Clara Kathleen Rogers
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Clara Kathleen Rogers (Clara Doria) (nee Barnett, 1844-1931) was born into a musical English family. Along with two siblings, she entered the Leipzig Konservatorium in 1857 and remained for four years. There she studied piano as well as harmony, part writing, violin, cello, and voice. Although composition classes were not yet open to women at the conservatory, she nevertheless produced the first movement of her string quartet while a student there; none other than her young fellow classmate Arthur Sullivan saw to it that the work was performed (in 1859 at one of the Barnett family's Sunday evening musicales), even copying out the parts himself. Graduating in piano in 1861, she went (along with a sister) to Milan to study voice. Under the stage name Clara Doria, she made her operatic debut in Turin two years later, and accompanied by her mother, she continued her career in Italy as a prima donna. Rogers gave up this career when her mother could no longer fill the role of chaperone. The need for a committed chaperone becomes evident in Rogers's memoirs (Memories of a Musical Career [Boston: Little, Brown, 1919]), where she recounts that in several cases the principal patrons of the various opera houses believed that their patronage entitled them to sexual favors as well as song.
Abandoning performance in Italy, Rogers returned to England for a time, making her London debut there in 1868 in her cousin John Francis Barnett's oratorio The Ancient Mariner. Three years later, she went to New York, where she sang with the Parepa-Rosa Grand English Opera Company and the Max Maretzek Company. At the invitation of Otto Dresel, she moved to Boston, taking a position as soprano soloist at Trinity Church and performing at the Harvard Symphony Concerts in addition to occasional appearances elsewhere, including at least one with the Theodore Thomas Orchestra in Chicago as the soprano soloist in Robert Schumann's oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri. Her public performing career ended with her 1878 marriage to Henry Munroe Rogers, a Boston attorney. Over the next two decades, she published many songs with Arthur P. Schmidt of Boston (including the two series of Browning Songs, opp. 27 and 32, in 1893 and 1900) and composed (or revised, in the case of the Scherzo of the quartet) but did not publish the chamber music that appears in the edition under review. (Arthur P. Schmidt did publish her D-minor Violin Sonata, op. 25, in 1893, reissued as Sonata dramatico by Hildegard Publishing Co. in 1994.) In 1902, Rogers joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory as professor of singing (she produced a series of six vocal methods between 1893 and 1927). After her death, Rogers's papers were deposited in the Harvard Theatre Collection (Houghton Library, Harvard University), where the enterprising editors of this volume, Judith Radell and Dieter Wulfhorst, following hints in the memoirs, discovered three forgotten chamber works: Rogers's String Quartet, op. 5, Sonata for Cello and Piano, op. 23, and Reverie for cello and piano.
[edit] References
- Memories of a Musical Career her autobiography
- Rogers Memorial Collection, Harvard
[edit] Miscellany
Roger's godparents were Fanny Fitzwilliam and John Baldwin Buckstone. Buckstone wrote theatrical music with Roger's father John Barnett, Buckstone providing the words and Barnett the music.
