"All right! Tell her to send me some soap!"
I sent it: and I supplied him with soap for the rest of the season. This was cheaper than buying new clothes.
Tenors are queer creatures. Most of them have their eccentricities and the soprano is lucky if these are innocuous peculiarities. I used to find it in my heart, for instance, to wish that they did not have such queer theories as to what sort of food was good for the voice. Many of them affected garlic. Stigelli usually exhaled an aroma of lager beer; while the good Mazzoleni invariably ate from one to two pounds of cheese the day he was to sing. He said it strengthened his voice. Brignoli had been long enough in this country to become partly Americanised, so he never smelled of anything in particular.
Poliuto by Donizetti was never as brilliant a success as other operas by the same composer. It is never given now. The scene of it is laid in Rome, in the days of the Christian martyrs, and it has some very effective moments, but for some reason those classic days did not appeal to the public of our presentation. I do not believe Quo Vadis would ever have gone then as it did later. The music of Poliuto was easy and showed off the voice, like all of Donizetti's music: and the part of Paulina was exceptionally fine, with splendid opportunities for dramatic work. The scene where she is thrown into the Colosseum was particularly effective. But the American audiences did not seem to be deeply interested in the fate of Paulina nor in that of Septimus Severus. The year before my début in Rigoletto I had rehearsed Paulina and had made something tragically near to a failure of it as I had not then the physical nor vocal strength for the part. Indeed, I should never then have been allowed to try it, and I have always had a suspicion that I was put in it for the express purpose of proving me a failure. That was when Muzio decided to "try me out" in the concert tournée as a sort of preliminary education. Therefore, one of the most comforting elements of the final Poliuto production to me was the realisation that I was appearing, and appearing well, in a part in which I had rehearsed so very discouragingly such a short time before. It was a small triumph, perhaps, but it combined with many other small matters to establish that sure yet humble confidence which is so essential to a singer. So far as personal success went, Brignoli made the hit of Poliuto.
Lucia was never one of my favourite parts, but it is a singularly grateful one. It has very few bad moments, and one can attack it without the dread one sometimes feels for a rôle containing difficult passages. Of course Lucia, with her hopeless, weak-minded love for Edgardo, and her spectacular mad scene, reminded me of my beloved Linda, and there were many points of similarity in the two operas. I found, therefore, that Lucia involved much less original and interpretive work than most of my new parts; and it was never fatiguing. Being beautifully high, I liked singing it. My voice, though flexible and of wide range, always slipped most easily into the far upper registers. I can recall the positive ache it was to sing certain parts of Carmen that took me down far too low for comfort. Sometimes too, I must admit, I used to "cheat" it. We nearly always opened in Lucia when we began an opera season. Its success was never sensational, but invariably safe and sure. Sometimes managers would be dubious and suggest some production more startling as a commencement, but I always had a deep and well-founded faith in Lucia.
"It never draws a capacity house," I would be told.
"But it never fails to get a fair one."
"It never makes a sensation."
"But it never gets a bad notice." I would say.