Marie Brema

[3] She was encouraged to undergo vocal training, which she did, but it was several years more (after 3 months of study with George Henschel) that she first appeared before the public, singing Schubert's Ganymed in a popular concert.

[4] On 10 October 1891 (aged 35), taking her stage name from her father's birthplace, she made her opera debut in the first English production of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, as Lola, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London.

[6] Shaw witnessed some early appearances in London, for instance in May 1892 an encored performance of Welsing's setting of Love's Philosophy,[7] and in July in a Miscellaneous Concert (with Ellen Terry, Joseph Hollman, etc).

[8] In February 1893, at a Royal Albert Hall performance of Gounod's Redemption (with Miss Palliser and Watkin Mills), he thought she sang 'While my watch I am keeping' 'with a gentler vocal touch and a nearer approach to purely lyric style than I had heard from her before', saying she might now become the successor of Mme Belle Cole.

[12] Established as a Wagnerian, in 1894 she made her first tour of the United States of America with the Damrosch Company, and in addition to those two roles also appeared as Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde and Brünnhilde in Die Walküre.

In the London 1897 season David Bispham, (Wotan in Walküre), called her 'superb' alongside Ernest van Dyck, Susan Strong and Ernestine Schumann-Heink,[13] and Klein ranked her with the greats in the casts of Felix Mottl's revival of The Ring at Covent Garden.

[14] In 1897 Brema was among those invited to perform at the State Jubilee Concert at Buckingham Palace, where she sang 'Plus grand dans son Obscurité' from Gounod's La reine de Saba.

She performed it again, this time under Elgar's baton, at the 1902 Sheffield Festival, with John Coates and David Ffrangcon-Davies: in the same concert Ysaÿe played the Beethoven concerto.

[18] In the following years the role of the Angel was more often taken by the leading English contralto Louise Kirkby Lunn, also a celebrated Wagnerian singer (Ortrud, Kundry, Brangane and Fricka), Amneris and Dalilah, and in many ways a successor to Marie Brema, though without her range for a compelling Brünnhilde.

'[19] Herman Klein, describing the London musical scene circa 1900, noted the absence of leading English-born contralto singers, apart from the three notable exceptions of Clara Butt, Marie Brema and Kirkby Lunn.

Of Marie Brema he wrote that she was more correctly a mezzo-soprano, distinguished by 'her admirable command of tone-colour, her faultless diction, and her infinitely varied shades of impassioned poetic expression.

'[20] Brema appeared opposite David Bispham again in the premiere of Stanford's opera Much Ado About Nothing, as Beatrice to his Benedick, in a cast also including John Coates, Suzanne Adams and Pol Plançon.

Both of the children later became performers like their mother: Francis became a classical baritone, and Helen became an actor, under the stage name of "Tita Brand", playing for George Bernard Shaw and Frank Benson.

[3][26] Brand was a large woman with a deep speaking voice, capable of reciting Grieg's Bergliot audibly over an unsubdued orchestra conducted by Henry Wood.