_Vorsingen_ is a trying ordeal. The great theatres have regular days for hearing aspirants, but this was a small theatre. The appointment is usually made on the stage, sometimes during, sometimes just after a rehearsal. Groups of the singers regularly engaged in the opera house stand in the wings, and you feel a nameless hostility emanating from all of them, especially from the one whom you are going to try to supplant. The theatre is like a cavern, and the acoustic is of course totally unknown to you. Two or three pale spots down in the orchestra chairs indicate the whereabouts of the director and perhaps the stage manager and first Kapellmeister who have come to hear you. The overhead "rehearsal lights" are very unbecoming and you are quite conscious of it. If you are to sing with orchestra, the conductor presents you to the players, "_Meine Herren, Fräulein----._" You bow, and your insides slip a few inches lower. My first _Vorsingen_ was with the piano. It stood at one side of the stage, and a whipper-snapper of a third Kapellmeister dashed more or less accurately into the prelude of the second aria from "Samson et Dalila." Then came a momentous interview in the Director's office. I had sung such good German, thanks to Frau----, that he had no idea that I understood only about three words in five of what he said. For form's sake he kept saying, "_Sie verstehen mich, Fräulein?_" and when I answered "_Ja_," he was satisfied. His wife, who thought she spoke English, was present, and tried to say a great deal, but my German proved the more serviceable of the two. I gathered that I was offered a two season contract, to sing the leading contralto parts, at the princely salary of 150 marks a month! (about $35). There was no _Spielgelt_. Salaries are usually divided into so much per month down, and so much per performance, the number of performances per month guaranteed; that is, one is paid for a certain number whether one sings them or not, and any performances over and above this number are paid extra. If a performance is lost by one's own fault, through illness for example, the _Spielgelt_ for that performance is forfeited. Three days absence from the cast through illness, even though one may be scheduled to sing only once during those days, is counted as one _Spielgelt_.