hat she had sung _Una voce poco fa_ at the age of seven with
the same embellishments which she used later when she appeared in the
opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers are freaks of nature
like tortoise-shell cats and like those rare felines they are usually
females of late, although such singers as Battistini and Bonci remind
us that men once sang with as much agility as women. But when this
type of singer finally becomes extinct naturally the operas which
depend on it will disappear too for the same reason that the works of
Monteverde and Handel have dropped out of the repertory, that the
Greek tragedies and the Elizabethan interludes are no longer current
on our stage. None of our actors understands the style of Chinese
plays; consequently it would be impossible to present one of them in
our theatre. As Deirdre says in Synge's great play, "It's a heartbreak
to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same things only."
We cannot, indeed, have everything. No one doubts that the plays of
AEschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are great dramas; the operas I have
just referred to can also be admired in the closet and probably they
will be. Even today no more than two works of Rossini, the most
popular composer of the early Nineteenth Century, are to be heard.
What has become of _Semiramide_, _La Cenerentola_, and the others?
There are no singers to sing them and so they have been dropped from
the repertory without being missed. Can any of our young misses hum
_Di Tanti Palpiti_? You know they cannot. I doubt if you can find two
girls in New York (and I mean girls with a musical education) who can
tell you in what opera the air belongs and yet in the early Twenties
this tune was as popular as _Un Bel Di_ is today.

Coloratura singing has been called heartless, not altogether without
reason. At one time its exemplars fired composers to their best
efforts. That day has passed. That day passed seventy years ago. It
may occur to you that there is something wrong when singers of a
certain type can only find the proper means to exploit their voices in
works of the past, operas which are dead. It is to be noted that
Nellie Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely 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
and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of
importance. They had no bearing on the