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. … 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 pretzels. The talk languished a little at first, but when Richter told us 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 roof 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. … Our amiable hostess explained her discovery in detail, illustrating meanwhile in a voice that sounded like a bell. ‘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.