The Forgotten Queen of Magic: Adelaide Herrmann in NYC
Adelaide Herrmann is best remembered as the wife and assistant of the world-renowned magician Herrmann the Great. She worked alongside her husband, Alexander, for twenty years, awing crowds across America and Europe, yet her own greatest feats have largely been forgotten by history. Known as the “Queen of Magic,” Adelaide Herrmann was the very first woman to headline her own magic act. Her story is just one of many highlighted in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ exhibition, Mystery and Wonder: A Legacy of Golden Age Magicians in New York City.
Born Adelaide Scarcez in London, England, in 1853 to affluent Belgian parents, Adelaide dreamed of becoming a dancer. She trained in aerial acrobatics and ballet and worked in circus and burlesque shows for the Kiralfy Brothers. She later became an expert trick rider in Professor Brown’s Lady Velocipede Troupe, traveling with the group to New York City in 1874. It was there that she met Alexander Herrmann, a French Jewish magician who had first arrived in the United States in 1860. The two married in 1875, and Adelaide began her career in magic as her husband’s assistant.
Adelaide played a key role in many of the couple’s most famous illusions, appearing as a levitating sleeper, a dancer, and eventually stepping in as the human cannonball after the original performer left the show. She received equal billing with her husband, performed solo spots, and invented several magic tricks of her own. The pair achieved enormous success, traveling internationally and living a glamorous life until Alexander died suddenly in 1896 at the age of fifty-two.
Grieving but determined, Adelaide sought a way for the show to continue. After briefly calling in their nephew Leon, who quickly proved unable to fill Herrmann the Great’s shoes, Adelaide made the bold decision to go solo. She returned to vaudeville stages, reinvented herself as the Queen of Magic, and adopted the traditional male magician’s costume of a white blouse and black trousers. In doing so, she became the first female headliner in the history of magic. In 1897, just one month after Alexander’s death, she stood before a live audience at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House and recreated her husband’s most dangerous illusion, the bullet catch. Facing a firing squad, she caught six specially marked bullets, making her the only woman magician known to have performed the trick at the time.
Source: New York Tribune
Adelaide Herrmann cemented her reputation as one of the most daring and accomplished magicians of the Golden Age, earning the respect of her mostly male peers. She toured for more than thirty years, made her Broadway debut in 1903 at the Circle Theatre, and created original illusions such as Noah’s Ark, which featured live animals and became a major success. She also actively supported other women throughout her career, corresponding with fans, encouraging women to study magic, and publishing instructional articles on performance techniques. Adelaide retired in 1928 and died of pneumonia in New York City in 1932 at the age of seventy-eight. Her inclusion in this exhibition ensures that her contributions to the history of magic are no longer overlooked.
Curated by Annemarie van Roessel, assistant curator of the Billy Rose Theatre Division and a devoted enthusiast of magic history, the New York Public Library exhibition features more than 300 rare items. These include magic books, illusion apparatuses, photographs, theatrical props, forty-eight original lithograph posters, and objects from the personal collection of Society of American Magicians co-founder Dr. Saram Ellison. Designed to evoke the interior of an early twentieth-century magic shop, the exhibition explores the eccentric and influential community of magicians who shaped New York City’s theatre culture during the Golden Age of Magic. Visitors can learn more about the Herrmanns, along with legendary figures such as Howard Thurston, Black Herman, and Harry Houdini, at the Vincent Astor Gallery.
Mystery and Wonder: A Legacy of Golden Age Magicians in New York City, presented by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, is open through July 11.
