MUSIC NOTES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1451, 14 February 1918, Page 34

MUSIC NOTES.

(By

“G” String.)

Madame Melba has entered upon a new era in her artistic career —that of an exponent of modern song. Her possibilities, it is said, in this direction have always stood out emphatically, especially in later years. Madame Melba’s exposition of modern songs is entirely captivating American audiences. The “once silver voice is now go’den.” In the Chicago opera, as Marguerite in “Faust,” Madame Melba, “if not so blithesome as once upon a time, did singing such as she herself never excelled. The voice is, as always, a marvellous organ, and one forgets that more than 27 years have passed since she first appeared in the Gounod work. Many curtain calls were given Melba.” Another Australian songstress who is delighting concert audiences in America is Miss Amy Castles. She has also been engaged to make additions to the gramophone repertory of songs. According to Mr. Peter Dawson, the brilliant English singer who is at present playing an engagement on the Tivoli circuit under the direction of Mr. Hugh D. Mclntosh, some of the ammunition workers in England are buying luxuries hitherto unknown to them. During a season in Nottingham, Mr. Dawson paid a visit to an old friend of his who kept a music shop. “He was lamenting,” said Mr. Dawson to an interviewer, “the fact that his stock of instruments was getting low, and that he did not know where he could be able to get any more. Suddenly a woman of the working-class type appeared and told him that she wanted a piano. ‘I am sorry, madame,’ he said, ‘but I have not any for hire.’ ‘But.’ she replied, ‘I want to buy one!’ Then, to the surprise of my friend and myself, she purchased a grand, valued at 140 guineas, and paid cash for it! But the biggest shock came when she told my friend to send it to a squalid tenement, where I doubt if anyone could play a piano.” It was not to be expected that Wagner would escape quite scot free from the unpopularity in which his fellow-countrymen of to-day have only too deservedly sunk. Saint-Saens it is who has dealt him the blow in a newly-published book entitled “Germanophile.” Says the veteran Frenchman; “Wagner was a true Hun, with all the blatant, blasphemous self-conceit of his compatriots,” and he quotes the story of how Wagner, at a moment when he was gambling and winning with stolen money, felt, he declared, guardian angels hovering over him. The money, if you please, the gambler had stolen from his mother.