have always regarded her as one of the few great interpreters, but in
the light of recent experience I now feel assured that she is the
greatest artist on the contemporary lyric stage. It is not, I would
insist, Mary Garden that has changed so much as we ourselves. She has,
it is true, polished her interpretations until they seem incredibly
perfect, but has there ever been a time when she gave anything but
perfect impersonations of Melisande or Thais? Has she ever been
careless before the public? I doubt it.
The fact of the matter is that when Mary Garden first came to New York
only a few of us were ready to receive her at anywhere near her true
worth. In a field where mediocrity and brainlessness, lack of
theatrical instinct and vocal insipidity are fairly the rule her
dominant personality, her unerring search for novelty of expression,
the very completeness of her dramatic and vocal pictures, annoyed the
philistines, the professors, and the academicians. They had been
accustomed to taking their opera quietly with their after-dinner
coffee and, on the whole, they preferred it that way.
But the main obstacle in the way of her complete success lay in the
matter of her voice, of her singing. Of the quality of any voice there
can always exist a thousand different opinions. To me the great beauty
of the middle register of Mary Garden's voice has always been
apparent. But what was not so evident at first was the absolute
fitness of this voice and her method of using it for the dramatic
style of the artist and for the artistic demands of the works in
which she appeared. Thoroughly musical, Miss Garden has often puzzled
her critical hearers by singing _Faust_ in one vocal style and _Thais_
in another. But she was right and they were wrong. She might, indeed,
have experimented still further with a new vocal technique if she had
been given any encouragement but encouragement is seldom offered to
any innovator. As Edgar Saltus puts it, "The number of people who
regard a new idea or a fresh theory as a personal insult is curiously
large; indeed they are more frequent today than when Socrates quaffed
the hemlock." It must, therefore, be a source of ironic amusement to
her to find herself now appreciated not alone by her public, which has
always been loyal and adoring, but also by the professors themselves.
It would do no harm to any singer to study the multitude of vocal
effects this artist achieves. I can think of nobody who could not
learn something from her. How, for example, she gives her voice the
hue and colour of a _jeune fille_ in _Pelleas et Melisande_, for
although Melisande had been the bride of Barbe-Bleue before Golaud
discovered her in the forest she had never learned to be anything else
than innocent and distraught, unhappy and mysterious. Her treatment of
certain important phrases in this work is so electrifying in its
effect that the heart of every auditor is pierced. Remember, for
example, her question to Pelleas at the end of the first act,
"_Pourquoi partez-vous?_" to which she imparts a kind of dreamy
intuitive longing; recall the amazement shining through her grief at
Golaud's command that she ask Pelleas to accompany her on her search
for the lost ring: "_Pelleas!--Avec Pelleas!--Mais Pelleas ne voudra
pas_..."; and do not forget the terrified cry which signals the
discovery of the hidden Golaud in the park, "_Il y a quelqu'un
derriere nous!_"
In _Monna Vanna_ her most magnificent vocal gesture rested on the
single word _Si_ in reply to Guido's "_Tu ne reviendras pas?_" Her
performance of this work, however, offers many examples of just such
instinctive intonations. One more, I must mention, her answer to
Guido's insistent, "_Cet homme t'a-t-il prise_?"... "_J'ai dit la
verite.... Il ne m'a pas touchee_," sung with dignity, with force,
with womanliness, and yet with growing impatience and a touch of
sadness.
Let me quote Pitts Sanborn: "It is easy to be flippant about Miss
Garden's singing. Her faults of voice and technique are patent to a
child, though he might not name them. One who has become a man can
ponder the greatness of her singing. I do not mean exclusively in
Debussy, though we all know that as a singer of Debussy ... she has
scarce a rival. Take her _mezza voce_ and her phrasing in the second
act of _Monna Vanna_, take them and bow down before them. Ponder a
moment her singing in _Thais_. The converted Thais, about to betake
herself desertward with the insistent monk, has a solo to sing. The
solo is Massenet, simon-pure Massenet, the idol of the Paris
_midinette_. Miss Garden, with a defective voice, a defective
technique, exalts and magnifies that passage till it might be the
noblest air of Handel or of Mozart. By a sheer and unashamed reliance
on her command of style, Miss Garden works that miracle, transfigures
Massenet into something superearthly, overpowering. Will you rise up
to deny that is singing?"
As for her acting, there can scarcely be two opinions about that! She
is one of the few possessors of that rare gift of imparting atmosphere
and mood to a characterization. Some exceptional actors and singers
accomplish this feat occasionally. Mary Garden has scarcely ever
failed to do so. The moment Melisande is disclosed to our view, for
example, she seems to be surrounded by an aura entirely distinct from
the aura which surrounds Monna Vanna, Jean, Thais, Salome, or Sapho.
She becomes, indeed, so much a part of the character she assumes that
the spectator finds great difficulty in dissociating her from that
character, and I have found those who, having seen Mary Garden in only
one part, were quite ready to generalize about her own personality
from the impression they had received.
One of the tests of great acting is whether or not an artist remains
in the picture when she is not singing or speaking. Mary Garden knows
how to listen on the stage. She does not need to move or speak to make
herself a part of the action and she is never guilty of such an
offence against artistry as that committed by Tamagno, who, according
to Victor Maurel, allowed a scene in _Otello_ to drop to nothing while
he prepared himself to emit a high B.
Watching her magnificent performance of Monna Vanna it struck me that
she would make an incomparable Isolde. At the present moment I cannot
imagine Mary Garden learning Boche or singing in it even if she knew
it, but if some one will present us Wagner's (who hated the Germans as
much as Theodore Roosevelt does) music drama in French or English with
Mary Garden as Isolde, I think the public will thank me for having
suggested it.
Or it would be even better if Schoenberg, or Stravinsky, or Leo
Ornstein, inspired by the new light the example of such a singer has
cast over our lyric stage, would write a music drama, ignoring the
technique and the conventions of the past, as Debussy did when he
wrote _Pelleas et Melisande_ (creating opportunities which any
opera-goer of the last decade knows how gloriously Miss Garden
realized). It is thus that the new order will gradually become
established. And then the new art ... the new art of the singer....
_April 18, 1918._
Au Bal Musette
_"Aupres de ma blonde
Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, bon, bon...."_
Old French Song.
Au Bal Musette
It has often been remarked by philosophers and philistines alike that
the commonest facts of existence escape our attention until they are
impressed upon it in some unusual way. For example I knew nothing of
the sovereign powers of citronella as a mosquito dispatcher until a
plague of the insects drove me to make enquiries of a chemist. For
years I believed that knocking the necks off bottles, lacking an
opener, was the only alternative. A friend who caught me in this
predicament showed me the other use to which the handles of high-boy
drawers could be put. It was long my habit to quickly dispose of
trousers which had been disfigured by cigarette burns, but that was
before I had heard of _stoppage_, a process by which the original
weave is cleverly counterfeited. And, wishing to dance, in Paris, I
have been guilty of visits to the great dance halls and to the small
smart places where champagne is oppressively the only listed beverage.
But that was before I discovered the _bal musette_.
One July night in Paris I had dinner with a certain lady at the
Cou-Cou, followed by cognac at the Savoyarde. I find nothing strange
in this program; it seems to me that I must have dined at the Cou-Cou
with every one I have known in Paris from time to time, a range of
acquaintanceship including Fernand, the _apache_, and the Comtesse de
J----, and cognac at the Savoyarde usually followed the dinner. This
evening at the Cou-Cou then resembled any other evening. Do you know
how to go there? You must take a taxi-cab to the foot of the hill of
Montmartre and then be drawn up in the _finiculaire_ to the top where
the church of Sacre-Coeur squats proudly, for all the world like a
mammoth Buddha (of course you may ride all the way up the mountain in
your taxi if you like). From Sacre-Coeur one turns to the left around
the board fence which, it would seem, will always hedge in this
unfinished monument of pious Catholics; still turning to the left,
through the Place du Tertre, in which one must not be stayed by the
pleasant sight of the _Montmartroises bourgeoises_ eating _petite
marmite_ in the open air, one arrives at the Place du Calvaire. The
tables of the Restaurant Cou-Cou occupy nearly the whole of this tiny
square, to which there are only two means of approach, one up the
stairs from the city below, and the other from the Place du Tertre. An
artist's house disturbs the view on the side towards Paris; opposite
is the restaurant, flanked on the right by a row of modest apartment
houses, to which one gains entrance through a high wall by means of a
small gate. Sundry visitors to these houses, some on bicycles, make
occasional interruptions in the dinner.... From over this wall, too,
comes the huge Cheshire cat (much bigger than Alice's, a beautiful
animal), which lounges about in the hope, frequently realized, that
some one will give him a chicken bone.... Conterminous to the
restaurant, on the right, is a tiny cottage, fronted by a still tinier
garden, fenced in and gated. Many of the visitors to the Cou-Cou hang
their hats and sticks on this fence and its gate. I have never seen
the occupants of the cottage in any of my numerous visits to this open
air restaurant, but once, towards eleven o'clock the crowd in the
square becoming too noisy, the upper windows were suddenly thrown up
and a pailful of water descended.... "_Per Baccho!_" quoth the
inn-keeper for, it must be known, the Restaurant Cou-Cou is Italian by
nature of its _patron_ and its cooking.
This night, I say, had been as the others. The Cou-Cou is (and in this
respect it is not exceptional in Paris) safe to return to if you have
found it to your liking in years gone by. Perhaps some day the small
boy of the place will be grown up. He is a real _enfant terrible_. It
is his pleasure to _tutoyer_ the guests, to amuse himself by
pretending to serve them, only to bring the wrong dishes, or none at
all. If you call to him he is deaf. Any hope of _revanche_ is
abandoned in the reflection of the super-retaliations he himself
conceives. One young man who expresses himself freely on the subject
of Pietro receives a plate of hot soup down the back of his neck,
followed immediately by a "_Pardon, Monsieur_," said not without
respect. But where might Pietro's father be? He is in the kitchen
cooking and if you find your dinner coming too slowly at the hands of
the distracted maid servants, who also have to put up with Pietro, go
into the kitchen, passing under the little vine-clad porch wherein you
may discover a pair of lovers, and help yourself. And if you find some
one else's dinner more to your liking than your own take that off the
stove instead. At the Cou-Cou you pay for what you eat, not for what
you order. And the Signora, Pietro's mother? That unhappy woman
usually stands in front of the door, where she interferes with the
passage of the girls going for food. She wrings her hands and moans,
"_Mon Dieu, quel monde!_" with the idea that she is helping vastly in
the manipulation of the machinery of the place.
And the _monde_; who goes there? It is not too _chic_, this _monde_,
and yet it is surely not _bourgeois_; if one does not recognize M.
Rodin or M. Georges Feydeau, yet there are compensations.... The girls
who come attended by bearded companions, are unusually pretty; one
sees them afterwards at the bars and _bals_ if one does not go to the
Abbaye or Pages.... It makes a very pleasant picture, the Place du
Calvaire towards nine o'clock on a summer night when tiny lights with
pink globes are placed on the tables. The little square twinkles with
them and the couples at the tables become very gay, and sometimes
sentimental. And when the pink lights appear a small boy in blue
trousers comes along to light the street lamp. Then the urchins gather
on the wall which hedges in the garden on the fourth side of the
square and chatter, chatter, chatter, about all the things that French
boys chatter about. Naturally they have a good deal to say about the
people who are eating.
I have described the Cou-Cou as it was this night and as it has been
all the nights during the past eight summers that I have been there.
The dinner too is always the same. It is served _a la carte_, but one
is not given much choice. There is always a _potage_, always
_spaghetti_, always chicken and a salad, always a lobster, and
_zabaglione_ if one wants it. The wine--it is called _chianti_--is
tolerable. And the _addition_ is made upon a slate with a piece of
white chalk. "_Qu'est-ce que monsieur a mange?_" Sometimes it is very
difficult to remember, but it is necessary. Such honesty compels an
exertion. It is all added up and for the two of us on this evening, or
any other evening, it may come to nine _francs_, which is not much to
pay for a good dinner.
Then, on this evening, and every other evening, we went on, back as we
had come, round past the other side of Sacre-Coeur, past the statue of
the Chevalier who was martyred for refusing to salute a procession
(why he refused I have never found out, although I have asked
everybody who has ever dined with me at the Cou-Cou) to the Cafe
Savoyarde, the broad windows of which look out over pretty much all
the Northeast of Paris, over a glittering labyrinth of lights set in
an obscure sea of darkness. It was not far from here that Louise and
Julien kept house when they were interrupted by Louise's mother, and
it was looking down over these lights that they swore those eternal
vows, ending with Louise's "_C'est une Feerie!_" and Julien's "_Non,
c'est la vie!_" One always remembers these things and feels them at
the Savoyarde as keenly as one did sometime in the remote past
watching Mary Garden and Leon Beyle from the topmost gallery of the
Opera-Comique after an hour and a half wait in the _queue_ for one
_franc_ tickets (there were always people turned away from
performances of _Louise_ and so it was necessary to be there early;
some other operas did not demand such punctuality). There is a terrace
outside the Savoyarde, a tiny terrace, with just room for one man, who
griddles _gaufrettes_, and three or four tiny tables with chairs. At
one of these we sat that night (just as I had sat so many times
before) and sipped our cognac.
It is difficult in an adventure to remember just when the departure
comes, when one leaves the past and strides into the future, but I
think that moment befell me in this cafe ... for it was the first time
I had ever seen a cat there. He was a lazy, splendid animal. In New
York he would have been an oddity, but in Paris there are many such
beasts. Tawny he was and soft to the touch and of a hugeness. He was
lying on the bar and as I stroked his coat he purred melifluously....
I stroked his warm fur and thought how I belonged to the mystic band
(Gautier, Baudelaire, Merimee, all knew the secrets) of those who are
acquainted with cats; it is a feeling of pride we have that
differentiates us from the dog lovers, the pride of the appreciation
of indifference or of conscious preference. And it was, I think, as I
was stroking the cat that my past was smote away from me and I was
projected into the adventure for, as I lifted the animal into my arms,
the better to feel its warmth and softness, it sprang with strength
and unsheathed claws out of my embrace, and soon was back on the bar
again, "just as if nothing had happened." There was blood on my face.
Madame, behind the bar, was apologetic but not chastening. "_Il avait
peur_," she said. "_Il n'est pas mechant._" The wound was not deep,
and as I bent to pet the cat again he again purred. I had interfered
with his habits and, as I discovered later, he had interfered with
mine.
We decided to walk down the hill instead of riding down in the
_finiculaire_, down the stairs which form another of the pictures in
_Louise_, with the abutting houses, into the rooms of which one looks,
conscious of prying. And you see the old in these interiors, making
shoes, or preparing dinner, or the middle-aged going to bed, but the
young one never sees in the houses in the summer.... It was early and
we decided to dance; I thought of the Moulin de la Galette, which I
had visited twice before. The Moulin de la Galette waves its gaunt
arms in the air half way up the _butte_ of Montmartre; it serves its
purpose as a dance hall of the quarter. One meets the pretty little
_Montmartroises_ there and the young artists; the entrance fee is not
exorbitant and one may drink a bock. And when I have been there,
sitting at a small table facing the somewhat vivid mural decoration
which runs the length of one wall, drinking my brown _bock_, I have
remembered the story which Mary Garden once told me, how Albert Carre
to celebrate the hundredth--or was it the twenty-fifth?--performance
of _Louise_, gave a dinner there--so near to the scenes he had
conceived--to Charpentier and how, surrounded by some of the most
notable musicians and poets of France, the composer had suddenly
fallen from the table, face downwards; he had starved himself so long
to complete his masterpiece that food did not seem to nourish him. It
was the end of a brilliant dinner. He was carried away ... to the
Riviera; some said that he had lost his mind; some said that he was
dying. Mary Garden herself did not know, at the time she first sang
_Louise_ in America, what had happened to him. But a little later the
rumour that he was writing a trilogy was spread about and soon it was
a known fact that at least one other part of the trilogy had been
written, _Julien_; that lyric drama was produced and everybody knows
the story of its failure. Charpentier, the natural philosopher and the
poet of Montmartre, had said everything he had to say in _Louise_. As
for the third play, one has heard nothing about that yet.
But on this evening the Moulin de la Galette was closed and then I
remembered that it was open on Thursday and this was Wednesday. Is it
Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday that the Moulin de la Galette is open?
I think so. By this time we were determined to dance; but where? We
had no desire to go to some stupid place, common to tourists, no such
place as the Bal Tabarin lured us; nor did the Grelot in the Place
Blanche, for we had been there a night or two before. The Elysee
Montmartre (celebrated by George Moore) would be closed. Its _patron_
followed the schedule of days adopted for the Galette.... To chance I
turn in such dilemmas.... I consulted a small boy, who, with his
companion, had been good enough to guide us through many winding
streets to the Moulin. Certainly he knew of a _bal_. Would _monsieur_
care to visit a _bal musette_? His companion was horrified. I caught
the phrase "_mal frequente_." Our curiosity was aroused and we gave
the signal to advance.
There were two grounds for my personal curiosity beyond the more
obvious ones. I seemed to remember to have read somewhere that the
ladies of the court of Louis XIV played the _musette_, which is French
for bag-pipe. It was the fashionable instrument of an epoch and the
_musettes_ played by the _grandes dames_ were elaborately decorated.
The word in time slunk into the dictionaries of musical terms as
descriptive of a drone bass. Many of Gluck's ballet airs bear the
title, _Musette_. Perhaps the bass was even performed on a
bag-pipe.... "_Mal frequente_" in Parisian _argot_ has a variety of
significations; in this particular instance it suggested _apaches_ to
me. A _bal_, for instance, attended by _cocottes_, _mannequins_, or
_modeles_, could not be described as _mal frequente_ unless one were
speaking to a boarding school miss, for all the public _bals_ in Paris
are so attended. No, the words spoken to me, in this connection, could
only mean _apaches_. The confusion of epochs began to invite my
interest and I wondered, in my mind's eye, how a Louis XIV _apache_
would dress, how he would be represented at a costume ball, and a
picture of a ragged silk-betrousered person, flaunting a plaid-bellied
instrument came to mind. An imagination often leads one violently
astray.
The two urchins were marching us through street after street, one of
them whistling that pleasing tune, _Le lendemain elle etait
souriante_. Dark passage ways intervened between us and our
destination: we threaded them. The cobble stones of the underfoot were
not easy to walk on for my companion, shod in high-heels from the
Place Vendome.... The urchins amused each other and us by capers on
the way. They could have made our speed walking on their hands, and
they accomplished at least a third of the journey this way. Of course,
I deluged them with large round five and ten _centimes_ pieces.
We arrived at last before a door in a short street near the Gare du
Nord. Was it the Rue Jessaint? I do not know, for when, a year later,
I attempted to re-find this _bal_ it had disappeared.... We could hear
the hum of the pipes for some paces before we turned the corner into
the street, and never have pipes sounded in my ears with such a shrill
significance of being somewhere they ought not to be, never but once,
and that was when I had heard the piper who accompanies the dinner of
the Governor of the Bahamas in Nassau. Marching round the porch of the
Governor's Villa he played _The Blue Bells of Scotland_ and _God Save
the King_, but, hearing the sound from a distance through the
interstices of the cocoa-palm fronds in the hot tropical night, I
could only think of a Hindoo blowing the pipes in India, the charming
of snakes.... So, as we turned the corner into the Rue Jessaint, I
seemed to catch a faint glimpse of a scene on the lawn at
Versailles.... Louis XIV--it was the epoch of Cinderella!