"Ah, I lived right with her for three months, and it was a great privilege for me. Her husband's music is to her like her very eyes. She taught me the German and helped me in every way. 'Lohengrin' had never been sung in Baireuth, and I was to create there the rôle of Elsa."
A remarkable honor this was, indeed: to be the first Elsa in Wagner's own temple, under the guidance of his own wife, with the grave of the great composer fairly in sight, and memories of the "Mad King" on all sides—the king whose ears were deaf to the functions of state, but open to the art of heaven.
"It was a great opportunity for me, but I sometimes thought I would have to give it up. Oh! I have been so discouraged! I have wept barrels of tears!"
This is a kind message for the great singer to send to the many struggling aspirants who may to-day be working under discouragement.
Madame Nordica insists that "work is everything. The voice is but the material; it is the stone from which the cathedral is built."
After her great success in Baireuth, the American prima donna sang Elsa in New York.
"But I had to sing again in Italian, for the rest of the company had not learned the German. It was through my efforts that they have since studied these rôles in the original, and we now sing all the Wagner operas in German."
It was a great musical event when Jean de Reszke and Madame Nordica appeared as Tristan and Isolde. This love-tragedy done in music is perhaps the most profound of all operas. It is somber with sorrow throughout; even the great love-duet in the second act is too intense and grand in its motifs ever to be called happy. It is not the joyous emotion of youth, but the fervor of maturity, where life itself is staked for a mighty love. This second act is a wondrous musical scene. It is in the moonlit gardens of the Cornish castle where Tristan and Isolde meet clandestinely, while Bragaende, the faithful attendant, keeps watch in the tower above. She is not seen, but the calm sustained tones of her watch-tower song soar out in contrast to the intense love-music like a beacon-light on a turbulent sea.
Another very popular rôle of Madame Nordica's, tho altogether different in style, is Valentine in "The Huguenots." Her sustained and crescendoed high C in the third act of this opera is worth a long journey to hear. Madame Fursch-Madi in years agone used to sing this rôle very grandly, but she was plain of feature; whereas with Madame Nordica her Valentine is so beautiful to behold that the audience is aroused to greatest sympathy with the hero's struggle between love and duty.
"Our art is so very legitimate," Madame Nordica thoughtfully remarked. "The painter or the writer can take advice, can be assisted, and has time to consider his work; but we must face the music alone, at the point of the bayonet as it were, for every tone must come at the right moment and on the right pitch. The actress has neither of these requirements to meet. It is very trying, also, to sing one night in German and the next time in some other language. Indeed, every performance is a creation. No wonder we are so insistent on the applause. A painter or writer can say to himself, if his work is not at first well received, 'Just wait till I am dead!' But our fate and fame are decided on the spot."