stad is more at home in the music dramas of Gluck and Wagner than she is in Carmen and Tosca, and that Marcella Sembrich is happier when she is singing Zerlina (as a Mozart interpreter she has had no peer in the past three decades) than when she is singing Lakmé. Mme. Melba sings Lucia in excellent style, but she probably could not convince us that she knows how to sing a Brahms song. So far as I know she has never tried to do so. A recent example comes to mind in Maria Marco, the prima donna of. The Land of Joy company, who sings Spanish music with irresistible effect, but on one occasion when she attempted Vissi d'arte she was transformed immediately into a second-rate Italian singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily full of grace and meaning, had become conventionalized.
If this quality of style which, after all, only means an understanding of both the surface manner and underlying purpose of a composition and an ability to transmit this understanding across the footlights, is of such manifest importance in the field of art-music, it is doubly so in the field of popular music or the folksong.[1] A foreigner
- ↑ According to no less an authority than Cecil J. Sharp, the peasants themselves differentiate between the two, and devote to each a special vocal method. In English Folksong, he writes: "But, it must be remembered that the vocal method of the folksinger is inseparable from the folksong. It is a cult which
