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"Oh, how jolly!" they murmur; and they hurry in from the conservatory, and come up from the stairs, and go and fetch each other from all over the house, and crowd into the drawing-room, and sit round, all smirking in anticipation. Then Harris begins. Well, you don't look for much of a voice in a comic song. You don't expect correct phrasing or vocalization.
Study had enabled her to execute with fluency and correctness the chromatic scales, ascending and descending, and it was by sheer hard practice that she learned to swell and diminish her accents; to emit tones full, large, and free from nasal or guttural sounds, to manage her respiration skillfully, and to seize the delicate shades of vocalization.
In the emission of a mellow tone, the use of the portamento, in the treatment of scales, of trills, and of other ornaments, and in facile vocalization in general, all nations can learn from the Italians. But the Italian method does not go far enough. It does not meet the demands of the modern opera and the modern music-drama.
Two periods in the development of the language may be clearly distinguished. In the older period the vocalization of the language was completely carried out, and the collision of two consonants was almost without exception avoided.
The division of the vocal scale into registers is not an artifice. It is Nature's method of assisting vocalization, her way of relieving the strain of the voice. A certain portion of the vocal scale lies naturally in the chest register. But if this open adjustment is carried up too far, the tones are strained and eventually ruined.
Titiens regarded ornamentation as merely an agreeable adjunct in vocalization; and in the music of Valentine she sang only what the composer had set down neither more nor less but that was accomplished to perfection. As an actress, her tall, stately, elegant figure was admirably calculated to personate the tragic heroines of opera.
Although I prefer to think of Mrs. Walters as a singer, owing to her unaccountable powers of reminiscential vocalization, I have upon occasion classified her among the waders; and certainly, upon the day when my engagement to Georgiana transpired, she waded not only all around the town but all over it, sustained by a buoyancy of spirit that enabled her to keep her head above water in depths where her feet no longer touched the bottom.
The year after this Henrietta lost her father, and she went to Prague with her mother, where she played children's parts under Weber, then chef d'orchestre. When she had attained the proper age she was admitted to the Prague Conservatory, and spent four years studying vocalization, the piano, and the elements of harmony.
Like Catalani, Persiani, and other distinguished singers, she was severely criticised toward the last of her operatic career for sacrificing good taste and dramatic truth to the technique of vocalization, but this is an extravagance so tempting that but few singers have been entirely exempt from it.
Without any embarrassment, she instantly improvised not merely the ornament, but the melody, pouring out a flood of dazzling vocalization which elicited noisy enthusiasm. It was not Rossini's "Il Barbiere," but it was successful in arousing a most flattering approbation. It may be fancied, however, that, when she sang the rôle of Rosina a second time, she knew the music as Rossini wrote it. Mlle.
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