Her voice is
strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer;
her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the
temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and
sets her whole being violently and delicately before you. She makes a
drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her
rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as much
with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the
melody of a picture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all
its lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it?
tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who
takes in energy at all her senses and gives out energy at all her
senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of
Maeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As one
looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of
the music or of the music than of the words. One took them
simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a
flower. I understood why Mallarme had seemed to see in her the
realisation of one of his dreams.
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