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If a different standard for the criticism of vocalization existed before 1600 there is no reason why there should not after 1917. As a matter of fact, maugre much authoritative opinion to the contrary, a different standard does exist. In certain respects the new standard is taken for granted. We do not, for example, expect to hear male sopranos at the opera.
A few months later, when Patti gave one of her innumerable farewell performances, I was again forced to admit that she is the greatest of living lyric sopranos, but took the liberty to express my conviction that "the charm of her voice is almost as purely sensuous as the beauty of a dewdrop or a diamond reflecting the prismatic colors of sunlight."
She has served half the sopranos in Europe she won't go to contraltos. I possess her because I outbid all rivals for her services. As a hairdresser she is unequalled. And it's so much nicer not being forced to call in a coiffeur in every town! It was she who invented my 'Elsa' coiffure. Perhaps you remember it?" "Perfectly. By the way, when do you recommence your engagements?"
He shrugged his shoulders, and his eyes flashed scornfully over the stage and the singers. "Now ladies, attention if you please! Look at me keep your eyes on my baton! Now piano!" The voices of the sopranos rose softly. "Crescendo!" They increased. "Donnerwetter! May the devil take you! Crescendo, I say! Crescendo! Do you need all day to make crescendo?"
I am a little critical, so far as music is concerned, and you have two sopranos outside who deafen me with their shrieks." "It is Marguerite Mottet and her sister. Since our cure has taken to teaching them, they bore us to death, coming here and singing their fine songs. One of these days I shall notify them to leave."
My dear Archie, that's the high voice we dream of; so pure and yet so virile and human. That combination hardly ever happens with sopranos." Ottenburg sat down and turned to the doctor, speaking calmly and trying to dispel his friend's manifest bewilderment.
The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance, the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty. Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms; and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed there.
Contemporary critics appear to have been highly pleased with the result but there is some excuse for H. T. Finck's impatience, expressed in "Songs and Song Writers": "The favourites of the eighteenth-century Italian audiences were artificial male sopranos, like Farinelli, who was frantically applauded for such circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on to a note, or racing with an orchestra and getting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who entertained his audiences by singing, in one breath, a chromatic chain of trills up and down two octaves.
An actress, even the most gifted, has no such 'following. The greatest dramatic sopranos that ever sing Brunhilde and Kundry enjoy no such popularity. It belongs exclusively to the nightingale primadonnas, whose voices enchant the ear if they do not always stir the blood. It may be explicable, but no explanation is at all necessary, since the fact cannot be disputed.
Even the fashionable sopranos and contraltos of Chicago, St. Paul, and St. He was not at all above helping a very lame singer across, if her husband's check-book warranted it. He had a whole bag of tricks for stupid people, "life-preservers," he called them. "Cheap repairs for a cheap 'un," he used to say, but the husbands never found the repairs very cheap.
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