There seems to be no question but that the old Italian masters of singing, whether knowingly or unknowingly, taught according to correct physiological principles, and that, because of a neglect of these principles since then, while there has been a general advance in everything else, the art of voice-production actually has retrograded. For not only did the old Italian masters understand the voice in its physical aspects; they also insisted, because they understood it so well, on a course of voice-training which lasted long enough to give the pupil complete ease and entire control of technic. The story of the famous master, Porpora, and his equally famous pupil, Caffarelli, is worth recalling. On a single sheet of music paper Porpora wrote all the feats of which the voice is capable, and from that one sheet Caffarelli studied with him five, some say six years. Then the great master dismissed him with these words: "Go, my son, I have nothing more to teach you; you are the greatest singer in Italy and in the world." In our own hurried days the teacher is only too apt, after a few months, or even after only a few weeks, to say: "Go, my dear. You know _enough_. You are pretty to look at, and you'll make a hit!" For, curiously enough, while the student of the pianoforte or the violin still will devote years to acquiring perfection upon it, a person who thinks himself gifted with a voice expects to become a singer with a year or two of instruction, possibly even after studying only a few months. Yet the apparatus concerned in voice-production is a most delicate one, and, being easily ruined when incorrectly used, haste in learning how to use it not only is absurd but criminal--voice-murder, in fact. It has been said that one error of the old Italian method was that it concerned itself only with beautiful tone-production, whereas real singing is the vitalization of words by emotion. But the vitalization of words by emotion may well follow upon beautiful tone-production and, though in the case of the old Italians this undoubtedly was aided by the smoothly flowing quality of the Italian language, a singer, properly taught, should be able to sing beautifully in any tongue.