It is impossible to mention by name all the many singers, male and female, who won applause and renown in the beginning and in the middle of the last century. Almost every European state was furnished with most excellent operas, and troops of artists, men and women, with voices of the highest cultivation, flocked thither. Even in the streets and inns and other places in Italy, where elsewhere we are accustomed to seek only music of the lowest kind, one could then hear the most artistic vocal music, such as was found in the churches, concert-saloons and theatres of Germany and France.
It appears that far greater demands were made upon singers then than now-a-days. At least, history celebrates, together with the great vocal flexibility of the earlier singers, the measured beauty of their singing, the noble tone, the thoroughly cultivated delivery, by which they showed themselves true artists, and produced upon their hearers effects almost miraculous.
On the other hand, how sad is the condition of vocal music in our time! How few artistically cultivated voices are there! And the few that there are, how soon are they used up and lost! Artists like _Lind_, and more recently _Trebelli_, are exceptions to be made.
Mediocre talent is now often sought, and rewarded far beyond its desert. One is often tempted to think that the public at large has wellnigh lost all capacity of judgment, when he witnesses the representation of one of our operas. Let a singer, male or female, only drawl the notes sentimentally one into another, execute a tremulo upon prolonged notes, introduce very often the softest piano and just where it is entirely out of place, growl out the lowest notes in the roughest timbre, and scream out the high notes lustily, and he or she may reckon with certainty upon the greatest applause. In fact, we have become so easily pleased that even an impure execution is suffered to pass without comment. Let the personal appearance of the singer only be handsome and prepossessing, he need trouble himself little about his art in order to win the favor of the public. This decline of the art of singing is usually ascribed to the want of good voices, and this poverty of voices to our altered modes of living. To me it appears as the natural consequence of the whole manner and way in which the art of singing has been historically developed since its earlier high state of perfection.