19th Century Opera Stars 
  
Curated by
T. Max Hochstetler
 
With the kind assistance of
Klaus Niermann
studioniermann.de/html/bieber.html
for permission to include photographs by Emil Bieber.
 
and to
Ann Kersting-Meuleman
Universitat Frankfurt am Main Manskopf Collection
for providing photographic scans.
 
Our grateful thanks to Dr Michael Burden, Dean; Reader in Music; Director of New Chamber Opera, New College, Oxford, UK for kindly providing the biography of Louisa Pyne.
 
Also to Dr. David S. Shields, McClintock Professor of Southern Letters, Department of English, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 for permission to include his biography of Benjamin Falk.
 
We would also like to thank Paul Frecker for his astute observations on the subject and for providing examples.
 
T. Max Hochstetler is Emeritus Professor and former Chair of Department of Art at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee where he taught painting and drawing. Listed in Who‘s Who in American Art, "Max" is well-known for his historical murals at Opryland Hotel in Nashville, and is represented by paintings in numerous public and private collections. He began collecting carte de visite and cabinet card photographs in 1990 when he was exchange artist to Christoph Merian Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland. Wandering into an antique store he noticed a broken scrapbook of theatrical cabinet cards all depicting the same actor in different costumes. From there a "hobby went crazy" and his private collection numbers in the hundreds with specialized interest in 19th Century German photographers who made photographs of performers and Prussian royalty. Works by the studios of E. Bieber and J.C. Schaarwächter are his favorites, but the collection also includes French and British photographers. 
  
Introduction