Part 2 (1/2)

CHAPTER II

GIRLHOOD

In taking up vocal study, however, I had no fixed intention of going on the stage. All I decided was to make as much as I could of myself and of my voice. Many girls I knew studied singing merely as an accomplishment.

In fact, the girl who aspired professionally was almost unknown.

I first studied under a Frenchman named Millet, a graduate of the Conservatory of Paris, who was teaching the daughters of Colonel Stebbins and, also, the daughter of the Baron de Trobriand. Later, I worked with Manzocchi, Rivarde, Errani and Muzio, who was a great friend of Verdi.

Most of my fellow-students were charming society girls. Ella Porter and President Arthur's wife were with me under Rivarde, and Anna Palmer who married the scientist, Dr. Draper. The idea of my going on the stage would have appalled the families of these girls. In those days the life of the theatre was regarded as altogether outside the pale. One didn't know stage people; one couldn't speak to them, nor shake hands with them, nor even look at them except from a safe distance across the footlights. There were no ”decent people on the stage”; how often did I hear that foolish thing said!

It is odd that in that most musical and artistic country, Italy, much the same prejudice exists to this day. I should never think of telling a really great Italian lady that I had been on the stage; she would immediately think that there was something queer about me. Of course in America all that was changed some time ago, after England had established the precedent. People are now pleased not only to meet artists socially, but to lionise them as well. But when I was a girl there was a gulf as deep as the Bottomless Pit between society and people of the theatre; and it was this gulf that I knew would open between myself and the friends of whom I was really fond as, in time, I realised that I was improving sufficiently to justify some definite ambitions. My work was steady and unremitting, and by the time I began study with Muzio my mind was pretty nearly made up.

A queer, nervous, brusque, red-headed man was Muzio, from the north of Italy, where the type always seems so curiously German. Besides being one of the conductors of the Opera, he organised concert tours, and promised to see that I should have my chance. It was said that he had fled from political disturbances in Italy, but this I never heard verified. Certainly he was quite a big man in the New York operatic world of his day, and was a most cultivated musician, with the ”Italian traditions” of opera at his fingers' ends. It is to Muzio, incidentally, that I owe my trill.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Clara Louise Kellogg. Aged Three=

From a photograph by Black & Case]

Oddly enough, I had great difficulty with that trill for three years; but in four weeks' study he taught me the trick,--for it is a trick, like so many other big effects. I believe I got it finally by using my sub-conscious mind. Don't you know how, after striving and straining for something, you at last relax and let some inner part of your brain carry on the battle? And how, often and often, it is then that victory comes? So it was with my trill; and so it has been with many difficult things that I have succeeded in since then.

No account of my education would be complete without a mention of the great singers whom I heard during that receptive period; that is, the years between fourteen and eighteen, before my professional _debut_. The first artist I heard when I was old enough really to appreciate good singing was Louisa Pine, who sang in New York in second-rate English Opera with Harrison, of whom she was deeply enamoured and who usually sang out of tune. We did not then fully understand how well-schooled and well-trained she was; and her really fine qualities were only revealed to me much later in a concert.

Then there was D'Angri, a contralto who sang Rossini to perfection.

_Italiani in Algeria_ was produced especially for her. About that same time Mme. de la Grange was appearing, together with Mme. de la Borde, a light and colorature soprano, something very new in America. Mme. de la Borde sang the Queen to Mme. de la Grange's Valentine in _Les Huguenots_, and had a French voice--if I may so express it--light, and of a strange quality. The French claimed that she sang a scale of _commas_, that is, a note between each of our chromatic intervals. She may have; but it merely sounded to the listener as if she wasn't singing the scale clearly. Mme. de la Grange was a sort of G.o.ddess to me, I remember. I heard her first in _Trovatore_ with Brignoli and Amodio.

Piccolomini arrived here a couple of years later and I heard her, too.

She was of a distinguished Italian family, and, considering Italy's aristocratic prejudices, it is strange that she should have been an opera singer. She made _Traviata_, in which she had already captured the British public, first known to us: yet she was an indifferent singer and had a very limited _repertoire_. She received her adulation partly because people didn't know much then about music. Adulation it was, too.

She made $5000 a month, and America had never before imagined such an operatic salary. She looked a little like Lucca; was small and dark, and decidedly clever in comedy. I was fortunate enough to see her in Pergolese's delightful, if archaic, opera, _La Serva Padrona_--”The Maid as Mistress”--and she proved herself to be an exceptional _comedienne_.

She was excellent in tragedy, too.

Brignoli was the first great tenor I ever heard; and Amodio the first famous baritone. Brignoli--but all the world knows what Brignoli was! As for Amodio; he had a great and beautiful voice; but, poor man, what a disadvantage he suffered under in his appearance. He was so fat that he was grotesque, he was absurdly short, and had absolutely no saving grace as to physique. He played Mazetto to Piccolomini's Zerlina, and the whole house roared when they came on dancing.

I heard nearly all the great singers of my youth; all that were to be heard in New York, at any rate, except Grisi. I missed Grisi, I am sorry to say, because on the one occasion when I was asked to hear her sing, with Mario, I chose to go to a children's party instead. I am much ashamed of this levity, although I was, to be sure, only ten years old at the time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Clara Louise Kellogg. Aged Seven=

Photograph by Black & Case]

Adelina Patti I heard the year before my own _debut_. She was a slip of a girl then, when she appeared over here in _Lucia_, and carried the town by storm. What a voice! I had never dreamed of anything like it.

But, for that matter, neither had anyone else.

What histrionic skill I ever developed I attribute to the splendid acting that I saw so constantly during my girlhood. And what actors and actresses we had! As I look back, I wonder if we half appreciated them.

It is certainly true that, viewed comparatively, we must cry ”there were giants in those days!” Think of Mrs. John Wood and Jefferson at the Winter Garden; of Dion Boucicault and his wife, Agnes Robertson; of Laura Keene--a revelation to us all--and of the French Theatre, which was but a little hole in the wall, but the home of some exquisite art (I was brought up on the Raouls in French pantomime); and all the wonderful old Wallack Stock Company! Think of the elder Sothern, and of John Brougham, and of Charles Walcot, and of Mrs. John Hoey, Mrs. Vernon, and Mary Gannon,--that most beautiful and perfect of all _ingenues_! Those people would be world-famous stars if they were playing to-day; we have no actors or companies like them left. Not even the Comedie Francaise ever had such a gathering.

It may be imagined what an education it was for a young girl with stage aspirations to see such work week after week. For I was taken to see everyone in everything, and some of the impressions I received then were permanent. For instance, Matilda Heron in _Camille_ gave me a picture of poor Marguerite Gautier so deep and so vivid that I found it invaluable, years later, when I myself came to play Violetta in _Traviata_.

I saw both Ristori and Rachel too. The latter I heard recite on her last appearance in America. It was the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_, and deeply impressive.

Personally, I loved best her _Moineau de Lesbie_. Shall I ever forget her enchanting reading of the little scene with the jewels?--_Suis-je belle?_

The father of one of my fellow students was, as I have said before, Baron de Trobriand, a very charming man of the old French aristocracy.