"The Key to Your Future..."? Move to Hillsborough

"The key to your future health and happiness lies in answering this advertisement."  So begins the 1912 sales pitch by the Equator Realty & Imp. Co. for $50 (and up!) lots in Flagtown.  Who could honestly say that they "...prefer the noise, the heat and ceaseless grind of the city to the calm healthful life of the country"?

 

 

Ad from the Brooklyn Standard Union, April 13, 1912

I'm not sure how successful this company was, as the earliest Flagtown homes still existing today seem to date from the 1920s and 30s.  Maybe the fact that another realty group was offering free excursions at the same time to visit their $75 lots at the site of the still building Johns Manville plant at the other end of Hillsborough tipped the scales in favor of an easy commute.  The lasting legacy of Equator Realty appears to be the name they attached to Flagtown's "Main Street".

New York Times, June 5, 1910

Somewhat more intriguing is the 80 acre Somerville suburb which was to be called Aten Estates.  Both the brief New York Times article and the advertisement from the Evening Telegram tout the development's proximity to the 3000 acre Duke's Park, the Hillsborough home of tobacco and power magnate J.B. Duke.  Project manager George L. Wheeler promised a plan similar to Duke's, with "winding avenues, concrete walks, and plenty of shade trees and ornamental plants."  A scheme made all the more plausible by the fact the landscape architect employed was Charles W. Leavitt who performed a similar function for Duke.

New York Evening Telegram, May 27, 1910

I am not sure if any lots were ever sold or homes built, nor can I find the exact location of this tract.  The only good clues are the aforementioned proximity to the Duke estate, and the description of the location as midway between the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Lehigh Valley Line.  And, of course, the fact that it was planned to be built in the area of Hillsborough where there are no mosquitoes!

Anna Case, She Writes Some Songs

Anna Case, the Metropolitan Opera soprano and noted concert artist, filed her first copyright notice with the United States Library of Congress on March 5, 1914.  The composition, an uncharacteristically up-tempo ragtime tune titled "Metropolitan Rag", went unpublished for more than three years before being picked up by Newark, N.J. publisher T.W. Allen.  A rather inauspicious beginning for what would be an on-again, off-again preoccupation for the Hillsborough native over the course of the next fifty years.



New York Post, April 11, 1938







For the multi-talented diva - she was skilled on piano, organ, and violin, and was known to occasionally play her own accompaniment during recital encores - extending her endeavors to include songwriting seems only natural.  But for the time, the notion of a young female opera singer becoming a published songwriter was something wholly out of the ordinary.  Yet her next composition, the patriotic "Our America", was so popular that she was requested to perform the song numerous times at appearances during World War I, and it was published by Harold Flammer over the next two years in no less than four different popular arrangements.

In her later years, Anna Case claimed to wake up in the middle of the night and rush to the piano with a melody in her head.  But on at least one occasion, inspiration came more directly.  In the spring of 1919, while sitting on the enclosed porch of her summer home in Mamaroneck, she chanced to hear a single robin perched on the broken branch of a tree, singing a tuneful melody.  She is reported to have jumped from her seat, quickly retrieved a notepad, and wrote out the notes as she and the red-breasted bird sang back and forth in collaboration. 

Sheet music published by Harold Flammer

Sheet music published by Harold Flammer

She debuted "Song of the Robin" at her July 5, 1919, Ocean Grove Auditorium concert, and recorded a popular "Diamond Disc" version for Thomas Edison in 1920 - no easy task, as Edison personally approved all recordings. 

Anna Case in "La Fiesta", 1926

For her next two compositions, Anna Case added musical scores to established poems.  "Anhelo (Longing)" a Spanish language poem by Simon Martinez with English lyrics by Cecil Cowdrey was given the Anna Case treatment and quickly became a concert staple.  She is seen and heard singing her composition in the 1926 short Vitaphone film "La Fiesta" - one of the very first "talkies". 

Sheet music published by Harold Flammer

Around the time she was making "La Fiesta", she sat down with a poem by Robert Burns and wrote "Ye Bonnie Banks O' Doon", once again published by Harold Flammer - with a fine photo portrait of the composer on the cover.  But it was something else that happened in 1926 which may have, arguably, sent Anna Case into a ten-year dry spell.  That was the year her beau, Postal Telegraph tycoon Clarence H. Mackay, by virtue of his daughter Ellin's wedding, became the father-in-law of one of America's greatest and most prolific songwriters, Irving Berlin.  Her eventual marriage to Mackay in 1931 made Anna Case the stepmother of  Berlin, her contemporary!  What the two musicians shared in maturity, however, did not extend to songcraft.  So it's worth noting here that while Anna Case's compositions show talent, and while her songwriting accomplishments were real (recording her own song for Edison!, singing her own composition in the first motion picture with sound!) she was no Irving Berlin.

It wasn't until 1936 that Anna Case once again caught the songwriting bug.  The impetus was her husband's birthday.  With his unimaginable wealth reduced by the great depression to a mere imaginable level, Clarence Mackay still had everything he could possibly ever need or want, so his wife gave him something he couldn't buy - a song - which she sang for him on his birthday, "My Irish Eyes".

"I Know An Irish Garden" - one of the many Irish-themed songs written by Anna Case.

Mr. Mackay so enjoyed the song, that he enlisted its use - with a few tweaks in the lyrics - for his new "song-o-gram" service, a kind of singing telegram delivered for a fee over the telephone.  The tune was a hit on St. Patrick's Day, and led to Anna Case composing additional ditties for other occasions, including more substantial works such as "Just an Old Fashioned Picture", which she sang on a special Mother's Day radio broadcast in 1938, and "Daddy, This is Your Day", introduced by popular young singer Mary Small on a similar radio broadcast for Father's Day.



"Daddy, This is Your Day" popularized by Mary Small



"Just an Old Fashioned Picture" was a collaboration with lyricist Gerald Fitzgerald, as was "I'm a Dreamer of Dreams (That Never Come True) - popularized by Ozzie Nelson - and many other songs during this period.

"I'm a Dreamer of Dreams" popularized by Ozzie Nelson

Inspired by her husband, Anna Case returned again and again to Irish themes in her music, with such songs as "I Know an Irish Garden" - another collaboration with Fitzgerald - and "By the Lakes of Killarney I Met My Kathleen", recorded contemporaneously by well-known Irish tenor John McCormack, and available on iTunes today.

"By the Lakes of Killarney..." recorded by Irish tenor John McCormack

Anna Case copyrighted about fifty songs between 1936 and 1940, mostly unpublished.  As World War II began,  she collaborated with Gladys Shelley on a patriotic song, "Long Live Our Democracy", and in 1943 with Roslyn Wells, more successfully, with "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! We'll Pull Together".

After another ten year break, we find "Un Papillon Capricieux", with French and English words by Mitchell Carroll and music by Anna Case - who received prominent top billing on the sheet music published by Harold Flammer - and, in a reversal, "When I Hold You in My Arms", with words by Anna Case, and music by Harold J. Stewart.

Sheet music published by Harold Flammer

An exhausting, if not exhaustive, search of U.S. copyright records finds one final unpublished song, "You've Got Ireland In Your Eyes", copyrighted words and music by the seventy-four-year-old Anna Case, 23 April 1962.

Anna Case, Tales of Redemption

Metropolitan Opera Company representative William J. Guard was given the unenviable task of addressing the Brooklyn Academy of Music audience before the curtain to announce that the continued indisposition of coloratura soprano Frieda Hempel would make it impossible for her to appear in the role of Olympia that evening.   The date was December 13, 1913, the occasion, the second performance that season of Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffmann" (Tales of Hoffman).  The fact that the hisses greeting this announcement were drowned by modest applause was a testament to the enduring popularity of Mme. Hempel's replacement: Anna Case.

Anna Case as Olympia the Doll in "Les Contes d'Hoffmann"

What could have proven a disaster for the twenty-six-year-old soprano from South Branch, New Jersey, instead turned into a triumph of perseverance and skill.  Given notice just six hours before the curtain, in a role that she had never before sung, with the memory of the decidedly mixed reviews that followed her performance as Sophie in "Der Rosenkavalier" just days before, there was every reason for the audience, and any ordinary diva, to fear the worst.

Olympia's signature song from Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffmann"

"Sophie" was supposed to be the role that put Anna Case at the top of the marquee.  She had enjoyed her first major success in the American debut of "Boris Godunov", starring in the trouser role of Fyodor.  She was then rewarded with another principal role in the American debut of  Strauss' comic opera.  The grueling two-month rehearsal schedule, in a language she was wholly unfamiliar with, German, took a terrible toll on her voice, which was evident at the December 9, 1913, premiere.  It didn't help that the part, which calls for soft, emotional, passages, was completely drowned by the orchestra more than once.

Anna Case as Sophie in "Der Rosenkavalier"

Anna Case as Sophie in "Der Rosenkavalier"

It is to the credit of the Metropolitan Opera directors, and Anna Case herself, that she was ready and willing to answer the call as Olympia the Doll.  As reported the next day in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, "Her fresh, young voice was as clear as a silver bell...and her acting was as supple as the role allowed.  Applause greeted her from all over the house and flowers were handed to her before the curtain."

Brooklyn Standard Union. 14 December 1913

She went back to Manhattan and continued in the role of Sophie for all eleven 1913-14 performances of "Der Rosenkavalier", to improving reviews, as well as appearing in four performances of "Orfeo ed Euridice", as the featured soloist in no less than six Sunday Night Concerts, and two additional performances of "Boris" - one in which she duplicated her "Tales" triumph by singing the role of Xenia on short notice, a part she had never rehearsed but only knew from being on the same stage as Leonora Sparkes while in her usual role of Fyodor.

Presentation of the Rose from "Der Rosenkavalier" with Anna Case, left, as Sophie, and Margarete Ober, center, as Octavian.

Anna Case reprised her role as Olympia with the Metropolitan Opera in Atlanta, Georgia at the end of the 1914-15 season, and recorded Olympia's signature song, "Les Oiseaux dans la Charmille", for the Edison record label in 1916 - although not released until she had effectively left the opera in 1918.

Bonus: Erin Morley as Olympia at the final dress rehearsal, Metropolitan Opera, January 9, 2015,  Enjoy!