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bout the detail with diligent drudgery, and without that her performances would go for nought. The singer pays for this intense concentration. In "Tower of Ivory" Mrs. Atherton says that all Wagnerian singers must pay heavily. Probably all good ones must. Charles Henry Melzer has related somewhere that he first saw Mme. Fremstad on the stage at Covent Garden, where between her scenes in some Wagner music drama, lost in her role, utterly oblivious of stage hands or fellow-artists, she paced up and down in the wings. At the moment he decided that she was a great interpretative artist, and he had never heard her sing. When she is singing a role she will not allow herself to be interrupted; she holds no receptions between scenes. "Come back after the opera," she says to her friends, and frequently then she is too tired to see any one. She often drives home alone, a prey to quivering nerves which keep her eyeballs rolling in ceaseless torture--sleepless. Nothing about the preparation of an opera is easy for Olive Fremstad; the thought, the idea, does not register immediately in her brain. But once she has achieved complete understanding of a role and thoroughly mastered its music, the fire of her personality enables her easily to set a standard. Is there another singer who can stand on the same heights with Mme. Fremstad as Isolde, Venus, Elsa, Sieglinde, Kundry, Armide, Bruennhilde in _Goetterdaemmerung_, or Salome? And are not these the most difficult and trying roles in the repertoire of the lyric stage to-day? In one of her impatient moods--and they occur frequently--the singer once complained of this fact. "How easy it is," she said, "for those who make their successes as Marguerite and Mimi.... I should like to sing those roles...." But the remark was made under a misconception of her own personality. Mme. Fremstad would find Mimi and Marguerite much more difficult to compass than Isolde and Kundry. She is by nature Northern and heroic, and her physique is suited to the goddesses and heroines of the Norse myths (it is a significant fact that she has never attempted to sing Eva or Senta). Occasionally, as in Salome, she has been able to exploit successfully another side of her talent, but in the rendering of the grand, the noble, and the heroic, she has no equal on our stage. Yet her Tosca always lacked nobility. There was something in the music which never brought the quality out. In such a part as Selika she see
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