early and intimate an association with the theatre as she.  Her repugnance to it in later life she attributed to a prejudice inherited from her mother.  A vastly different heritage is disclosed by Madame Lehmann’s devotion to the drama, a devotion almost akin to religion.  I have known her to go into the scene-room of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and search for mimic stumps and rocks with which to fit out a scene in “Siegfried,” in which she was not even to appear.  That, like her super-human work at rehearsals, was “for the good of the cause,” as she expressed it.

[Sidenote:  Sontag.]

Most amiable are the memories that cluster around the name of Sontag, whose career came to a grievous close by her sudden death in Mexico in 1854.  She was a German, and the early part of her artistic life was influenced by German ideals, but it is said that only in the music of Mozart and Weber, which aroused in her strong national emotion, did she sing dramatically.  For the rest she used her light voice, which had an extraordinary range, brilliancy, and flexibility, very much as Patti and Melba use their voices to-day—­in mere unfeeling vocal display.

“She had an extensive soprano voice,” says Hogarth; “not remarkable for power, but clear, brilliant, and singularly flexible; a quality which seems to have led her (unlike most German singers in general) to cultivate the most florid style, and even to follow the bad example set by Catalani, of seeking to convert her voice into an instrument, and to astonish the public by executing the violin variations on Rode’s air and other things of that stamp.”

[Sidenote:  La Grange.]

[Sidenote:  Piccolomini.]

[Sidenote:  Adelina Patti.]

[Sidenote:  Gerster.]

[Sidenote:  Lucca and Nilsson.]

[Sidenote:  Sembrich.]

Madame La Grange had a voice of wide compass, which enabled her to sing contralto roles as well as soprano, but I have never heard her dramatic powers praised.  As for Piccolomini, read of her where you will, you shall find that she was “charming.”  She was lovely to look upon, and her acting in soubrette parts was fascinating.  Until Melba came Patti was for thirty years peerless as a mere vocalist.  She belongs, as did Piccolomini and Sontag, to the comic genre; so did Sembrich and Gerster, the latter of whom never knew it.  I well remember how indignant she became on one occasion, in her first American season, at a criticism which I wrote of her Amina in “La Sonnambula,” a performance which remains among my loveliest and most fragrant recollections.  I had made use of Catalani’s remark concerning Sontag:  “Son genre est petit, mais elle est unique dans son genre,” and applied it to her style.  She almost flew into a passion. “Mon genre est grand!” said she, over and over again, while Dr. Gardini, her husband, tried to pacify her.  “Come