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Updated: July 28, 2025
Thus, at the end of this season, a young female chorister, engaged for the opening of the King's Theatre, found herself unable to quit Paris for want of funds. Mme. Malibran promised to sing at a concert which some of the leading vocalists gave for her benefit.
All prospective vocalists should study utterance by the speaking voice first and continue it when the study of singing has been begun. The words of every song, etc., should be mastered in all respects before they are sung.
Some of them may be tasteful; but the bulk seem weak and wearisome lack fine-flowing harmony, and can neither be joined in nor appreciated by many parties. The members of the choir are not a very lustrous class of vocalists; but they do their best, and appear to fight through the musical fog surrounding them very patiently. We believe the tunes are selected by the incumbent.
Among those who are most dogmatic on this and other questions there is often a plentiful lack of knowledge of the vocal organs; and some clever laryngologists must have learned, when they were carried into the discussion of this subject, that some knowledge of music and singing is absolutely indispensable, and that enough cannot be picked up, even by an able man, in a few minutes devoted to interrogating singers, especially when these vocalists have been trained by widely different methods, and have, as is too often the case, given but little real thought to the scientific, or, indeed, any other side of their art.
One of the sensations of the season was Titiens's rendering of "Casta Diva," in "Norma." Though many great vocalists had thrilled the public by their rendering of this celebrated aria, no one had ever yet given it the power so to excite the enthusiasm of the public. Mlle. Titiens performed also in the opera of "Oberon" for the first time, with great success.
I soon became tired of the extravagant execution of the vocalists, and I often amused my friends exceedingly by imitating the latest Parisian methods and the vulgar exaggerations with which the performances teemed. Those composers, moreover, who aimed at achieving success by adopting the style which was then in vogue, could not help, either, incurring my sarcastic criticism.
Trouble began at once with the vocalists for my first concert, fixed for 14th November, as the baritone, Hauser, who was to sing 'Wotan's Farewell' and Hans Sachs's 'Cobbler Song, was ill and had to be replaced by a voiceless though well-drilled vaudeville singer. In Eduard Devrient's opinion this made no difference.
Half an hour afterward he returned, and with a merry laugh laid in my lap two little brown fish, informing me that they were singing-fish, and that the music we had heard had been produced by shoals of these tiny vocalists then clinging to the bottom of our ship.
There was too much of an air of purpose about it to permit of the thought that it was a mere accident or coincidence; but whether it was a musical contest between rival vocalists, or the love song of a tomtit and his mate, I could not determine. Cunning in other ways, it would be strange if the tomtits did not display acuteness in the selection of nesting sites.
A good Elsa or Brünnhilde will get an engagement ten times sooner than a good Lucia; and young vocalists whose voices have not sufficient volume and power to cope with German dramatic music, will do well to devote their attention to the better class of French operas, for which there is a growing demand, as the French style has always been much more like the German than like the Italian, owing to the great attention paid by French composers, especially since the days of Gluck, to vigorous declamation and distinct enunciation.
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