Emma Calvé

Emma Calvé (1858-1942) is a famous soprano born in Decazeville (Aveyron-France). She toured the world and sang in the greatest opera houses.

Between 1893 and 1927, she made a dozen tours of the United States, each lasting several months. She played in a large number of cities, including New York where she had 22 encores, Boston (20 encores), Albany, Chicago, Washington, Cleveland, Saint-Louis, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles… and performed at the Metropolitan, Carnegie Hall, Manhattan Opera House…

She performs, among others, Ophelia (Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas), Carmen (opera by Georges Bizet), Marguerite (Faust by Charles Gounod), Santuzza (Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni), Suzel (L’Amico Fritz by Mascagni), Anita (La Navarraise by Jules Massenet), Leïla (Les Pêcheurs de perles by Bizet), and Marguerite (Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito)…

Nikola Tesla will visit her on stage and send her flowers. Given the year of the exchange of correspondence between them (1897), it seems that Tesla saw the opera Faust, performed at the Metropolitan in New York between January and April. This is an amusing little detail, given that fifteen years earlier in 1882, he has had a vision of the rotating field in the Budapest Park, which led him to declaim an excerpt from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust to his friend and colleague Anton Szigety.

Several times, it seems, Emma Calvé visited Tesla’s workshop to “admire his marvelous discoveries”.

Emma Calvé and Nikola Tesla had mutual acquaintances, including Swami Vivekananda.