Compared with this character, Beethoven's Leonora, Weber's Euryanthe, are only so much child's play." This is topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, but at the same time it is suggestive. The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach between the two schools. Wagner called upon the singer to express powerful emotion, passionate feeling, over a great body of sound, nay, in many instances, _against_ a great body of sound. (It is significant that Wagner himself admitted that it was a singer [Madame Schroeder-Devrient] who revealed to him the possibilities of dramatic singing. He boasted that he was the only one to learn the lesson. "She was the first artist," writes H. T. Finck, "who fully revealed the fact that in a dramatic opera there may be situations where _characteristic_ singing is of more importance than _beautiful_ singing.") It is small occasion for wonder that singers began to bark. Indeed they nearly expired under the strain of trying successfully to mingle Porpora and passion. According to W. F. Apthorp, Max Alvary once said that, considering the emotional intensity of music and situations, the constant co-operation of the surging orchestra, and, most of all, the unconquerable feeling of the reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing actors did not go stark mad, before the very faces of the audience, in parts like Tristan or Siegfried.... The critics, however, were inexorable; they stood by their guns. There was but one way to sing the new music and that was the way of Bernacchi and Pistocchi. In time, by dint of persevering, talking night and day, writing day and night, they convinced the singer. The music drama developed but the singer was held in his place. Some artists, great geniuses, of course, made the compromise successfully.... Jean de Reszke, for example, and Lilli Lehmann, who said to H. E. Krehbiel ("Chapters of Opera"): "It is easier to sing all three Brunnhildes than one Norma. You are so carried away by the dramatic emotion, the action, and the scene, that you do not have to think how to sing the words. That comes of itself" ... but they made the further progress of the composer more difficult thereby; music remained merely pretty. The successors of these supple singers even learned to sing Richard Strauss with broad cantilena effects. As for Puccini! At a performance of _Madama Butterfly_ a Japanese once asked why the singers were producing those nice round tones in moments of passion; why not ugly sounds?