scratchiness infinitely distressing
to listen to...." No allowances of this sort need be made for the deep
impression made by Olive Fremstad. At the Metropolitan Opera House she
followed a line of well-beloved and regal interpreters of the Wagner
roles. Both Lilli Lehmann and Milka Ternina had honoured this stage and
Lillian Nordica preceded Mme. Fremstad as Kundry there. In her career at
the Metropolitan, indeed, Mme. Fremstad sang only three operas at their
first performances there, _Salome_, _Les Contes d'Hoffmann_, and
_Armide_. In her other roles she was forced to stand comparison with a
number of great artists. That she won admiration in them under the
circumstances is the more fine an achievement.

I like to think, sometimes, that Olive Fremstad is the reincarnation of
Guiditta Pasta, that celebrated Italian singer of the early nineteenth
century, who paced triumphantly through the humbler tragedies of _Norma_
and _Semiramide_. She too worked hard to gain her ends, and she gained
them for a time magnificently. Henry Fothergill Chorley celebrates her
art with an enthusiasm that is rare in his pages, and I like to think
that he would write similar lines of eulogy about Olive Fremstad could
he be called from the grave to do so. There is something of the mystic
in all great singers, something incomprehensible, inexplicable, but in
the truly great, the Mme. Pastas and the Mme. Fremstads, this quality
outstrips all others. It is predominant. And just in proportion as this
mysticism triumphs, so too their art becomes triumphant, and flames on
the ramparts, a living witness before mankind to the power of the
unseen.

_August 17, 1916._

Geraldine Farrar

[Illustration: Mme. Farrar's insigne.]

The autobiography of Geraldine Farrar is a most disappointing document;
it explains nothing, it offers the reader no new insights. Given the
brains of the writer and the inexhaustibility of the subject, the result
is unaccountable. Any opera-goer who has followed the career of this
singer with even indifferent attention will find it difficult to
discover any revelation of personality or artistry in the book.
Geraldine Farrar has always been a self-willed young woman with a
plangent ambition and a belief in her own future which has been proved
justifiable by the chronological unfolding of her stage career. These
qualities are displayed over and over again in the book, together with a
certain number of facts about her