LVI
A Great Vocalist Shows that Only Years of Labor Can Win the Heights of Song.
OF the five internationally famous singers—Melba, Calvé, Nordica, Eames and Lehmann—none is a greater favorite than Madame Lillian Nordica. She has had honors heaped upon her in every music-loving country, including her own, America. Milan, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and New York in turn accepted her, and the music-lovers of those cities received her with a furore of praise. Jewel cases filled with bracelets, necklaces, tiaras and diadems of gold and precious stones, attest the unaffected sincerity of her admirers in all the great music-centers of the world. She enjoys, in addition, the distinction of being one of the first two American women to attain to international fame as a singer in grand opera. When Madame Nordica was in New York fulfilling her part in the most brilliant operatic season the city had ever known, she lived in sumptuous style at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where I met her by appointment. She accepted the statement that the public is interested in the details of her career as most natural, and was pleased to discuss the philosophy of a singer’s success from the view-point of its difficulties.
“You would like to know how distinction in the field of art is earned? Well, it is not thrust upon anyone. The material for a great voice may be born in a person—it is, in fact—but the making of it into a great voice is a work of the most laborious character.”
“Is the matter of nationality of any advantage to an aspirant?”
“You wish to know——”
“Whether, in some countries, the atmosphere is not very favorable to a beginner;—the feeling of the public and the general support given to music not particularly conducive to the musical development of, we will say, a young girl with a promising voice.”
“Yes. I should judge almost any of the greater European nations would be better in this respect than the United States; not much better, however, because nearly all depends on strength of character, determination, and the will to work. If a girl has these, she will rise as high, in the end, anywhere; perhaps not so quickly in some places, but no less surely.”
“You had no European advantages?”