But perhaps the most clearly defined of all the traditions that we absorbed were those relating to the actors and the singers of the past, especially to the singers. My father was no great idolater of the past in the matter of acting, and he told me once that he imagined Macready and the actors of his time to have been ranters.
It was French acting he preferred—the art of Got, Delaunay, and Coquelin—although Fechter was spoken of with enthusiasm, and many of the English comedians, the Wigans, Mrs. Keeley, Sam Sothern, Buckstone. The Bancrofts and Hare and Mrs. Kendal he admired enormously, and Toole made him shake with laughter.
At a play he either groaned if he disliked the acting or shook with laughter if amused, or cried if he was moved. Irving made him groan as Romeo or Benedick, but he admired him in melodrama and character parts, and as Shylock, while Ellen Terry melted him, and when he saw her play _Macbeth_, he kept on murmuring, “The dear little child.” But it was the musical traditions which were the more important—the old days of Italian Opera, the last days of the _bel canto_—Mario and Grisi and, before them, Ronconi and Rubini and Tamburini.
My mother was never tired of telling of Grisi flinging herself across the door in the _Lucrezia Borgia_, dressed in a parure of turquoises, and Mario singing with her the duet in the _Huguenots_. Mario, they used to say, was a _real_ tenor, and had the right _méthode_. None of the singers who came afterwards was allowed to be a real tenor. Jean de Reszke was emphatically not a real tenor. None of the German school had any _méthode_. I suppose Caruso would have been thought a real tenor, but I doubt if his _méthode_ would have passed muster. There was one singer who had no voice at all, but who was immensely admired and venerated because of his _méthode_. I think his name was Signor Brizzi. He was a singing-master, and I remember saying that I preferred a singer who had just a little voice.
My father loathed modern German Opera. Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi enchanted him, and my mother, steeped in classical music as she was, preferred Italian operas to all others. Patti was given full marks both for voice and _méthode_, and Trebelli, Albani, and Nilsson were greatly admired. But Wagner was thought noisy, and _Faust_ and _Carmen_ alone of more modern operas really tolerated.