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Musical Courier 1898-05-25: Vol 36 Iss 951, 1898
30 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 5. See the scan on archive.org.
1THE close of the season with Sembrich's brilliant performances in the Italian Opera Stagione in the Carl Theatre comes laden with "arrears" that I have long promised to write of. There never has been a season when so much of importance has come crowding one event upon the other. But before I touch upon these I must write of some Americans here in fulfillment of promises made long since, but to which many other demands on my time have prevented earlier attention.
3The first in order come the Misses Schuyler, especially Miss Idalia Schuyler. The latter is from Cincinnati, if I mistake not, and is studying singing with Madame Materna, who, in her picturesque villa in the historic and romantic neighborhood of the quaint old "Heiligenstadt," full of memories of Beethoven, Schubert and Grillparzer, in the outer suburbs of Vienna, is now devoting her time and the results of her unparalleled experience to teaching and the preparation of worthy talent for the music drama.
5Madame Materna, although a born songstress, with a vocal organ as yet unequaled, attributes all she really ever learned in voice placing to the Marchesi method, which is only, after all, synonymous with old Italian principles of placing the voice as far forward in the mouth as possible, thus preventing overstraining the larynx and the vocal cords—so often the cause, alas! of premature failure and sudden breakdown of most promising singers earlier in their career than any other cause would warrant. Madame Materna deprecates the great length of time and amount of money spent in unnecessarily prolonging the period of study before engagements are procured. Madame Materna dubs the whole modern plan of study as a catch-penny system in a large degree. She points to Miss Schuyler as an example of a young student with talent, industry and energy, whom she considers ready for the stage after a period of little more than a year's study. Not that she means study is completed and finished—"that never ceases with any true artist," says she, "but she is now prepared to study further with a constantly increasing advantage to herself on the stage. One of the most salient features of learning any art is routine; and where can a dramatic singer learn routine except on the operatic stage? Most singers learn after six years of study that the most necessary elements of operatic singing on the stage have first to be begun on the stage. To be sure they can trill and turn off roulade after roulade; they have their tones all placed." They know the chief arias of a dozen or more operas, but where do they find themselves when first launched before a critical public on the stage with old and practiced operatic singers, an infallible orchestra and nothing but the knowledge of well-placed tones, trills, passages and a few well learned arias to support them?
7What then becomes of the ensemble singing? Where does their voice even disappear and all they thought they knew so well when the orchestra marches steadily onward with unfailing tempo, leaving them halting, stammering, frightened, confused and in a panic, forgetting their parts, feeling stiff, immovable and embarrassed in the simplest outward gestures of acting or the most ordinary, best recognized "unities of the drama?" Many singers have proven themselves apt students and talented who completely lose themselves in the first "ensemble" of the whole. Madame Materna considers this training as necessary as all other preliminaries, and encourages her pupils to all possible concentration of their forces for two years study at the most in preparation. After two or three roles are well studied she interests herself and encourages her pupils in seeking engagements for the development of "routine" study, not necessarily at first on any prominent stage in a great capital, but rather in smaller towns for one year, where the public do not pay so much and are more lenient with young débutantes.
9Miss Schuyler prepared three or four operatic roles in one year. She had already a fair knowledge of the languages. She inherits a musical talent from her father, in whose home she "tumbled about in a musical library" and atmosphere from her childhood, and with whom she mastered the elements of theory and composition. Miss Schuyler has made a practical use of this study in composition. A very good aria, an "Ave Marie," with an arrangement for the organ and harp, has been well received in Vienna. It was dedicated to the Princess Stephanie, who is one of the first royal patrons of art in Austria. The princess accepted the dedication, and soon after it was sung in the "Leopold" Church, I think. "The Wanderer" is another song with a noble gait and clang which she dedicated to Mrs. Bartlett Tripp, the genial wife of our former American Ambassador. "Te Souviens Tu" was published, I think, by Oliver Ditson. These songs display an easy acquaintance of harmony and composition, if not a very great inventive genius. Miss Schuyler's best gifts lie in a dramatic direction. She has a fine personal presence, a good voice, learns easily, and Materna promises great things for her. She has won very valuable aid in securing notice and protection among the aristocracy in Vienna, that which is not accorded to many Americans here. Her home with her beautiful sister, who is studying in Vienna also with Materna, and who has a rich, mellow contralto voice, is delightful to mention—a quaint little cottage in the "Hohe Warte" section of "Heiligen-stadt," where they have collected many precious souvenirs of art in their travels.
11Another young American songstress here is one I have already mentioned, and of whom I prophesy the world will hear later on. Miss Helen Herbert is a brave, courageous, energetic, young girl, with a rich, warm, dark-colored mezzo soprano and a nationality which in art—especially music—is certainly promising. Of Hungarian-German parentage and born in America, there you have a combination which in itself is enough to produce a genius. I will dwell on Miss Herbert's personality a little, because, happily, she possesses the qualities which are necessary to constitute success. As Emerson declared that "success is a constitutional trait," it would be well if other women who are studying in Europe would cultivate what she has, and without which they will never be able to cope with European indifference toward Americans. So many young girls "go to the wall" for lack of it!—more the pity. With a dash of Magyar fire and dominance she has caught the American national spirit of true freedom and independence without losing womanliness and dignity—that freedom from false notions of feminine limitations in conservative Europe; a freedom which breeds the strong character and makes for righteousness and beauty in the life as well as in art. And, my dear young American friends, who come here relying on your talents, your good family, superior breeding and perhaps wealth, timid, modest, retiring and laid low by the first strains which point to difficulties, conscious of your real superiority, and therefore hurt so much the more by those who will obstinately ignore you, learn, I say, my young friends, to show a stanch front to these difficulties and overcome them. Even with American-Hungarian blood you may still have to learn, like the Hungarian, to "hold your own." If you have any idea in your pretty heads that agents are going to rush to you with engagements served in heaps on golden platters, which they place before you on their knees, dispel these ideas as quickly as possible, for I warn you now that, with a voice like Jenny Lind's and a colorature like Patti's, you will have to fight for all you get in Europe, and—yes, in America, too.
13If you imagine you have anything especially rare in your possession you may just as well disillusionize your self-estimation a little before the agents themselves tell you there are "thousands of others just like you," all confident of engagements. What do you imagine made Jenny Lind what she was? What has made the Patts, the Calvés, the Melbas, the De Reszkés what they are? Public recognition, in the greatest degree; and for this no one worked or fought harder to win than Jenny Lind herself, the greatest singer the world ever knew. I tell you the road to success is always a long, dreary battle, and the triumphs come to the strongest only. Do you imagine there never was a voice like Jenny Lind's? There are and have been plenty of them. It was Jenny Lind's personality more than anything else, which combined with a talent for work, an ideal in pursuit of art and a naturally good voice, which made her what she became. Think a little less of your voice, your trills, your roulades, your high C's, and stop a little to cultivate a personality. And what a personality Jenny Lind's was! Dignity, modesty, truth and beauty informed it! Courage and perseverance aided it, consequent happiness imbued it and a lofty purpose crowned it. Quit the terribly small, vain, petty existence you are leading in your self-adulation, or, perhaps, warped in petty jealousies and pettier aims of vain glory; yes, even at the expense of frightening or losing your friends (?) who are killing you with flattery, belittling your aims and thus effectually excluding you from the nobler world, perhaps of seclusion and solitude, but where alone true, great success lies.
15It seems strange after all that has been said and written that it should still be necessary to write to you like this—and yet the most of this is said for the especial benefit of one or two of my young acquaintances in Vienna who came to Europe to study in ignorance of what art demands of them, and more ignorant still of the European methods for killing off young "aspirants" such as we read of not long since in THE COURIER.
17Yes, one of these has been studying here six long years, has a rare voice and much else besides that ought to aid her, and is only to-day learning things that her teachers, if they were conscientious, ought long since to have told her. "We went to Italy only there to learn things we might just as well have learned of the teachers in Leipsic, and now that we are in Vienna we are just beginning to know things we ought to have known all along," say they.
19This seems a wide digression from Miss Herbert, but as it is she who led me hither I will now continue my account of her. I have shown that she has in her favor in springing from a race that "breeds poets, a singing race and a valiant one," and I hope I may be pardoned for dwelling upon the subject of personality at such length, for none of you, without being what she is, will attain what she will.
21Miss Herbert has been studying with a rising young teacher of Vienna—Garimberti—during the past two years, and has mastered a number of operatic roles. Garimberti adopts Italian and Marchesi principles in voice placing. Miss Herbert is also fully awake to the value of routine study. She learns her ensemble parts with an old, experienced orchestral director. She is also a pet protégé of Louis Saar, and I hear now and then of a possible future engagement with Grau. One of the famous Grünfeld brothers, who is a solo correpétitior in the Court Opera, studies her parts with her occasionally, and gives her the benefit of his valuable experience in dramatic, stage and ensemble "points."
23Beside having a wonderfully pleasing voice, Miss Herbert has plenty of dramatic fire, and her true "pente" is for dramatic singing. Roles from Mozart, Gounod, Massenet, Bizet ("Carmen") and Mascagni form her present repertory. I think she has the dramatic depth and quality suited to Wagnerian roles, but these she has not attempted as yet. She is one of the most convincing Carmens I have ever heard. A born Magyar, the gypsy element is not difficult for her to bring to her support, and Miss Herbert does not, like Renard, commit the mistake of belittling the part. Her Carmen is a woman who never descends to disgusting coarseness. She is a born, fiery, mad gypsy, borne along and carried away by an unquenchable, untamable, fiery spirit, who, cursed with the madness of that love which knows no law, dies a victim to the destiny of her character. Gay and amorous, she adds a touch of mobility to a fiery, passionate nature that lifts the role above the degradation it has received at the hands of some. Her Carmen is at times madly wicked, but never light, frivolous and, worse than all, "tame," or merely coquetish.
25I hear that Miss Herbert already has a number of engagements offered her, and think there is small doubt that she will achieve a real and lasting success in the best sense.
27Still another American who, although she comes last, by no means claims the least of our attention, is Miss Poddie Ross, with whom readers of THE COURIER have already become acquainted through Mr. Floersheim, in Berlin. Miss Ross had the ambitious task assigned her of singing at the Sarasate concert here this season, and that, too, when Sarasate was at his best. The latter goes without saying, so without stopping to describe his playing of the Zigeuner music, his Thomé's Variations or Fantaisie, or the wonderful Cantilene of the Chopin Nocturne, E flat major, I will confine my remarks to Miss Ross' début in Vienna. The latter announces herself unpretentiously as a "débutante from the Souvestre Italian School of Dresden"; later also she studied with Bimboni and Carignani (who is especially recommended by the well-known Italian publisher, Ricordi) for her operatic repertory.
29Miss Ross has a beautiful high soprano—a fresh, ringing, American voice—her colorature is exceedingly fine, and she has possibilities which look to a successful career. The criticisms here were highly laudatory, especially from the celebrated Ralbeck, who prophesied that we would hear more of her later on. Miss Ross' intentions at first were to devote herself entirely to the Italian opera and Italian singing, but since coming to Vienna she has become convinced of the necessity for singing German opera as well. As she is already fluent in the latter language she will study German ensemble and aria singing with one or more of Miss Herbert's teachers and artists. Her progress, I am told, is astonishing, and I believe Miss Ross herself considers her teaching in Vienna superior to that in other cities. Never before, she declares, has she studied singing where so much is required and exacted with the most consummate skill. As she has devoted a
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