costume from the
Salome whose image she was supposed to be, but also took curtain calls.
I think it was Gemma Belincioni, the Italian, who first conceived the
idea of Salome dancing her own dance. She was followed by Mary Garden,
who discovered what every one should have noticed in the beginning, that
the composer has given the singer a long rest after the pantomimic
episode.

Aside from this disturbance to the symmetry of the performance, Olive
Fremstad was magnificent. Her entrance was that of a splendid leopard,
standing poised on velvet paws on the terrace, and then creeping slowly
down the staircase. Her scene with Jochanaan was in truth like the
storming of a fortress, and the scene with the Tetrarch was clearly
realized. But it was in the closing scene of the drama that Mme.
Fremstad, like the poet and the composer, achieved her most effective
results. I cannot yet recall her as she crept from side to side of the
well in which Jochanaan was confined, waiting for the slave to ascend
with the severed head, without that shudder of fascination caused by the
glimmering eyes of a monster serpent, or the sleek terribleness of a
Bengal tiger. And at the end she suggested, as perhaps it has never
before been suggested on the stage, the dregs of love, the refuse of
gorged passion.

Singers who "create" parts in great lyric dramas have a great advantage
over those who succeed them. Mary Shaw once pointed out to me the
probability that Janet Achurch and Elizabeth Robins only won
enthusiastic commendation from Bernard Shaw because they were appearing
in the Ibsen plays which he was seeing for the first time. He attributed
a good part of his pleasure to the interpretations of these ladies.
However, he was never satisfied with their performances in plays with
which he was more familiar and he never again found anyone entirely to
suit him in the Ibsen dramas. Albert Niemann was one of the first tenors
to sing Wagner roles and there are those alive who will tell you that he
was one of the great artists, but it is perhaps because they heard him
_first_ in lyric dramas of such vitality that they confused singer and
role. Beatty-Kingston, who heard him in 1866, said (in "Music and
Manners") that he had torn his voice "to tatters by persistent shoutings
at the top of its upper register, and undermined it by excessive worship
at the shrines of Bacchus and the Paphian goddess.... His 'production'
was characterized by a huskiness and