Felicita Vestvali, also known as Felicità von Vestvali, was an opera singer and actress famous in both Europe and the United States. She was known in North America as "Vestvali the Magnificent" or "Magnificent Vestvali" and was a favorite performer of Abraham Lincoln's and Napoleon III. Vestali was admired for her beauty and her contralto voice and for her independence from the norms of femininity at the time. She was a self-described "man-hater" and widely described as Uranian, with links with the feminist movement, the nascent movement for gay and lesbian rights, and to the movements for racial and religious emancipation.
Life
Her family background is unclear. According to Ludwig Eisenberg, Vestvali came from an old noble family. Despite her Italian stage name, Vestvali was born in Stettin, Germany as Anna Marie Stegemann. Her father—as a senior civil servant—had adopted the name "Stegemann" for political reasons, and her mother was Baroness von Hünefeld. According to another source, her father belonged to the Polish noble family Westfalowicz. Others indicate that she was born in 1834 as the daughter of a high Austrian officials in Kraków. Vestvali's family refused her a theater training; therefore she ran away from home in boy's clothes and joined the impresario Wilhelm Bröckelmann and his theater company in Leipzig in 1846 at the age of 15. Together with Bröckelmann's group, Vestvali undertook a longer tour to various northern German city theaters. Back in Leipzig, she was discovered by actress Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and accepted as a student. With her support, Vestvali was able to make her debut there at the Altes Theater in the role of Agathe in Der Freischütz. After a short guest appearance at the Hanover Opera House, Vestvali went to France to the Conservatoire de Paris. This was followed by a concert tour as a soloist. From winter 1855/56 she was a student with Romani and Saverio Mercadante in Naples. During this time she also took the stage name Felicita Vestvali and sang as a supposedly Italian singer in the La Scala in her first travesti role of Romeo. This was followed by sensational successes in Paris, London, New York and Mexico City. After that, she planned a longer relaxing vacation in Italy. But Emperor Napoleon III brought Vestvali back to the Paris Opera. He was so captivated with her that he presented her with a solid silver suit of armor for her performance as Romeo in Bellini's Romeo and Juliet.The audience celebrated her performances enthusiastically and the critics compared Vestvali to Maria Malibran, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and Rachel Félix. With a French opera company she made a tour through France, Belgium and Holland and in 1862 another tour to New York followed. There she worked with colleagues like Charles Kean. In the United States, Vestvali was the first female Hamlet actress ever. From this time on, she was also called "the female Kean". Karl Gutzkow suggested her in the preface to his play Richard Savage as a candidate for the leading role. After bad reviews of her appearance in Gluck'sOrfeo ed Euridice in San Francisco, 1865, she switched from musical theater to speaking roles. She returned to Europe and was again successful. She appeared as Romeo and Hamlet in Shakespeare's dramas. She played these roles in 1867 in London at the Lyceum Theatre in English. Queen Victoria attended one of the performances. The Royal Academy of Arts made her an honorary member. From the spring of 1868 Vestvali performed in Hamburg and Lübeck. Afterwards she was on a big tour through Europe for about two years. After the war ended in 1871, Vestvali hardly performed anymore and retired more and more into private life. She spent the last years of her life in Bad Warmbrunn. During a visit to friends in Warsaw, she fell ill and died there on April 3, 1880, six weeks after her 49th birthday. During her last illness, she was "nursed by a Miss G", as well as her "inseparable friend" and principal heir, a German actress Elise Lund, "who came to nurse her also" and later took Vestvali's body to Bad Warmbrunn.
