"The Art That Conceals Art":

I love this quotation from an old Dublin Grand Opera Society program:

Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1862-1936) described [McCormack] on many occasions as the greatest singer of his time, and she had heard all the great singers over her career of more than 60 years.

Author and critic Ernest Newman in the London Sunday Times wrote a week after McCormack’s death: "He was a supreme example of the art that conceals art, and sheer hard work that becomes manifest only in its results, not in the revolving of the machinery that has produced them."

(Taken from "John McCormack– a Centenary Tribute" from a program of the Dublin Grand Opera Society, Spring Season 1984, at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin)