![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.nli.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Rothauser-image.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOn the back of the portrait, which was taken at the Lovag Mertens \u00e9s T\u00e1rsa photography studio in Budapest in 1888, I managed to decipher a name: \u201cTer\u00e9z Rothauser\u201d.<\/p>\n
After a bit of research, I found out that Ter\u00e9z Rothauser was a world famous opera singer. She was 23 years old in 1888 when the photograph was taken, 55 years before she was murdered in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.<\/p>\n
Born in Budapest to a Jewish family, her father was a trader who encouraged his three children to become artists. She gave her first concert in 1886 in Budapest and performed the same year in Vienna and Berlin. She then spent two years in Leipzig where \u2013 among other roles \u2013 she played Inez in the premiere of the comic opera “The Three Pintos”, originally composed by Carl Maria von Weber and finished 65 years later by Gustav Mahler.<\/p>\n
She later moved to Berlin where she joined the Royal Opera House.<\/p>\n With her first name Germanized to “Therese”, the public enjoyed her Mezzo-Soprano voice and she quickly became very popular, even playing the female title role in Berlin’s first production of nineteenth-century composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel”.<\/p>\n Richard Strauss liked her voice and Kaiser Wilhelm II told her in 1892 that she \u201cwas the best Carmen I have ever seen\u201d. Five years later, the Kaiser personally gave her a sapphire brooch \u201cwith diamonds, a small crown and the monograms of the Kaiser\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/a>