Emma Marcy Raymond


Emma P. Marcy Raymond was an American composer of operetta, songs and piano music.
She was born in 1839 in Hartford, Connecticut, the oldest daughter of Dr. Erastus Egerton Marcy and Emeline Babcock Kilbourn Marcy, whose father was Henry Kilbourn of Hartford. Her father was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and later a homeopathic specialist, who apparently lived for many years on Fifth Avenue on the site opposite Tiffany's. In 1850 he published a book called The Homeopathic Theory and Practice of Medicine. Her sister Nina Marcy, married a lawyer called Ernest G. Stedman.
Her uncle was General Randolph D. Marcy, an 1832 graduate of West Point, and her obituary in The New York Times says she was a cousin to Mrs George B. McClennan, presumably Ellen Mary Marcy, the wife of General George Brinton McClellan, the father of the New York mayor of the same name.
She married 26 October 1860 Captain Edward A. Raymond.
She later lived in an apartment in the Ansonia, 2109 Broadway between West 73rd and West 74th Streets in New York.
She was buried in the Green Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

Life as a composer

She studied piano with Louis Moreau Gottschalk and singing with Giorgio Ronconi, and soon became known for her musical talent being credited as being one of the first American women to compose an operetta: in 1889 she composed the successful Doretta. Her obituary in The New York Times reported that she produced another in Chicago called The Sheik. Her songs and piano pieces were published in France and Germany as well as in the United States. Amongst her songs were 'O Salutaris', 'Bird of Love', 'First Love', and an Ave Maria.
She was a patron of the Metropolitan Opera House and numbered many singers and prima donnas amongst her friends. During the winter of 1896–1897, she commissioned the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury to paint a portrait of the bass-baritone Pol Plançon for her, which was subsequently exhibited in March 1897 at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York. It is now untraced.
After her death on 7 November 1913 she left a bequest of $300,000 to a homeopathic hospital, her family apparently later challenging the probate on her estate in the courts.