Catharina Anna Grandon de Hochepied

Catharina Anna Grandon de Hochepeid, (d.1803), was a Hungarian and Swedish noble. As married to the Swedish ambassador in the Ottoman Empire, she became the likley first female ever to have performed on stage in the Islamic Turkey.

Born to the Hungarian count Jan Daniel Grandon de Hochepied, she married Gerhard von Heidenstam, the Swedish ambassador of the Ottoman Empire, in 1783 and mowed woth him to Istanbul, where they lived.

Hedienstam organized an amateur theatre on the Swedish hotel in Pera in the city. In 1786, the theatre opened with the opera "L’ecole des Jaloux", the first Italian Opera ever performed in Turkey and, likely, in the Muslim world. The music was played by the embassy staff. Catharina Anna participated in the opera, together with a couple of other amateur actresses from the embassy staff's familys, in front of three hundred spectators, thereby becoming the perhaps first woman ever to have performed on a public stage in a muslim country. She was to have both acted and singed quite well. The audience consisted of both foreign diplomats and muslim nobles, and was much complimented afterwords.

References

* http://runeberg.org/sqvinnor/0174.html