Page:Our Little Girl (1923).pdf/166

 He was insulting her intelligence as well!

“How you sing,” he continued, “depends greatly on how you live and how you think. Anyone who knows a few tricks can teach you how to make beautiful tones—if you have a voice. You have a voice. Perhaps not a great voice, but a good voice. Many great singers have had no better. But it is your outlook on life that interests me more than your voice. Which interests you more—another person or yourself?”

Stupid question. Soedlich was a coach of singing. Why did he ask her, “Which interests you more?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she answered, and her tone said that she considered the question beside the point.

“Let me put it differently. Have you ever searched your own heart? Have you ever searched the heart of a friend?”

“Do you mean, do I understand people?”

She didn’t like the mockery in his eyes.

“Not exactly, but it will do.”

“Yes. I think I do understand people.”

That ought to be an end to it.

“Then you ought to put that understanding into your singing. When you sing a song about a young lady whose lover is too shy, you must, for the time, be that young lady and you must feel like a young lady who wishes the embraces of her timid lover. Do you understand?”

And Soedlich, she supposed, would like to be that lover.

“If I may be frank, my dear young lady,” he went on, “I think that your mind is too much on yourself and on how you are singing. Have you ever heard Chaliapin in ‘Boris’ or have you ever heard Schumann-Heink sing ‘Der Erlkonig’? If you have, you will understand. You are too young to have heard Calvé as ‘Carmen,’ but she was ‘Carmen,’ not Calvé. You, my dear, are always