Bayreuth colleagues--Winkelmann, tenor, and Scaria, bass--she took part
in concerts and festivals which Mr. Thomas gave in 1884 in Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago. After returning to
Europe after the American engagement of 1882, she had gone straight
to Bayreuth, where she "created" the part of Kundry in the original
production of "Parsifal," alternating afterward in the character
with Fräulein Brandt, who was associated with her in Dr. Damrosch's
Metropolitan company. When she came to the Metropolitan (she made her
first appearance after the season was well under headway, in January,
1885) Mme. Materna was thirty-eight years old and her splendid powers
were at their zenith. She had sung in public since her thirteenth year,
at first in church, then in comic opera in Graz and Vienna. While
singing at a small theater in the Austrian capital she became a member
of the Court Opera, attracted wide attention by her dramatic abilities
in the grand operas of its repertories, and at once leaped into fame by
her impersonation of Brünnhilde at the first Bayreuth festival, in 1876.

Next in significance in the first Metropolitan German Company was
Marianne Brandt, whose influence in creating new ideals and developing
new tastes among the opera-goers of New York was even greater than that
of Mme. Materna, because her powers were no less and her labors of
longer duration. She came here after having won praise from the critics
of London, where she had sung at the first performance in England of
"Tristan und Isolde" at Drury Lane in 1882. That was ten years after
she had effected her London début. The principal Coloratursängerin of
the company was Frau Marie Schroeder-Hanfstängl, then a member of
the Frankfort Opera, who was a native of Breslau and a friend of the
Damrosch family while they were there. As Mlle. Schroeder she had
already established a reputation at that time in Paris, where she had
sung at the Théâtre Lyrique through the mediation of her teacher,