Confessions of an Opera Singer

The Bohemian, Hungarian and Croatian singers nearly always add to one's joy in work by eating garlic. The "high dramatic" soprano in my next engagement was from Croatia. The fir...

During that summer Baron S---- died in Munich. This of course was a great blow to me and I did not know what I could do about my contract. I went to Berlin to see Herr Harder, w...

One of the first things you do on arriving at a new residence in Germany is to acquaint the police of your presence. This is called _Anmeldung_. It is a fearsome experience and...

In due time we set out for London. One of our cousins had found us delightful diggings in M---- Street, which I was able to enjoy, as dear Mr. and Mrs. Jones sent me an extra ch...

The Grand Duke was always very good to me. He liked talking English with my sister and me, and always referred to the Germans as "they," never as "we." He asked me to the palace...

Early the next morning, before we were up, our English friend kindly came to see us, and with her help we soon discovered just what we were looking for, in an eminently respecta...

At the beginning of the season, the director's family was still in the country, where they remained until the opera had been running for some time. We met his wife and daughter...

We had also what is known as _Abstecher_, on off nights. That is, performances in a neighbouring and still smaller town about once a month. We would travel altogether, taking ou...

We played continuously nine months from September to June, and then scattered for the holidays. I often went to Munich for the Wagnerian _Festspiel_. We have many German relativ...

The second year of my first engagement was drawing to a close, and I was much exercised over the next step. I wanted to try for one of the _Hoftheaters_, not the very largest an...

One factor in my success was the beautiful wardrobe I was enabled to have through the kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Frank S. Jones. The first clothes I ordered from Marie Muelle in P...

At first I had no companionship and very little recreation, beyond the ever fresh wonder and delight of the Paris streets as I saw them in my daily constitutional. One day I wen...

I had to sing _Azucena_, my first part on any stage, without rehearsal. The reason for this dawned upon me afterwards. Though I sang German well by this time, my conversational...

By the first of December I had broken the back of the German declensions, understood a good part of an ordinary conversation, and had painfully acquired three or four rôles in G...

All this time I was working very hard at the opera. Our repertoire was very large, including nearly all the Italian operas, from Verdi to Wolf-Ferrari, and the German operas fro...

I crossed on one of the steady big boats of the Atlantic Transport Line. I remember only one passenger, a boy of even then such personal magnetism that he stands out in my recol...

After a few months of strenuous endeavour on my part, I began to be a little dissatisfied and restless. I saw clearly that in a year's time, working at such pressure, I should h...

That winter in New York was a revealing experience to me in many ways. Numbers of things assumed different values in my estimation. One of the first new things I learned was the...

"When I make my début" was the phrase that I had heard so often on the lips of my American fellow students. Each one had chosen her opera house, and decided in which rôle she wo...

The first of September, without a word of German, I set out for Berlin. My mother had come over during the preceding Spring, to make her home in Paris with my sculptor brother C...

I was very young and I was engaged to be married. We had just lost our money in rather dramatic fashion, and we were all doing what we could to supply the sudden deficit. My sis...

If you make a hit with the audience your residence in the town is made very pleasant. Even the conductors and motormen of the street cars used to greet me as they passed and all...

I was on the whole very happy in Darmstadt. All the leading contralto work came to me by right, and it was brightened by an occasional rôle in operetta. They found they could us...