bout the detail with diligent drudgery, and without that her
performances would go for nought. The singer pays for this intense
concentration. In "Tower of Ivory" Mrs. Atherton says that all Wagnerian
singers must pay heavily. Probably all good ones must. Charles Henry
Melzer has related somewhere that he first saw Mme. Fremstad on the
stage at Covent Garden, where between her scenes in some Wagner music
drama, lost in her role, utterly oblivious of stage hands or
fellow-artists, she paced up and down in the wings. At the moment he
decided that she was a great interpretative artist, and he had never
heard her sing. When she is singing a role she will not allow herself to
be interrupted; she holds no receptions between scenes. "Come back
after the opera," she says to her friends, and frequently then she is
too tired to see any one. She often drives home alone, a prey to
quivering nerves which keep her eyeballs rolling in ceaseless
torture--sleepless.

Nothing about the preparation of an opera is easy for Olive Fremstad;
the thought, the idea, does not register immediately in her brain. But
once she has achieved complete understanding of a role and thoroughly
mastered its music, the fire of her personality enables her easily to
set a standard. Is there another singer who can stand on the same
heights with Mme. Fremstad as Isolde, Venus, Elsa, Sieglinde, Kundry,
Armide, Bruennhilde in _Goetterdaemmerung_, or Salome? And are not these
the most difficult and trying roles in the repertoire of the lyric stage
to-day?

In one of her impatient moods--and they occur frequently--the singer
once complained of this fact. "How easy it is," she said, "for those who
make their successes as Marguerite and Mimi.... I should like to sing
those roles...." But the remark was made under a misconception of her
own personality. Mme. Fremstad would find Mimi and Marguerite much more
difficult to compass than Isolde and Kundry. She is by nature Northern
and heroic, and her physique is suited to the goddesses and heroines of
the Norse myths (it is a significant fact that she has never attempted
to sing Eva or Senta). Occasionally, as in Salome, she has been able to
exploit successfully another side of her talent, but in the rendering of
the grand, the noble, and the heroic, she has no equal on our stage. Yet
her Tosca always lacked nobility. There was something in the music which
never brought the quality out.

In such a part as Selika she see