ABSTRACT
During the first two decades of Adriënne Solser’s career, from the 1880s through 1904, popular stage entertainment became professional and turned into a booming business in the Netherlands, as in most developed countries. The boom was enhanced by the advent of variété, revue, cabaret, and cinema. Solser’s career parallels this development in the sense that, in those years, she became a professional and respected soubrette in the Dutch variété. The oldest verses from her repertoire preserved at the EYE Filmmuseum date from 1904; if this was indeed the year when she began to collect and copy her repertoire—rather than that preceding notebooks were lost—, this is a sign that she was reaching professional maturity. Sources such as advertisements in local newspapers and the program leaflets of theaters where she used to perform testify to her increasing prominence by 1905, and as such, they provide more adequate means to reconstruct Solser’s career than the extremely scarce remarks in newspaper reports and the virtually absent reviews in other periodicals, even up to 1912. Additional illuminating source material is contextual and relates to two of her brothers, who were major players in the business; to some of her female colleagues; and, finally, to issues pertaining to the entertainment business in general. In this weaving of a contextual fabric around the few available facts and figures, the contours and conditions of Adriënne Solser’s early professional years will be reconstructed.
