tine reformers, who invented the lyric drama while trying to recreate Greek tragedy, Richard Wagner rounds out a cycle with Peri, Cuccini, Monteverde, and their immediate successors. Music is again become a means of dramatic expression, and the singers who appeal to us most powerfully are those who are best able to make song subserve that purpose, and who, to that end, give to dramatic truthfulness, to effective elocution, and to action the attention which mere voice and beautiful utterance received in the period which is called the Golden Age of Singing, but which was the Leaden Age of the Lyric Drama.

The people of New York City enjoy a unique position among the communities of the world, so far as operatic singers are concerned. For seventy years they have heard all the great singers of Europe. I do not attempt to mention all, but only those of the highest rank whose names occur to me.

Madame Malibran was one of the first Italian opera company that ever sang here. Before that time there had been a period of seventy-five years during which English opera was scarcely absent a year from our theatres; a period, moreover, in which some of the best of the English singers, such as Madame Caradori-Allan, Mrs. Leesugg (who married the Canadian Hackett), Mrs. Holman (the sister of Michael Kelly), Mrs. Oldman, Incledon the bass, and Phillips the tenor, appeared in the ballad operas. However foolish these operas may have been otherwise, they still surpassed the Italian operas of the period in developing singing actors instead of mere costume-wearing singers.

Madame Cuiti-Damorean came in 1844, Bosio in 1849, Jennie Lind in 1850, Sontag in 1853, Grisi and Mario in 1854, La Grange in 1855, Frezzolini in 1857, Piccolomini in 1858, Nilsson in 1870, Lucca in 1872, Tietjens in 1876, Gerster in 1878, and Sembrich in 1873. I omit the singers of the German opera as belonging to a different category. Adelina Patti was always with us until she went to Europe, in 1861, and remained twenty years.

Of

Of the men who were the artistic associates of these prime donne, mention may be made of Mario, Benedeth, Corsi, Salvi, Ronconi, Formes, Brignoli, Amadio, Coletti, Campanini, and many more, none of which, excepting Mario, were of much importance compared with the women singers. In this former generation the popular admiration for men was in inverse ratio to the admiration for women. Is it because this is woman's era that the men are the "stars" nowadays? Or is this also explained to some extent by the prevalent liking for that which is dramatic ?

The great majority of these singers, even those still living and remembered by the younger generation of to-day, exploited their gifts in the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, the early Verdi, and Meyerbeer. The last seemed to them a radical in his modernity. Grisi was acclaimed a great dramatic singer, and it is told of her that once in "Norma" she frightened the tenor who sang the part of Pollio, by the fury of her acting. But it is to be found that, measured by the standards of to-day, say by Calve's Carmen or Miss Brema's Ortrud, that it must have been a simple age that could be impressed by the tragic power of any one acting the part of Bellini's Druidical priestess. The surmise is strengthened by the circumstance that Madame Grisi created a sensation in "Il Trovatore" by showing signs of agitation in the tower scene, walking about the stage during Manrico's "Ah, che la morte ognora" as if she would fain discover the part of the castle where her lover was imprisoned. The chief charm of Jenny Lind, in the memory of the older generation of American men and women, is the pathos with which she sang simple songs. Madame Nilsson also won her first success here in concerts by the way in which she sang "The Old Folks at Home." In the case of musicians and critics, it was her brilliant execution that placed her on the eminence she occupied.

Mendelssohn esteemed her greatly as a woman and artist, but he is quoted as once remarking to Chorley: “I

cannot

cannot think why she always prefers to be in a bad theatre." Moscheles, recording his impressions of her in Meyerbeer's "Camp of Silesia" (now "L'Etoile du Nord"), reached the climax of his praise in the words: "Her song with the two concertante flutes is, perhaps, the most incredible feat in the way of bravura singing that can possibly be heard." She was credited with fine powers as an actress, but we are compelled to question her dramatic sincerity when we read that she compelled her managers to cut out the parts of Isabella, in "Robert Le Diable," in order that no rival should appear in an opera with her. Compare this with the modern spirit as exemplified by Madame Lehmann, who was not only willing to sing second parts that had "blood in them,” but whom I have known to go into the sceneroom of the Metropolitan Opera House and hunt mimic stumps and rocks with which to fit out a scene in Siegfried, in which she was not even to appear. That, like her superhuman work at rehearsals, was "for the good cause, as she herself expressed it.

Most amiable are the memories that cluster around the name of Sontag, which include at least one of the notable concerts given by Beethoven in the closing years of his life. Her career was wofully ended by her sudden death in Mexico in 1854. She was a German, and the early part of her artistic life was influenced by German ideals, but it is said that only in the music of Mozart and Weber, which revived in her strong national emotion, did she sing dramatically. For the rest she used her light voice, which had an extraordinary range, brilliancy, and flexibility, very much like Patti and Melba use theirs to-day in mere unfeeling vocal display. "She had an extensive soprano voice," says Hogarth, "not remarkable for power, but clear, brilliant, and regularly flexible; a quality which seems to have led her (unlike most German singers in general) to cultivate the most florid style, and even to follow the bad example set by Catalani, of seeking to convert her voice into an instrument, and to astonish the public by executing