usness attacked him to such an extent that he began drinking in
self-defence to enable him to stand the strain. Perhaps his beverages
were more potent than usual, but that night he was decidedly
irresponsible. He struggled through the _Wanderer's_ first scene, and
conscious that he was doing it badly, he sent out for a bottle of
champagne as a bracer. The consequence was that in our scene in the
third act, he was utterly incapacitated. He sang all kinds of things not
in the text, bits from _Hunding_ in "Walkuere," from _Daland_ in
"Hollaender," from "Fidelio." He rolled about the stage and lurched in
my direction with his spear pointed at me, shouting _Pogner's_ advice to
_Eva_ while I was singing _Erda's_ responses. It seemed to go on for
ages, but at last _Siegfried_, waiting for his cue in the wings,
realized that he must save the scene, entered and escorted his befuddled
relation from the stage. I had made up with a creamy white grease paint
and no red. My sister said, "Why did you make up with rouge and not
have the pallor we agreed upon?" My cheeks were so scarlet from
mortification that no grease paint would have paled them.

The audience took it splendidly, I must confess, and refrained from any
expression of disapproval or joy--though it _must_ have been funny! The
next day there were announcements in all the papers that he had had a
temporary lapse of memory owing to grief over the sudden death of his
mother, who, as the stage manager cynically informed us, had reached out
a hand from the grave to save her son, she having been dead for ten
years! The director went to Berlin and stayed there for weeks. We
afterwards learned that it was a plot, deliberately planned and put
through by Carlhof to gain the direction of the theatre. I can see him
now stalking around, six foot four, chewing his rag of a dyed moustache,
his face pale and his eyes glittering with anxiety as to the success of
his plan to encourage the director to drink. The director once told me
the hours between the last meal and the time to go to one's dressing
room to begin making up are the dangerous ones. He said, "First one
takes a glass of wine to steady one's shaking nerves; later a glass is
not enough so it becomes a bottle, then two bottles and so on till
control is lost." It is easy for any singer to understand, and the best
remedy is to omit that first glass.

"Carmen" was the second opera which I had to do without rehearsal. The
soprano ha