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Collection Data
- Description
- Éva Gauthier (1885-1958) was a Canadian-American vocalist best known for her performances of contemporary music and her associations with George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, and other composers. The Éva Gauthier papers, dating from 1899 to 1960, document the singer's life and career through correspondence; photographs; writings; programs and publicity material; scrapbooks; published scores; clippings; a short film; and business and legal records. The bulk of the collection consists of Gauthier's collection of published scores.
- Names
- Gauthier, Eva, 1885-1958 (Creator)
- Dates / Origin
- Date Created: 1890 - 1960
- Library locations
- Music Division
- Shelf locator: JPB 13-29
- Topics
- Music -- United States -- 20th century
- Vocal scores
- Gauthier, Eva, 1885-1958
- Genres
- Albums (books)
- clippings (information artifacts)
- correspondence
- Diaries
- manuscripts (documents)
- Motion pictures
- Photographs
- Programs (Publications)
- Notes
- Biographical/historical: Josephine Éva Phoebe Gauthier (1885-1958) was a Canadian-American vocalist best known for her performances of contemporary music, as well as her associations with George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, and other composers. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and began studying piano, harmony, and voice as a child.
In 1902, at age seventeen, she travelled to Europe for further study and to launch her career. She trained in Paris under the voice teachers Auguste-Jean Dubulle and Jacques Bouhy. Gauthier performed as a contralto at first, but expanded her range to include the soprano and coloratura registers, though she became known primarily as a mezzo-soprano.
By 1905, she had toured the United Kingdom and Canada with the famed singer Dame Emma Albani, who publicly endorsed Gauthier as her successor. She toured Europe as a soloist for a few years before her 1909 opera debut in Pavia, Italy. The following year, Gauthier was scheduled to premiere in Britain with the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, but was replaced at the last minute. She resigned from the company and never attempted to perform opera again.
After the Covent Garden incident, Gauthier moved to Java, Indonesia, to live with her future husband, Frans Knoote, with whom she had a son named Evan. She stayed for four years, learning the music of Java and studying with a Gamelan orchestra (Gauthier may have been among the first classically trained western artists to do so). She also toured other countries in the region and performed recitals in China at a time when western classical music was rarely heard there.
Gauthier left Indonesia for New York when the First World War started. She began performing annually at Aeolian Hall, and a recital there in 1917 proved to be her breakthrough. She sang works of Stravinsky and Ravel, after which Stravinsky chose Gauthier to debut all his concert vocal compositions; she quickly became known for her associations with contemporary composers, who regularly submitted new works for her to perform.
Through the 1920s, Gauthier toured North America and Europe with a piano accompanist (usually Celius Dougherty), and occasionally performed with orchestras. She became attracted to jazz at that time, and in November 1923, at her annual Aeolian Hall recital, became the first classical musician to perform songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin (accompanied by the composer). The program also included music by Schoenberg, Milhaud, Bartók, and Hindemith, and proved to be historic; it directly led to Gershwin's own premiere at Aeolian Hall a few months later, when he debuted his Rhapsody in Blue with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.
Gauthier took a hiatus from performance in the late 1920s because of health and financial issues, but resumed her career from 1931 to 1937, after which she retired to concentrate on teaching private students and giving master classes. She maintained a presence in the arts and music scene of New York, attending performances of her students and other vocalists; she was also a founding member of the American Guild of Musical Artists, and served on its board of governors.
In her final years, Gauthier wrote articles about her life and career for The Musical Record and Musical Courier, and also wrote for radio. She died in New York on December 20, 1958.
- Content: The Éva Gauthier papers, dating from the 1890s to 1960, document the singer's life and career through correspondence; photographs; scrapbooks; writings; programs and publicity material; published scores; clippings; a short film; and business and legal records. The bulk of the collection consists of Gauthier's collection of published scores. The rest of the files focus primarily on her professional life, though some personal photographs and letters are present.
- Physical Description
- Extent: 25.04 linear feet (95 boxes, 3 volumes)
- Type of Resource
- Text
- Identifiers
- Other local Identifier: JPB 13-29
- NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b21962469
- MSS Unit ID: 25772
- Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): beee00f0-1ff1-013f-ad05-0242ac110002
