tress,
and she brought to them all her most effectual enchantments, including a
series of truly seducing costumes. The imperious unrest of the first
act, the triumph of love over hate in the second, the invocation to La
Haine in the third, and the final scene of despair in the fifth, all
were depicted with poignant and moving power, and always with fidelity
to the style of the piece. She set her own pace in the finale of the
first act. The wounded warrior returns to tell how a single combatant
has delivered all his prisoners. Armide's half-spoken guess, _O ciel!
c'est Renaud!_ which she would like to have denied, was uttered in a
tone which definitely stimulated the spectator to prepare for the
conflict which followed, the conflict in Armide's own breast, between
her love for Renaud as a man, and her hatred of him as an enemy. I do
not remember to have seen anything on the stage more profound in its
implied psychology than her acting of the scene beginning _Enfin il est
en ma puissance_, in which she stays her hand with dagger uplifted to
kill the enemy-hero, and finally completely conquered by the darts of
Love, transports him with her through the air to her own fair gardens.

The singer told me that she went to work on this opera with fear in her
heart. "I don't know how I dared do it. I suppose it is because I had
the simplicity to believe, with the Germans, that Kundry is the top of
everything, and I had sung Kundry. As a matter of fact my leaning toward
the classic school dates very far back. My father was a strange man, of
evangelical tendencies. He wrote a hymn-book, which is still in use in
Scandinavia, and he had a beautiful natural voice. People often came for
miles--simple country people, understand--to hear him sing. My father
knew the classic composers and he taught me their songs.

"This training came back to me when I took up the study of _Armide_. It
was in May that Mr. Gatti-Casazza asked me if I would sing the work,
which, till then, I had never heard. I took the book with me to the
mountains and studied--not a note of the music at first, for music is
very easy for me anyway; I can always learn that in a short time--but
the text. For six weeks I read and re-read the text, always the
difficult part for me in learning a new opera, without looking at the
music. I found the text of _Armide_ particularly difficult because it
was in old French, and because it was in verse.

"I worked over it for six weeks,