Gertrude Elizabeth Mara, Germany’s earliest noted queen of song, began her public career in 1755 as a child violinist of six, traveling with her father, Johann Schmaeling, a respectable musician of Hesse-Cassel.  In London her musical gifts proved to include a phenomenal soprano voice, which developed a compass from G to E altissimo, unrivalled portamento di voce, pure enunciation and precise intonation.  She became skilled in harmony, theory, sight-reading and harpsichord playing.  When she sang, her glowing countenance, her supreme acting and the lights and shades of her voice made people forget the plainness of her features and the insignificance of her form and stature.  Her rendering of Handel’s airs, especially “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” was pronounced faultless.

Frederick the Great, who as soon expected pleasure from the neighing of a horse as from a German songstress, vanquished on hearing her, retained her as court singer.  While in his service she became the wife of Jean Mara, a handsome, dissipated court violoncellist, whom she loved devotedly, but who led her a sorry life.  Returning to London later she taught singing at two guineas a lesson.  Upon fear being expressed that her price, double that of other teachers, would limit her class, she said her pupils having her voice as a model could learn in half the time required for those who had only the tinkling of a piano to imitate.  Though she believed singing should be taught by a singer, a tenderness for her own experience made her insist that the best way to begin the musical education was by having the pupil learn to play the violin.  When she heard a songstress extolled for rapid vocalization she would ask:  “Can she sing six plain notes?” This question might afford young singers food for reflection.  Madame Mara passed her declining years teaching singing near her native place, and died at Reval, in 1833.  Two years earlier, on her eighty-third birthday, Goethe offered her a poetic tribute.

At a London farewell concert given by Madame Mara in 1802, she was assisted by Mrs. Elizabeth Billington, who has been ranked first among English-born queens of song.  Her pure soprano had a range of three octaves, from A to A, with flute-like upper tones.  She sang with neatness, agility and precision, could detect the least false intonation of instrument or voice, and was attractive in appearance.  Haydn eulogized her genius in his diary, and in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was painting her portrait as St. Cecilia, exclaimed:  “You have represented Mrs. Billington listening to the angels, you should have made them listening to her.”  It was she who introduced Mozart’s operas into England.  She only lived to be forty-eight, breaking down in 1818, from the effects of brutal treatment of her second husband, a Frenchman, named Felissent.