that visit to West Point, a note came behind the scenes to me during one of my performances, and with it was a mass of exquisite flowers. "Please wear one of these flowers to-night!" the note begged me. It was from one of the cadets to whom I had sung so long before, but whom I had never seen since.