McCormack

" The audience refused to leave when the lights were extinguished after a recital by John McCormack, forcing him to sing two encores in semi-darkness." So runs a wireless despatch reporting the Irish tenor's appearance in Berlin. This sort of thing certainly gives the lie to the opinion still in vogue among cynical subway riders that McCormack's reputation results from crowding audiences of servant girls and from other manifestations of Gaelic loyalty. The tenor, far from being a showy player to gushy sentiment, is one of the most refined and scholarly of artists.

He has done much to foster the present vogue of songs and other small pieces of the Italian masters of the 17th and 18th centuries, composers whose work, with its formalistic sedateness and untrumpeting beauty, is the very caviar of caviar for these jazz-blaring years.