ied these operas
in order to sing them, and when you take into consideration that they
were not "music dramas" that require really more proficiency in acting
than in singing, but the Italian operas, requiring most perfect
=coloratura= work, and the Wagner operas, demanding heavy =dramatic=
singing, I think you must be convinced that if early study were
injurious to the voice, these great "songsters" would not be living
examples of my assertion.

Someone will say, "This may be the case with women, but what of the
men?"

We find the great German tenor, Albert Nieman, singing the grand opera
roles at eighteen.

Heinrich Vogl, styled the "Interpreter of Wagner," sang these opera
roles at the age of twenty.

Italo Campanini was singing in grand opera at twenty-one.

Guilliam Ibos, the grand French tenor, and Van Dyck, were both singing
the grand opera roles at the age of twenty-two.

Jean de Reszke was soloist at the cathedral at Warsaw at the age of
=twelve=, and was singing in grand opera at twenty-two. I am sure many of
you have heard him sing after his forty-fifth year, and will not deny
that he is both singer and artist.

Then I hear someone say, "Perhaps their voices did not change, as they
were tenors." There is =some= change at maturity in =all voices=. Very well,
what about Victor Maurel? He was singing the grand opera roles at
twenty-one. Jean Baptiste Faure took up the study of the voice at
thirteen, and at twenty-two =created= the part of Mephistopheles in Faust.

These men and women, whose names stand out as brilliant stars in the
firmament of music, studied and sang before and in their early teens,
and these are the voices that have been everlasting.

Within the past six or eight years some beautiful singers have appeared
in the grand opera--one tenor who claims to have studied less than six
months before he appeared in grand opera, and a soprano, making the same
claim, and this study is supposed to have taken place after they were
out of their teens. It will be of interest to wait and watch these
voices to see if they will withstand the wear of twenty-five years'
service, and still be beautiful, or like the fire-fly, radiate their
beautiful light but for a moment and then disappear.

SINGING LESSONS AS A HEALTH CULTURE.

"I should like to take up the study of voice culture, but am not very
strong."

That is the very reason you should take up singing. I have seen anaemic
girls take up th