The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-11-17
DUPED IN FLORENCE
Students Who Want to Sing and
 Paint Better Off at Home

From the New York Times.
 Florence and other Italian cities are full of young Americans studying music ana painting who ought to be at home, &C., cording to Oliver Dennett Grover, an American painter who makes his home on the bank of the Arno for part of each year. and who has just arrived from there. MT. Grover says young people who know nothing about the first principles Of either art rush over there, when they could at least learn the greater part Of what they want to know at home. AS for the colony of foreign artists in Flor ence, that is diminishing each year
 .tThere are Florentine music teachers who are making great incomes out Of teaching young Americans" said MT. Grover. ''The most successful seems to be a man from Boston, who is said to be earning from $15,O0O to s1s,O0O a year. But there are dozens of other men who are simply duping the young American stu dents who go to them in way that makes the blood boil.
 Last year we had at one of our homes an American woman of 35 and her mother. Mrs Grover is interested in music, and she was asked to an at-home which the woman was having the following week. She went, and learned that the woman had separated from her husband because he did not sympathize with her musical aspirations, had gathered together what money she could, made her aged father sell out his property, and had dragged him. her mother, and her own two small l children off to Florence to live, while she l prepared for grand opera. Mrs. Glover,
 who has studied music, and knows a
 great deal about it, heard her sing and | was thrown into consternation. Not only 1 had she no voice, but she had no car, and l If never would have been possible for her so become a singer. Yet she told us that her maestro had been telling her con-
 tinually that her debut, for which he was l arranging was only question of a few 1 weeks She dropped out Of sight after a l short time, and we have never been able
 to learn what became of her. l have i known half a dozen cases just as bad. 1 Young women were kept on and on there l until they had been drained of their last i cent. when they had absolutely no chance l of becoming singers. The same thing IS l true of Milan to greater extent, ana m l Rome it is just as bad.
 'In Florence Buonanici. one of the old est piano teacers, a pupil of Liszt. and one of the two greatest teachers of the piano in Italy. was too busy when a | young American woman came to him a
 year or two ago to take her as pupil
 He suggested another teacher Buonanicl learned that the young Noiudh ndu SpHie
 all the way from Chicago, and that she knew merely the rudiments of music. {" But why did you not study in Chi go,' he asked her, where you have one
 of the greatest pianists in the world?
 She replied that she had wanted to come
 where the air was inspiring. Buonanichi
 told her there was no reason why she
 should not have taken her lessons over here.
 'It is the same way with art students. If had youngster who wanted to study Il art would not send him abroad for at least the first four years. There are some | schools here where you get much better | instruction as beginners than anywhere
 abroad. Of course, the time comes when
 a painter wants to go over to see old things But among modern painters. it is not a question of nationality any more. It is just as likely that great painter ] will come up in Denver. or New York, or l Chicago, as in London. or Paris, or Berlin, l or Rome.'