and Lilli Lehmann) made the compromise successfully, but they rendered the further progress of the composer more difficult thereby; music remained merely pretty. The successors of these supple singers even learned to sing Richard Strauss with broad cantilena effects. As for Puccini! At a performance of Madama Butterfly a Japanese once demanded why the singers were producing those nice round tones in moments of passion; why not ugly sounds?
Will any composer arise with the courage to write an opera which cannot be sung? Stravinsky came very near to achieving this happy result in. The Nightingale, but I am looking forward to a more complete break with the past. Think of the range of sounds made by the Japanese, the Gipsy, the Chinese, the Spanish folk-singers. The composer of the future may ask for shrieks, groans, squeaks, screams, a thousand delicate shades of guttural and falsetto vocal tones, from his interpreters. "Why should the gamut of expression on our opera stage be so much more limited than it is in our music halls? Why should the Hottentots be able to make so many delightful noises that we are incapable of producing? Composers, up to date, have taken into account a singer's apparent inability to bridge difficult intervals. Why? It is only by ignoring all such artificial limitations that the new music
