Schumann-Heink

More than 60 years old, Mme. Schumann-Heink gave a recital (in Baltimore) the other night--a recital of superb beauty. The passage of time seems scarcely to have dimmed her great voice. If you ask her the reason for it, she will tell you it is the result of living naturally. " I have never liked anything artificial," she will tell you. " Look at me. I do not use rouge. Certainly I need beautifiers more than most women. But I live by nature."

And indeed there is about her a health and sense and sanity that exhilarates you like a very spirit of the green earth. She is the daughter of a Hungarian father and an Italian mother and you find in her that plain earthy sense that is characteristic of the Italians. She will continue that she owes her voice to her many children. " With every child my voice grew better. And in my early years I was left alone to support eight children. I had to work hard and study hard and become a success in opera to keep them fed, clothed and sheltered."

A recent book* tells an extraordinary story about this extraordinary woman. One afternoon years ago the director of the Metropolitan Opera House asked her hesitatingly whether she could sing in Die Walkuerie that night. He was badly in need of her services. She said: "Why not?" That evening she sang as an aerial Valkyrie--that is to say, suspended in the iron ring. Next evening her ninth child was born. A few nights later she was again in the iron ring singing.

She had sons in the War in both the American and German armies, and underwent the agonies of such a sardonic situation. ''They might be killing each other," she would say, with a sudden look of sorrow on her merry face. One son went to horrible doom in a sunken German submarine. These emotional pangs have bred in her a great pity and tenderness for soldiers of all races. It is this which has made her devote herself to the American Legion, for whose benefit she sings constantly.

She is an utter conservative, and says she finds wisdom and happiness in respect for authority--the authorities of Church and State. When I had a husband," she says, "I respected the authority that nature had placed over me. I obeyed my husband."

* THE ART OF THE PRIMA DONNA-- Frederick H. Martens--Appleton ($3.00).