 The back of this lithograph reads:
Miss Fritzi Scheff
FRITZI SCHEFF! Had ever an actress a name more in keeping with her personality? It suggests even o one who has never beheld its possessor a diminutive person, alive from the tips of her satin slippers to the crown of her shining hair; the personification of chic—that untranslatable word that means so much and is so often misapplied. Fritzi Scheff was born in Vienna on a summer morning. It must have been in June, though she does not say. Anyway, her father was the stage director of a very popular theater devoted to the production of operettas and such musical trifles, so the juvenile Fritzi had as playmates in the wings a number of roughed and sparkling Viennese chorus girls. It is to Walter Damrosch that America’s thanks are due for having disclosed the charming little Vienna person on this side of the Atlantic. She came over with a number of European operatic people in ’95 and her first appearance in America was made in Philadelphia in that year. Her original American part was the daughter of the inn-keeper in "Fidelio." Her success was immediate; the Philadelphia reviewers singled her out, and the result was a quantity of personal publicity that would have turned many a singer’s head. But it didn’t turn the head of the little Viennese. She was called by every semi-affectionate term the reviewers’ vocabularies possessed and by others that were invented to fit her. At the Academy, in Philadelphia, also, she made another hit in "The Marriage of Figaro," and then to cap the climax, she leaped into the role allotted Sembrich in "The Daughter of the Regiment," and while Sembrich lay ill she could hear the plaudits of the delighted crowd. It was in this part that the vivacious Fritzi first appeared with the drum that she has since made famous. Later, as a member of Grau’s Opera Company, Miss Scheff appeared with Campanari and repeated her earlier hits. It was Paderewski who, due to her "cutting-up" at the rehearsals of his opera called her "the little devil," a classification that has clung to her ever since. Stardom was the natural result of her success, and her first independent venture was in "Babette." Last season she appeared in "Mlle. Modiste," and her new opera I called "The Prima Donna." Miss Scheff considers herself an American nowadays, and a if in proof of it, the story is that she will shortly wed the well-known American novelist, John Fox, Jr.
Credit: Original lithograph in Old Alabama Rails Collection.
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