On the necessity of sound health it is hardly necessary to insist, while good looks and a fine presence naturally go for much also, though these are not absolutely indispensable, as many notable instances have gone to show.
Then, in addition, there are those temperamental qualities which mean so much: imagination and feeling, sympathy and insight, magnetism and personality. Perhaps, indeed, next to voice and ear these are the most important qualities of all. But unfortunately they cannot be acquired by any amount of study.
How often has it not happened, indeed, that artists have been endowed in all other respects but these! They may have the most beautiful voices, they may sing with the most finished art, but for lack of these incommunicable attributes of the soul they never attain the highest places. They leave their audiences cold because they are cold themselves.
These are artists of the type which Lamperti used to refer to as mere “voice machines”—singers who, as Gounod once put it, are not artists at all in the true sense of the word, but merely people who “play upon the larynx,” achieving great results perhaps in the purely vocal and mechanical sense, but never touching the hearts of their hearers for lack of those elemental human qualities which are essential if this result is to be attained.
Let the student do all in his power, therefore, to develop the higher side of his nature. By the study of literature and art, by the reading of fine poetry, by going to good plays, and in every other way let him cultivate his imagination and give play to his finer sensibilities.
For though such qualities as I have referred to may not be acquired when they are non-existent, they may be drawn out and developed if they are merely latent; and in the case of members of the northern races especially this is not infrequently the case.
Another quality of a different kind which is none the less very valuable, indeed essential, is the power of self-criticism; and I attach great importance also to having abundant faith in oneself. Even if it be pushed to the point of vanity and conceit—as I am afraid it occasionally is—this helps enormously when it is a case of withstanding the jolts and jars almost inseparable from the practice of vocal art.
Chapter VI
GENERAL CULTURE
OF course, too, wide general culture is very necessary. Everything that can be possibly acquired in this way helps, and is, indeed, almost more necessary to the singer than in the case of any other branch of the profession.
For the art of the singer is brought into immediate relation with all the other arts. The singer has to deal with poetry and literature and the drama—if he takes up opera—in a way quite unknown to the mere instrumentalist.