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NEW Isolde! It is almost like saying, a new Juliet or, considering the more tragic significance of Wagner's heroine, a new Lady Macbeth. Yet it was precisely a new Isolde that Olive Fremstad gave us last winter in the Metropolitan Opera House. We have heard, here in New York, nearly all the great interpreters of this psychologically complicated rôle: its originator, Madame Schnorr von Carolsfeld, never visited us; neither did Frau von Voggenhuber; Materna was not particularly sympathetic. Lilli Lehmann was actually our first Isolde. A half dozen have followed her, but she remains in our memory as the most brilliant, though not, however, an ideal Isolde. The Valkyr steel flashed through the voluptuous measures of the music; nor did she display womanly tenderness. She was a daughter of the gods, remote, glacial, haughty, and her voice was like a diamond. Klafsky, affluent vocally, lacked poetry. She was a bourgeois Isolde. Others who have essayed the part need not now detain us; they were not of the generation of giants, old Wotan's Bayreuth brood. Then Milka Ternina appeared, and we heard and saw another Isolde. For the first time possibilities latent in the character were made visible and audible to us. Broadly composed, but without the old-fashioned Wagnerian rhetoric of gesture and attitude, Ternina's Isolde was a human woman, not a spouting volcano, nor yet a histrion brandishing aloft arms or strutting like a queen in some transpontine tragedy. The advent of this Isolde was marked by Wagner-worshipers with a white stone. To follow her and not to better her was merely to employ again the old Bayreuth stencil; in a word, to present the obvious Isolde of the German opera-houses.

But Madame Fremstad has followed,

and at once we forgot the occasional Isoldes, for she is of the lineal artistic blood of Lehmann and Ternina. She is new; that is, she is different, and to be different, as Stendhal said, is to be original. Fremstad has not the majestic presence, the heroic voice, nor the commanding authority, of her glorious predecessors. But she is lovelier, vocally and physically. She is the most alluring Isolde we have seen, and her charm is of the most intimate. This lovelorn, unhappy Irish princess was, it must be remembered, poetic of temperament as well as passionate. She was not a contemporary of the cavemen, not an aboriginal, despite her fierce hatred of her foes. She was of royal descent. stad played her in the key of womanhood outraged by treachery, implacable in the desire for vengeance, but yet a woman, always the woman-tender, clinging, enchanting, reckless, brave, scornful, a creature of a myriad moods, and as true to her love as the flower to the sun.

Frem

In the first act we miss at first the storm and stress, the too often undignified agitation, even feline spitefulness, of some Isoldes. The Fremstad Isolde is in a clairvoyant condition; she moves as if in a dream. After the first fiery outburst, "Destroy this proud ship, swallow its shattered fragments, and all that dwells upon it!" she seems to commune with her dreams. A soliloquy is her vocal speech, upon the first withdrawal of Kurvenal; her narrative is spoken more to the soul of Isolde than to the ears of Brangaene. The meeting of the lovers, the drinking of the potion, and the sublime surrender to destiny, are not isolated notes in the dramatic fabric, but a closely spun synthesis. Not a gesture is exaggerated; the comminglement of repose and passion is harmonious. And her second act never descends to the exhibition of a too easily

simulated theatric emotion; the high-born princess loves, as well as the ardent woman. The ending, while arousing criticism, is all of a piece with the entire conception. Ternina it was who showed us that the "Liebestod" was not a bravura concert aria to be delivered in accents of mock-heroic grief and exultation. Fremstad is even more subtle. Sorrow, immitigable, profound, clothe in crape the closing measures, the swan song of Isolde. Her mien, her despair, the hopeless cadence of woe in her voice-all these are subtly indicated.

Predictions that the vocal tessitura of the part would prove too high were happily not realized. Never has her voice sounded so sumptuous, so velvety; never has it been so plastic in its adaptation to the ever-changing moods of the music. Opalescent were the ever-shifting hues of her powerful and plangent organ. From irony to ecstasy, she underlined the faintest nuance. Naturally the impersonation left untouched several sides: it will grow in inches; it will be bigger in sweep, swifter, intenser, and more beautiful. To the eye, Fremstad was a dramatic picture, sinuous, graceful, and pathetic. "When I have sung Isolde fifty times," she said, after the first performance, "then-perhaps you may praise me-but now!" This modest remark only demonstrates that the versatile American singer, who, as Carmen or Kundry, Salome or Sieglinde, Ortrud or Brangaene (she is a Brangaene, the best we ever heard with the exception of Marianne Brandt, and superior to Brandt vocally and physically; Brangaene was not a witch but a charmer) has never lacked in artistic probity. And she is the only artist who ever achieved the distinction of singing Brangaene and Isolde on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House.

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Variety,

In Gustave Mahler's reading of "Tristan and Isolde" we may recognize the germ of Fremstad's Isolde. She rehearsed the character with him. This reading is the modern, not the tempest-tossed Wagner of other years. The analysts are busy with the masterwork, dissecting it, digging into it for new beauties. The torrential swing and profound poetry of Seidl are lacking. Mottl's massiveness seems trifle slow and old-fashioned. tonal and rhythmic variety, and a potent musical intellect, are in Mahler's interpretation. Granting the validity of his dynamic scheme at the outset, his logic of tonal gradations is unescapable. From a pin-point pianissimo to a pin-point pianissimo the music surged through the three acts to adequate climaxes. It is a reading that laid bare the nerves of the music, and its tempi never relapsed into mere speed for speed's sake, or into the swampy grandeur of the average conductor. One sighed for moments of more sultriness, more lightning and thunder. Mahler over-refines, the "scholar's fault." Tristan's entrance is not majestic, there are too much logic and too little sensuousness in parts of the second act; as for final climax, Herr Mahler can quote Wagner at the dissidents; Wagner who said that the orchestra should serve merely as coloring material to beautify and emphasize the action.1

However, there is no reason why we should not accept this novel "Tristan and Isolde," and this new Isolde. Remember that Nietzsche, a backslider from the Bayreuth faith, wrote: "Apart from Wagner the magnetizer and fresco-painter, there is yet a Wagner who deposits little jewels in his works, our greatest melancholist in music, full of flashes, delicacies, and words of comfort . . . the master of the tones, of a melancholy and languorous happiness. . .

"I HAVE a farm of about two hundred

acres near

that came to me from my father. It has fairly good buildings, is near a good local market, and should be a good dairy farm. The present tenant, who is honest and faithful, runs it in the old way; and although it is no expense to me, and sometimes turns a fair profit, the place is not my ideal of what a farm should be. It seems to me that I ought to change superintendents, and I thought that among the graduates from your college there might be some good young man whom you could recommend. I pay my man $30 per month the year round, and he has a small garden plot and a cow, and gets his firewood on the place. I would be willing to pay a little more than this for a man who was scientifically trained and has had experience, or I might let him work the place on shares."

This kind of communication is typical of many that come to me with requests for college men to take charge of farms. Very often it is a worn-out or run-down place that is in need of a manager, and the owner is willing to let the man have half the earnings if he is successful in bringing it into a profitable condition.

There is such wide-spread misunderstanding of the problems involved in these questions that I cannot refrain from inviting my reader to a discussion of the merits of the case. There must be a complete readjustment of ideas in respect to the remuneration that educated men are to receive in agriculture, and it is time that we face the question. I understand, of course, that a graduate of any institu

tion may be glad to work for a time. merely for experience, but of this I am not now speaking: I am considering the remuneration for managers.

In order to ascertain the expectations of students themselves as to their value to an employer, I addressed a letter of inquiry to the several hundred students in the College of Agriculture at Cornell University. I asked what kind of position or employment the student desired on graduation, what wages or salary he thought he would be fairly worth, and why he put the value of his services at such figure. I had 135 replies, coming from regular four-year men, one-year or two-year specials, and three-months' winter-course students.

Of this number, forty-two desired. to become farm managers, eighteen of them being four-year men, thirteen of them specials, and eleven winter-course students. Most of the men, in all classes, were brought up on the farm, and the others had had more or less farm experience. The sums that they specify in every case are for the first year of service, with expectation that promotion may come if the respondent is successful. These sums are not merely what is blindly hoped for, but are suggested by what college-mates and others before them have been able to secure in the way of remuneration in various kinds of business.

The pay expected by the eighteen fouryear men on graduation, for farm managership, ranges from $700 to $2000 per year, and most of the men expect to receive more or less subsistence in addition.