'Wir welken und sterben dahinnen': Carrie Pringle and the solo Flowermaidens of 1882

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Cormack, David

Commentators who mention her are at one (almost) in describing Carrie Pringle as English. The 1881 England and Wales Census, however, shows no trace of her or her family in England. This is because they were and had been at large in Europe since at least the 1850s.

THE source of Basil John Charles Pringle's wealth is not known. The Pringle name is Scottish in origin, but the famous knitware firm denies any connection. Basil's father, Volkier Rudolph Pringle, was born in around 1782, possibly with some Dutch connection if his name is anything to go by. Nor is it known where Basil was born in 1825, but the woman he was to marry some 30 years later, Isabelle Latinivics de Borsod, was born in Hungary in 1830. Basil seems to have retired early, becoming a rentier of independent means, and apparently in order to raise a family.

Isabelle Pringle bore the future Flowermaiden, their first child Caroline Mary Isabelle, in Linz on 19 March 1859. A sister, Catherina Lavinia, followed on 24 April 1860, and a brother, Basil Rudolph, on 31 May 1861. This younger Basil was to die only five years later, after the family had moved from Linz to Gotha.43 In 1863 Basil Pringle bought the first of two imposing villas in Gotha, and it was at Lindenauallee 18 that Volkier Colin Slepney Pringle was born, only to die the following year. In 1865 Mary Home, who had been living with the Pringles, died and was buried in Gotha; she was perhaps Volkier Rudolph Pringle's widowed sister. Mary Jane Home Pringle was born the same year.

In 1867 the family was further augmented by the arrival of retired Captain Volkier Rudolph Pringle himself. He was there for the birth of John Charles Godfrey Pringle on 30 November 1867, and of Lydia Caroline Louise Pringle in 1870, before his death in Gotha in the latter year. The Pringles were to have one more child, their eighth, Elisabeth Caroline Anna Jenny, born probably in 1870 but who appears to have died early.

Basil, Isabelle, Caroline, Lavinia, Mary, Godfrey and Lydia Pringle moved to a second, even grander, villa in 1873, at Friedrichstraße 19, but here the track peters out. The next trace is Hermann Levi's encounter with Caroline in that rehearsal room in Munich in 1878, but whether the whole family was now there is unknown. By 1881, 'Carrie and the Pringle family' were living in Milan, where the 22-year-old Caroline may have gone for singing lessons. Apart from her address at Piazza del Duomo 23, nothing more has been discovered.

SOME four years after the Parsifal premiere at Bayreuth the focus turns to 32 Eardley Crescent SW, in Earls Court, London. Kelly's Post Office Directories for Kensington suggest that Basil John Charles Pringle was at this address in 1887 and 1888. (There is no trace in the Directories for 1882, 1884, 1885 or 1886.) In fact he had died there from phthisis (tuberculosis) on 9 December 1886: the death certificate describes him as a 'musician'. His death seems to have occurred not long after he (and presumably his family) arrived in London that same year. If this was a homecoming for Basil, there is no evidence that Carrie Pringle or any of his children had previously set foot on English soil.