The School of Prime Donne
In European countries there are innumerable small companies capable of giving good opera which the people enjoy quite as thoroughly as the metropolitan audiences of the world enjoy the opera which commands the best singers of the times. For years these small opera companies have been the training schools of the great singers. Not to have gone through such a school was as damaging an admission as that of not having gone through a college would be to a college professor applying for a new position. Lilli Lehmann, Schumann-Heink, Ruffo, Campanini, Jenny Lind, Patti, all are graduates of these schools of practice.
In America there seems to have existed for years a kind of prejudice, bred of ignorance, against all opera companies except those employing all-star casts in the biggest theatres in the biggest cities. This existed, despite the fact that these secondary opera companies often put on opera that was superior to the best that was to be heard in some Italian, German and French cities which possessed opera companies that stood very high in the estimation of Americans who had never heard them. It was once actually the case that the fact that a singer had once sung in a smaller opera company prevented her from aspiring to sing in a great opera company. America, however, has become very much better informed and much more independent in such matters, and our opera goers are beginning to resemble European audiences in that they let their ears and their common sense determine what is best rather than their prejudices and their conventions regarding reputation. It was actually the case at one time in America that a singer with a great reputation could command a large audience, whereas a singer of far greater ability and infinitely better voice might be shut out because she had once sung in an opera company not as pretentious as those in the big cities. This seemed very comic indeed to many European singers, who laughed in their coat sleeves over the real situation.
In the first place, the small companies in many cities would provide more singers with opportunities for training and public appearances. The United States now has two or three major opera companies. Count up on your fingers the greatest number of singers who could be accommodated with parts: only once or twice in a decade does the young singer, at the age when the best formative work must be done, have a chance to attain the leading rôles. If we had in America ten or twenty smaller opera companies of real merit, the chances would be greatly multiplied.
The first thing that the singer has to fight is stage fright. No matter how well you may know a rôle in a studio, unless you are a very extraordinary person you are likely to take months in acquiring the stage freedom and ease in working before an audience. There is only one cure for stage fright, and that is to appear continually until it wears off. Many deserving singers have lost their great chances because they have depended upon what they have learned in the studio, only to find that when they went before a great and critical audience their ability was suddenly reduced to 10 per cent., if not to zero. Even after years of practice and experience in great European opera houses where I appeared repeatedly before royalty, the reputation of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York was so great that at the time I made my début there I was so afflicted by stage fright that my voice was actually reduced to one-half of its force and my other abilities accordingly. This is the truth, and I am glad to have young singers know it as it emphasizes my point.
Imagine what the effect would have been upon a young singer who had never before sung in public on the stage. Footlight paralysis is one of the most terrifying of all acute diseases and there is no cure for it but experience.