Emily Soldene: In Search of a Singer
Kurt Gänzl

	Biographies Autobiography, History, Music Price: $390.00 Availability: now Format: 280x200mm hardback, 2 volumes IBSN: 978-1-877338-72-4 Add this book to your shopping bag

About the Book

Emily Soldene was a singer in the late nineteenth-century, and a star on the English-speaking stage sharing a concert platform with such operatic stars as Sims Reeves, Carlotta Patti and Santley, taking Bizet’s brand new Carmen to the British provinces, and stunning both sides of the world with her vivacious performances in opéra-bouffe and comic opera. She was also a star in the heyday of the British music hall, of Christmas pantomime and even of the underclad American burleycue stage. An actress, too, a producer and a director, a theatre manager, a playwright and a novelist, a journalist and a high-flying gossip columnist, and at the same time a wife and four times a mother. And the author of the most colourful and scandalous memoir of the Victorian stage ever written.

This book tells the story of the authors search into the history of this most remarkable woman — from the Hertfordshire countryside to London, New York, San Francisco and Sydney, to Gundagai, Australia and Christchurch, NZ, as well as to Emily’s final resting place in Shirley, Surrey. 

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About the Author

Opera singer, wandering minstrel, theatrical agent, West End casting director, broadcaster, theatre critic, and sometime harness-racehorse driver, Kurt Gänzl launched his writing career in 1986 with an award-winning two-volume history of the British Musical Theatre. A further dozen volumes of multicoloured theatre history have followed, including the three-tomed encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre, Musical Theatre on Record, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre and, most recently, biographies of burlesque queen Lydia Thompson and comedian-playwright William B Gill.