IVINTERPRETER
TO MARY GARDEN AS CLEOPATRA
“C’est Affreux Mourir”
“And now this scorchèd terrace is your sole domain,Your only subject Roman, dying Anthony;The outer vastnesses they held, the soldieryOf Cæsar; their stout captain will not here refrain.You lived, O Queen, but not to countenance that painWhich is surrender of the body’s sovereignty;You take your part; is it the frightful thing to dieAnd see in dying just the realm you must regain?You have not let the game play you, my Queen, but fedThe aspic at a famished breast—the rascal freshFrom gluttony a glutton still!—Why, the hot landIs dim, alone lies Anthony save for the dead—One more ambition, Queen, for your expiring hand.The last adventure, woman of imperious flesh!”
—Pitts Sanborn.
Though the first hearing of the work in New York was during the winter of 1919 at the Lexington Theatre, and sung by the Chicago Opera Association, Cleofonte Campanini, director, it had been presented before Chicago audiences when the impersonation of the supersubtle serpent of Old Nile by Mary Garden caused muchcomment, critical and otherwise. The libretto states that the conception of M. Payen radically differs from Shakespeare’s tragedy—a rather superfluous remark. It does considerably differ, the principal difference being that Shakespeare wrote great poetry as well as great drama.
Payen’s attempt resolves itself into a series of tableaux, the characterization generalized, his verse respectably tepid. In a word, not the Queen that Shakespeare drew. Of this Cléopâtre you dare not say: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” She is more germane to that Queen shown us in the sumptuous prose of Theophile Gautier’s Une Nuit de Cléopâtre than the imperial courtesan who turned the head of Anthony and stirred the pulse of Julius Cæsar to the supreme tune of Shakespeare’s music.
There is plenty of action, some picturesque episodes, and at least one brutal scene. Of love and the talk of love there is no end. Yet it is not all convincing. Moving pictures. You think of Gérôme, of Le Nouy, of the hundred and one painters who have celebrated on canvas this seductive creature of old Egypt. “For her own person, it beggar’d all description; she did lie in her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue, o’er-picturing that Venus where we see the fancy out-work nature.”
Cléopâtre is Massenet and the modiste. Brackish-sweet, it is the ultimate expression of musical impotence. Clever craftsman Massenetcould turn out martial music and amorous, the clangor of trumpets and voluptuous, dizzy dance measures. But here it is generally bosh. Languid, enervating, it attained a feeble climax in the ballet of the penultimate act. Ambiguous shapes and attitudes crowded the scene. Two dancers slipped and fell, but the recovery was so swift that the tumbled ensemble seemed a veritable climax. Cléopâtre cynically regarded this daring symbolism, though Marc-Antoine seemed rather shocked. And he should have been. Musically speaking, nothing happened in Act I; less followed in Act II, while Act III was a glittering triumph of vacuity. In the last act the asp played protagonist. As its name did not figure on the programme, it probably died from envy, or else inanition, doubtless humming Will Shakespeare’s mournful lay: “I am dying, Egypt, dying.” You also recall Swinburne’s: “Under those low, large lids of hers She hath the histories of all times....”
But the Cléopâtre! A youthful Sphinx, her entrance on the great burnished barge was an evocation. As she faced Antoine so must have looked Sheba’s Queen before the majesty of Solomon. It would have been trying on the nerves of the most pudic potentate from Herod down. A saucy lad, in a later scene, Cléopâtre got in a mix-up at an early-Egyptian boozing-ken. An extraordinary apparition, a fantastic faun of Aubrey Beardsley caught the roving riggish eye of the disguised Queen. She encouraged theadvances of the anonymous animal. An Adonis à rebours. Pavley was this delicate monster and his subtle rhythms made Cléopâtre shiver. Here the music was too prudish.
Stravinsky or Richard Strauss would have given the screw an enharmonic wrench. Act III saw the Queen attired at once so sonorously and exquisitely that the vast audience gasped with admiration. It is, however, the tavern scene that will save the tawdry work. The anatomical wigwagging of the two golden lads set the lobby buzzing. Cléopâtre is doomed to packed houses in the future. Nothing succeeds like true spirituality.
Mary Garden is Cléopâtre, as she is Mélisande and Thaïs. It is not a rôle that taxes her dramatic resources or her personal pulchritude. All she did was to look beautiful and turn on the full voltage of her blandishments. Men went to the ground before that dynamic yet veiled glance, like soldiers facing a machine-gun. It is uncanny, the emotion she projects across the footlights and with such simple but cerebral means.
That she would have been burned at the stake a few centuries ago, this lovely witch, is no conjecture. Her nose is not “tip-tilted like the petal of a flower,” as Cléopâtre’s is said to have been; nevertheless, she is the tawny Egyptian. And she has never spoken so eloquently as in this parlando part. Perhaps the most poignant criticism was carelessly uttered by a big policeman who had strayed in during thegarden scene. “Some Queen!” he said. And the definitive words had been spoken. Fie on naughty professional opinion after that memorial phrase!
Once upon a time we called this “precious” lyric work Wagner and Absinthe, for there are many rumors of Tristan and Isolde in it, and the opalescent music, drugged with dreams, has the numbing effect of that “green fairy” no longer permitted in la belle France. Like all epigrams, this is only a half-truth. In the Belgian poet’s The Death of Tintagiles—so wonderfully interpreted in tone by Charles Martin Loeffler—his marionettes are beginning to modulate into flesh and blood, and, like the mermaid of the fairy story, the transformation is a painful one. We note the achievement of a new manner in Pelléas and Mélisande. Played in English first by Forbes-Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the piece created a mixed impression in London, though it may be confessed that, despite the scenic splendor, the acting transposed to a lower realistic key this lovely drama of souls. No play of Maeterlinck’s is so saturated with poesy, replete with romance. There are episodes almost as intense as the second act of Tristan. We listen for King Mark’s distant, tremulous hunting-horns in the forest scene when Pelléas and Mélisande uncover their hearts.
MARY GARDEN AS MELISANDE
From a photograph copyrighted by Davis and Eickemeyer
MARY GARDEN AS MELISANDE
The second act begins at an immemorial fountain in the royal park. Here the young Prince sits with the wife of his brother. Mélisande is the most convincing full-length portrait of the poet. Exquisitely girlish, she charms with her strange Undine airs. Mélisande is enveloped in the haze of the romantically remote. At times she seems to melt into the green tapestry of the forest. She is a woodland creature. More melancholy than Miranda, she is not without traces of her high-bred temperament; less real than Juliet, she is also passion-smitten. You recall Melusina and Rautendelein. Not altogether comprehensible, Mélisande piques us by her waywardness, her fascinating if infantile change of moods. At the spring the two converse of the water and its healing powers. “You would say that my hands were sick to-day,” she murmurs as she dips her fingers into the pool. The dialogue is as elliptical as if written by Browning or Henry James. But the symbol floats like a flag.
The mad apostrophe to the hair of Mélisande is in key with this moving tableau. Perhaps Maeterlinck took a hint from the mournful tale of his friend, the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach (Bruges-la-Morte), with its reincarnation of a dead woman in the form and features of a live one. The beautiful hair of the new love serves but to strangle her. Pelléas is more tender.
“I have never, never seen such hair as thine,Mélisande. I see the sky no longer through thy locks.... They are alive like birds in my hands.” The last scene, as Mélisande dies of a broken heart, even when read on the printed page, is pity-breeding. It is the tragedy of souls distraught. “She must not be disturbed,” urges the venerable Arkel. “The human soul is very silent.... The human soul likes to depart alone.... It suffers so timorously.... But the sadness, Golaud, the sadness of all we see.... ’Twas a little being so quiet, so fearful, and so silent. ’Twas a poor little mysterious being like everybody.” Pascal comes to the mind here. No matter the splendor of human lives, we must die alone.
The speech of the poet in its rhapsodic rush merges into Debussy’s music. That we shall ever see another such ensemble as at the Manhattan Opera House years ago is doubtful. Mary Garden is Mélisande. No further praise is needful. All her trumpery rôles, Thaïs, Gismonda, Cléopâtre, with their insincere music and pasteboard pathos, are quickly dismissed. Her Mélisande is unforgettable.
This opera was first heard here on February 17, 1914, at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Mary Garden, Vanni Marcoux, and Huberdeau. It had been produced by the Boston Opera Company in December, 1913, and by thepresent organization January 23, 1918. Miss Garden was the heroine on that occasion, and was greeted with overwhelming applause. The première of the play Monna Vanna occurred at the Nouveau Théâtre, Paris, May 17, 1902. We had the good fortune to see it a week later. Georgette Leblanc was the original Monna. Jean Froment, Darmont, and Lugné Poé were the other principals. The drama enjoyed an immediate success all over Europe from Bergen to Palermo. London alone stood firm against its blandishments. The censor forbade a production. New York first saw it in English with Bertha Kalich at the old Standard Theatre, Harrison Gray Fiske, manager.
As a play it was a new departure for Maeterlinck. It is almost theatric. In the heyday of his glory Sardou never devised anything more arresting than the dénouement—setting aside consideration of the psychologic imbroglio. There are spots in the dramatic scheme which tax the credulity. However, something of the improbable must always be granted a playwright, be he never so logical. The rapid mental change of Vanna hints at a native-born casuist, an Italian Renaissance type of mind. Her love of Colonna could not have been deep-rooted. But she did not betray him in the tent, and yet she has been adjudged profoundly immoral; in a word, not to put an edge too fine upon the sophistries of the situation, this heroine committed an imaginative infidelity as well asuttering a splendid falsehood. The madness of the finale is the logical outcome of her passion for Prinzevalle. All that has gone before in her life had been a bad dream. The true, the beautiful moment is at hand. It will be both her revenge and justification.
She goes to Prinzevalle in his cell. “This must end here; it is too perfect.... It is one blaze about me and within me.... Oh, some death will run its sudden finger round this spark and sever us from the rest!” Thus Browning sings In a Balcony.
The play’s the thing! though it did not seem to catch the conscience of the composer. Nevertheless, Monna Vanna is more grateful to our ears than Gismonda. There are too many “things” that are set to music in the Sardou libretto, while Maeterlinck deals only with the primal passions—love, jealousy, hatred, conflict of wills. There is more unity in action and mood in the older score. The music is Wagnerian from first to final curtain, but it is cleverly assimilated and swifter, more poignant. The introduction to the third act recalls the third act of Valkyrs; so we were not surprised to find Brunhilde pleading, or to hear the chorus shrilly cry out the Valkyr theme. In the tent scene, Tristan and Isolde reign, as might be expected. The first act has been cut and to its advantage.
MARY GARDEN AS MONNA VANNA
From a photograph copyrighted by Mishkin
MARY GARDEN AS MONNA VANNA
At our first view of Mary Garden as the mediæval Judith who fetches to Pisa her beloved Holofernes, we frankly confess that the impressions of her interpretation were strong. Monna Vanna will rank in her portrait-gallery among the finest. It far outshines Gismonda, as Monna herself outshines the incredible, erotic Duchess of Athens. There was no attempt to make a disrobing scandal in the tent scene, which would be obviously theatrical flimflam. Miss Garden disposed of the situation simply. She did not appear half-nude, but clothed in exquisitely-toned draperies. But if she did not show her lovely person, she spilled for us the soul of the heroine who saved her country and lost her reputation. In the opening act she did little, but suggested the psychology of a woman who had begun to loathe a supine husband. Note the nuance with which she uttered “J’rai, mon père,” and the repetition when she says it to Colonna. It was like molten steel at first; it was cold, rigid steel, the steel of unalterable resolution the second time. Yet how tender is her “Si” when she turns to her fuming spouse.
There was tenderness in the tent scene, yes, true tenderness, not expressed by the sentimental symbols of the English theatre, but in the restrained terms of the French tradition; therefore, more eloquent, more artistic, despair and pride modulating into amazed joyfulness at meeting her early friend, stern Prinzevalle. But the last scene gave us the most moving side of this wonderful woman’s art. The shock of incredulity caused by her husband’s suspicions, merging into the supreme ecstasy as she graspsthe key that is to unlock the future—in sooth, no such acting has been witnessed for a long time. The scale was essentially smaller than Bernhardt’s, but as subtle as the art of Sarah were the indications of love triumphant with death staring her in the face. The tiny play of shadows round her eyes and mouth as she sees her lover trapped were touching. That she was a picture in every act is a matter of course. Her slow steps to the open door most impressive. It was a veritable march to the scaffold. Fevrier’s music in this last episode rings true.
Of Mary Garden it is always the correct thing to say that she is charming. True. Charming, and also many other qualities she boasts. She is exquisite, and she is sometimes a great dramatic artist. But her voice is a sonorous mirage. The lower register is still rich, sombre in coloring, thrilling when she wills. The gift of temperamental ecstasy is hers, though the character she paints so subtly is hardly worth the powder and shot to blow it sky-high. A sensual prowling panther, notwithstanding the al fresco exhibition of mother-love in Act I.
The panther glides from its midnight jungle to meet its mate, and then Miss Garden’s magic begins to operate. Her soliloquy is the finest bit of psychology expressed in voice, mimique, and with the entire arsenal of her personalbeauty that we have seen on any stage, dramatic or lyric, for years. She needs an intimate atmosphere. Her diction, her phrasing, her general grasp of the rôle are most impressive. She has distinction in every pose, distinction in the carriage of her head and arch of the neck.
Her cadenced step in the first scene is replaced by rhythmic movements in the second act that reveal her glowing inner life. She is all flame and gold—except when she sings above the staff. Even then she infuses it with a characteristic timbre. A singing-actress. People like Mary Garden because she has that rarest of artistic virtues—personality.
During the first week of last season’s Chicago opera the temperament of Mary Garden was carefully chained in its cage; nevertheless, we overheard its growls in Gismonda, but the mock-Fafner at the bottom of the cistern outroared Miss Garden’s tame panther. In Monna Vanna there were whimperings and menacing claws. The feline had no chance to spring, not even in the tent scene. At a matinée in the Lexington Theatre Thaïs was sung by the Chicago Opera Association, and now or never! we said, the temperament so artistically expressed, rather canalized and exquisitely distributed, in the two other operas, will leap. It did. In the palace of Thaïs the panther appeared for a few moments—andit assumed the form of hysteria. The famous courtesan of Alexandria experienced a true “conversion,” the physical manifestations of which were well-nigh pathological. “You have created a new shudder,” wrote Victor Hugo to Charles Baudelaire after the production of his Flowers of Evil. The “nouveau frisson” of Miss Garden is thrilling, and must have appalled the well-meaning, stupid Athanael.
This singing-actress does not widely depart from her usual interpretation, except that slight perpetual novelty which we expect from her. Her last scene is beautiful in conception and execution; the “spiritual” flirtation on the mossy bank as piously piquant as ever. The kiss suggested and evaded set us to wondering again at the morose monk. In the early acts Thaïs is too restless. The firm yet plastic lines of the character are thereby disturbed. She looked lovelier than ever, and she did not sing in the best of voice. A trying week was behind her; besides, the domesticated panther must have tugged hard and frequently at its leash.
I attended Miss Garden’s reading of the score for my first time, and freely admit my mixed feelings. We were assured by perfectly honorable lobbyists that the last season the Garden version was much better, more temperamental; and one who had overheard her inParis swore that she was a seething caldron in Act II. Her interpretation seems to us to be “overpainted,” to employ studio argot. Like the canvas in Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, there is little left of the original design, except perhaps a miraculously painted foot.
There were bits here and there that are admirable; the slow awakening of her interest in the toreador as he thunders forth that supreme song of table d’hôtes. We see some delicate and definitive notations, yet it is lost in the cloudy chaos of the scene. All the strong theatrical points are deliberately renounced; the first tumultuous entrance, the Habanera, Seguidilla, and the duo in Act II. The renunciation suggests technical heroism, but it doesn’t help us much in the development of the character.
Her Carmen is essentially frigid. And it is neither sinister nor sensuous. To be sure, it is different, but then so is Hedda Gabler “different.” We went to see, to hear, Carmen, and Hedda—in a lyric mood—was more often adumbrated than the Mérimée-Bizet gypsy. The disturbing element of the performance was the undeniable fact that, granted her idea of the rôle, she didn’t even “get it across.” She missed fire in Act II, in the card episode particularly. Nor did she look bewitching. We quite understand her avoidance of the conventional posing, hipping, strutting, and inane postures; yet there should have been compensations. (In the days of Calvé the criticism was “Elle se hanche trop.”)
These were slim, not her singing, nor yet the beautiful shawl that might have been designed by Sorolla y Bastida. The famous fan we missed. If Mary Garden had but lavished a tithe of her blandishments on her Don José that she so recklessly, so alluringly bestowed upon Marc-Antoine Maguenat in Cléopâtre, we might have been won over a little to her general conception. This Carmen was a distinguished dame. Lilli Lehmann alone outshone her in aristocratic Sevillian courtesy. But Lilli could sing. And Lilli had not the Aberdeen-cum Philadelphia-cum Chicago-cum Boston complex of Mary.
We have since learned that the singer was grievously indisposed. And she surely missed the Don José of Dalmores and Muratore.
And on this rather chilly note of dissent I prefer to end. Of Miss Garden’s twenty or thirty other rôles it is hardly necessary to speak. Her Louise and Salome, so dissimilar, yet both incomparable, need no belated praise. She is unique. Thus endeth the Book of Mary the Garden.