My first experience of his [Albert Niemann] vocalisation was acquired during his performance of the title-role in Tannhaeuser, towards the close of the 1866 autumn. It was a painfully disappointing one. His voice, even then, was nothing more than a splendid ruin. He had torn it to tatters by persistent shoutings at the top of its upper register, and undermined it by excessive worship at the shrines of Bacchus and the Paphian goddess. Although his intonation was generally correct, its rare departures from central truthfulness being exclusively ascribable to fatigue — never to any shortcoming in his sense of tunefulness, which has always been exquisitely keen — his "production" was characterised by a huskiness and scratchiness infinitely distressing to listen to.