"Execution is certainly one of the most difficult parts of musical science. Young singers are desirous of attaining it without reflecting whether, from the formation of the throat and various physical causes, they may ever be able to accomplish their wishes. Few, indeed, possess the power of execution in a pre-eminent degree. It is in part a gift of nature: those who have ever delighted as well as astonished us by their rapid manner of running through divisions must have been naturally endowed with flexible organs.
"... Some voices may be compared to gems which in their original state are dull, and, to those unacquainted with their worth, of no value.... It frequently happens that singers, from timidity or want of proper knowledge in exercising their voices, remain ignorant of their own qualifications. The hinges of a door which have continued for years undisturbed, will, when the door is re-opened, grate harshly on the ear; but every effort renders the harshness more tolerable, until, from frequent use, they move easily. Thus it is with the voice: on the flexibility of the uvula and the muscles connected with it depend both the perfectibility of the shake and execution. But still it must be acknowledged that acquired execution should never be exercised by the side of nature otherwise than sparingly, even where necessity requires it, for the latter possesses an easy velocity which can playfully sport with its subject at will; but, however gratifying the power of execution may be considered by those who possess it, I recommend them not to be indiscriminately lavish, lest they cloy by too great a profusion, and, as Voltaire remarks, 'shine in trills and divisions, at the expense of poetry and good sense.'"
Fashion.—The songs which are "the rage" at any time are always great snares for amateurs. Aspiring young singers hear a ballad charmingly rendered by some great singer, and straightway go home, send for it, and on the first available opportunity treat their friends to their version of it. This is really unfair to themselves, as it throws them into unwise contrast with the public singer who has made the song popular, and whose well-known rendering of it forbids ordinary hearers to judge the rendering of an amateur on its own merits, or by any rule but that of comparison. Moreover, "popular" songs—I mean songs whose popularity is largely due to their having been sung by favourite public singers—are by no means always good in themselves; or, if fairly good, by no means easy; or if good and not difficult, by no means always sufficiently so to make it worth while for an amateur to spend time and study on them. In very many cases the public singer has to sing these songs because he is paid for doing so, and gets a "royalty" on every copy sold; it is simply one development of the hydra-headed art of advertising, and such productions are known by the vulgar name of "pot-boilers," i.e., compositions hastily thrown off to bring in a little money "to keep the pot boiling." If composers who are capable of better things are reduced to making money in this way, we may be sincerely sorry for them; but speaking from an artistic point of view, the practice is reprehensible, and "pot-boilers" are not the kind of music which a young singer, anxious to improve, should waste time or money upon. I am far from saying that there are no good songs to be found among new music, but I think they seldom lie on the top of the pile.
Forming a Repertoire.—In gradually forming your repertoire, or collection of properly studied songs for drawing-room or concert singing, do not be in haste to make it a large one. It is better to know only a few songs and do them really well, than to sing a large number indifferently. If you are studying for the profession, there is a considerable number of songs which you will be expected to know as a matter of course, but over and above such, every singer should have a special repertoire of his or her own, and it is of this that I now speak. Your selection of songs, like your singing, should have the stamp of your own individuality upon it. You should have a little stock of songs, with which your singing is in a way identified, and which you must be able to sing in a manner that at once stamps those songs as your property, so that another person might say, "I could not sing that song before you, it is one of your own."
To form such a repertoire, you may have to go a little out of the beaten track of what is best known at the time. If opera music suits you best, look at the operas, never performed now, of Glück, or the less known of Mozart's, or earlier works of Rossini, Auber, &c.; or else try and get hold of works not yet known in England, such as Macfarren's, Wallace's, Purcell's, and a few other such native dramatic composers. In a word, do not limit your notions of operatic music to what you hear year after year at Covent Garden or Her Majesty's.
So, too, in oratorio: search in the less familiar oratorios of Handel, and such of his operas as you can get access to, and carry the same idea out in examining the works of other composers, ancient and modern. Good work has been done of late years by various publishers in publishing many works of this class, and there are plenty of these which are still unfamiliar and unhackneyed.
The same with your songs and ballads: before you rush into the modern fashionable ballad, see if you cannot find a few that you can appropriate among the stores of old English music, or the detached songs of old Italian masters (many of which are magnificent as songs, and utterly unknown at present, except to the few).