Maggie Teyte

Dame Maggie Teyte, DBE (17 April 1888 – 26 May 1976) was an English operatic soprano and interpreter of French art song.

Margaret Tate was born in Wolverhampton, England, one of ten children of Jacob James Tate, a successful wine and spirit merchant and proprietor of public houses and later lodgings. Her parents were keen amateur musicians and opera enthusiasts. She was the sister of composer James W. Tate. Her family moved to London in 1898, where Teyte attended St. Joseph's Convent School, Snow Hill, and later studied at the Royal School of Music.

Her father died in 1903 and she went to Paris the following year to become a pupil of the celebrated tenor Jean de Reszke. She made her first public appearance in Paris in 1906 when she sang Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and Zerlina in Don Giovanni, both conducted by Reynaldo Hahn. Her professional debut took place at the Opera House in Monte Carlo on 1 February 1907, where she performed Tyrcis in Myriame et Daphné (André Bloch's arrangement of Jacques Offenbach's Daphnis et Chloé), with Paderewski. The following week, again at the Opera House in Monte Carlo, she sang Zerlina.

Finding that her surname was generally mispronounced in France, she changed it from Tate to Teyte before joining the Opéra-Comique in Paris. After a few small parts, she was cast as Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy, replacing the originator of the role, Mary Garden. To prepare for Pelléas et Mélisande, she studied with Debussy himself, and she is the only singer ever to be accompanied by Debussy on the piano with an orchestra in public (see Beau Soir). In 1910, Sir Thomas Beecham cast Teyte as Cherubino and Mélisande and also as Blonde in Die Entführung aus dem Serail for his London season. Despite her early singing successes, Teyte did not easily establish herself in the main opera houses. Instead, she moved to America and performed with the Chicago Opera Company from 1911–1914 and the Boston Opera Company from 1914–17, singing in Philadelphia and elsewhere, but not in New York, though she created the title role in Henry Kimball Hadley's opera, Bianca, at Manhattan's Park Theater in 1918. Returning to Britain in 1919, she created the rôle of Lady Mary Carlisle in André Messager's operetta, Monsieur Beaucaire, at the Prince's Theatre. She married for a second time in 1921, to Canadian millionaire Walter Sherwin Cottingham, and went into semi-retirement until 1930, when she performed as Mélisande and played the title role in Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

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