indeed suffered little from the ravages of time, are Marcella Sembrich
and Nellie Melba. Both of these singers, however, have consistently
refrained from misusing their voices (if one may except the one
occasion on which Mme. Melba attempted to sing Brunnhilde in
_Siegfried_ with disastrous results). Mme. Melba (according to Grove's
Dictionary, which, like all other books devoted to the subject of
music, is frequently inaccurate) was born in Australia, May 19, 1859.
Therefore she was 28 years old when she made her debut in Brussels as
Gilda on October 12, 1887. She has used her voice carefully and well
and still sings in concert and opera at the age of 59. With the
advance of age, indeed, her voice began to take on colour. When she
sang here in opera at the Manhattan Opera House in 1906-7 she was in
her best vocal estate. Her voice, originally rather pale, had become
mellow and rich, although it is possible it had lost some of its old
remarkable agility. When last I listened to her in concert, a few
years ago at the Hippodrome, it seemed to me that I had never before
heard so beautiful a voice, and yet Mme. Melba sang in the first
performance of opera I ever attended (Chicago Auditorium; _Faust_,
February 22, 1899).
According to H. T. Finck, Caruso once said, "When you hear that an
artist is going to retire, don't you believe it, for as long as he
keeps his voice he will sing. You may depend upon that." Sometimes,
indeed, longer. Mme. Melba made a belated and unfortunate attempt to
sing Marguerite in _Faust_ with the Chicago Opera Company, Monday
evening, February 4, 1918, at the Lexington Theatre, New York. She
sang with some art and style; her tone was still pure and her
wonderful enunciation still remained a feature of her performance but
scarcely a shadow of the beautiful voice I can remember so well was
left. As if to atone for vocal deficiencies the singer made histrionic
efforts such as she had never deemed necessary during the height of
her career. Her meeting with Faust in the Kermesse scene was
accomplished with modesty that almost became fright. She nearly danced
the jewel song and embraced the tenor with passion in the love duet.
In the church scene, overcome with terror at the sight of
Mephistopheles, she flung her prayer book across the stage.... Her
appearance was almost shocking and the first lines of the part of
Marguerite, "_Non monsieur, je ne suis demoiselle, ni belle_" had a
merciless application. However, the audience received her with
kindness, more with a certain sort of enthusiasm. She reappeared again
in the same opera on Thursday evening, February 14, 1918, but on this
occasion I did not hear her.
Marcella Sembrich was born February 15, 1858. She made her debut in
Athens in _I Puritani_, June 8, 1877, and she made her New York debut
in _Lucia_ October 24, 1883, at the beginning of the first season of
the Metropolitan Opera House. After a long absence she returned to New
York in 1898 as Rosina in _Il Barbiere_. After that year she sang
pretty steadily at the Metropolitan until February 6, 1909, when, at
the age of 51 (or lacking nine days of it), she bid farewell to the
New York opera stage in acts from several of her favourite operas. She
subsequently sang in a few performances of opera in Europe and was
heard in song recital in America. When she left the opera house she
had no rival in vocal artistry; and she had so satisfactorily solved
the problems of style in singing certain kinds of songs that she also
surveyed the field of song recital from a mountain top.... But such a
singer as Mme. Sembrich, who made her appeal through the expression of
the milder emotions, who never, indeed, attempted to touch dramatic
depths, even style, in the end, will not assist. Magnificent Lilli
Lehmann might make a certain effect in _Gotterdammerung_ so long as
she had a leg to stand on or a note to croak, but an adequate delivery
of _Der Nussbaum_ or _Wie Melodien_ demands a vocal control which a
singer past middle age is not always sure of possessing.... After a
long retirement, Mme. Sembrich gave a concert at Carnegie Hall,
November 21, 1915. The house was crowded and the applause at the
beginning must almost have unnerved the singer, who walked slowly
towards the front of the platform as the storm burst and then bowed
her head again and again. Her program on this occasion was not one of
her best. She had not chosen familiar songs in which to return to her
public. This may in a measure account for her lack of success in
always calling forth steady tones. However, on the whole, her voice
sounded amazingly fresh. Her high notes especially rang true and
resonant as ever. Her middle voice showed wear. Her style remained
impeccable, unrivalled.... She announced, following this concert, a
series of four recitals in a small hall and actually appeared at one
of them. This time I did not hear her, but I am told that her voice
refused to respond to her wishes. Nor was the hall filled. The
remaining concerts were abandoned. "Mme. Sembrich has never been a
failure and she is too old to begin now!" she is reported to have said
to a friend.
Emma Calve's date of birth is recorded as 1864 in some of the musical
dictionaries. This would make her 53 years old. Her singing of the
_Marseillaise_ a year ago at the Allies Bazaar at the Grand Central
Palace proved to me that her retirement from the Opera was premature.
Her performances at the Manhattan Opera House in 1906-7 were
memorable, vocally superb. Her Carmen was out of drawing dramatically,
but her Anita and her Santuzza remained triumphs of stage craft.
Emma Eames, born August 13, 1867, is three years younger than Mme.
Calve. She made her debut as Juliette, March 13, 1889. She retired
from the opera stage in 1907-8, although she has sung since then a few
times in concert. Her last appearances at the Opera were made in
dramatic roles, Donna Anna, Leonora (in _Trovatore_), and Tosca, in
contradistinction to the lyric parts in which she gained her early
fame. That she was entirely successful in compassing the breach cannot
be said in all justice. Yet there was a certain distinction in her
manner, a certain acid quality in her voice, that gave force to these
characterizations. Certainly, however, no one would ever have compared
her Donna Anna favourably with her Countess in _Figaro_. Her
performance of _Or sai chi l'onore_ was deficient in breadth of style
and her lack of breath control at this period gave uncertainty to her
execution.
Life teaches us, through experience, that no rule is infallible, but
insofar as I am able to give a meaning to these rambling biographical
notes, collected, I may as well admit, more to interest my reader than
to prove anything, it is the meaning, sounded with a high note of
truth, by Arthur Symons, in the paragraph quoted at the beginning of
this essay. Style is a rare quality in a singer. With it in his
possession an artist may dare much for a long time. Without it he
exists as long as those qualities which are perfectly natural to him
exist. A voice fades, but a manner of applying that voice (even when
there is practically no voice to apply) to an artistic problem has an
indefinite term of life.
Yvette Guilbert once told me that crossing the Atlantic with Duse on
one occasion she had asked the Italian actress if she were going to
include _La Dame aux Camelias_ in her American repertory. "I am too
old to play Marguerite ..." was the sad response. "She was right,"
said Guilbert, in relating the incident, "she was too old; she was
born too old ... in spirit. Now when I am sixty-three I shall begin to
impersonate children. I grow younger every year!"
_September 12, 1917._
Impressions in the Theatre
I
The Land of Joy
_"Dancing is something more than an amusement in Spain. It
is part of that solemn ritual which enters into the whole
life of the people. It expresses their very spirit."_
Havelock Ellis.
An idle observer of theatrical conditions might derive a certain
ironic pleasure from remarking the contradiction implied in the
professed admiration of the constables of the playhouse for the
unconventional and their almost passionate adoration for the
conventional. We constantly hear it said that the public cries for
novelty, and just as constantly we see the same kind of acting, the
same gestures, the same Julian Mitchellisms and George Marionisms and
Ned Wayburnisms repeated in and out of season, summer and winter.
Indeed, certain conventions (which bore us even now) are so deeply
rooted in the soil of our theatre that I see no hope of their being
eradicated before the year 1999, at which date other conventions will
have supplanted them and will likewise have become tiresome.
In this respect our theatre does not differ materially from the
theatres of other countries except in one particular. In Europe the
juxtaposition of nations makes an interchange of conventions possible,
which brings about slow change or rapid revolution. Paris, for
example, has received visits from the Russian Ballet which almost
assumed the proportions of Tartar invasions. London, too, has been
invaded by the Russians and by the Irish. The Irish playwrights,
indeed, are continually pounding away at British middle-class
complacency. Germany, in turn, has been invaded by England (we regret
that this sentence has only an artistic and figurative significance),
and we find Max Reinhardt well on his way toward giving a complete
cycle of the plays of Shakespeare; a few years ago we might have
observed Deutschland groveling hysterically before Oscar Wilde's
_Salome_, a play which, at least without its musical dress, has not, I
believe, even yet been performed publicly in London. In Italy, of
course, there are no artistic invasions (nobody cares to pay for them)
and even the conventions of the Italian theatre themselves, such as
the _Commedia del' Arte_, are quite dead; so the country remains as
dormant, artistically speaking, as a rag rug, until an enthusiast like
Marinetti arises to take it between his teeth and shake it back into
rags again.
Very often whisperings of art life in the foreign theatre (such as
accounts of Stanislavski's accomplishments in Moscow) cross the
Atlantic. Very often the husks of the realities (as was the case with
the Russian Ballet) are imported. But whispers and husks have about as
much influence as the "New York Times" in a mayoralty campaign, and as
a result we find the American theatre as little aware of world
activities in the drama as a deaf mute living on a pole in the desert
of Sahara would be. Indeed any intrepid foreign investigator who
wishes to study the American drama, American acting, and American
stage decoration will find them in almost as virgin a condition as
they were in the time of Lincoln.
A few rude assaults have been made on this smug eupepsy. I might
mention the coming of Paul Orleneff, who left Alla Nazimova with us to
be eventually swallowed up in the conventional American theatre. Four
or five years ago a company of Negro players at the Lafayette Theatre
gave a performance of a musical revue that boomed like the big bell in
the Kremlin at Moscow. Nobody could be deaf to the sounds. Florenz
Ziegfeld took over as many of the tunes and gestures as he could buy
for his _Follies_ of that season, but he neglected to import the one
essential quality of the entertainment, its style, for the
exploitation of which Negro players were indispensable. For the past
two months Mimi Aguglia, one of the greatest actresses of the world,
has been performing in a succession of classic and modern plays (a
repertory comprising dramas by Shakespeare, d'Annunzio, and Giacosa)
at the Garibaldi Theatre, on East Fourth Street, before very large and
very enthusiastic audiences, but uptown culture and managerial acumen
will not awaken to the importance of this gesture until they read
about it in some book published in 1950....
All of which is merely by way of prelude to what I feel must be
something in the nature of lyric outburst and verbal explosion. A few
nights ago a Spanish company, unheralded, unsung, indeed almost
unwelcomed by such reviewers as had to trudge to the out-of-the-way
Park Theatre, came to New York, in a musical revue entitled _The Land
of Joy_. The score was written by Joaquin Valverde, _fils_, whose
music is not unknown to us, and the company included La Argentina, a
Spanish dancer who had given matinees here in a past season without
arousing more than mild enthusiasm. The theatrical impressarii, the
song publishers, and the Broadway rabble stayed away on the first
night. It was all very well, they might have reasoned, to read about
the goings on in Spain, but they would never do in America. Spanish
dancers had been imported in the past without awakening undue
excitement. Did not the great Carmencita herself visit America twenty
or more years ago? These impressarii had ignored the existence of a
great psychological (or more properly physiological) truth: you cannot
mix Burgundy and Beer! One Spanish dancer surrounded by Americans is
just as much lost as the great Nijinsky himself was in an English
music hall, where he made a complete and dismal failure. And so they
would have been very much astonished (had they been present) on the
opening night to have witnessed all the scenes of uncontrollable
enthusiasm--just as they are described by Havelock Ellis, Richard
Ford, and Chabrier--repeated. The audience, indeed, became hysterical,
and broke into wild cries of _Ole! Ole!_ Hats were thrown on the
stage. The audience became as abandoned as the players, became a part
of the action.
You will find all this described in "The Soul of Spain," in
"Gatherings from Spain," in Chabrier's letters, and it had all been
transplanted to New York almost without a whisper of preparation,
which is fortunate, for if it had been expected, doubtless we would
have found the way to spoil it. Fancy the average New York first-night
audience, stiff and unbending, sceptical and sardonic, welcoming this
exhibition! Havelock Ellis gives an ingenious explanation for the fact
that Spanish dancing has seldom if ever successfully crossed the
border of the Iberian peninsula: "The finest Spanish dancing is at
once killed or degraded by the presence of an indifferent or
unsympathetic public, and that is probably why it cannot be
transplanted, but remains local." Fortunately the Spaniards in the
first-night audience gave the cue, unlocked the lips and loosened the
hands of us cold Americans. For my part, I was soon yelling _Ole!_
louder than anybody else.
The dancer, Doloretes, is indeed extraordinary. The gipsy fascination,
the abandoned, perverse bewitchery of this female devil of the dance
is not to be described by mouth, typewriter, or quilled pen. Heine
would have put her at the head of his dancing temptresses in his
ballet of _Mephistophela_ (found by Lumley too indecent for
representation at Her Majesty's Theatre, for which it was written; in
spite of which the scenario was published in the respectable "Revue de
Deux Mondes"). In this ballet a series of dancing celebrities are
exhibited by the female Mephistopheles for the entertainment of her
victim. After Salome had twisted her flanks and exploited the prowess
of her abdominal muscles to perfunctory applause, Doloretes would have
heated the blood, not only of Faust, but of the ladies and gentlemen
in the orchestra stalls, with the clicking of her heels, the clacking
of her castanets, now held high over head, now held low behind her
back, the flashing of her ivory teeth, the shrill screaming, electric
magenta of her smile, the wile of her wriggle, the passion of her
performance. And close beside her the sinuous Mazantinita would flaunt
a garish tambourine and wave a shrieking fan. All inanimate objects,
shawls, mantillas, combs, and cymbals, become inflamed with life, once
they are pressed into the service of these senoritas, languorous and
forbidding, indifferent and sensuous. Against these rude gipsies the
refined grace and Goyaesque elegance of La Argentina stand forth in
high relief, La Argentina, in whose hands the castanets become as
potent an instrument for our pleasure as the violin does in the
fingers of Jascha Heifetz. Bilbao, too, with his thundering heels and
his tauromachian gestures, bewilders our highly magnetized senses.
When, in the dance, he pursues, without catching, the elusive
Doloretes, it would seem that the limit of dynamic effects in the
theatre had been reached.
Here are singers! The limpid and lovely soprano of the comparatively
placid Maria Marco, who introduces figurations into the brilliant
music she sings at every turn. One indecent (there is no other word
for it) chromatic oriental phrase is so strange that none of us can
ever recall it or forget it! And the frantically nervous Luisita
Puchol, whose eyelids spring open like the cover of a Jack-in-the-box,
and whose hands flutter like saucy butterflies, sings suggestive
popular ditties just a shade better than any one else I know of.
But _The Land of Joy_ does not rely on one or two principals for its
effect. The organization as a whole is as full of fire and purpose as
the original Russian Ballet; the costumes themselves, in their
blazing, heated colours, constitute the ingredients of an orgy; the
music, now sentimental (the adaptability of Valverde, who has lived in
Paris, is little short of amazing; there is a vocal waltz in the style
of Arditi that Mme. Patti might have introduced into the lesson scene
of _Il Barbiere_; there is another song in the style of George M.
Cohan--these by way of contrast to the Iberian music), now pulsing
with rhythmic life, is the best Spanish music we have yet heard in
this country. The whole entertainment, music, colours, costumes,
songs, dances, and all, is as nicely arranged in its crescendos and
decrescendos, its prestos and adagios as a Mozart finale. The close of
the first act, in which the ladies sweep the stage with long ruffled
trains, suggestive of all the Manet pictures you have ever seen, would
seem to be unapproachable, but the most striking costumes and the
wildest dancing are reserved for the very last scene of all. There
these bewildering senoritas come forth in the splendourous envelope of
embroidered Manila shawls, and such shawls! Prehistoric African roses
of unbelievable measure decorate a texture of turquoise, from which
depends nearly a yard of silken fringe. In others mingle royal purple
and buff, orange and white, black and the kaleidoscope! The revue, a
sublimated form of zarzuela, is calculated, indeed, to hold you in a
dangerous state of nervous excitement during the entire evening, to
keep you awake for the rest of the night, and to entice you to the
theatre the next night and the next. It is as intoxicating as vodka,
as insidious as cocaine, and it is likely to become a habit, like
these stimulants. I have found, indeed, that it appeals to all classes
of taste, from that of a telephone operator, whose usual artistic
debauch is the latest antipyretic novel of Robert W. Chambers, to that
of the frequenter of the concert halls.
I cannot resist further cataloguing; details shake their fists at my
memory; for instance, the intricate rhythms of Valverde's elaborately
syncopated music (not at all like ragtime syncopation), the thrilling
orchestration (I remember one dance which is accompanied by drum taps
and oboe, nothing else!), the utter absence of tangos (which are
Argentine), and habaneras (which are Cuban), most of the music being
written in two-four and three-four time, and the interesting use of
folk-tunes; the casual and very suggestive indifference of the
dancers, while they are not dancing, seemingly models for a dozen
Zuloaga paintings, the apparently inexhaustible skill and variety of
these dancers in action, winding ornaments around the melodies with
their feet and bodies and arms and heads and castanets as coloratura
sopranos do with their voices. Sometimes castanets are not used;
cymbals supplant them, or tambourines, or even fingers. Once, by some
esoteric witchcraft, the dancers seemed to tap upon their arms. The
effect was so stupendous and terrifying that I could not project
myself into that aloof state of mind necessary for a calm dissection
of its technique.
What we have been thinking of all these years in accepting the
imitation and ignoring the actuality I don't know; it has all been
down in black and white. What Richard Ford saw and wrote down in 1846
I am seeing and writing down in 1917. How these devilish Spaniards
have been able to keep it up all this time I can't imagine. Here we
have our paradox. Spain has changed so little that Ford's book is
still the best to be procured on the subject (you may spend many a
delightful half-hour with the charming irony of its pages for
company). Spanish dancing is apparently what it was a hundred years
ago; no wind from the north has disturbed it. Stranger still, it
depends for its effect on the acquirement of a brilliant technique.
Merely to play the castanets requires a severe tutelage. And yet it is
all as spontaneous, as fresh, as unstudied, as vehement in its appeal,
even to Spaniards, as it was in the beginning. Let us hope that Spain
will have no artistic reawakening.
Aristotle and Havelock Ellis and Louis Sherwin have taught us that the
theatre should be an outlet for suppressed desires. So, indeed, the
ideal theatre should. As a matter of fact, in most playhouses (I will
generously refrain from naming the one I visited yesterday) I am
continually suppressing a desire to strangle somebody or other, but
after a visit to the Spaniards I walk out into Columbus Circle
completely purged of pity and fear, love, hate, and all the rest. It
is an experience.
_November 3, 1917._
II
A Note on Mimi Aguglia
_"Art has to do only with the creation of beauty, whether it
be in words, or sounds, or colour, or outline, or rhythmical
movement; and the man who writes music is no more truly an
artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who
composes rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the
dancer who composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no
more to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be
preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in
those forms of art which we have agreed to recognize as of
equal value."_
Arthur Symons.
The only George Jean, "witty, wise, and cruel," and the "amaranthine"
Louis Sherwin, who understands better than anybody else how to plunge
the rapier into the vulnerable spot and twist it in the wound, making
the victim writhe, have been having some fun with the art of acting
lately, or to be exact, with the art of actors. Now actor-baiting is
no new game; as a winter sport it is as popular as making jokes about
mothers-in-law, decrying the art of Bouguereau or Howard Chandler
Christy, or discussing the methods of Mr. Belasco. Ever so long ago
(and George Henry Lewes preceded him) George Moore wrote an article
called "Mummer Worship," holding the players up to ridicule, but
George really adores the theatre and even acting, goes to the
playhouse constantly, and writes a bad play himself every few years.
None of these has achieved success on the stage. The list includes
_Martin Luther_, written with a collaborator, _The Strike at
Arlingford_, _The Bending of the Bough_ (Moore's version of a play by
Edwin Martyn), a dramatization of "Esther Waters," _Elizabeth Cooper_,
and the fragment, _The Apostle_, on which "The Brook Kerith," was
based. Now he is at work turning the novel back into another play....
When the Sunday editor of a newspaper is at his wit's end he
invariably sends a competent reporter to collect data for a symposium
on one of two topics, Is the author or the player more important? or
Does the stage director make the actor? The amount of amusement this
reporter can derive in gathering indignant replies from mountebanks
and scribblers is only limited by his own sense of humour. Even the
late Sir Henry Irving felt compelled on more than one occasion to
defend his "noble calling."
The actor, when he slaps back, usually overlooks the point at issue,
but sometimes he has something to say over which we may well ponder.
Witness, for example, the following passage, quoted from that justly
celebrated compendium of personal opinions and broad-shaft wit called
"Nat Goodwin's Book": "The average author and manager of today are
prone to advertise themselves as conspicuously as the play (as if the
public cared a snap who wrote the play or who 'presents'). I doubt if
five per cent of the public know who wrote 'The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray,' 'In Mizzoura,' or 'Richelieu,' but they know their stage
favourites. I wonder how many mantels are adorned with pictures of the
successful dramatist and those who 'present' and how many there are on
which appear Maude Adams, Dave Warfield, Billie Burke, John Drew,
Bernhardt, Duse, and hundreds of other distinguished players."