Part 4 (1/2)

I never did anything in my life without study. The ancient axiom that ”what is worth doing at all is worth doing well” is more of a truth than most people understand. The thing that one has chosen for one's life work in the world:--what labour could be too great for it, or what too minute?

When I knew that I was to make my _debut_ as Gilda, in Verdi's opera of _Rigoletto_, I settled down to put myself into that part. I studied for nine months, until I was not certain whether I was really Gilda--or only myself!

I was taking lessons in acting with Scola then, in addition to my musical study. And, besides Scola's regular course, I closely observed the methods of individuals, actors, and singers. I remember seeing Brignoli in _I Puritani_, during that ”incubating period” before my first appearance in opera. I was studying gesture then,--the free, simple, _inevitable_ gesture that is so necessary to a natural effect in dramatic singing; and during the beautiful melody, _A te, o cara_, which he sang in the first act, Brignoli stood still in one spot and thrust first one arm out, and then the other, at right angles from his body, twenty-three consecutive times. I counted them, and I don't know how many times he had done it before I began to count!

”Heavens!” I said, ”that's one thing not to do, anyway!”

Languages were a very important part of my training. I had studied French when I was nine years old, in the country, and as soon as I began taking singing lessons I began Italian also. Much later, when I sang in _Les Noces de Jeannette_, people would speak of my French and ask where I had studied. But it was all learned at home.

I never studied German. There was less demand for it in music than there is now. America practically had no ”German opera;” and Italian was the accepted tongue of dramatic and tragic music, as French was the language of lighter and more popular operas. Besides, German always confused me; and I never liked it.

Many years later than the time of which I am now writing, I was charmed to be confirmed in my anti-German prejudices when I went to Paris. After the Franco-Prussian War the signs and warnings in that city were put up in every language in the world except German! The German way of putting things was too long; and, furthermore, the French people didn't care if Germans did break their legs or get run over.

Of course, all this is changed--and in music most of all. For example, there could be no greater convert to Wagnerism than I!

My mother hated the atmosphere of the theatre even though she had wished me to become a singer, and always gloried in my successes. To her rigid and delicate instinct there was something dreadful in the free and easy artistic att.i.tude, and she always stood between me and any possible intimacy with my fellow-singers. I believe this to have been a mistake.

Many traditions of the stage come to one naturally and easily through others; but I had to wait and learn them all by experience. I was always working as an outsider, and, naturally, this att.i.tude of ours antagonised singers with whom we appeared.

Not only that. My brain would have developed much more rapidly if I had been allowed--no, if I had been _obliged_ to be more self-reliant. To profit by one's own mistakes;--all the world's history goes to show that is the only way to learn. By protecting me, my mother really robbed me of much precious experience. For how many years after I had made my _debut_ would she wait for me in the _coulisses_, ready to whisk me off to my dressing-room before any horrible opera singer had a chance to talk with me!

Yet she grieved for my forfeited youth--did my dear mother. She always felt that I was being sacrificed to my work, and just at the time when I would have most delighted in my girlhood. Of course, I was obliged to live a life of labour and self-denial, but it was not quite so difficult for me as she felt it to be, or as other people sometimes thought it was. Not only did I adore my music, and look forward to my work as an artist, but I literally never had any other life. I knew nothing of what I had given up; and so was happy in what I had undertaken, as no girl could have been happy who had lived a less restricted, hard-working and yet dream-filled existence.

My mother was very strait-laced and puritanical, as I have said, and, naturally, by reflection and a.s.sociation, I was the same. I lay stress on this because I want one little act of mine to be appreciated as a sign of my ineradicable girlishness and love of beauty. When I earned my first money, I went to Mme. Percival's, the smart lingerie shop of New York, and bought the three most exquisite chemises I could find, imported and trimmed with real lace!

I daresay this harmless ebullition of youthful daintiness would have proved the last straw to some of my Psalm-singing New England relatives.

There was one uncle of mine who vastly disapproved of my going on the stage at all, saying that it would have been much better if I had been a good, honest milliner. He used to sing:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Musical notation; ”Broad is the road That leads to h.e.l.l!”]

in a minor key, with the true, G.o.d-fearing, nasal tw.a.n.g in it.

How I detested that old man! And I had to bury him, too, at the last. I wonder whether I should have been able to do so if I had gone into the millinery business!

CHAPTER IV

A YOUTHFUL REALIST

As I have said, I studied Gilda for nine months. At the end of that time I was so imbued with the part as to be thoroughly at ease. Present-day actors call this condition ”getting inside the skin” of a _role_. I simply could not make a mistake, and could do everything connected with the characterisation with entire unconsciousness. Yet I want to add that I had little idea of what the opera really meant.

My _debut_ was in New York at the old Academy of Music, and Rigoletto was the famous Ferri. He was blind in one eye and I had always to be on his seeing side,--else he couldn't act. Stigelli was the tenor. Stiegel was his real name. He was a German and a really fine artist. But I had then had no experience with stage heroes and thought they were all going to be exactly as they appeared in my romantic dreams, and--poor man, he is dead now, so I can say this!--it was a dreadful blow to me to be obliged to sing a love duet with a man smelling of lager beer and cheese!

Charlotte Cushman--who was a great friend of Miss Emma Stebbins, the sister of Colonel Stebbins--had always been interested in me; so when she knew that I was to make my _debut_ on February 26 (1861), she put on _Meg Merrilies_ for that night because she could get through with it early enough for her to see part of my first performance. She reached the Academy in time for the last act of _Rigoletto_; and I felt that I had been highly praised when, as I came out and began to sing, she cried:

”The girl doesn't seem to know that she has any arms!”

My freedom of gesture and action came from nothing but the most complete familiarity with the part and with the detail of everything I had to do.

In opera one cannot be too temperamental in one's acting. One cannot make pauses when one thinks it effective, nor alter the stage business to fit one's mood, nor work oneself up to an emotional crescendo one night and not do it the next. Everything has to be timed to a second and a fraction of a second. One cannot wait for unusual effects. The orchestra does not consider one's temperament, and this fact cannot be lost sight of for a moment. This is why I believe in rehearsing and studying and working over a _role_ so exhaustively--and exhaustingly.

For it is only in that most rigidly studied accuracy of action that any freedom can be attained. When one becomes so trained that one cannot conceivably r.e.t.a.r.d a bar, and cannot undertime a stage cross nor fail to come in promptly in an _ensemble_, then, and only then, can one reach some emotional liberty and inspiration.