unfitted to sing in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti[1] and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here, then, is an entirely paradoxical situation: a set of interpreters who apparently exist only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the past. What would we think of a modern actor who could make no effect save in the tragedies of Corneille? Berlioz, one of the first to foresee the coming day, forewarned us in his Mémoires: "We shall always find a fair number of female singers, popular from their brilliant singing of brilliant trifles, and odious to the great masters because utterly incapable of properly interpreting them. They have voices, a certain knowledge of music, and flexible throats; they are lacking in soul, brain, and heart. Such women are regular monsters and all the more formidable to composers because they are often charming monsters. This explains the weakness of certain masters in writing falsely sentimental parts, which attract the public by their brilliancy. It also explains the number of degenerate works, the gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of expression, the neglect of dramatic
- ↑ She made an abysmal failure in Carmen.
