Clara Louise Kellogg

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 rÔles 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 rÉpertoire. She secured the notes and the requisite rÔles; 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 PlanÇon 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 FrÄulein, 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.