Article on the return and reception of Clara Louise Kellogg

“A WORD ABOUT MISS KELLOGG.

A maintée performance of ‘The Barber of Seville’ today, at the Academy of Music, will bring to a close one of the most curious musical ‘seasons’ which we have seen in New York for a great while. Miss Clara Louise Kellogg, when she left us last year for a professional visit to Europe, carried away the good wishes and regards of the entire public. We had not been slow to discover the capabilities of her voice, or to perceive her enthusiasm for her art, her intelligence as an actress, and the excellent foundation for her future eminence which, at the outset of her career, had been laid by a correct method of instruction. Her popularity had grown pretty steadily during the six or seven years that she had been singing in New York—not bursting out in frenzied fits of enthusiasm, but merely keeping even pace with the development of her voice and the continual progress of her culture. Except Parepa Rosa, there had been, upon the whole, no singer since Patti went away whom we liked so much. We felt proud of her, too, as an American by birth and a New-Yorker by education. It is true we never overwhelmed her with money. Many a time, even after she had reached the plentitude of her powers, we used to leave the benches half-empty, while with excellent support and all the needed accessories of the stage she tempted us in vain. We liked her, yes; we praised her with all our might; but the praise and the liking were of a rather lofty kind, we patronized the young songstress, and thought her a very promising pupil, and predicted a fine success for her some day or other. Meantime the pleasant young voice had ripened by degrees into a soprano of rare purity and truth; the blushing girl had become an accomplished actress; the graceful singer had grown to be one of the five or six most excellent prima donnas in the world. The change had been wrought to gradually that we hardly perceived it, until one night she sang in London, and the Cable [sic] flashed news to us of the ringing praises of the English critics, and the flatteries which were showered upon the unknown American girl by the titled connoisseurs of the old world. That altered everything, of course. There is nothing your free born American of a certain class respects so profoundly as an English lord, and after Miss Kellogg had been made the fashion in London, Shoddy and Petrella outran each other in determination that she should thenceforth and therefore be the fashion in New York. Patrons became courtiers, and lukewarm admirers were turned into devotees. This was all very well to be sure. Miss Kellogg is a charming singer, and an attractive young lady besides; only we did not realize it until London told us so. In the mdist, however, of the vulgarity which made much of her because it had been pronounced the aristocratic thing to do, and which crowded about her when she came home, not because she was what she was, but because her robes were scented with the perfumes of Belgravia, there was a good deal of honest, hearty, warm feeling, a good deal of proper pride in the success of a country woman, and, perhaps, a fair amount of real musical appreciation. The triumph of her first night, at any rate, was complete. The applause was not purchased from the regular corps [?], nor stimulated by free tickets; the flowers were not furnished by the manager, the recalls were not part of the play rehearsed beforehand. If the Academy of Music had contained a thousand seats more they would all have been sold days before the opening; and though many of the stockholders, with characteristic indifference to the art which their theater was built to foster, left a conspicuous array of locked and empty boxes to chill the aspect of the auditorium, the house was, upon the whole, one of the most brilliant as well as one of the fullest that we have seen for a long, long while. The assemblage was brilliant; but neither on that nor on any of the subsequent nights was it critical, and most of the applause was, evidently, a personal tribute, rather than an expression of approval of the performance. We said at the time that Miss Kellogg had not improved during her absence. Subsequent hearings have confirmed us in that impression. Some of her simplicity, so charming of old, has been rubbed off; and no style which is not simple can long please the ear or over touch the heart. The change as yet is slight, but when a singer once falls into the sin of affectation it is marvelous how rapid is the decline from bad to worse, until the end is reached in a mere artificial vocalism, which differs from music almost as a beautiful piece of mechanism differs from a living creature. Miss Kellogg often commits the fault of thinking more about the form of the music than its meaning. She sacrifices expression, and that peculiar pathos which lies in a perfectly natural style, to an ambition for brilliant execution. And one effect of this little failing—an effect of which she probably is unconscious—is an apparent loss of power in parts of many of her phrases, as if she saved her voice—not for passages which either for musical or dramatic reasons require increased intensity, but for those which give opportunities of vocal exhibition. This is not true art, the true artist forgets self in the effort to give adequate interpretation to a grand or beautiful idea. Miss Kellogg is an artist in reality; and it is because she is so good a one that we make this minute criticism on a fault which is not very apparent, and which she may easily correct if she will. She has a strong hold upon the popular heart, but she can retain it only in one way, she must aim high, and not imagine that the goal of her career is reached when she is made the pet of the drawing rooms. We think that only a small minority of her audiences have noticed any difference in her, except that her dresses perhaps are unusually gorgeous and her self possession somewhat assured. That her success so far since her return has been personal and social rather than artistic, is evident from the heartiness with which she has nightly been applauded in her singing of ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ and the sublime patience with which her ‘supporting’ performers have been tolerated. The song expressed the sentiment which animated the assemblage; we were heartily glad to have our young prima donna at home again, and it was delightful to hear that she was glad to be with us; but the song was not well sung, because it was not sung simply. And then the rest of the troupe! There were short spasms of excellence to be sure from one or two of them; Lotti, for instance, the first night, played Faust well, and Petrelli was almost pretty good in the concert in the same evening; but if Miss Kellogg had sung with such a company a year ago she would have sung to an empty house. As it is, nobody seems to care whether these people are good or bad. They are like the musicians at a ball, only accompaniments for the entertainment of the evening.”