TEACHING AND THE HALF-TALENTED
I have gone abroad nearly every summer and it was on one of these trips,
in 1877, that I first met Lilian Nordica. It was at a garden party given
by the Menier Chocolat people at their _usine_ just outside Paris, after
she had returned from making a tour of Europe with Patrick Gilmore's
band. A few years later she and I sang together in Russia; and we have
always been good friends. At the time of the Gilmore tour she was quite
a girl, but she dressed her hair in a fashion that made her look much
older than she really was and that threw into prominence her admirably
determined chin. She always attributed her success in life to that chin.
Before becoming an opera singer she had done about everything else. She
had been a book-keeper, had worked at the sewing machine, and sung in
obscure choirs. The chin enabled her to surmount such drudgery. A young
person with a chin so expressive of determination and perseverance could
not be downed. She told me at that early period that she always kept her
eyes fixed on some goal so high and difficult that it seemed impossible,
and worked toward it steadily, unceasingly, putting aside everything
that stood in the path which led to it. In later years she spoke again
of this, evidently having kept the idea throughout her career. "When I
sang Elsa," she said, "I thought of Brunhilde,--then Isolde,--" My
admiration for Mme. Nordica is deep and abounding. Her breathing and
tone production are about as nearly perfect as anyone's can be, and, if
I wanted any young student to learn by imitation, I could say to her,
"Go and hear Nordica and do as nearly like her as you can!" There are
not many singers, nor have there ever been many, of whom one could say
that. And one of the finest things about this splendid vocalism is that
she has had nearly as much to do with it as had God Almighty in the
first place. When I first knew her she had no dramatic quality above _G_
sharp. She could reach the upper notes, but tentatively and without
power. She had, in fact, a beautiful mezzo voice; but she could not hope
for leading _roles_ in grand opera until she had perfect control of the
upper notes needed to complete her vocal equipment. She went about it,
moreover, "with so much judition," as an old man I know in the country
says. But it was not until after the Russian engagement that she went to
Sbriglia in Paris and worked with him until she could sing a high _C_
that thrilled the soul. That _C_ of hers in the Inflammatus in Rossini's
_Stabat Mater_ was something superb. Not many singers can do it as
successfully as Nordica, although they can all accomplish a certain
amount in "manufactured" notes. Fursch-Nadi, also a mezzo, had to
acquire upper notes as a business proposition in order to enlarge her
_repertoire_. She secured the notes and the requisite _roles_; yet her
voice lost greatly in quality. Nordica's never did. She gained all and
lost nothing. Her voice, while increasing in register, never suffered
the least detriment in tone nor _timbre_.
It was Nordica who first told me of Sbriglia, giving him honest credit
for the help he had been to her. Like all truly big natures she has
always been ready to acknowledge assistance wherever she has received
it. Some people--and among them artists to whom Sbriglia's teaching has
been of incalculable value--maintain a discreet silence on the subject
of their study with him, preferring, no doubt, to have the public think
that they have arrived at vocal perfection by their own incomparable
genius alone. All of my training had been in my native country and I had
always been very proud of the fact that critics and experts on two
continents cited me as a shining example of what American musical
education could do. All the same, when I was in Paris during an off
season, I took advantage of being near the great teacher, Sbriglia, to
consult him. I really did not want him actually to do anything to my
voice as much as I wanted him to tell me there was nothing that needed
doing. At the time I went to him I had been singing for twenty years.
Sbriglia tried my voice carefully and said:
"Mademoiselle, you have saved your voice by singing far _forward_."
"That's because I've been worked hard," I told him, "and have had to
place it so in self-defence. Many a night I've been so tired it was like
_pumping_ to sing! Then I would sing 'way, _'way_ in front and, by so
doing, was able to get through."
"Ah, that's it!" said he. "You've sung against your teeth--the best
thing in the world for the preservation of the voice. You get a _white_,
flat sound that way."
"Then I don't sing wrong?" I asked, for I knew that the first thing
great vocal masters usually have to do is to tell one how not to sing.
"Mademoiselle," said Sbriglia, "you breathe by the grace of God!
Breathing is all of singing and I can teach you nothing of either."
Sbriglia's method was the old Italian method known to teachers as
_diaphragmatic_, of all forms of vocal training the one most productive
of endurance and stability in a voice. I went several times to sing for
him and, on one occasion, met Plancon who had been singing in Marseilles
and, from a defective method, had begun to sing out of tune so badly
that he resolved to come to Paris to see if he could find someone who
might help him to overcome it. He was quite frank in saying that
Sbriglia had "made him." I used to hear him practising in the Maestro's
apartment and would listen from an adjoining room so that, when I met
him, I was able to congratulate him on his improvement in tone
production from day to day. Phrasing and expression are what make so
many great French artists--that, and an inborn sense of the general
effect. French actors and singers never forget to keep themselves
picturesque and harmonious. They may get off the key musically but never
_artistically_. Germans have not a particle of this sense. They are
individualists, egoists, and are forever thinking of themselves and not
of the whole. When I heard Slezak, I said to myself: "If only somebody
would photograph that man and show him for once what he looks like!"
The worst thing Sbriglia had to contend with was the obtuseness of
people. They did not know when they were doing well or ill, and would
not believe him when he told them. I remember being there one day while
a young Canadian girl was making tones for the master. She had a good
voice and could have made a really fine effect if she could only have
heard herself with her brain. After he had been working with her for a
time, she sang a delightful note properly placed.
"Good!" exclaimed Sbriglia.
"That was lovely," I put in.
"_That?_ I wouldn't sing like that for anything! It sounded like an old
woman's voice!" cried the girl, quite amazed.
Sbriglia threw up his hands in a frenzy and ordered her out of the
house. So that was an end of her as far as he was concerned.
Sbriglia really loved to teach. It was a genuine joy to him to put the
finishing touches on a voice; to do those things for it that,
apparently, the Creator had not had time to do. I know one singer who,
when complimented upon his vast improvement, replied without the
slightest intention of impiety:
"Yes, I am singing well now, thanks to Sbriglia,--and, of course, _le
bon Dieu_!" he added as an after-thought.
Everyone knows what Sbriglia did for Jean de Reszke, turning him from an
unsuccessful baritone into the foremost tenor of the world. Sbriglia
first met the Polish singer at some Paris party, where de Reszke told
him that he was discouraged, that his career as a baritone had not been
a fortunate one, and that he had about made up his mind to give it all
up and leave the stage. He was a rich man and did not sing for a living
like most professionals. Sbriglia had heard him sing. Said he:
"M. de Reszke, you are not a baritone."
"I am coming to that conclusion myself," said Monsieur ruefully.
"No, you are not a baritone," repeated Sbriglia. "You are a tenor."
Jean de Reszke laughed. A tenor? He? But it was absurd!
Nevertheless Sbriglia was calmly assured; and he was the greatest master
of singing in France, if not in the world. After a little conversation,
he convinced M. de Reszke sufficiently, at least, to give the new theory
a chance.
"You need not pay me anything," said the great teacher to the young man.
"Not one franc will I take from you until I have satisfied you that my
judgment is correct. Study with me for six months only and then I will
leave it to you--and the world!"
That was the beginning of the course of study which launched Jean de
Reszke upon his extraordinarily prosperous and brilliant career.
Speaking of Sbriglia leads my thoughts from the study of singing in
general to the struggle of young singers, first, for education, and,
second, for recognition. I would like to impress upon those who think of
trying to make a career or who would like to make one the benefit to be
derived from reading the twenty-third and twenty-fourth chapters of
George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_, in which she makes clear how much early
environment counts. There must have been some musical atmosphere, even
if not of an advanced or educated kind. Music must be absorbed with the
air one breathes and the food one eats, so as to form part of the blood
and tissue.
It is sad to see the number of girls with the idea that they are
possessed of great gifts just ready to be developed by a short period of
study, after which they will blossom out into successful singers.
Injudicious friends--absolutely without judgment or musical
discrimination--are responsible for the cruel disillusions that so
frequently follow. I would like to cry out to them to reject the
thought; or only to entertain it when encouraged by those capable by
experience or training of truly judging their gifts. Many and many a
girl comes out of a household where the highest musical knowledge has
been the hand-organ in the street, and believes that she is going to
take the world by storm. She is prepared to save and scrimp and struggle
to go upon the stage when she really should be stopping at home, ironing
the clothes and washing the dishes allotted her by a discriminating and
judicious Providence. Said Klesner to Gwendolen who wants to go on the
stage in _Daniel Deronda_:
You have exercised your talents--you recite--you sing--from the
drawing-room _Standpunkt_. My dear _Fraeulein_, you must unlearn all
that. You have not yet conceived what excellence is. You must
unlearn your mistaken admirations. You must know what you have to
strive for, and then you must subdue your mind and body to unbroken
discipline. Your _mind_, I say. For you must not be thinking of
celebrity. Put that candle out of your eyes and look only at
excellence. You would, of course, earn nothing. You could get no
engagement for a long while. You would need money for yourself and
your family....
A mountebank's child who helps her father to earn shillings when
she is six years old--a child that inherits a singing throat from a
long line of choristers and learns to sing as it learns to
talk--has a likelier beginning. Any great achievement in acting or
in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to
say, "I came, I saw, I conquered," it has been at the end of
patient practice. Genius at first is little more than a great
capacity for receiving discipline. Singing and acting, like the
fine dexterity of the juggler with his cups and balls, require a
shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of
effect. Your muscles--your whole frame--must go like a watch, true,
true, true, to a hair. That is the work of springtime, before
habits have been determined.
This demonstrates what I cannot emphasise too heartily--the
impossibility of taking people out of their normal environment and
making anything worth while of them. There is a place in the world for
everybody and, if everybody would stay in that place, there would be
less confusion and fewer melancholy misfits. Singing is not merely
vocal. It is spiritual. One must be _in_ music in some way; must hear it
often, or, even, hear it talked about. Merely hearing it talked about
gives one a chance to absorb some musical ideas while one's mental
attitude is being moulded. Studying in classes supplies the musical
atmosphere to a certain extent; and so does hearing other people sing,
or reading biographies of musicians. All these are better than
nothing--much better--and yet they can never take the place of really
musical surroundings in childhood. Being brought up in a household where
famous composers are known, loved, and discussed, where the best music
is played on the piano and where certain critical standards are a part
of the intellectual life of the inmates is a large musical education in
itself. The young student will absorb thus more real musical feeling,
and judgment, and knowledge, than in spending years at a conservatory.
I have often and often received letters asking for advice and begging me
to hear the voices of girls who have been told they have talent. It is a
heart-breaking business. About one in sixty has had something resembling
a voice and then, ten chances to one, she has not been in a position to
cultivate herself. It is difficult to tell a girl that a woman must
have many things besides a voice to make a success on the stage. It
seems so--well!--so _conceited_--to say to her:
"My poor child, you must have presence and personality; good teeth and a
knowledge of how to dress; grace of manner, dramatic feeling, high
intelligence, and an aptitude for foreign languages besides a great many
other essentials that are too numerous to mention but that you will
discover fast enough if you try to go ahead without them!"
An impulsive and warm-hearted friend was visiting me once when I
received a letter from a young woman whom I will call "E. H.," asking
permission to come and sing for me. I read the note in despair and threw
it over to my friend.
"What are you going to do about it?" she asked, after she had glanced
through it.
"Nothing. The girl has no talent."
"How do you know that?" protested my friend.
"By her letter. It is a crassly ignorant letter. I feel perfectly sure
that she can't sing."
"You are very unkind!" my friend reproached me. "You ought at least to
hear her. You may be discouraging a genuine genius----"
"Now see here," I interrupted, "'E. H.' is evidently ignorant and
uneducated. She further admits that she is poor. These facts taken
together make a terrible handicap. She'd have to be a miracle to make
good in spite of them."
"I will pay her expenses to come here and see you," declared my dear
friend, obstinate in well-doing, like many another mistaken
philanthropist.
I told her that she might take that responsibility if she liked, but
that I would have nothing to do with raising a girl's false hopes in
any such way. "It's a little hard on her," I said, "to have to borrow
money to take a journey simply to be told that she can't sing. However,
have it your own way and bring her."
She came. I saw her approaching up the driveway and simply pointed her
out to my misguided friend. Anyone would have known the minute he saw
"E. H." that she could not sing. She slouched and dragged her feet and
was hopelessly ordinary, every inch of her. It was not merely a matter
of plainness, but something far worse. She was quite hopeless. It turned
out, poor soul, that she was a chambermaid in a hotel. People had heard
her singing at her work and had told her that she ought to have her
voice cultivated. It was, as usual, a case of injudicious friends, and,
by the way, the very fact of being carried away by such praise is in
itself a mark of a certain lack of intelligence. This girl had no
temperament, no ear, no equipment, no taste, no advantages in the way of
having heard music. I had to say to her:
"You have a pretty voice but nothing else, and not a sign of a career.
Dismiss it all, for you must have something more than a few sweet
notes."
She cried, and I did, too. I hate to be obliged to tell girls such
disagreeable truths.
Another girl came to me with her mother. She was full of herself and her
mother equally wrapped up in her. She had taken part in small village
affairs in the little Connecticut town where she lived. Her voice was
not bad, but she produced her notes in a wrong manner. Her teacher had
encouraged her and promised her success. But teachers do that, many of
them! I do not know that they can altogether be blamed.
"You don't breathe right," I said to this Connecticut girl. "You don't
produce your tone right. You've no experience and, of course, you
believe your teacher. But you forget one thing. Your teacher has to live
and you pay him for stimulating you, even if he does so without
justification."
What I did not go on to say to her, although I longed to, was that she
was not the _build_ of which _prime donne_ are made. A _prima donna_ has
to be compactly, sturdily made, with a strong backbone to support her
hard work and a _lifted_ chest to let the tones out freely. A niece of
Bret Harte's, who appeared for a time in grand opera, drooped her chest
as she exhausted her breath and, when I saw her do it, I said:
"She sings well; but she won't sing long!"
She didn't.
My Connecticut girl was big and sloppy, a long-drawn-out person, such as
is never, never gifted with a big voice.
There is something else which is very necessary for every girl to
consider in going on the operatic stage. Has she the means for
experimenting, or does she have to earn her living in some way
meanwhile? If the former is the case, it will do no harm for her to play
about with her voice, burn her fingers if need be, and come home to her
mother and father not much the worse for the experience. I sympathise
somewhat with the teachers in not speaking altogether freely in cases
like these. There is no reason why anyone should take from a girl even
one remote chance if _she_ can afford to take it. But poor girls should
be told the truth. So I said to my young Connecticut friend:
"My dear, you are trying to support yourself and your mother, aren't
you? Very well. Now, suppose you go on and find that you can't--what
will you do then? What are you fitted for? What can you turn your hand
to? What have you acquired? Look how few singers ever arrive and, if you
are not one of the few, will you not merely have entirely unfitted
yourself for the life struggle along other lines?"
Herewith I say the same to four-fifths of all the girl singers who, in
villages, in shops, in schools, everywhere, are all yearning to be
great. They came to me in shoals in Paris and Milan, begging for just
enough money to get home with. I have shipped many a failure back to
America, and my soul has been sick for their disappointment and
disillusionment. But they will _not_ be guided by advice or warning.
They have got to learn actually and bitterly. Neither are they ever
grateful for discouragement nor yet for encouragement. If you give them
the former, they think you are a selfish pessimist; and if you give them
the latter, they accept it as no more than their due. As I have
previously mentioned, I have known only one grateful girl and she was of
ordinary ability. Emma Abbott, for whom I certainly did a great deal,
was only grateful because she knew it was expected of her by the world
at large. I believe she really thought that all I did was to hasten her
success a little and that she really had not needed my assistance.
Possibly, she had not. But this other girl, to whom I gave a little,
unimportant advice, wrote me afterwards a most appreciative letter,
saying that my advice had been invaluable to her. It was the only word
of genuine gratitude I ever received from a young singer; and I kept her
letter as a curiosity.
I believe there are, or were, more would-be _prime donne_ in Chicago
than anywhere else on earth. I shall never forget appointing a Thursday
afternoon in the Windy City to hear twelve aspirants to operatic
fame--pretty, fresh, self-conscious, young girls for the most part.
There was one of the number who was particularly pretty and particularly
aggressive. She criticised the others lavishly, but hung back from
singing herself. She talked a great deal about her voice, saying that
she had sung for Theodore Thomas and that he had told her there was no
hall big enough for it! Such colossal conceit prejudiced me in advance
and I must confess I felt a little curiosity to hear this "phenomenal
organ." It proved to be perfectly useless. She had neither power nor
quality nor comprehension. She could, however, make a big noise, as I
told her. On Sunday my friends began coming in to see me, full of an
article that had appeared in one of the papers that morning. Everyone
began with:
"Good morning, Louise. My dear! Have you seen,"--etc.
The article, that had quite openly been given the paper by the young
lady whose voice had been so much admired by Theodore Thomas, described
my unkindness to young singers, my jealous objection to praising
aspirants, my discouragement of good voices!
As a matter of fact, I have always been the friend of young girls,
especially of young singers. So far from wishing to hurt or discourage
them, I have often gone out of my way to help them along. And I believe
that every time I have been obliged to tell a young and eager girl that
there was no professional triumph ahead of her, it has cut me almost, if
not quite, as deeply as it has cut her. For I always feel that I am
maiming, even killing some beautiful thing in discouraging her,--even
when I know it to be necessary and beneficial.
Another thing that I wish young would-be artists would remember is
that, if it is worth while to sing the music of a song, it is equally
worth while to sing the words, and that you cannot sing the words
really, unless you are singing their meaning. Do I make myself
understood, I wonder? Once a girl with a sweetly pretty voice sang to me
Nevin's _Mighty Lak a Rose_, the little negro song which Madame Nordica
gave so charmingly. When the girl had finished, I said:
"My dear, have you read those words?"
She looked at me blankly. I know she thought I was crazy.
"Because," I proceeded, "if you read the poetry over before you sing
that song again, you'll find that it will help you."
She had, I presume, "read" the words or she could not have actually
pronounced them; but she had not made the slightest attempt to read the
spirit of the little song. No picture had come to her of a rosy baby
dropping asleep and of a loving mammy crooning over him. She had not
read the _feeling_ of the song, even if she had memorised the syllables.
Girls hate to work. They, even more than boys, want a short cut to
efficiency and success. Labour and effort are cruel words to them. They
want the glamour and the fun all at once. What would they say to the
noble and inspiring example of old E. S. Jaffray, a merchant of sixty,
whom I once knew, who, at that age, decided to learn Italian in order to
read Dante in the original?
The best way--as I have said before and as I insist on saying--for
anyone to learn to sing is by imitation and assimilation. My friend
Franceschetti, a Roman gentleman, poor but of noble family, has classes
that I always attend when I am in the Eternal City, and wherein the
instruction is most advantageously given. He criticises each student in
the presence of the others and, if the others are listening at all
intelligently, they must profit. But you must listen, and then listen,
and then keep on listening, and finally begin to listen all over again.
You must keep your ear ready, and your mind as well.
Just as Faure, when he heard the bad baritone, said to himself, "that's
my note! Now how does he do it?" so you must hold yourself ready to
learn from the most humble as well as from the most unlikely sources.
Never forget that Faure learned from the really poor singer what no good
one had been able to teach him. Remember, too, that Patti learned one of
her own flexible effects from listening to Faure himself: and that these
great artists were not too proud to acknowledge it. I never went to hear
Patti, myself, without studying the fine, forward placing of her voice
and coming home immediately and trying to imitate it.
Yet, after all one's efforts to help, one can only let the young singers
find out for themselves. If we could profit by each other's experience,
there would be no need for the doctrine of reincarnation. But I
wish--oh, how I wish--that I could save some foolish girls from
embarking on the ocean of art as half of them do with neither chart or
compass, nor even a seaworthy boat.
A better metaphor comes to me in my recollection of a famous lighthouse
that I once visited. The rocks about were strewn with dead
birds--pitiful, little, eager creatures that had broken their wings and
beaten out their lives all night against the great revolving light. So
the lighthouse of success lures the young, ambitious singers. And so
they break their wings against it.