ally, I consider a crime, that the
state should prohibit.

All the inflexibility and unskilfulness, mistakes and deficiencies,
which were formerly disclosed during a long course of study, do not
appear now, under the factory system, until the student's public
career has begun. There can be no question of correcting them, for
there is no time, no teacher, no critic; and the executant has learned
nothing, absolutely nothing, whereby he could undertake to distinguish
or correct them.

The incompetence and lack of talent whitewashed over by the factory
concern lose only too soon their plausible brilliancy. A failure in
life is generally the sad end of such a factory product; and to
factory methods the whole art of song is more and more given over as a
sacrifice.

I cannot stand by and see these things with indifference. My artistic
conscience urges me to disclose all that I have learned and that has
become clear to me in the course of my career, for the benefit of art;
and to give up my "secrets," which seem to be secrets only because
students so rarely pursue the path of proper study to its end. If
artists, often such only in name, come to a realization of their
deficiencies, they lack only too frequently the courage to acknowledge
them to others. Not until we artists all reach the point when we can
take counsel with each other about our mistakes and deficiencies, and
discuss the means for overcoming them, putting our pride in our
pockets, will bad singing and inartistic effort be checked, and our
noble art of singing come into its rights again.

MY TITLE TO WRITE ON THE ART OF SONG

Rarely are so many desirable and necessary antecedents united as in my
case.

The child of two singers, my mother being gifted musically quite out
of the common, and active for many years not only as a dramatic
singer, but also as a harp virtuoso, I, with my sister Marie, received
a very careful musical education; and later a notable course of
instruction in singing from her. From my fifth year on I listened
daily to singing lessons; from my ninth year I played accompaniments
on the pianoforte, sang all the missing parts, in French, Italian,
German, and Bohemian; got thoroughly familiar with all the operas, and
very soon knew how to tell good singing from bad. Our mother took
care, too, that we should hear all the visiting notabilities of that
time in opera as well as in concert; and there were many of them every
year at the Deutsch