ery year. Her
voice has a sensuous beauty that is matchless, and no other prima
donna, except Materna, has emotion in her voice so deep and genuine as
that which moves us in Lehmann's _Isolde_ and _Bruennhilde_.

She made her _debut_ in 1866, at Prague, and ten years later sang the
small _roles_ of the first Rhine maiden and the forest bird in
"Rheingold" and "Siegfried," at the Bayreuth festival--little
fancying, perhaps, that she would twelve years later be the queen of
German opera in America. She takes excellent care of her voice, and
never allows the weather to interfere with her daily walk of several
miles. Her versatility is extraordinary, for she sings _Norma_ and
_Valentine_ as well as she does _Isolde_. She scouts the idea that
Wagner's music ruins the voice, agreeing on this point with the most
famous vocal teacher of the day, Madame Marchesi. It is only when
Wagner's music is sung to excess that it injures the voice, according
to Fraeulein Lehmann, because it requires such extraordinary power to
cope with the orchestra. Heretofore she has not always succeeded in
holding her own against the full orchestra, but in her latest and
greatest impersonation--_Bruennhilde_, in "Die Goetterdaemmerung"--her
voice rivalled Materna's in power without losing a shade of its
sensuous beauty, which is always enchanting.

If it were possible to secure half a dozen more singers like Lehmann,
Alvary, and Fischer, the operatic problem might be regarded as solved.
It is the scarcity of first-class acting vocalists that makes opera so
expensive, and prevents it from being self-supporting. The number of
first-class singers is so small that every manager competes for them,
and enables them to charge fancy prices, which are ruinous to any
manager who has no government or other support to fall back on.

It is a curious thing, this scarcity of good singers. We read so much
about all professions being over-crowded; and yet here is a profession
in which success literally means millions, and yet so few come forward
in it that managers are at their wits' ends what to do, especially in
the case of tenors. Herr Niemann obtains seven hundred and fifty
dollars for every appearance; Fraeulein Lehmann gets six hundred
dollars, and there are singers who are much better paid still because
they appear under the star system. Surely this ought to be a
sufficient bait to catch talented pupils. How many professions are
there in which one can make be