Page:Eminent women of the age.djvu/510

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EMINENT Women of the age.


excellent, all more or less good. Besides others, Mtidame Miolan-Carvalho (the original Marglierita in Paris), Mad- emoiselle Lucca, Mademoiselle Patti, Mademoiselle Titiens, Mademoiselle Artot, and, last of all. Mademoiselle Christine Nilsson, have all been heard here in this part, and have left impressions which render it extremely difficult for any new- comer to succeed in the same character. The great success, therefore, of Miss Kellogg is decisive proof of her merits and accomplishments. Her voice is a soprano of pure and even quality, sufficiently brilliant in its upper portion, and intensely sympathetic in its middle and lower range. She has perfect command over a compass of two octaves, — her execution and intonation evidencing that complete course of student training, the necessary drudgery of which is so frequently shirked by vocal aspirants, and more especially when gifted with naturally fine voices, which are too generally considered by their possessors to be the chief requisites for success ; whereas, in point of fact, the voice is but as an instrument apart from the trained skill and art requisite to wield it. Miss Kellogg is one of those exceptional singers who, blessed with a fine voice, have yet not presumed, on the strengtlx. thereof, to neglect those minute and laborious details of vocal exercise which form the requisite training fon an executive artist. These qualities are apparent in the certainty and precision with which she intonates distant intervals, the note beiiig at once perfectly reached without that wavering which is some- times perceptible in singers of great pretensions, whose prac- tice of scales and solfeggi hsiS not been sufficiently diligent. Miss Kellogg's power, too, of sustaining a note with a pro- longed diminuendo^ finishing with an almost imperceptible pianissimo^ unfalteringly in tune, is another proof of thorough training. Then her bravura-singing in fiorld orna- mental passages has that distinctness and completeness of style so seldom re'ilized ; while her shake is irreproachable in