Disappointed Singers

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 7, 1886

Disappointed Singers.

IT is surprising to know how many girls there are with aspirations toward the operatic stage. Not one in a thousand has the rare voice necessary to success, and it is always sorrowful to find a young person with ambitions far beyond his or her abilities.

A little success in concert singing, a solo or two in a church choir, the flattery of people who cannot discriminate between good and bad voices, and the young singer must go at once to a conservatory of music, and thence to the operatic stage. This last misfortune, however, seldom befalls her, and in time she goes back home with much of the sweetness gone out of her life, as well as out of her poor little voice.

She affects contempt for the sweet and simple little ballads she might sing so pleasantly; yet she really has no ability for anything greater.

Perhaps she has appeared at a musicale, in a showy dress with an immense train, a part of which ought to have been around her bare arms, back, and shoulders. If this calamity has befallen her, she will ever after affect a mad passion for Italian music, and will sing in Italian only, although she knows less of the language than a two-year-old baby kicking up its heels under the blue sky of Italy.

She becomes envious, jealous, satirical. Her life is often imbittered by the disappointments she is sure to meet. And of course it is hard for her to go back to her village or country home with all those golden imaginations coming to naught. It is hard to gather up all the bright hopes of one's life into the secret recesses of the heart, and sorrow and rebel over them.

Fortunately, most of these disappointed operatic candidates are young, and to youth is given the blessed privilege of outgrowing and forgetting the failures and disappointments of early life. This disappointment might, however, be averted entirely if ambitious young singers would only think calmly and seriously of the mighty obstacles in the way of a successful public singer.

When all is said, and when success is won, the laurel crowns an operatic singer may wear are not so beautiful as the crown of a pure, good, and noble womanhood spent in faithfully discharging the duties that come to every woman who really lives her life.—Youth's Companion.