Sad, it is, indeed, to think of the fine voices which have been lost to the world in this way! Nor need one look very far for instances. Hardly a day passes, indeed, but what one reads or hears of some wonderful voice which has been “discovered” in this place or that. Alas! how few of these wonderful voices eventually justify the hopes which they have aroused! Either the other necessary qualities are lacking, or—too often, I am afraid—their training is entrusted to the wrong hands and they come to nothing.
Chapter IX
GOOD AND BAD “MAESTRI”
AS to the absolute necessity of a teacher there can, I suppose, hardly be two opinions. Much can be learnt from books, no doubt; by listening to other singers; and by working things out for oneself, so far as possible. Also it is a fact, doubtless, that some of the world’s greatest singers have had remarkably little formal instruction.
Mario, for instance, never had a lesson in his life except when Meyerbeer taught him the part of Raymond in “Robert le Diable”—and Meyerbeer, it is hardly necessary to say, was not a singing master.
But such cases are the exceptions, and in the ordinary way there cannot be the slightest doubt that the services of a teacher are absolutely essential to sound progress. There are exceptions, of course. One of these is the great Chaliapine, who represents his own school and has never had any instruction as we understand it. He is by nature endowed with a beautiful voice, and obtains his fine effects by long hours of deep thought and reflection. I have asked him when and how he prepared, and he replied: “I think out my work in the silence of my bedchamber, when I am waiting for sleep, or in the mornings before I rise. In fact, during all my hours of wakefulness I am always visualising the stage, the actors, the audiences, and contriving how best to obtain effects emotional, sentimental, dramatic.”
Grave indeed are the risks run by any student who attempts to supply his own requirements in this matter and to dispense with the skilled advice which only the trained expert can supply—entailing possibly the ruin of his entire career.
It was for lack of such advice in her earlier days that Jenny Lind’s voice was almost ruined at the outset, so that when she went to García for advice his verdict was: “It is quite useless for me to think of teaching you, since you have no voice left.”
Fortunately rest and proper training saved the situation in that case, as we all know, but how easily it might have been otherwise. Other fine voices have, indeed, been irretrievably destroyed by faulty methods continued too long.
A famous case was that of Duprez, a well-known tenor who flourished some seventy or eighty years ago. “I have lost my voice,” he wrote in despair to Rubini, “how have you kept yours?” Rubini replied: “My dear Duprez, you have lost your voice because you have sung with your capital; I have kept mine because I have sung only with the interest.” And there is a world of instruction in this pithy way of putting it.
See to it at all costs, therefore, that you put yourself in the right hands. By which I do not necessarily mean a teacher of world-wide repute—for there are many equally good who do not happen to be so generally known. The supremely important thing is that whoever you go to shall be a man—or a woman, as the case may be—of honour and integrity, who can be trusted to deal faithfully with you, and not a quack or a charlatan.