CHAPTER III

WHY SINGERS ARE SCARCE

The career of a singer is one offering a certain number of prizes but many, many blanks, and only those possessed of the most unmistakable natural gifts and ready to work tremendously hard should ever be encouraged to embark upon it. Hard work, beyond everything, is essential if success is to be achieved, and it is here, I am afraid, that so many of our modern students fail.

Imbued with the eager impatient spirit of these headlong days, they want to do things too quickly, and are unwilling to submit to the toil and drudgery which are none the less as necessary as ever if really solid results are to be achieved. It has even been suggested that to this circumstance may be traced that scarcity of great singers nowadays of which we hear so often.

True, more vocalists than ever before, probably, are inviting attention at the present time, but how few of them can be reckoned in the first class? Doubtless it is easy to exaggerate in this matter. Seen through the mists of time the figures of the past always tend to assume heroic proportions.

Making due allowance, however, in this respect, are we really the victims of hallucination in thinking that great singers are fewer nowadays than formerly? It would be pleasant to think so, but I am afraid that the facts point the other way.

What, then, is the explanation? Different authorities would doubtless suggest different answers, but most, I fancy, would agree that lack of adequate study has had not a little to do with the matter.

Porpora, we all know, kept Caffarelli for five years to one page of exercises, and at the end of that time told him that he was the greatest singer in Europe. It would be amusing to learn the experience of a modern teacher who proposed to one of his pupils the adoption of the same course. The great Patti, who told me I was her successor, also said to me that we artists will still be learning when we are too old to sing.

The average vocal student of to-day considers himself a finished artist at a time when he would be reckoned just qualified to begin serious study by the teachers of an earlier period.

While no amount of training will make fine voices out of poor material, the history of singing furnishes numerous instances--that of Pasta is one of the best known--in which limited natural powers have been developed to an astonishing degree by study and training. Nowadays I am afraid it is the converse of this which is more frequently illustrated, and one hears only too often of fine natural voices which have been steadily ruined by the manner in which they are used.

Modern music has also, no doubt, had its influence--not so much because it is harmful to the voice in itself, but simply because it is possible to sing it (after a fashion) without such prolonged study and exercise as that of the older school absolutely necessitated.

Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and the rest of the old masters have indeed been avenged in a wholly unanticipated manner. Precisely as the music of their school has fallen in favour has the power been lost of singing that of the so-called higher kind which has taken its place.