April 5th—night.
IT is she.
This afternoon I was revising my notation of the Japanese music; quite late, five o'clock or so. Suddenly I heard a voice—a woman's voice—singing very softly, in the next room, beyond that shrunken door and the bulky piece of furniture. It is a bureau, I think, with a mirror above it that is nearly as high as the door.
She was singing “Aus Meinen Grossen Schmerzen” of Robert Franz, that saddest and most exquisite of German lieder. The voice is a full, even soprano. It is a big voice, I am sure, though she sang so softly. The impression I received was that she was carefully holding it down to a pianissimo. It is, I should say, a remarkable organ. Even in her softest voice there is what the great singers call an “edge”—that firm, fine resonance that will send the lightest thread of tone floating out over all the volume of sound of a full orchestra.
She sang the little song with a tone color of poignant sadness—as if her heart were throbbing with all the sorrow of the world, and yet as if she could not keep from singing. She has plainly studied much. The impulse to sing and the habit of singing are strong within her.
But the voice, so beautiful and under such fine control, was not what suddenly caused me to leap up from my chair and tiptoe to that rather useless door, and then to turn to my kit-bag and fumble wildly for my tuning-fork. No; what excited me—for it did excite me out of all reason—was her sense of pitch. The mezzo-soprano or baritone transposition of that Franz song is in the key of f-major, ending in d-minor. I stood by her door, the c-fork resting lightly against my teeth, waiting for that lovely voice to descend the final minor third, linger, tenderly and sadly, on the d. Then I bit the fork. She was singing a perfect d. Certainly there was no piano in any of these miserable little rooms. And she had employed no other instrument; she had simply and naturally broken into song because she could not help singing. She has absolute pitch!
The great regret of my life is that my own sense of pitch is not absolute. It is very nearly but not quite perfect, despite my extremely delicate ear for close intervals. Yet this young woman, who to my own knowledge has not sung a note for several days, and who can not conceivably have heard any Occidental music whatever, breaks into song, and casually and unconsciously employs the correct pitch to the twentieth part of a tone.
My first thought was that it might be an accident. So I waited, tuning-fork in hand.
Having begun to sing, of course she could not stop. I am thinking now that probably it was the first time she had released her voice for a considerable period, and that at last she simply could not help making use of what was the natural outlet for her emotions.
She next hummed a few bars of “Im Herbst,” also by Franz. Evidently she is fond of the work of this fine lyric composer. This is in the key of c-minor. Again I tested her with my tuning-fork, and again she was correct to the minutest shade of a tone. Her voice had leaped the interval between the two keys apparently without a conscious thought on her own part.