Marie Brema

Marie Brema (28 February 1856 – 22 March 1925) was a British dramatic mezzo-soprano singer in concert, operatic and oratorio work in the last decade of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries. She created several important roles and was the first British singer to appear at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

Marie Brema was born Mary Agnes Fehrmann (also known as Minnie Fehrmann) in Liverpool of a German father John Fehrmann (from Bremen) and an American mother Cora Wooster Jarvis. She was brought up among people who enjoyed music and drama, but took no professional interest in music until her marriage in 1874 to Arthur Frederick Braun. She was then encouraged to undergo vocal training, which she did, but it was several years more (after 3 months of study with George Henschel) that she first appeared before the public, singing Schubert's Ganymed in a popular concert. She was so admired that she continued training under other teachers and made further concert appearances. Her stage debut was in 1891 at Oxford as Adriana Lecouvreur.

On 10 October 1891 (aged 35), taking her stage name from her father's birthplace, she made her opera debut in the first English production of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, as Lola, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London. (This was under Arditi, and opposite Francesco Vignas as Turiddu: the new opera was a sensation.) A performance was given before H.M Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in November 1891. She achieved a success, and followed it with a greater one in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice later in the same year.Shaw witnessed some early appearances in London, for instance in May 1892 an encored performance of Welsing's setting of Love's Philosophy, and in July in a Miscellaneous Concert (with Ellen Terry, Josef Hollmann, etc.). She had won Shaw's admiration in a performance of Schubert's Erlkonig, but now he found her he found her insufficiently versatile, over-specialized, with a fixed vocal colour owing to over-emphasis of the dramatic lower register: and recommended that she should permit instead the simple beauty of sound in the upper part of her voice to be heard, when she should take high rank as a singer.

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