Marta Eggerth asked to be paid for her first professional singing engagement in chocolates. The soprano was only 9 years old at the time, when airy romantic confections known as comic operettas were all the rage. No one could have predicted then that Eggerth would sing such works for nine decades, bringing their Old World charm to Broadway and becoming the doyenne of the genre.
Eggerth was born in Budapest as “the only child of a banker and a dramatic soprano,” said The New York Times. She became a teenage star in Vienna singing “the sprightly, tuneful work of Middle European composers” like Franz Lehar and Emmerich Kalman. Emerging just as sound came to the moving picture, she made dozens of musical films throughout Europe, and by the 1930s Variety “ranked her among the top 10 box-office attractions in the overseas market.”
The fame she secured with “her light, silvery soprano and her physical beauty” only increased when she married matinee-idol tenor Jan Kiepura, said The Washington Post. But both Eggerth and Kiepura had Jewish mothers and were forced to flee Europe in 1938 for the U.S. Though Eggerth made two films with Judy Garland, her Hollywood career never took off. But in 1943 she and her husband launched a Broadway revival of Lehar’s The Merry Widow, and went on to perform the operetta some 2,000 times over the next two decades.
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Eggerth sang well into her 90s at Café Sabarsky in Manhattan. She attributed her voice’s longevity to a life of devoted abstinence: She never smoked, stayed out late, or drank any alcohol except the occasional glass of Hungarian Tokay wine.
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