a
Company she was engaged for dramatic roles at the Metropolitan, and has
become a great favorite.

[Illustration: MME. FLORENCE EASTON.

(C) Mishkin.]

THE OPEN DOOR TO OPERA

MME. FLORENCE EASTON

What is the open door to opera in America? Is there an open door, and if
not, how can one be made? Who may go through that door and what are the
terms of admission? These are questions which thousands of young
American opera aspirants are asking just now.

The prospect of singing at a great opera house is so alluring and the
reward in money is often so great that students center their attentions
upon the grand prize and are willing to take a chance of winning, even
though they know that only one in a very few may succeed and then often
at bitter sacrifice.

The question is a most interesting one to me, as I think that I know
what the open door to opera in this country might be--what it may be if
enough patriotic Americans could be found to cut through the hard walls
of materialism, conventionalism and indifference. It lies through the
small opera company--the only real and great school which the opera
singer of the future can have.

THE SCHOOL OF PRIME DONNE

In European countries there are innumerable small companies capable of
giving good opera which the people enjoy quite as thoroughly as the
metropolitan audiences of the world enjoy the opera which commands the
best singers of the times. For years these small opera companies have
been the training schools of the great singers. Not to have gone through
such a school was as damaging an admission as that of not having gone
through a college would be to a college professor applying for a new
position. Lilli Lehmann, Schumann-Heink, Ruffo, Campanini, Jenny Lind,
Patti, all are graduates of these schools of practice.

In America there seems to have existed for years a kind of prejudice,
bred of ignorance, against all opera companies except those employing
all-star casts in the biggest theatres in the biggest cities. This
existed, despite the fact that these secondary opera companies often put
on opera that was superior to the best that was to be heard in some
Italian, German and French cities which possessed opera companies that
stood very high in the estimation of Americans who had never heard them.
It was once actually the case that the fact that a singer had once sung
in a smaller opera company prevented her from aspiring to sing in a
great opera com