ABSTRACT
Viennese lyric soprano Fritzi Scheff had come to America in 1901 under contract with impressario Maurice Grau to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House. While she performed important principal roles-Papagena in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Musetta in Puccini’s La bohème, Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Nedda in Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci-Scheff was dissatisfied. She had come to America to be a headliner, and she soon realized that the Metropolitan Opera House was not the place for her. She began to explore the possibilities of appearing in operettas where her lyrical voice could be put to more lucrative (if not better) use, and in March 1902, the Dramatic Mirror announced that, under the management of the Shubert Brothers, Scheff would star in a new Smith-de Koven comic opera in the coming season. However, the singer did not like de Koven’s music, so nothing came of that project, but Fritzi was still determined to appear in light opera. Almost a year passed before the Dramatic Mirror (February 21, 1903) revealed that the singer was to be under the management of a relatively unknown producer, Charles Dillingham, and that her operetta debut would be an adaptation from the French, later revealed to be Ivan Caryll’s The Duchess of Dantzig (based on Madame Sans-Gêne, by Victorien Sardou and Emile Moreau). Even though Ziegfeld had been courting the singer to appear in his production of The Red Feather, Scheff decided to go with the lesser-known producer. A composer she did not like, de Koven, was writing the music for Ziegfeld’s show, and Dillingham had promised her $1,000 a week, substantially more than she was earning in grand opera, and sumptuously mounted vehicles that would showcase her talents.
