168

Geraldine Farrar as Zaza 190

Mary Garden as Cleopatre 196

Olive Fremstad

_"C'est que le Beau est la seule chose qui soit immortelle, et qu'aussi
longtemps qu'il reste un vestige de sa manifestation materielle, son
immortalite subsiste. Le Beau est repandu partout, il s'etend meme
jusque sur la mort. Mais il ne rayonne nulle part avec autant
d'intensite que dans l'individualite humaine; c'est la qu'il parle le
plus a l'intelligence, et c'est pour cela que, pour ma part, je
prefererai toujours une grande puissance musicale servie par une voix
defectueuse, a une voix belle et bete, une voix dont la beaute n'est que
materielle._"

Ivan Turgeniev to Mme. Viardot.

The career of Olive Fremstad has entailed continuous struggle: a
struggle in the beginning with poverty, a struggle with a refractory
voice, and a struggle with her own overpowering and dominating
temperament. Ambition has steered her course. After she had made a
notable name for herself through her interpretations of contralto roles,
she determined to sing soprano parts, and did so, largely by an effort
of will. She is always dissatisfied with her characterizations; she is
always studying ways and means of improving them. It is not easy for her
to mould a figure; it is, on the contrary, very difficult. One would
suppose that her magnetism and force would carry her through an opera
without any great amount of preparation. Such is not the case. There is
no other singer before the public so little at her ease in any impromptu
performance. Recently, when she returned to the New York stage with an
itinerant opera company to sing in an ill-rehearsed performance of
_Tosca_, she all but lost her grip. She was not herself and she did not
convince. New costumes, which hindered her movements, and a Scarpia with
whom she was unfamiliar, were responsible in a measure for her failure
to assume her customary authority.

If you have seen and heard Olive Fremstad in the scene of the spear in
_Goetterdaemmerung_, you will find it difficult to believe that what I say
is true, that work and not plenary inspiration is responsible for the
effect. To be sure, the inspiration has its place in the final result.
Once she is certain of her ground, words, music, tone-colour, gesture,
and action, she inflames the whole magnificently with her magnetism.
This magnetism is instinctive, a part of herself; the rest is not. She
brings a