Oh, but nothing, nothing should or could turn me from my art; all homage I would put away from me, every discreditable demand the proud lady in me would spurn, and every enticement to renounce the stage and enter wedlock would leave the proud artist unmoved. Whoever stands on the highest pinnacle of Art belongs henceforth and forever to its temple service.
Such were my thoughts and intentions as I practiced solfeggios or wrote out my harmony exercises; and I was happy in it.
We lived in absolute retirement; my guardian visited us only once or twice a month, and nothing of these musical plans was divulged to him. The first that he should learn was to be the fait accompli, when I had made my appearance in a great theater with overwhelming success. We had no intercourse with the families that wintered in Baden, and we never went to Vienna. It was a rigorous novitiate in art; nothing was to divert me from my studies, nothing else but learn, learn, learn, was to fill my time. I was no longer so young, and I had to make up in a single year what other pupils accomplish in four or five years.
There was only a single family which we met socially from time to time; this was two old ladies, daughters of a general, and their brother, a retired first lieutenant of hussars, also well on in years, who had a barytone voice and had missed his calling,—that of an opera singer,—to his deep regret. I sang Italian duets with him, but without letting him guess my plans of the future. I should properly say, a duet; he had no more in his repertory. It was the scene between the brother and the sister in Lucia di Lammermoor. We performed the piece dramatically, singing by heart and putting in all the action, I carrying myself forward into my beckoning future and my partner going back to the past that he had let slip. He was convinced that he would have made a great singer, exactly as I was convinced of my coming greatness, and most likely his melancholy conviction was just as fallacious as my joyful one was.
I remember that our duet cost us much study before we could do it together. The lieutenant was not especially musical, and did not keep time well, and I too was very prone to slip, for I had not yet begun to sing arias at all with my teacher—he insisted strictly on my practicing nothing but scales and arpeggios; the Lucia duet, which was performed in the house of the Cortesi sisters, was basely kept a secret from my master.
After about a year and a half of this preparatory course, Professor Beranek made the announcement that it was now time for me to finish my studies under a famous singing-teacher. Our choice fell on Pauline Viardot-Garcia. Many artists had gone forth from her instruction; and anyhow, Garcia’s two-volume “Method” having been my gospel, in whom could I have felt greater confidence than in the daughter of that incomparable master?[[16]] So off went a letter to Baden-Baden.
It must have been an exuberant letter. I knew that Madame Viardot was very particular and refused many who wished to take lessons of her. To be received by her was an especial favor granted only to those who had real talent. I tried, therefore, to prejudice her in my behalf by my letter itself. I could not well speak of my talent (although, resting on my teacher’s assurances, I felt no doubt of it), so I must have written all the more of enthusiasm for art, of ardor in my vocation, and such trite things, and naturally intimated also that I desired to put myself under none but the foremost teacher in the world. At any rate, Madame Viardot answered that I might come and let her test me.
My mother and I went to Baden-Baden without delay. On the appointed day and at the appointed hour we presented ourselves at the Villa Viardot. We were shown into a small ground-floor salon and told to wait a little while. I still see the piano in the corner at the right by the window. There were several music cabinets with scores; on the walls, pictures and photographs of artists; through the open balcony door a glimpse of the garden. In the background of this was a pavilion, presumably the dwelling of Ivan Turgénief, Madame Viardot’s friend of many years.
In this waiting time I was seized by a horrible panic. Something that I had never yet felt in my life. Something that actually took away my breath and tortured me. Is this, then, what is called stage fright, le trac? Why, that is not at all unlike what one must feel at going to the guillotine! How can one—God have mercy!—sing in such a state?
“Mamma,” I wailed, “I shan’t be able to sing a note!”