It was Nordica who first told me of Sbriglia, giving him honest credit for the help he had been to her. Like all truly big natures she has always been ready to acknowledge assistance wherever she has received it. Some people--and among them artists to whom Sbriglia's teaching has been of incalculable value--maintain a discreet silence on the subject of their study with him, preferring, no doubt, to have the public think that they have arrived at vocal perfection by their own incomparable genius alone. All of my training had been in my native country and I had always been very proud of the fact that critics and experts on two continents cited me as a shining example of what American musical education could do. All the same, when I was in Paris during an off season, I took advantage of being near the great teacher, Sbriglia, to consult him. I really did not want him actually to do anything to my voice as much as I wanted him to tell me there was nothing that needed doing. At the time I went to him I had been singing for twenty years. Sbriglia tried my voice carefully and said:
"Mademoiselle, you have saved your voice by singing far _forward_."
"That's because I've been worked hard," I told him, "and have had to place it so in self-defence. Many a night I've been so tired it was like _pumping_ to sing! Then I would sing 'way, _'way_ in front and, by so doing, was able to get through."
"Ah, that's it!" said he. "You've sung against your teeth--the best thing in the world for the preservation of the voice. You get a _white_, flat sound that way."
"Then I don't sing wrong?" I asked, for I knew that the first thing great vocal masters usually have to do is to tell one how not to sing.
"Mademoiselle," said Sbriglia, "you breathe by the grace of God! Breathing is all of singing and I can teach you nothing of either."
Sbriglia's method was the old Italian method known to teachers as _diaphragmatic_, of all forms of vocal training the one most productive of endurance and stability in a voice. I went several times to sing for him and, on one occasion, met Plançon who had been singing in Marseilles and, from a defective method, had begun to sing out of tune so badly that he resolved to come to Paris to see if he could find someone who might help him to overcome it. He was quite frank in saying that Sbriglia had "made him." I used to hear him practising in the Maestro's apartment and would listen from an adjoining room so that, when I met him, I was able to congratulate him on his improvement in tone production from day to day. Phrasing and expression are what make so many great French artists--that, and an inborn sense of the general effect. French actors and singers never forget to keep themselves picturesque and harmonious. They may get off the key musically but never _artistically_. Germans have not a particle of this sense. They are individualists, egoists, and are forever thinking of themselves and not of the whole. When I heard Slezak, I said to myself: "If only somebody would photograph that man and show him for once what he looks like!"