Madame Nordica had been for years a so-called “utility” singer at the Metropolitan. She had been trained in the French-Italian repertoire, and while her voice was beautiful she had not yet achieved full stardom, perhaps because she was American born and lacked the European cachet, which at that time was more important than it is to-day. She was not by nature musically gifted and was able to learn a rôle only by the hardest and most painful work of endless repetition and rehearsals. But her ambition was boundless—she bided her time and, like Lilli Lehmann, gradually worked herself into the Wagner repertoire. Realizing its advertising value, she offered herself to Madame Cosima Wagner for the “Lohengrin” production at Bayreuth. She meekly accepted every instruction given her there during the months of preparations, no matter how meticulous or artificial some of them seemed to her, and the success which she obtained there launched her successfully on her career as a Wagner singer. I trained her in the _Brunhildes_ as well as _Isolde_ and was amazed at the way in which she achieved through hard work what nature gives to others overnight. I remember her coming to Philadelphia to sing “Götterdämmerung” with my company. She arrived the previous day and I found her still very uncertain in the second act, which is rhythmically very difficult. I sat down with her at eight o’clock that evening and we went over that second act again and again until about four o’clock in the morning. It was ghastly but wonderful. At ten A. M. I gave her an orchestral rehearsal and in the evening she sang the rôle with perfect assurance and with hardly a mistake. One performance of “Tristan” which we gave with the Grau Company in Baltimore at the Lyric Theatre, which has perhaps the best acoustics of any auditorium in the country, still stays vividly in my memory. At the close we were so elated that all concerned kissed each other ecstatically after the last curtain fell. Those are the rare moments that make one forget the many times perfection in opera seems impossible to attain. [Illustration: MATHILDE MARCHESI] [Illustration: NELLIE MELBA] XI ARTISTS I have written elsewhere of my first visit to Europe after my father’s death, when the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House made me assistant to the director, Edmund C. Stanton.