Garcia the Centenarian and His Times: Being a Memoir of Manuel Garcia's Life and Labours for the Advancement of Music and ScienceMackinlay, M. (Malcolm) Sterling
History
Garcia the Centenarian and His Times: Being a Memoir of Manuel Garcia's Life and Labours for the Advancement of Music and Science
"Such training she had never had. She had formed her own ideal of the
difficult _rôles_ that had been entrusted to her at the Royal Theatre in
Stockholm, and had tried to reach that ideal by the only means she knew
of--very pernicious means indeed. The result was that the voice had been
very cruelly injured. The mischief had been seriously aggravated by the
fatigue consequent upon a long and arduous provincial tour; and the
effect was a chronic hoarseness, painful enough to produce marked
symptoms of deterioration upon the fresh young voice which had never
been taught either the proper method of singing or the cultivation of
style necessary for the development of its natural charm.
"Manuel Garcia was not slow to perceive all this, and he afterwards told
a lady who questioned him upon the subject that the Swedish soprano was
at that time altogether wanting in the qualities needed for presentation
before a highly cultivated audience.
"Soon after this Mademoiselle Lind called by appointment upon the
maestro, who then occupied a pleasant _deuxième étage_ in a large block
of houses in the Square d'Orleans, near the Rue Saint Lazare. It was a
handsome residence, built around a turfed courtyard, with a fountain in
the centre and a large tree on each side.
"As on this occasion she formally requested the great teacher to
receive her as a pupil, he examined her voice more carefully than he had
been able to do at Madame Soult's party.
"After making her sing through the usual scales and forming his own
opinion of the power and compass of her organ, he asked her for the
well-known scena from 'Lucia di Lammermoor'--'Perchè non ho.' In this,
unhappily, she broke down completely--in all probability through
nervousness, for she had appeared in the part of Lucia at the Stockholm
Theatre no less than thirty-nine times only the year before, and the
music must therefore have been familiar to her. However, let the cause
have been what it might, the failure was complete, and upon the strength
of it the maestro pronounced his terrible verdict: 'It would be useless
to teach you, mademoiselle; you have no voice left.'
"It is necessary that these words should be distinctly recorded, for
their misquotation in the newspapers and elsewhere has led to a false
impression, equally unjust to master and pupil. The exact words
were--'Vous n'avez plus de voix,' not 'Vous n'avez pas de voix.' Jenny
Lind had once possessed a voice, as Garcia realised perfectly clearly,
but it had been so strained by over-exertion and a faulty method of
emission that for the time being scarcely a shred of it remained.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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