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Some great actors, like some great musicians and authors, create out of their fulness. They cannot explain; they do not need to study; they create by instinct. Others, like Beethoven and Olive Fremstad, work and rework their material in the closet until it approaches perfection, when they expose it.
I have heard Olive Fremstad complain of the cooking in this hotel in Paris, or that hotel in New York, or the other hotel in Munich, and when she found herself in an apartment of her own she immediately set about to cook a few special dishes for herself. Two musicians I know not only keep restaurants in New York, but actually prepare the dinners themselves.
The world, the flesh, and the devil lurk in the larynx of the soprano or alto, and her place is before the footlights, not as a vocal staircase to paradise. I say this, knowing in my heart that nothing is so thrilling as Tristan and Isolde, and my memory-cells hold marvellous pictures of Lilli Lehmann, Milka Ternina, and Olive Fremstad.
Pasta and Mme. Fremstad, on the other hand, toiled very slowly towards fame. The former singer was an absolute failure when she first appeared in London and it took several years of hard work to make her the greatest lyric artist of her day. The great Jenny Lind retired from the stage completely defeated, only to return as the most popular singer of her time.
Her pose was hieratic as a sphinx when she watched the antics of the neurasthenic Herod. And her dance was one of the best I have yet seen, though Aino Acté's is said to rank them all. Wittich, Krull, Destinn, Rose, Walther, Acté, not one of them ever sang as sang Olive Fremstad at that memorable dress rehearsal of a certain Sunday morning in the Metropolitan Opera-House.
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