singers are all considered as servants. Well, it was most strange. We were all put in a sort of balcony which looked down upon the banqueting scene below, and as each of our turns came to sing, we went to a little opening and sang through it. What amused me was this, that all the time we were trying to sing our best, and produce our notes most effectively, the clatter of knives and forks still went on, and to make all complete, the singer might be in a most impressive passage and right in the midst of it, when, quite regardless of the uncomplaining singers, there would be a flourish of trumpets and somebody would get up and propose a toast. I was more fortunate than Madame Patti, for she was interrupted in the middle of her solo.
"Yes, I have often had requests to sing beside a deathbed or a person very ill. I sang to the old Bishop of Albany when he was suffering. The first festival I ever sang in was at Norwich, and when I returned to that place after six years, I had a letter from an old gentleman who heard me there, and who was now bedridden. He wanted to hear 'The Last Rose of Summer,' and I shall never forget standing there by his side and singing that beautiful song. And many a time have I had to convert the balcony of the hotel where I was staying into a temporary platform, and appear at midnight, long after the opera was over, and sing 'Home, sweet Home,' or some such popular ballad to the people waiting outside. That was the case at Dublin some few years ago, when the students there took the horses out of my carriage, and I was told that if I did not sing they would break the windows of the hotel. I stood on the balcony, wrapped up in great shawls, for it was a bitterly cold night, and it was no easy matter to sing 'The Last Rose of Summer' under those circumstances.
"I have sung, too, in the quiet little church at Braemar in the choir, and it was there that I received what I have always considered one of my greatest compliments. The speaker was one of the mountain folk, and had never even been to Edinburgh. When the service was over a friend of mine heard him say, "I never thought anybody could have such control over one's voice." That was all, but that is the whole secret of a singer's success—perfect control."
"Chat."
From a Photograph.
Then it was that I learned something about Madame Albani's method of studying. Like all great singers, she has one hard and fast rule which binds her household. When rehearsing nobody is ever allowed to disturb her. Her soul is in her work just as earnestly in the drawing-room as on the stage. She is a remarkably quick study, a thing she attributes to her arduous though enjoyable training in her early childhood. Madame Albani studied and sang "Lohengrin" in a fortnight, and she has been equally rapid in gaining her knowledge of such lengthy studies as Margherita, Ophelia, Mignon, Elisabetta, Lucia, and other operatic characters which will always be associated with her name. When she is about to take up a new character, she will first of all sit down quietly in the wicker chair in the conservatory, or in some quiet and undisturbable corner about the house, and taking the score in her lap, run through the music. Then she devotes herself to the words. Having learnt these, she now sits down to the piano, and commences work in real earnest. Having learnt both words and music, the services of an accompanist are called in, and, as she plays, Madame Albani will take up her position in the room, and, imagining the other characters about her, rehearse piece by piece. The morning preceding the opera she will go through every note to be sung in the evening. After all this individual work it is possible that she may get three piano rehearsals at the theatre, two fully orchestral, and one for action and situations.
She likes "Otello" best of any opera. She learnt the music of it in a fortnight.
"But," once more resumes the artiste, "there is much more to think about besides words and music. I read my Shakespeare well, and the operatic singer must realise the character to be 'sung,' just as much as the actor must realise the part he is to play. I design all my own dresses,
