for a time, and allow your voice to rest during several months, and
then, by correct artistic studies, and with a voice never forced or
strong, often indeed weak, you improve your method of attack by the use
of much less and never audible breathing, and acquire a correct, quiet
guidance of the tones. You must also make use of the voice in the middle
register, and strengthen the good head-tones by skilfully lowering them;
you must equalize the registers of the voice by a correct and varied use
of the head-tones, and by diligent practice of _solfeggio_. You must
restore the unnaturally extended registers to their proper limits; and
you have still other points to reform. Are you not aware that this
frequent tremulousness of the voice, this immoderate forcing of its
compass, by which the chest-register is made to interfere with the
head-tones, this coquetting with the deep chest-tones, this affected,
offensive, and almost inaudible nasal _pianissimo_, the aimless jerking
out of single tones, and, in general, this whole false mode of vocal
execution, must continually shock the natural sentiment of a cultivated,
unprejudiced hearer, as well as of the composer and singing-teacher?
What must be the effect on a voice in the middle register, when its
extreme limits are forced in such a reckless manner, and when you expend
as much breath for a few lines of a song as a correctly educated singer
would require for a whole aria? How long will it be before your voice,
already weakened, and almost always forced beyond the limits of beauty,
shall degenerate into a hollow, dull, guttural tone, and even into that
explosive or tremulous sound, which proclaims irremediable injury? Is
your beautiful voice and your talent to disappear like a meteor, as
others have done? or do you hope that the soft air of Italy will in time
restore a voice once ruined? I fall into a rage when I think of the many
beautiful voices which have been spoiled, and have dwindled away without
leaving a trace during the last forty years; and I vent my overflowing
heart in a brief notice of the many singing-teachers, whose rise and