I remember her coming to Philadelphia to sing “Götterdämmerung” with my company. She arrived the previous day and I found her still very uncertain in the second act, which is rhythmically very difficult. I sat down with her at eight o’clock that evening and we went over that second act again and again until about four o’clock in the morning. It was ghastly but wonderful. At ten A. M. I gave her an orchestral rehearsal and in the evening she sang the rôle with perfect assurance and with hardly a mistake.
One performance of “Tristan” which we gave with the Grau Company in Baltimore at the Lyric Theatre, which has perhaps the best acoustics of any auditorium in the country, still stays vividly in my memory. At the close we were so elated that all concerned kissed each other ecstatically after the last curtain fell. Those are the rare moments that make one forget the many times perfection in opera seems impossible to attain.
MATHILDE MARCHESI
NELLIE MELBA
XI
ARTISTS
I have written elsewhere of my first visit to Europe after my father’s death, when the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House made me assistant to the director, Edmund C. Stanton.