The article below, written in 1938, towards the end of Anna Schoen-René’s tenure at the Juilliard School of Music, contains fascinating details about her life and teaching. What it does not reveal is an accurate origin story. Check the footnotes to find the truth about Anna Schoen-René’s illness, which prevented her from debuting with the Metropolitan Opera in 1893-4.

Four of Schoen-René’ s former pupils appeared prominently at the Metropolitan Opera this season, and at least one other will make his debut there next year. Others are active in a dozen European music centers. In fact, you can walk into almost any major opera house of the world with a better than even change of finding some one who, at some time, has studied the art of singing under her.

She’s an old lady now, but she is still carrying on her work with undiminished vigor and undimmed enthusiasm. She will tell you, if you promise not to name names, and thereby risking infecting the young with swollen headedness, that two or three of the Juilliard School group now under her guidance are “big talents,” and should become as good artists as any of those she has helped to careers in her four decades of teaching. [1]

It is significant of her whole outlook that her interest in centered in this rising generation of singers, and not in those she has taught in the past. Out of her own resources, she has created a trust-fund which is to be used to enable “very talented Americans” to get training in Europe, “until we here in the United States establish and support stock opera-companies, in which our singers can get the experience which only actual performances can give them.”

It is difficult to persuade her to talk about her noted former pupils, because she is afraid some one might think she is using their names for her own advertisement. She takes justifiable pride that her position and prestige make such advertisement unnecessary. For a long while now, she has accepted as private pupils only singers she believes to possess outstanding talent. “So let those who have studied with me acknowledge it, if they like,” she told me. “And,” she added laughingly, “now that some of them are stars, might not like. It does not bother me. That is merely human nature.”

Most of those I happen to know, however, are proud that they studied with Schoen-René, and therefore are inheritors of the Garcia tradition, perhaps the greatest in the history of the vocal art. For Schoen-René’s teachers were Manuel Patricio Rodriguez Garcia, the first man to make a really scientific investigation of voice production, and Pauline Viardot-Garcia. Their sister was the fabulous Maria Malibran.

A few of the well-known singers who have received at least part of their training from Schoen-René are Florence Easton, Karin Branzell, Anni Konetzni, Florence Austral, Paul Robeson, George Meader, Julius Huehn, Rise Stevens and Charles Kullman, Mack Harrell, just engaged by the Metropolitan after winning the 1938-39 “Auditions on the Air,” also is her pupil.

Talent and Work

She admits that she is a severe taskmistress, and her dark eyes twinkle when she reports that some of the Julliard young have, on occasion, referred to her as “the old dragon.” [2]

“But,” she says, “learning to sing is a difficult business. Learning to be an artist is even more difficult. It was willingness to work and sacrifice as well as talent, that gave us our ‘Golden Age’ of singing. The De Reszkes, Sembrich, Eames, Nordica, Melba, Fremstad, Schumann-Heink, Caruso, Plançon—I knew them all, and I know how hard they had to work to become the great artists they were.

“It is true—there is no use denying it—that there has been a decline in the art of singing since their time. I think it has come partly because we have tried to make things too easy for aspiring singers. And there has been such confusion of methods, such running around in search of short-cuts, which do not exist!

“Manuel Garcia laid down the rules for the scientific training of the human voice. Why should we try to improve upon methods which produced the greatest singers the world has ever known?”

It was Garcia who invented the laryngoscope which made possible advances in medical as well as vocal science. Born in 1805, he lived until 1906. He was a member of the history-making opera company his father brought to New York in 1825, of which his sister, La Malibran, was the bright, particular star. After 1829, he devoted himself entirely to teaching. From 1842 to 1847 he was professor of singing at the Paris conservatoire, and from 1848 to 1895 he held a similar post at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Jenny Lind and Mathilde Marchesi were among his pupils. His “Traite Complet de L’Art du Chant” is still, Mme. Schoen-René insists, “the true gospel of the singer.” He was well into his nineties when she went to him after studying with his younger sister, Pauline, one of the greatest singers of her day.

Anna Schoen-René was born in Coblenz into a family of diplomats and soldiers. Her father was a Councilor to Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany. [3]

“You can imagine the opposition I faced when I determined to become a singer, and make a career on the stage,” she said. But no less a personage than Queen Emma of Holland, mother of the present rule of that country, came to her aid in winning over her relatives, and she was allowed to compete for a scholarship, offered by the Emperor, in the Royal Academy of Berlin. One of her examiners was Brahms. Later, it was he who recommended her to Mme. Viardot-Garcia as a worthy pupil.

The examination took place in Cologne on a spring day, and one of Schoen-René’s most vivid memories is of the great Johannes, standing at a window, looking out over the Rhine as she sang, and then nodding his massive head.

After she was graduated from the Academy, she made her professional debut at Berlin in “Der Freishutz.” Engagements at Leipzig, Cologne and the Staatsoper of Vienna followed. Meanwhile, she was winning a place on a concert platform as a lieder-singer.

From Singer to Teacher

Maurice Grau engaged her for the Metropolitan season of 1893-4, but she was not destined to be heard here. The summer before her scheduled debut, she was stricken with an illness that ended her career as a singer. Nevertheless, she came to America. New York doctors diagnosed her aliment as tuberculosis, and ordered to Colorado, but after she’d got as far as Chicago, she decided to consult other physicians. They pronounced her lungs sound, but told her she must rest for a long time. Instead of going to Colorado, she went to Minneapolis, where her sister was living. [4, 5, 6]

Although forbidden to sing, she could not “stay out of music.” She became interested in the students of the University of Minneapolis—”I suppose you might say I started the music faculty there”—organized choruses and eventually formed an orchestra, which, on occasion, she conducted herself. Indirectly, out of the beginnings she made, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra grew. She became an American citizen in 1895.

She remained in the northwestern metropolis for seven years. At the end of that time, her health was completely recovered. She thought of trying to resume her career as a singer, but another life work had begun to open up before her.

“I’d found several really beautiful voices,” she said, “and I had wanted to train them, but I would not set myself up as a teacher without Pauline Viardot-Garcia’s consent.” Back to Europe she went. Mme. Garcia not only gave her consent, but urged her to devote her whole time to teaching the Garcia method. Thereafter, Schoen-René spent part of each year in Europe, assisting her beloved teacher until she died in 1910, and carrying on her work afterward. She was caught in Germany by the war, and had to remain there until it was over. Twice she was arrested on suspicion of being an American spy.

She returned to New York in 1919, and became a member of the faculty of the Juilliard Graduate School, the post she still holds, in 1925.

I asked her if she regretted the cutting short of her own promising career as a singer. She smiled and shook her white head.

“I have enjoyed teaching. I still enjoy teaching,” she said. “I want to die with my boots on, doing all I can to help young American singers make the most of their talents.” [7]

Her autobiography, which she undertook to write chiefly because she wanted to preserve for others her memories of the Garcias and their work, is nearing completion. It should prove fascinating reading, for Schoen-René has known intimately most of the great figures of music of her time. To give you some small indication of what it may contain, she “spent much time with Brahms”: she “never got enough of hearing Nikisch conduct”: she studied Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” with his widow, Clara, “a strange, sad woman, who somehow depressed me”; and at various periods she was “in the favor and in the disgraces “of Cosima Wagner. Whatever else the daughter of Liszt and the relict of the mighty Richard may have been, she says, “she was the greatest operatic stage-director I have ever seen.”

— William G. King, “Great Teacher—About Anna Schoen-René, Who Carries on a Noble Tradition,” The New York Sun, April 15, 1939, Juilliard School Scrapbook.

1. Schoen-René’s Juilliard student Margaret Harshaw won the Metropolitan Opera “Auditions of the Air” in 1942 and debuted later the same year on November 25th as the Second Norn in Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung—twelve days after Schoen-Rene’s death on November 13, 1942.

2. Schoen-René was also called “The Prussian General.” James A. van Zant, “Miss Margaret’s Way,” Opera News, March 2, 1996.

3. Schoen-René’s passport and birth certificate records her birthplace in Merienwerder, West Prussia, north of Berlin. Schoen-René’s biography America’s Musical Inheritance: Memories and Reminiscences (1941) does not give the reader Schoen-René’s birthplace: only that she grew up in Coblenz (Koblenz) —located on the Rhine in Western Germany — until age 10 when her father died. Earlier biographical sources refer to Coblenz as Schoen-René’s birthplace. Find Schoen-René’s memoir on the download page.

4. The Metropolitan Opera was gutted by fire on August 27th, 1892. Schoen-René was taken ill the same summer, and the 1892-3 season was canceled while the theatre was rebuilt.

5. Schoen-René never had tuberculosis. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis recorded on November 4, 1894, page 15, that “Fraulein Marie Schon and her sister, Schoen-Rene are both confined to their home, 529 Fifth Avenue southeast, with typhoid fever.” Two years later, on December 6, 1896, on page 22, the Minneapolis Times recorded: “In the fall of 1892 Miss Anna Schoen-Rene arrived at this city, where her sister, Miss Marie Schoen, was already residing. She had come to the Metropolitan Opera of New York, having left her engagement at the Opera Comique of Paris to accept the flattering offer extended to her by Messrs. Abbey and Grau. Shortly after her arrival at New York and before she had appeared more than once—at a private concert—she fell a victim to the Atlantic coast climate, which has proved fatal to so many European artists. For months she struggled with disease and death. When she finally arose from the sickbed she was hardly more than a shadow of her former self. Her voice was gone as a result of the total exhaustion of her system. She suffered badly from neuralgic pains. The physicians feared for her life, even after they had succeeded in conquering the stubborn typhoid fever which for such a long period had been threatening the life of their patient. They ordered a change of climate, and they approved heartily of a removal to the pure, strong air of Minnesota.”

6. Assuming Schoen-Renè is telling the truth, she may have been misdiagnosed and then later used it to obscure her typhoid infection. Typhoid fever was the 4th leading cause of death in 1900. A few years later, in New York City, the case of Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary, ignited a nationwide stigmatization of the illness, which did not abate until antibiotics were used as a treatment in 1948—six years after Schoen-René’s death—and towns had adequate sewerage and water treatment. Today, the illness is considered rare.

7. Schoen-René taught up until the last three weeks of her life.