Sabine Kalter was born on March 28, 1889, in Jaroslaw (present-day Jarosław), Poland, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She studied singing at the Vienna Academy of Music under Rosa Papier and made her debut in 1911 at the Vienna Volksoper. In 1914, the alto went to the Hamburg Stadttheater for a guest engagement and became a permanent member of the ensemble the following year as the successor to Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann.
Her repertoire primarily comprised alto and mezzo roles in the operas of Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, as well as Herodias in Richard Strauss’s Salome, Orfeo in Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Fidès in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, and the title role in George Bizet’s Carmen. She performed in the 1927 premiere of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane and the 1929 premiere of Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage at the Berlin Kroll Opera. The 1920s onward saw guest engagements in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and Vienna. In Hamburg, the singer was an undisputed and celebrated star of the ensemble.
The Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 was the beginning of the end of her illustrious career in Germany. Her performance scheduled for May at the Reichs-Brahmsfest in Hamburg was canceled on short notice: “The selection of soloists,” the Hamburg Philharmonic Society reported to Berlin in early April, “will of course be changed so that no Jewish artists will take part. Ms. Sabine Kalter and Mr. Rudolf Serkin will be replaced by artists of German origin.” However, by early 1935, the new authorities had still been hesitant to issue a complete occupational ban for the opera star. After her final performance as Lady Macbeth on January 5, 1935, Sabine Kalter and her husband, the banker Max Aufrichtig, moved to London.
There, she sang between 1935 and 1939 at the Covent Garden Opera in addition to undertaking guest engagements in Paris, Brussels, and Antwerp as well as giving multiple performances in 1936/37 in Palestine, where she performed with the Palestine Orchestra and the likewise exiled Lotte Schöne under the direction of Artur Toscanini. She also returned to Germany from exile for a number of events organized by the Jewish Cultural Federation, including a recital on December 6, 1937, in Hamburg.
The closure of the Covent Garden Opera due to the war spelled the end of Sabine Kalter’s stage career. She performed only on occasion in the years that followed, working primarily as a voice teacher to secure her modest livelihood in London. After the war, she returned to Hamburg for a final recital on October 23, 1950. Sabine Kalter died on September 1, 1957, in London.
1889 Jarosław (Jaroslaw)
1957 London