Chapter XXI

Richter's mother lived in a little village somewhere in the neighbourhood of Munich. He had planned to pass two or three days with her before his departure for Lucerne and had asked us to go with him; he would show us the country and we should be able to return to Munich the same day before the evening meal.

Villiers and Servais were of the party. We passed through pleasant and hilly country, picturesque with the villages of the suburban residents.

Frau Richter was a professor of singing, and it was the lesson hour when we entered the little house where she lived. Scales and trills of remarkable shrillness struck our ears, while we waited on the ground floor for the lesson to be over. The pupils passed us on their way out, and Richter conducted us up to the first floor and into the drawing-room, which was well furnished in a homelike and very German fashion.

Frau Richter was still a young woman, of attractive presence and manner. She spoke very regretfully of the events which had led to the dismissal of her son and she seemed to fear that he would never again find so good a position.

They brought us beer and bretzels. The talk languished a little at first, but when Richter told us that his mother had invented a method of singing which increased the power of the voice five-fold, she at once became interested and animated.

In fact, the pupils we had heard just before, had seemed to us to have a very unusual volume of tone.

Frau Richter's method consisted in throwing the sound, when singing, against the vault of the palate, which then forms a sort of drum increasing the resonance and the force of the tone to an astonishing degree.

Richter sat down at the piano and sang according to this method. His voice came out in tremendous volume, making the little house tremble to its foundation.

"One would say that his palate was made of tin," cried Villiers.

Our amiable hostess explained her discovery in detail, illustrating meanwhile in a voice that sounded like a bell.

Servais was the first one to grasp the idea, he tried it and produced some very wonderful bellowings.

"The curious thing about it," said Richter, "is that this system which my mother has found, does away with all fatigue. One is able to use the voice indefinitely in this way."

And Richter, to prove the truth of his assertion, sang us the entire third scene from the Rheingold.

When we had taken leave of our hosts, and were established in our railway carriage, we made our very best endeavours to sing from the palate, and the result was a scandalous cacophony.