The women who master the masters. – A deep and powerful alto voice, such as one sometimes hears in the theatre, suddenly raises the curtain upon possibilities that we usually do not believe in. All at once we believe that somewhere in the world there could be women with lofty, heroic, royal souls, capable of and ready for grandiose retorts, resolutions, and sacrifices, capable of and ready for mastery over men, because in them the best of man aside from his sex has become an incarnate ideal. To be sure, the intention of the theatre is not at all that such voices convey this concept of women; normally they are supposed to represent the ideal male lover, for example a Romeo; but to judge from my experience, the theatre quite regularly miscalculates on this point, as does the composer who expects such effects from such a voice. One does not believe in these lovers: such voices always retain a motherly and housewifely colouring, and most of all when love is in their tone.