On Sunday I caught on the iplayer a French film called “Marguerite" with a very similar story line as the film “Florence Foster Jenkins". Both are inspired by a true stories of a rich middle aged woman (Marguerite Dumont in France and Florence Foster Jenkins in the States) inspired to sing opera to a large audience, but suffering from a neurological kind of tone deafness that is very difficult to correct. In both stories the woman is a generous patron to a music society, so the delusions that they please the audience of that small circle is preserved. In both films, when the woman’s ambition increases and she decides to go public, her husband takes every possible step to first dissuade her and when that fails to then to protect his wife from ever finding out the truth. In both films knowledge of how their singing is perceived emerges brutally enough to speed the woman’s already deteriorating health and kill her. In the American version syphilis and associated brain damage is deemed the cause of Florence losing her ability to keep to a tune, so there is a degree of tenderness and sympathy from people around her. The French version on the other hand is harsher and more clearly a moralistic tale about the harm of self delusion. The only ‘vocal coach’ that could be hired to work with Marguerite — while being contracted to keep her away from knowing what she really sounded like — on preparing her public concert was a disillusioned opera singer at the end of his career. As she rehearses too hard she begins to experience increasing degrees of vocal damage. But even so she is not stopping at any point to question whether there might be any problems with her approach singing. It’s only when the hospital staff eventually decide to play to her a recording of her own singing that she suddenly realises what other people hear… and dies there and then of shock! Feedback has been absolutely essential at every step of my learning singing from my first singing lessons recording through being the dunce at local singing competition festivals to our regular interactions on Gillian Gingell Wormley ‘s Virtually Vocalise and The Voice School hub online plateforms. Yet my learning curve is slow, and to keep it moving in the right direction it is important to continuously ask myself how accurately I’m receiving the feedback, what I’m doing with the information, what I’m paying attention to and what changes it makes. Self delusion is an inherent pitfall to having a sense of self and can offer a whole set of obstacles in our learning.