Excerpt from Opera Singers a Pictorial Souvenir: With Biographies of Some, of the Most Famous, Singers of the Day A BR unnhilde or an Isolde hardly is associated with a little village in Maine. Yet Maine is the native State of Mme. Nordica, as it is of two other great Ameri can prima donnas - Mme. Eames and Annie Louise Carey. Mme. Nordica was born in Farmington, in the interior of the State, in 1859. Her parents were musical. Her father, as a boy, played surreptitiously on the violin. He had been forbidden to bring the instrument into the house, because his father thought it was the devil. But his mother, more lenient, allowed him to hide it in one of the lower bureau-drawers, and when the sterner parent was out, the boy exhumed his beloved fiddle from the depths of the bureau and revelled in its sound. He grew up to have a fine bass voice, and hemarried a girl who had a fine soprano. They sang in church - the only place where it was not considered sinful to s1ng. Thus, within limitations it is true, Lillian Norton (mme. Nordica's real name) grew up in a musical atmosphere. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.