Thérèse Tietjens

Thérèse Johanne Alexandra Tietjens (17 July 1831, Hamburg – 3 October 1877, London) was a leading opera and oratorio soprano. She made her career chiefly in London during the 1860s and 1870s, but her sequence of musical triumphs in the British capital was terminated by cancer.

During her prime, her powerful yet agile voice, was said to span seamlessly a range of three octaves. Many opera historians consider her to have been the finest dramatic soprano of the second half of the 19th century.

She was of German birth but, according to some sources, Hungarian extraction. Mme Thérèse Tietjens received her vocal training in Hamburg and in Vienna. She studied with Heinrich Proch, who was also the teacher of Mme Peschka-Leutner and other prime donne. She made a successful debut at Hamburg in 1849 as Lucrezia Borgia in Donizetti's opera, a work with which she was particularly associated all her professional life. She sang in Frankfurt from 1850 to 1856 and in Vienna from 1856-1859.

Tietjens made her first appearance in London in 1858, as Valentine in Les Huguenots. England thereafter became her home, and she continued to sing opera regularly at Her Majesty's Theatre, the Drury Lane and Covent Garden until her untimely death in 1877. She was equally fine in oratorio, and became a leading dramatic soprano in England, during the 1860s and early 1870s on both stage and platform. The early part of her London career coincided with the heyday of the tenor Antonio Giuglini (1827–1865), a student of Cellini, who made his debut at Her Majesty's in 1857 as Fernando in La Favorita. In July 1859, Tietjens created the first London Elena in Les vêpres siciliennes of Verdi (four years after the original Paris production) at Drury Lane, opposite Giuglini's Arrigo.

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