February 27, 2021 - Marie Smith/Madame Selika скачать в хорошем качестве

February 27, 2021 - Marie Smith/Madame Selika

Lyles Station Historic School and Museum honors the memory of a queen today on February 27, 2021—the Queen of Staccato, born Marie Smith in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1849, known in the musical world as Madame Selika. The Smith family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, when she was young. Her beautiful voice came to the attention of a wealthy family who became her patrons so that she could study music. In her early twenties, she moved to San Francisco, California, in order to study with Signora G. Bianchi, then on to Chicago where she studied with Antonio Farini in order to develop her coloratura soprano voice and learn the Italian singing method, making her operatic debut as a concert soprano in 1876. While studying in Chicago, she met her future husband, student Sampson Williams, an operatic baritone, also known as Signor Velosko, the Hawaiian tenor. Two years later, in 1878, Frederick Douglass introduced her for her performance in the Green Room of the White House—the first African American artist to perform at the White House, with her audience including President Rutherford B. Hayes and his wife Lucy Webb Hayes. She sang Verdi’s “Ernani, involami,” Thomas Moore’s “The Last Rose of Summer,” Harrison Millard’s “Ave Maria,” and Richard Mulder’s “Staccato Polka.” Her performance of “Staccato Polka” led to her being known as the Queen of Staccato. Her husband performed, by popular request, a well-known ballad “Far Away.” Although born Marie Smith and then known as Marie Williams after her marriage, her took her stage name of Madame Selika from a character in the opera L’Africaine. In the years following her White House performance, she continued to tour nationally performing for all-Black audiences. Due to the racism of the times, African American artists were not welcomed on the American operatic stages until the 1930, primarily relegated to minstrel shows, but she and her husband toured the United States and Europe (twice), performing at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, New York’s Steinway Hall, and performing for Queen Victoria in concert in St. James’s Hall, London in 1883, along with the West Indies. The couple also performed with two other African American performers, Flora Batson and Sissieretta Jones, at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1896. The couple opened a music studio in Cleveland, Ohio, where she taught while continuing to tour. Her husband passed away in 1911, prompting her to retire from the stage, and five years later she took a teaching position at the Martin-Smith School of Music in New York. At the age of eighty-seven, Madame Selika died in 1937 in New York, leaving behind her legacy as the most renowned and acclaimed African American female singer of the late 19th century.