romise, opera, in which
other arts as well have their share and in which Wagner would have us
see the supreme form of art. Again something is lost; we lose more and
more, perhaps for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, in
order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings are
written partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man. For the
sake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, we
have lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice in
the gain, by all means; but not without some consciousness of the loss,
not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem has
been found.

An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a
singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who
wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same
time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter
between poetry and the world.

Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs.
Brown-Potter, without being really like either; she is small,
exuberantly blonde, her head is surrounded by masses of loosely twisted
blonde hair; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or
passionate, or cruel, or watchful; a large nose, an intent, eloquent
mouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figure
vaguely, supple to every movement. When she sings, she has an old,
high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean. When I
heard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to
her; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered herself
to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious of that
image of herself which came back to her out of the mirror: it was
herself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which she
was evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement. Her voice is
strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer;
her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the
temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and
sets her whole being violently and delicately before you. She makes a
drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her
rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as much
with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the
melody of a pic