MADAME MARCHESI’S REMARKABLE PROTEST.

Otago Witness, Issue 3488, 18 January 1921, Page 52

MADAME MARCHESI’S REMARKABLE PROTEST.

ALadame Blanche Marchesi, who is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her debut as singer, makes a remarkable protest in tho Weekly Dispatch, London. “In the 22 years I have given to this country my heart has been well-nigh broken. England is the most wonderful of musical countries, full of gorgeous throbbing voices, but England drives her singers away,” she says. “I have brought out some wonderful voices—those of a plumber, a brass turner, and a mill girl. But there is no place for them in London, and what I have to do is to send them to the Continent and to teach them a foreign language hi order that they may get their chance in the opera houses which seize on talent. “Some day they will come back to this country, where now they have no honour, and if they are introduced through some influential people in the social world they will sing at Covent Garden and gain fame and tremendous salaries. But unless they secure that influence they will not have the opportunity. “And so, for the sake of the pupils I have and the amazing voices they command, I am extending my activities to Paris and the Continent. “Years ago, when 1 first came here, filled with the desire to do all I could for this country, I discovered that every-

thing foreign was pushed to the front. Society raved over the flimsiest concoctions of the modern Italian school. English composers had no chance unless they wrote ’pot boilers.' The real beautiful English music was forgotten—barred. “To-day matters have improved just a little—because of the war, nations want their own—but the vicious ring still exists, and that is why Delius and Ethel Smyth and other gifted composers had to go abroad to get their works performed. ‘lf you go to the Continent and come back we will take you, is the challenge given to the young aspiring singers of to-day, and then London society steps into the ring and singers have to fight a losing battle against private and personal influences in an effort to reach Covent Garden. “Intrigues, money, and patronage are bound up with opera in London, and while these remain opera enterprise will be hampered. “Give our English singers an opportunity. I know young artists who possess voices like Caruso; hut nobody wants them, nobody will take them up, no one will break the vicious ring to let them through. “Archie Nowell—a plumber from the Alidlands—one of the greatest baritones 1 know, has had to go abroad to sing. Phyllis Archibald and Astra Desmond, possessors of wonderful voices, would oe stars of the first magnitude. But they are English, and they are not wanted here.”