In story-telling songs and in oratorio, slovenly delivery is reprehensible, but when the words of a song are the lyric flight of a true poet, a careless utterance becomes intolerable.
Beauty of tone is not everything; the singing of mere sounds, however lovely, is but a tickling of the ear.

The shortcoming of the Italian school of singing, as of composition, has been too exclusive devotion to sensuous beauty of tone as an end in itself.

The singer must never forget that his mission is to =vitalize text with tone=.

The songs of Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Brahms, Grieg, Strauss, and Wolf, as well as the Wagnerian drama, are significant in their inseparable union of text and music.

The singer is therefore an interpreter, not of music alone, but of text made potent by music.
Pronunciation, moreover, concerns not only the listener, but the singer and speaker, for pure tone and pure pronunciation cannot be divorced, one cannot exist without the other.