Part 9

Since my dear old friend Italo Campanini there has been no one to match Caruso. Italo was a greater actor, indeed more versatile. His Lohengrin, the first I ever heard, I shall never forget. Mr. Finck is happy in his suggestion that Caruso add Lohengrin to his long list of operatic portraits. I have heard tenors from Brignoli to Gayarre, from Campanini to Tamagno, Masini and Nicolini--this second husband of Aunt Adelina Patti wasn’t such a mediocrity as represented by some critics; he suffered only from contiguity to a blazing star of the first magnitude--yet no one possessed a tithe of the vocal richness of Camerado Enrico. Some have outpointed him in finesse, Bonci; Tamagno could have outroared him; Jean de Reszke had more personal charm and artistic subtlety; nevertheless, Caruso has a marvellous natural voice, paved with lyric magic. It is positively torrential in its outpouring, and with the years it grows as mellow as a French horn. Why, there are men in this vast land of ours who would rather be Caruso than the President of the United States of Europe. Can you blame them? In his golden prime, happily mated, full of verve, gayety--and healthy--well, his presence, apart from his art, consoles us for many a gray day on this ocky little orb we inhabit.

The recognition of personality has become in my “middle-years” a veritable obsession. With Henry James I could say that “I have found myself, my life long, attaching values to every noted thing in respect to a great person.” Please strike out “great” from this sentence and substitute “any”; any person is interesting to me. Himself exquisitely aware of the presence of others, Henry James placed his fastidious preference amid certain castes, social and artistic. Like Walt Whitman, I prefer the company of “powerful uneducated persons,” and nothing inhuman or human is foreign to me. I shouldn’t be surprised to find more interesting “stories” among the members of the chorus than in the ranks of the “stars”; but the “stars” alone capture the curiosity of the public, and thus it is that I speak of some of them to-day instead of la bella ragazzina in Mr. Setti’s forces. I was bundled on Manager Gatti’s special car and promptly paid my fare to a conductor who suspiciously appraised my presence; to him I was neither fish nor flesh, nor good red chorus. I should have liked very much to walk through the chorus car, but with Otto Weil on one side and Edward Ziegler on the other I couldn’t escape; furthermore, young Ziegler thus admonished me: “Sir, it’s no place for an elderly inflammable person, is that car full of pretty young song-birds; Pattis and Scalchis en herbe.” I meekly submitted and found myself in a smoking-compartment where a card-table was promptly installed.

A friendly game of old cat bridge-whist. Now, I play Bach inventions every morning, but I can’t play cards. I despise card games, agreeing with my friend J. K. Huysmans, who asserted that a monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of cards because “he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility.” If the distinguished French pessimist and master of jewelled prose could have been with us that day he might have revised his polite judgment. Such gabbling. Such “kachesse,” such feminine squabbles. No hotel piazza on the Jersey coast of an August afternoon could have held a candle to the shrewd repartee and vivacious wrangling over a few painted pasteboards. Antonio Scotti, drumming on the table the rhythm of the Rataplan, would suddenly scowl, and, with Scarpia-like intensity, demand: “Why you play that ace?” And Technical Director Siedle would groan in reply. A flash of lightning from a blue sky. Then Otto Weil banged down his cards and audibly expressed his opinion of his partner’s playing. It is not fit to print. Judels never turned a hair, and he isn’t bald. Even Scotti relaxed for a moment his ferocious Neapolitan air. No one can “stay mad” long with Judels. Pan Ordynski drops in, and Amato, Chalmers, or Althouse. Scotti is smoke-proof. It is pleasant to record that this big operatic organization with its divers nationalities is en route a happy family. Music, after all, is the solvent, the real melting-pot of which we hear so much and see so little in every-day life.

Caruso is not the only funmaker on the wheels of this Opera Special. Rosina Galli of the dainty, tapering toes and woven paces is always rollicksome. Her imitations would make her fortune in vaudeville. Signor Gatti philosophically reposes after the fatigue of travel and Union League Club terrapin. Scotti munches chicken, resting after his Sergeant Sulpizio rôle, and still strums the Rataplan. Caruso smokes. Friend Scognomillo sleeps with one eye open. Florence Easton, wrung from her triumph as Santuzza, is there. In a compartment sits Geraldine Farrar. She sips coffee. Her mother is with her. So are chicken sandwiches. “Our Jerry” is bright-eyed and keyed up as might be expected. I mention the name “Sid” Farrar, my boyhood’s idol. The ladies become sympathetic. When I stoutly declared that I had never fallen in love with a prima donna during four decades as a music reporter, my “specialty” being admiration of the mothers of singers, the air is charged with interrogation-marks. Why hasn’t some authoritative pen been employed in behalf of the mother of the singer who has succeeded? What a theme! What peeps into a family inferno! I think that Mrs. Farrar could write a better book about her brilliant daughter than did Mrs. Lou Tellegen of herself.

Another time I talk with Frieda Hempel, who is one of the rapidly dwindling race of artists who know Mozart as well as Donizetti. What a Marguerite she would be! On the train she is like her contemporaries. She sits. She chats. For all I know, she may doze. Singers are very human. To fancy them as “gloomy, grand, and peculiar” is to imagine a vain thing. In private they behave like their butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. If they have one weakness peculiar to their tribe, it is never to read newspaper criticism of their performances! This is discouraging for music-critics. But the public likes sentimental flimflam, and the opera singer is pictured as a strange and fearful bird of prey; when seen at close range she is in reality a domesticated fowl. The much-advertised artistic temperament is only intermittent; even arrant bohemians are normal at least twice every twenty-four hours.

The call is sounded. Again New York! A jumble of voices is heard in the smoking-compartment. “If you hadn’t played that trump!”--it is Judels speaking. “Oh!” groans Papa Siedle. Scotti is now whistling the Rataplan. The blond Ordynski, having wished the Polish curse on Otto Weil--“may you have hangnails and dandruff!”--dons his greatcoat. “Addio, Hunekero!” sings Caruso. After refusing Ned Ziegler’s kind offer of “First Aid to Flatbushers,” which means his private car, I find myself alone on the chilly concourse. The hour of disillusionment, three past midnight. I’ve been on and off wheels with Caruso for twelve times sixty minutes. I ponder Flatbush and the possibilities of getting there by dawn. The scrubwomen are at work, a new postwoman saunters along. The luncheon-room cat rubs against me, almost coos with joy. I slink away, being superstitious regarding cherry-colored cats, step-ladders, and cross-eyed theatre managers. (I am writting plays.) Then, resigned to the inevitable, I seek my trusty Glenn Curtiss hydro-aeroplane, which is anchored in the Thirty-third Street enclosure, and fly home to Flatbush-by-the-Sea. I’ve had a crowded and enjoyable day.

XV

SING AND GROW VOICELESS

Sing and grow voiceless! Why not? We know of a dozen methods that are guaranteed to ruin even a Rose Ponselle vocal equipment in thirty lessons by mail, better known as absent treatment. We have had over forty years’ experience in the fair land of song, a scarred battle-field strewn with the shards and wrecks of beautiful voices and high hopes. In no sphere of music are there so many sharks, cormorants, swindlers, humbugs, criminals, as in the ranks of vocal teaching--so-called. The hard-earned, carefully saved money of parents is extorted from victims, who usually return home with health impaired, voices gone, even worse. It is pitiful. It is cruel. What are you going to do about it? The profession of medicine is protected. Why not music? Malpractice is swiftly punished. Why not lock up the rascals who ruin a voice and get money under false pretenses? No, chewing gum in public is of far more importance to people; now a national neurosis, it will soon be elevated to the dignity of a Fine Art. If we had our way we should drive every one of these vocal parasites who infest the temple of music into the swamp of public odium.

Now, having worked off my chronic bad humor, let us look at the matter through the spectacles of the absurd. There is a comic side to everything, from a volcano to a prohibitionist. The fake singing-teachers are as funny as their fakery is pernicious.

I am reminded of all the pamphlets from How to be Happy Though Divorced, How to Starve and Grow Fat when I read the pompous pronouncements of certain Voice Builders. I confess that I am not an expert in vocal hygiene, but I have heard all the great men and women for the past half-century who have made this drab, dreary planet worth living on with their beautiful voices. And that is a brevet of taste. Standards. Without standards we critically perish, says, in effect, Mr. Brownell. I also confess that I don’t know a resonator from a refrigerator, or the difference between a lynx and a larynx. Both growl, I believe, if you rub them the wrong way. I have not the science of W. J. Henderson or Holbrook Curtis. But I do know when a singer slathers her phrases or sings above or below pitch--and there are more who sing sharp than you think. The main thing is that I criticise by ear, not with a laryngoscope or a mirror to peep at the breath-control.

Herbert Witherspoon, not unknown to fame as an operatic artist and concert singer, summed up for me the situation in a phrase. “Opera singers open their mouths too wide.” Hence screaming and bawling which nearly splits sensitive ears. That the public likes shouting on top-tones is only evidence of the public’s appalling taste. Noise, noise, noise! We worship noise in America. Another neurosis. Noise the Ultimate Vulgarity. At last the subway voice has penetrated our opera-houses; charmless, voiceless, vicious. The three dramatic unities in the modern theatre have resolved themselves into Legs, Glitter, Buncombe. On the lyric stage the chief unit is yelling. No wonder they sing and grow voiceless. Purdon Robinson, himself a concert singer of note, in the course of an instructive lecture recently remarked: “My own opinion, backed by thirty years of singing and teaching, has resulted in the belief that a mechanical method makes a mechanical singer”; and “after the voice has been placed and one has it under control, forget it when singing. Try to get at the composer’s meaning, realizing that words in themselves mean little, and that notes in music are simply the symbols by which musical ideas are indicated.” For the average vocalist words are not symbols but cymbals. But Mr. Robinson’s words are golden.

Years ago (do sit still a moment, this is not a spun-out story of my life!) a young woman consulted me about a vocal master. She was a choir singer from the remote South, her parents poor as brewery mice--are to be--and she thought she had a remarkable voice. I say “thought.” Care killed a cat. Thought never slew a larynx. I played a hymn tune. She sang. I shuddered, but was relieved when she told me that her name was Elvina Crow. After all, there is something to be said for Prof. Slawkenbergius and his theory of names as set forth by the veracious Rev. Laurence Sterne. I suggested that if she decided on a career she change her name to “Sgallinacciare,” which appropriately enough means to crow; also a faulty method of singing. “Signorina Sgallinacciare!” How that would ring in the credulous ears of the dear old deluded public, which, Hamlet-like, doesn’t know a hawk from a hand-saw, or, if you prefer, a hernshaw. Shriek and grow rich! Nothing else matters but “mazuma” in the box-office of the Seven Deadly Arts.

It must have been a month after our interview that Miss Crow again visited me. I was at the time assistant professor of applied paleontology, and mightily interested in the psychic life of micro-organisms, so naturally singers came first on the list. Into my large and sympathetic tympani Elvina poured a tale, not of woe, but of thrilling truth. This is not the first time I have related it, yet it improves on repetition, just because of its probability. Not discouraged by my slurring, even portamento, criticism of her voice, the lone girl bravely started to find out the truth herself; the real test of character. She said that her first experience was in the studio of a maestro. She had a letter to him which he barely read. In a rich Italian brogue he bade her be seated. He wore a velvet jacket. He was bald. He smoked cigarettes. The type was perfect.

“I giva da lesson in fiva minuta,” he explained, and then scowled at a tall girl who faced a mirror in a guilty manner as her eyes computed the possible value of the newcomer’s gown. “Must I sit here like a fool?” the professor angrily demanded. His pupil opened her mouth. Elvina eagerly listened. But no sound escaped the lips of the other girl. She gazed into the mirror and mouthed and grimaced, and almost, though not quite, formed words. “Faster,” cried the teacher at the keyboard. The student’s lips moved like a praying mill; she clicked her teeth castanet fashion; and at last with a wild bang on the keyboard the voiceless aria ended. The maestro knitted his dyed eyebrows. “Vara fair, not presto assai. You sing without expression. You are too cold--what shall I call it?” A husky voice asked: “Shall I try it over again?” “Dio mio! girl, how dare you speak after singing such a difficult aria from Rossini’s Cinderella? Your vocal pores are open, you perspire with your lungs--pouf! You die of the inflammatus by, by”--he impatiently pulled at his large nose. “The Inflammatus by Rossini, you mean!” interposed Elvina. “How? No, no, ah! by pneumonia, that’s it.” And he bustled from the instrument. Throwing an old bearskin rug over his speechless singer, he led her to a chair, admonishing her: “Now perspire!” She coughed in a terrifying way while the maestro imperturbably explained his method to Elvina. He did not permit his pupils to open their mouths for a year, during which time he put them through a severe throat and lung drill. All songs were given in vocal miming, with due facial expression, and the ventriloquist was adduced as the highest type of masterly vocal control, for a ventriloquist can sing in his stomach without moving a muscle of his face. Think of Fred Stone and his Very Good Eddie. The Signor became eloquent. Had the young Miss Elvina--Corpo di Baccho! what a pretty name!--had she a little money for tuition? One thousand dollars. Dirt cheap. A second Patti she would become for the money. Sign a contract with him for ten years. Then the movies for a year so that her stage nervousness would wear off, then vaudeville, et puis donc--grand opera. A ravishing prospect. He rolled his eyes ecstatically as he took Elvina’s ten-dollar bill. She escaped. To her taste the method seemed a trifle too swift.

In another part of the town she found the atelier of Mme. Boche. She was about to enter the anteroom unannounced when she heard low moaning sounds, which presently increased in volume and intensity, then suddenly died away in a sickening style. It seemed as if some animal were undergoing vivisection, and Elvina, her sympathies aroused, pushed open the door without knocking. It was a strange sight that met her indignant gaze, a sight that set her wondering, and soon smiling. On a huge mattress, which occupied half the room, were a dozen girls in seaside bathing costume. They lay on their backs, and upon their diaphragms rested twenty-pound weights, and from their closed lips issued the moans made by their respiration. The Madame, a high-nosed old dame, stood by, rattan cane in hand, and in militarist accents gave her commands: “One, two, three--inhale! Hold breath! Shoulders--up! Relax! Down!” And the class went patiently through this ventral drill until completely fagged. After the order to arise a babel of chatter ensued as Elvina told the Madame of her aspirations and the amount of cash she possessed.

“Na! I have the only system for the breathing. My pupils know how to breathe, how to breathe, and, again--how to breathe. There is one necessary thing in singing, the breath. If my pupils can’t stand my system I send them forth.”

Elvina positively feared this martinet. Her pupils’ figures were lanky. She mildly inquired when they sang. “What, sing? Niemals, never, jammai, jamais de la leben! You heard them breathing? Did they breathe or no?” Then turning to her class she resumed: “Young ladies, attention! Fall down! Relax!” Elvina slipped away, muttering as she went: “Calisthenics, not art.” It had cost her another ten dollars.

After a hurried Automat luncheon she proceeded to a crosstown street, the address of which she had read in the newspapers. The window displayed this sign, “Professor Erasmus Brick, Voice Builder.” He was a burly gentleman, the Prof. His linen was not irreproachable, his forehead looked like a mansard roof, and his eyes were shrewd. She named her errand, confided her doubts, hinted at the poverty of her purse. He laughed, and his voice restored her courage, if not her confidence. “My dear Miss, cast your eye round this room and see if I have a piano, a looking-glass, a pulsometer, or any other foreign fiddle-faddle of those Signors or Fraus. I build the voice up into the perfect thing the good Lord intended it to be, and without any extry fixin’s or bricks and mortar. The job is simple if you know how. All this gabble about vocal registers and nasal emission makes me tired. I build up a voice on the word ‘Moo’; jest keep ’em right at that word till the old cow--so to speak--dies of the tune. While you sing I work this pocket-fan. I use it to fan away the breath as you sing ‘Moo.’ By this means the lungs are unobstructed and the voice grows of its free accord. My theory is that the breath kills the voice--Moo!” Elvina passed out, and in the hall a phonograph hoarsely sang: “Do, re, mi, fa, sol. Five dollars. Please put the cash on the mantelpiece.” “That’s a dollar a note,” she calculated. She paid, and her bank-roll became ominously slender.

She found Mlle. Pinson in her apartment, small, stuffy, crowded with rickety furniture, books, china, music, even a parrot. The lady was drinking chocolate. “V’là, Mamselle! I’ve purchased a frugal meal, is it not? I diet myself as carefully as in the days when I was leading soprano at the Grand Opera. Hélas! those miserable days when I was so happy. Oh, Paris! Now sing ‘la,’ Mamselle. No, no, louder, please. C’est bon. You must know that when you sing correctly the vibrations travel to the knee-caps. I test them and know exactly if the tone is formed naturally or not. My vibratory system is the only true one. Yes, twenty dollars will be enough for this time. You have a sweet voice, my dear, and I’ll make a great singer of you in five years.” Elvina faintly asked: “When do I begin on songs?” “What! Songs? Ah! those Americans, they are always in a hurry, what you call get rich in a week! My child, you can’t hurry art. Bonsoir, Mamselle! To-morrow at nine, precisely, and I’ll test your knee-caps. Take one of my pamphlets. Vibration, vibration, vibration!” The parrot opened its beak: “Vibration, vibration, vibration. I’m in for life, chérie. Take me out of jail, chérie.” Elvina sat in a Madison Avenue tram and read the booklet of Mlle. Mimi Pinson, entitled Hygiene for Voiceless Singers. Numerous rules and “Don’ts,” ending with, “Don’t marry. Husbands of opera-singers always collect their wives’ salaries. Vibrate when you breathe. You may achieve fame and happiness. Think blue! It is the color of hope. Vogue la galère!”

“This is becoming monotonous,” said Elvina aloud, and gritting her teeth she packed her duds and returned to her home town with only one dollar and twenty-five cents in her pocket. However, family affection, above all family flapjacks, restored her jarred nerves to their normal pitch. From time to time she sends me programmes of concerts in which she is described: “Our native song-bird, Elvina, Prima Donna Dissoluta.” As Esther Beautiful Queen (newly reorchestrated by Stravinsky) she made a “real hit.” She may have exaggerated a little in her confidences, but I can personally vouch for the heavy weights on pupils’ chests to promote breathlessness. There was advocated such a vocal system two or three decades ago in New York. Sing and grow voiceless! Basta!

XVI

ANATOLE FRANCE: THE LAST PHASE

Anatole France is seventy-six years old, but his mind is still vigorous, if that word be not too brisk when applied to such a subtle, supple, undulating intelligence as his. He now writes prose glowing with patriotism. Like the late Remy de Gourmont he shed his cynic’s skin when war invaded his beloved land. And it was not the first time that he, a writer of humanitarian impulses, opened the door of his ivory tower and descended into the stormy arena; witness the Dreyfus case. However, it would be idle to deny that his best work is well behind him. Prefaces to letters to distinguished men and women he occasionally publishes, such as Sur la Voie Glorieuse, or Ce que disent nos morts; but the Anatole France of La Révolte des Anges seems to have vanished forever. In the vast whirlwind of European events his scepticism, irony, and pessimism have given way to pity and tenderness for human suffering. The son of the bookseller Thibaut may figure, some day, in a modern hagiography of those lay-saints who fought for a new spiritual freedom.

The subject-matter composing Sur la Voie Glorieuse is altogether patriotic and contains much that is striking. The cloven hoof of the original faun that lurks somewhere in this Frenchman’s temperament is shown in a passage wherein he groups the Christmas festival with other antique festivals and symbols of Adonis and Mithra. A pagan to the end. Possibly the best pages are devoted to a free translation from Herodotus, a dialogue between the potentate Xerxes and a Spartan slave. The moral rings clear. Of quite different material is fashioned The Revolt of the Angels. We cannot conscientiously recommend the fiction to elderly persons of either sex, though, no doubt, it is favorite reading of the “advanced” college girl. What would be vulgarity in another writer is turned to favor and prettiness by the wand of the Gallic enchanter. Violence, rapine, hissing irony, and Rabelaisian episodes make a feast for lovers of Anatolian literature. Those who have retained any old-fashioned prejudices concerning propriety--morality is out of the running--may expect to be shocked. Has he not said: “Man, seek not to know thyself! Man is not a reasoning animal.”