The musical Hausmann family

Not only were the cousins Georg and Robert Hausmann both professional cellists who played the same cello with some of the same people in the same places, Robert’s sister Marie was a singer who had a cousin Marie who was also a singer.

Robert’s sister Marie was born in 1847. She studied singing with Julius Stockhausen and Pauline Viardot-Garcia. She had originally planned to be a concert singer, but Eduard Devrient and Hermann Levi persuaded her to go into opera and began an engagement at the Carlsruhe Theater in 1869. Shortly thereafter she received strong notices as an up-and-coming singer as Elsa in Lohengrin and in a leading role along with Viardot-Garcia in the latter’s opera Der Letzte Zauberer. But in 1870 she married Friedrich Schulz and gave up the stage. Thereafter she sang occasionally in Berlin in oratorios and in other concert performances with, among others, Joseph and Amalie Joachim, Clara Schumann, and her brother until 1886.

Marie Hausmann Schulz’s second cousin, Marie, was born in 1845. She was the daughter of George’s older brother Bernhard. She and her sister Sophie were friends with the daughters of the King of Hannover, and got her voice instruction at the royal palace. In 1867 Joachim was scheduled to perform in Hannover along with his wife, the singer Amalie Joachim. When she became indisposed, Joachim suggested that Marie stand in for her. This success launched her career. She received good reviews for performances in 1870 in Hildesheim and in Göttingen, where she sang the alto solo in Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elias. (This was also a role the other Marie sang.) But she married in 1871 and gave up her career. Coincidentally, both Maries gave birth to sons a year after their wedding and both named their boys after their paternal grandfathers (the brothers Friedrich (b. 1871 and Bernhard (b. 1872)). Presumably they knew each other!

 

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