Sanderson, Sibyl Swift1865╨1903opera singerBorn in Sacramento, California, on December 7, 1865, Sibyl Sanderson was educated privately. She early showed remarkable vocal talent, and in 1881, at, the age of fifteen, she was taken to Paris to study singing. After two years she returned home, but in 1885 she went again to Paris and early the next year entered the Paris Conservatoire, where she studied under Jean-Baptiste Sbriglia, Mathilde Marchest, and Jean and âdouard de Reszke. She made her operatic debut under the name ╥Ada Palmer╙ in 1888 at The Hague, singing the title role of Jules Massenet╒s Manon. She had by that time captivated Massenet utterly with her beauty and her voice. For her he wrote Esclarmonde to exploit her remarkable three-octave range, and in that opera she made her Paris debut at the OpÄra Comique in May 1889. She repeated the performance a hundred times in Paris before taking it on to Brussels and then St. Petersburg. Wherever she appeared, she attracted the favor of royalty. In March 1891 she introduced Massenet╒s Le Mage, which he had written for her, at the Paris OpÄra; at the OpÄra Comique in 1893 she created the title role in PhrynÄ, which Camille Saint-Saæns had written for her; and in March 1894 she sang in the premiere of Massenet╒s highly successful Thaòs, also written for her, at the Paris OpÄra. Although Sanderson had become a leading prima donna on the Continent in an amazingly short time, similar success eluded her elsewhere. Her London debut in Manon at Covent Garden in 1891 earned a mixed reception. Maurice Grau engaged her for the Metropolitan Opera of New York, where her debut in Manon in January 1895 was not successful. American audiences found her voice small and her acting cold. She repeated her earlier European triumphs in Milan in 1896, singing Manon and PhrynÄ. In December 1897 she married Antonio Terry, a wealthy Cuban residing in France, and retired from the stage. After his death a year later and a lengthy legal wrangle over his will, she resumed singing. In 1900 she was successful in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. A second American tour in 1901 repeated the failures of her first. After a final performance in RomÄo et Juliette at the Philadelphia Academy of Music in January 1902 she returned to Paris. Later that year she scored another great success in the premiere of Reynaldo Hahn╒s La CarmÄlite at the OpÄra Comique. Before her planned marriage to Count Paul Tolstoi, a cousin of the Russian novelist, she fell ill and died in Paris on May 15, 1903. styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ ! 5¬ / !I c !I h !I ═ !I ╪ !I ) !I 0 !I ! !I & !I T 5¬ U !I ± !I ≈ !I !I ä !I . !I 3 !I 8 !I > !I ┬ !I ╘ !I u !I ü !I link `
