Henriette Grabau-Bünau

Grabau grew up with five siblings and received her first voice and piano lessons from her father and from the Bremen music director Wilhelm Friedrich Riem.

In spring 1826, through Miksch's mediation, she successfully performed a subscription concert with an aria by Rossini in the Leipzig Gewandhaus.

She was friends with Henselt and with him at Davidsbündler (under the name of "Maria"), a circle of young artists founded by Schumann in the Leipzig pub "Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum [de]".

"[2] One day later, Mendelssohn wrote to the painter Eduard Hildebrandt: "[...] I have seldom heard such perfection from a German singer, and the sons of Düsseldorf's muses would rave if they could hear this golden lecture.

Grabau, the violin virtuoso Ferdinand David, the violinist and music theorist Moritz Hauptmann, the organist and music writer Carl Ferdinand Becker and Robert Schumann taught there; Grabau was the first and at that time only teacher of choral and solo singing until 1849.

This album also contains Mendelssohn's watercolour of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and autographs of Franz Liszt, Maria Malibran, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann as well as Friedrich Rochlitz (Numerized, Helene Bünau legacy, Gertrude Clarke Whittall Foundation Collection of the Library of Congress)

Steel engraving of the Wandschneiderhaus (then Kramer-Amtshaus) in Bremen after a drawing by Friedrich Wilhelm Kohl from 1848. Place of performance of Henriette Grabaus in the 1820s.
Gewandhaussaal Leipzig, fig. in Illustrirte Zeitung , 19 April 1845, p. 253
Death notice of Madame Bünau-Grabau in the newspaper Signale für die musikalische Welt , 1852 issue 49, p. 441
The old Gewandhaus with scores from the opera Ali-Baba or The Forty Robbers by Luigi Cherubini , watercolour by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1836) in the family register of Henriette Grabau, dedicated to her, performed at Mendelssohn's inaugural concert on 4 October 1835