Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Nordheimer.

Canadian firm of music publishers, dealers and piano manufacturers. It was established by Abraham and Samuel Nordheimer, who, having emigrated from Germany to New York in 1839, opened a music shop in Kingston in 1842 and moved to Toronto in June 1844. By 1845 they had issued Joseph Labitzky’s The Dublin Waltzes, the earliest engraved sheet music in Canada. Despite provision for copyright protection under Canadian law, many of the firm’s early publications were engraved in New York and registered there by agents; Nordheimer did not choose to begin registering works in Canada until 1859. That year the firm became the only Canadian member of the Board of Music Trade of the USA, and nearly 300 of its publications were included in the Board’s catalogue (1870).

A. & S. Nordheimer, as the company was first known, issued the usual reprints of popular European songs and piano pieces, as well as new works by such Canadian residents as J.P. Clarke, Crozier, Hecht, Lazare, Schallehn and Strathy. Publications registered between 1846 and 1851 include plate numbers, but there is evidence that they were added to the plates after the first issue. Numbering resumed in the 1880s and continued after the firm changed its name, to Nordheimer Piano & Music Co., in 1898. But the highest numbers of both sequences do not even approach the number of publications issued between 1845 and 1927, of which about a thousand have been located. Nordheimer was by far the largest music publishing firm in 19th-century Canada.

Nordheimer began its piano operations in about 1845 as agents for US piano manufacturers including Stodart & Dunham in New York and Chickering in Boston. It established its own factory in 1890 and produced upright and grand pianos of high quality – 21,500 by 1927 when the business was taken over by Heintzmann & Co., which kept the Nordheimer name for some styles until 1960.

After Abraham’s death in 1862, Samuel was president of the firm until 1912, succeeded by his nephew Albert who retired in 1927. Branches were established at various times in Hamilton, London, Ottawa, St Catharine’s, Montreal, Quebec and Winnipeg. The Nordheimers were active also as impresarios, opening concert halls in Montreal and Toronto.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The House of Nordheimer Celebrates its 63rd Anniversary (Toronto, 1903)

Piano Teacher’s Thematic Guide (Toronto, 1914–18) [pubd by Nordheimer Piano & Music Co. Ltd]

M. Calderisi: Music Publishing in the Canadas 1800–1867 (Ottawa, 1981)

H. Kallmann: ‘A & S Nordheimer Co.’, Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (Toronto, 1981, 2/1992)

MARIA CALDERISI

Nordica [Norton], Lillian [Lilian]

(b Farmington, ME, 12 May 1857; d Batavia, Java [now Jakarta, Indonesia], 10 May 1914). American soprano. She studied with John O'Neill at the New England Conservatory, graduating in 1876. Engaged by Patrick Gilmore, she made her concert début with his band (September 1876), then toured America – and, in 1878, Europe – with the ensemble; her London début was at the Crystal Palace (21 May 1878). She left Gilmore to study with Sangiovanni in Milan; he coined her stage name and arranged for her operatic débuts – as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni (Teatro Manzoni, Milan, March 1879) and as Violetta (Teatro Guillaume, Brescia, April 1879). She sang in St Petersburg (1880–82) and continued summertime studies in Paris with Sbriglia; she also studied Marguerite (Faust) and Ophelia (Hamlet) with Gounod and Thomas, making her Paris Opéra début in the former role (22 July 1882). In 1882 she married Frederick Gower, who disappeared three years later in the midst of their divorce proceedings. Nordica's American operatic début, as Lillian Norton-Gower, was at the New York Academy of Music as Marguerite (26 November 1883). It marked the beginning of a long association with Mapleson, with whose company she also made her Covent Garden début (12 March 1887).

Nordica subsequently sang at Drury Lane (1887), Covent Garden (1888–93) and the Metropolitan Opera, where she made her début as Leonora in Il trovatore (27 March 1890). In the 1890s she turned her attention to Wagner. After extensive coaching by Cosima Wagner, she sang Elsa in the first production of Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 1894. At the height of her Metropolitan Opera career (1893–1907) she was known primarily as a Wagnerian. In 1896 she married a Hungarian tenor, Zoltan Dome, whom she divorced in 1904. Between 1897 and 1908 she sang at the Metropolitan and with the Damrosch-Ellis Company (1897–8), at Covent Garden (1898, 1899, 1902), and with Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera Company (1907–8). From 1908 Nordica devoted herself to concert performances; her final appearance with the Metropolitan was in December 1909. That year she married George Washington Young; they lived in Ardsley-on-the-Hudson, New York. Nordica's final operatic appearance was in Boston (March 1913); shortly afterwards she embarked on a world concert tour. In December the steamer on which she was travelling struck a reef off New Guinea; Nordica contracted pneumonia, from which she later died.

Alhough not a strong actress, Nordica had a rich voice and a remarkable coloratura range. She knew 40 operatic roles in English, Italian, German, French and Russian. A resolute and shrewd – but also generally good-natured – individual, she owed her stature as a great Wagnerian soprano to hard work, constant study and determination. Late in her career she became a strong proponent of opera in English; she was also an ardent suffragist and had an unfulfilled dream of establishing a Bayreuth-like American Institute for Music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAB (F.H. Martens)

NAW (W. Lichtenwanger)

L. Nordica: Lilian Nordica's Hints to Singers (New York, 1923)

G.T. Edwards: Music and Musicians of Maine (Portland, ME, 1928/R)

O. Thompson: The American Singer (New York, 1937)

I. Glackens: Yankee Diva: Lillian Nordica (New York, 1963)

J.F. Cone: First Rival of the Metropolitan Opera (New York, 1983)

KATHERINE K. PRESTON