Anna Case is Made, Part 1

When the curtain rose at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the evening of November 15, 1909, it is a fair bet that many in the audience were not there to see Carl Burrian in the title role of Tannhauser or superstar diva Johanna Gadski as Elizabeth, but rather to see Anna Case, the blacksmith's daughter from the little village of South Branch, New Jersey, in the first of her 154 appearances with the Metropolitan Opera.

30 May 1909 St. Louis Post Dispatch

Anna Lucretia Case first realized she could sing while a member of the choir at the South Branch Reformed Church. Self-taught on violin, organ, and piano, the young girl took many jobs to supplement her family's income. She cleaned her neighbors' homes, sold soap door-to-door, picked up fares in a gig at the Flagtown train stations, and gave piano lessons to the children in the evenings - driving that same gig over the pitch-black country roads, a revolver in her lap. All the while dreaming of becoming a professional singer.

Plainfield First Presbyterian Church, circa 1910

A loan of $75 from the wife of the South Branch Grocer enabled the budding soprano to take voice lessons from Somerville teacher Catherine Opdyke. A $12-a-month job as organist and choir director at the Neshanic Reformed Church - as well as a revenue-generating concert there - allowed her to pay back the grocer's wife and begin taking lessons with former Swedish grand opera soprano Mme. Augusta Ohrstrom-Renard. 

Mme. Augusta Ohrstrom-Renard, circa 1883

Realizing the incredible raw talent possessed by Anna Case, the former diva took no fee for lessons, encouraging the 18-year-old to be ambitious and make her way by auditioning for the soprano part in the quartet of Plainfield's Crescent Avenue Presbyterian Church. She was turned down in 1906 but auditioned the next year at the nearby First Presbyterian Church and was enthusiastically accepted.

12 March 1907 Plainfield Daily Press

This first truly professional job as a singer paid only $24 a month - just barely enough for room and board at 225 East Fifth Street. Anna Case later described how she kept to her room on most days saying, "you don't feel so hungry when you are just lying still." She also gave concerts - often alongside other pupils of Mme. Ohrstrom-Renard such as Somerville native Jessamine Burd - and supplemented her income by giving voice lessons.

24 December 1907, Plainfield Daily Press

It was during the first of what would eventually become many concerts at the famous Ocean Grove Auditorium that Anna Case met former New Jersey Governor Edward Stokes. So enchanted was he with her singing, that he promised to use his connections to get her an engagement at Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.

Although she would later protest that she was never "discovered" - that it had been her own hard work all along that led to her success - Anna's big break was upon her. With a borrowed dress and playing her own accompaniment on piano, she sang weekdays from four to six p.m. Although the engagement that fall lasted less than two weeks, it coincided with the New York Metropolitan Opera's season which began in November and found the company in Philadelphia each Tuesday.

12 May 1909, New York Herald

The Metropolitan's managing director Andreas Dippel - staying at the hotel - heard the 21-year-old soprano one Tuesday afternoon and nearly engaged her on the spot. Upon his return to New York, he arranged for Anna Case to come into the city and audition for him. This time, opera star Geraldine Farrar played piano while she sang. 

Circa 1909

In her own words. "I really didn't appreciate all it meant until I told my singing teacher. She said, 'You are made.' I said, 'I am not so sure, you really can't tell from a beginning.' She replied, 'This beginning is the end; it is all up to you from now on.'"

No sooner had the ink dried on Anna's first contract than the publicity machine was out in full force. Stories about Anna's humble beginnings began appearing in local newspapers across the country six months before she had sung a note. We will take a look at those in Part 2.