Born on February 15, 1858, in Wisnieczyk, Galicia (then part of Austrian Poland, now of Ukraine), Praxede Marcelline Kochanska was the daughter of an itinerant musician and teacher. After taking lessons from him she entered the conservatory in Lemberg (now Lvov) in 1869 and studied piano under Wilhelm Stengel. She also studied violin and harmony. In 1873 she left Lemberg for Vienna, where both Franz Liszt and the singer Mathilde Marchesi advised her to concentrate on her singing. While continuing to study piano under Julius Epstein she began vocal lessons with Victor Rokitansky of the Vienna Conservatory. In 1875 she went to Milan to study with Giovanni and Francesco Lamperti. In May 1877 she married her old teacher, Wilhelm Stengel. The next month she made her operatic debut in I Puritani in Athens. In 1878 she began a two-year engagement with the Saxon Royal Opera in Dresden. At that time she adopted her mother╒s maiden name, Sembrich, as her professional name.
In 1880 Sembrich won a five-year contract from the Royal Italian Opera company of London and made her debut there in June in Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden. During that period she sang a command performance (with Adelina Patti) for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace in 1881, sang for Czar Alexander II at the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, in 1882, and made her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, in Lucia di Lammermoor in October 1883. She sang some 55 performances of 11 different operas that season, and in April 1884, at a benefit concert for the Met╒s manager, Henry E. Abbey, she amazed the audience by singing a selection from Il Barbiere di Siviglia, playing solo violin in a De Beriot concerto, and as an encore playing a Chopin mazurka on the piano. For the next several years she sang in Austria, Germany, Russia, Scandinavia, France, and Spain. In 1895 she returned to Covent Garden, and in 1897 she gave a series of concert recitals in New York. In 1898, after a new management under Maurice Grau had reintroduced Italian opera, she returned to the Met, where she sang each season until 1909. In that period several highly publicized incidents earned her a reputation as a tempestuous prima donna. At the height of her career, the 1905╨1906 season, she was paid $1000 each for 45 performances.
Among Sembrich╒s favorite roles were those in La Traviata, Rigoletto, Pagliacci, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and La BohÅme. Her voice, a brilliant and flute-like soprano of marked sweetness and remarkable range, was accounted one of the greatest of the time. She and Enrico Caruso were a favorite team; they were on tour together in San Francisco at the time of the earthquake of April 1906. She retired after a final performance of La Traviata in January 1909 and a farewell performance in a mixed bill the next month. She continued active on the concert stage until 1917, the year of her husband╒s death. Thereafter she devoted herself to teaching, both privately and from 1924 at the Juilliard School in New York City and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Among her pupils was Alma Gluck. She died in New York City on January 11, 1935.
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