In the spring of 1885 I was to accompany Mr. Stanton as assistant director and musical adviser to engage singers for the following season of German opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, but as Mr. Stanton’s little daughter became ill and subsequently died, I went over alone and have always been quite proud of the four contracts I had ready for Stanton’s signature when he, a month later, arrived in Germany. These were Lilli Lehmann, soprano from the Royal Opera House in Berlin; Emil Fischer, bass from the Royal Opera House in Dresden; Max Alvary, lyric tenor from Weimar, and Anton Seidl, conductor of the Angelo Neumann Wagner Opera Company. These four artists became subsequently the mainstay of the German opera and in America developed to greater and greater power and fame. Lilli Lehmann, at that time forty years of age, had sung principally the coloratura rôles, and with these had made a great local reputation throughout Germany and Austria. She had sung the _First Rhine Maiden_ at Bayreuth in 1876, and an occasional _Elsa_ in “Lohengrin,” but it was not until she came to America that she began to sing the _Brunhildes_ and _Isoldes_ which made her one of the greatest dramatic sopranos of her time. Curiously enough, she insisted on making her first appearance in America as _Carmen_, a rôle to which she gave a dramatic, tragic, and rather sombre significance, but in which the lighter, coquettish touches were perhaps not sufficiently emphasized. She had achieved her pre-eminence as a dramatic soprano only after years of the hardest kind of work, and had only through her indomitable will and energy changed her voice from a light coloratura to a dramatic soprano, and as I was at that period only twenty-three and already occupied a position of considerable responsibility, it took some time before she was ready to concede that I was really a musician of serious purpose who was working day and night to fit myself for the various responsibilities so suddenly thrust upon me.