_mezzo-voce_ singing, which--though one would hardly expect it from a
singer endowed with such a noble bass voice--is one of the most telling
features of his performance. There is never any striving after vocal
effects, and his voice is always subservient to the words.... The
atmosphere and tone-colour which Shaliapin imparts to his singing are of
such remarkable quality that one feels his interpretation of Schubert's
_Doppelgaenger_ must of necessity be a thing of genius, unapproachable by
other contemporary singers ... his method is based upon a thoroughly
sound breath control, which produces such splendid _cantabile_ results.
Every student should listen to this great singer, and profit by his
art."
My intention in placing before the eyes of my readers such contradictory
accounts as may be found in this article has not been altogether
ingenuous. The fact of the matter is that opinions differ on every
matter of art, and on no point are they so various as on that which
refers to interpretation. It may further be urged that the personality
of Chaliapine is so marked and his method so direct that the variations
of opinion are naturally expressed in somewhat violent language.
For those, accustomed to the occidental operatic repertoire, who find it
hard to understand how a bass could acquire such prominence, it may be
explained that deep voices are both common and very popular in Russia.
They may be heard in any Greek church, sustaining organ points a full
octave below the notes to which our basses descend with trepidation. As
a consequence, many of the Russian operas contain bass roles of the
first importance. In both of Moussorgsky's familiar operas, for example,
the leading part is destined for a bass voice.
_July 18, 1916._
Mariette Mazarin
Sometimes the cause of an intense impression in the theatre apparently
disappears, leaving "not a rack behind," beyond the trenchant memory of
a few precious moments, inclining one to the belief that the whole
adventure has been a dream, a particularly vivid dream, and that the
characters therein have returned to such places in space as are assigned
to dream personages by the makers of men. This reflection comes to me
as, sitting before my typewriter, I attempt to recapture the spirit of
the performances of Richard Strauss's music drama _Elektra_ at Oscar
Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House in New York. The work remains, if
not in the repertoire of any opera house in my vicinity, at least deeply
imbedded in my eardrum and, if need be, at any time I can pore again
over the score, which is always near at hand. But of the whereabouts of
Mariette Mazarin, the remarkable artist who contributed her genius to
the interpretation of the crazed Greek princess, I know nothing. As she
came to us unheralded, so she went away, after we who had seen her had
enshrined her, tardily to be sure, in that small, slow-growing circle of
those who have achieved eminence on the lyric stage.
Before the beginning of the opera season of 1909-10, Marietta Mazarin
was not even a name in New York. Even during a good part of that season
she was recognized only as an able routine singer. She made her debut
here in _Aida_ and she sang Carmen and Louise without creating a furore,
almost, indeed, without arousing attention of any kind, good or bad
criticism. Had there been no production of _Elektra_ she would have
passed into that long list of forgotten singers who appear here in
leading roles for a few months or a few years and who, when their time
is up, vanish, never to be regretted, extolled, or recalled in the
memory again. For the disclosure of Mme. Mazarin's true powers an
unusual vehicle was required. _Elektra_ gave her her opportunity, and
proved her one of the exceptional artists of the stage.
I do not know many of the facts of Mariette Mazarin's career. She
studied at the Paris Conservatoire; Leloir, of the Comedie Francaise,
was her professor of acting. She made her debut at the Paris Opera as
Aida; later she sang Louise and Carmen at the Opera-Comique. After that
she seems to have been a leading figure at the Theatre de la Monnaie in
Brussels, where she appeared in _Alceste_, _Armide_, _Iphigenie en
Tauride_ and _Iphigenie en Aulide_, even _Orphee_, the great Gluck
repertoire. She has also sung Salome, the three Bruennhildes, Elsa in
_Lohengrin_, Elisabeth in _Tannhaeuser_, in Berlioz's _Prise de Troie_,
_La Damnation de Faust_, _Les Huguenots_, _Griselidis_, _Thais_, _Il
Trovatore_, _Tosca_, _Manon Lescaut_, _Cavalleria Rusticana_,
_Herodiade_, _Le Cid_, and _Salammbo_. She has been heard at Nice, and
probably on many another provincial French stage. At one time she was
the wife of Leon Rothier, the French bass, who has been a member of the
Metropolitan Opera Company for several seasons.
Away from the theatre I remember her as a tall woman, rather awkward,
but quick in gesture. Her hair was dark, and her eyes were dark and
piercing. Her face was all angles; her features were sharp, and when
conversing with her one could not but be struck with a certain eerie
quality which seemed to give mystic colour to her expression. She was
badly dressed, both from an aesthetic and a fashionable point of view. In
a group of women you would pick her out to be a doctor, a lawyer, an
_intellectuelle_. When I talked with her, impression followed
impression--always I felt her intelligence, the play of her intellect
upon the surfaces of her art, but always, too, I felt how narrow a
chance had cast her lot upon the stage, how she easily might have been
something else than a singing actress, how magnificently accidental her
career was!
She was, it would seem, an unusually gifted musician--at least for a
singer,--with a physique and a nervous energy which enabled her to
perform miracles. For instance, on one occasion she astonished even
Oscar Hammerstein by replacing Lina Cavalieri as Salome in _Herodiade_,
a role she had not previously sung for five years, at an hour's notice
on the evening of an afternoon on which she had appeared as Elektra. On
another occasion, when Mary Garden was ill she sang Louise with only a
short forewarning. She told me that she had learned the music of Elektra
between January 1, 1910, and the night of the first performance, January
31. She also told me that without any special effort on her part she had
assimilated the music of the other two important feminine roles in the
opera, Chrysothemis and Klytaemnestra, and was quite prepared to sing
them. Mme. Mazarin's vocal organ, it must be admitted, was not of a very
pleasant quality at all times, although she employed it with variety and
usually with taste. There was a good deal of subtle charm in her middle
voice, but her upper voice was shrill and sometimes, when emitted
forcefully, became in effect a shriek. Faulty intonation often played
havoc with her musical interpretation, but do we not read that the great
Mme. Pasta seldom sang an opera through without many similar slips from
the pitch? _Aida_, of course, displayed the worst side of her talents.
Her Carmen, it seemed to me, was in some ways a very remarkable
performance; she appeared, in this role, to be possessed by a certain
_diablerie_, a power of evil, which distinguished her from other
Carmens, but this characterization created little comment or interest in
New York. In _Louise_, especially in the third act, she betrayed an
enmity for the pitch, but in the last act she was magnificent as an
actress. In Santuzza she exploited her capacity for unreined intensity
of expression. I have never seen her as Salome (in Richard Strauss's
opera; her Massenetic Salome was disclosed to us in New York), but I
have a photograph of her in the role which might serve as an
illustration for the "Mephistophela" of Catulle Mendes. I can imagine no
more sinister and depraved an expression, combined with such potent
sexual attraction. It is a remarkable photograph, evoking as it does a
succession of lustful ladies, and it is quite unpublishable. If she
carried these qualities into her performance of the work, and there is
every reason to believe that she did, the evenings on which she sang
Salome must have been very terrible for her auditors, hours in which the
Aristotle theory of Katharsis must have been amply proven.
_Elektra_ was well advertised in New York. Oscar Hammerstein is as able
a showman as the late P. T. Barnum, and he has devoted his talents to
higher aims. Without his co-operation, I think it is likely that America
would now be a trifle above Australia in its operatic experience. It is
from Oscar Hammerstein that New York learned that all the great singers
of the world were not singing at the Metropolitan Opera House, a matter
which had been considered axiomatic before the redoubtable Oscar
introduced us to Alessandro Bonci, Maurice Renaud, Charles Dalmores,
Mary Garden, Luisa Tetrazzini, and others. With his productions of
_Pelleas et Melisande_, _Louise_, _Thais_, and other works new to us, he
spurred the rival house to an activity which has been maintained ever
since to a greater or less degree. New operas are now the order of the
day--even with the Chicago and the Boston companies--rather than the
exception. And without this impresario's courage and determination I do
not think New York would have heard _Elektra_, at least not before its
uncorked essence had quite disappeared. Lover of opera that he
indubitably is, Oscar Hammerstein is by nature a showman, and he
understands the psychology of the mob. Looking about for a sensation to
stir the slow pulse of the New York opera-goer, he saw nothing on the
horizon more likely to effect his purpose than _Elektra_. _Salome_,
spurned by the Metropolitan Opera Company, had been taken to his heart
the year before and, with Mary Garden's valuable assistance, he had
found the biblical jade extremely efficacious in drawing shekels to his
doors. He hoped to accomplish similar results with _Elektra_....
One of the penalties an inventor of harmonies pays is that his
inventions become shopworn. A certain terrible atmosphere, a suggestion
of vague dread, of horror, of rank incest, of vile murder, of sordid
shame, was conveyed in _Elektra_ by Richard Strauss through the adroit
use of what we call discords, for want of a better name. Discord at one
time was defined as a combination of sounds that would eternally affront
the musical ear. We know better now. Discord is simply the word to
describe a never-before or seldom-used chord. Such a juxtaposition of
notes naturally startles when it is first heard, but it is a mistake to
presume that the effect is unpleasant, even in the beginning.
Now it was by the use of sounds cunningly contrived to displease the ear
that Strauss built up his atmosphere of ugliness in _Elektra_. When it
was first performed, the scenes in which the half-mad Greek girl stalked
the palace courtyard, and the queen with the blood-stained hands related
her dreams, literally reeked with musical frightfulness. I have never
seen or heard another music drama which so completely bowled over its
first audiences, whether they were street-car conductors or musical
pedants. These scenes even inspired a famous passage in
"Jean-Christophe" (I quote from the translation of Gilbert Cannon):
"Agamemnon was neurasthenic and Achilles impotent; they lamented their
condition at length and, naturally, their outcries produced no change.
The energy of the drama was concentrated in the role of Iphigenia--a
nervous, hysterical, and pedantic Iphigenia, who lectured the hero,
declaimed furiously, laid bare for the audience her Nietzschian
pessimism and, glutted with death, cut her throat, shrieking with
laughter."
But will _Elektra_ have the same effect on future audiences? I do not
think so. Its terror has, in a measure, been dissipated. Schoenberg,
Strawinsky, and Ornstein have employed its discords--and many newer
ones--for pleasanter purposes, and our ears are becoming accustomed to
these assaults on the casual harmony of our forefathers. _Elektra_ will
retain its place as a forerunner, and inevitably it will eventually be
considered the most important of Strauss's operatic works, but it can
never be listened to again in that same spirit of horror and repentance,
with that feeling of utter repugnance, which it found easy to awaken in
1910. Perhaps all of us were a little better for the experience.
An attendant at the opening ceremonies in New York can scarcely forget
them. Cast under the spell by the early entrance of Elektra, wild-eyed
and menacing, across the terrace of the courtyard of Agamemnon's palace,
he must have remained with staring eyes and wide-flung ears, straining
for the remainder of the evening to catch the message of this tale of
triumphant and utterly holy revenge. The key of von Hofmannsthal's fine
play was lost to some reviewers, as it was to Romain Rolland in the
passage quoted above, who only saw in the drama a perversion of the
Greek idea of Nemesis. That there was something very much finer in the
theme, it was left for Bernard Shaw to discover. To him _Elektra_
expressed the regeneration of a race, the destruction of vice,
ignorance, and poverty. The play was replete in his mind with
sociological and political implications, and, as his views in the matter
exactly coincide with my own, I cannot do better than to quote a few
lines from them, including, as they do, his interesting prophecies
regarding the possibility of war between England and Germany,
unfortunately unfulfilled. Strauss could not quite prevent the war with
his _Elektra_. Here is the passage:
"What Hofmannsthal and Strauss have done is to take Klytaemnestra and
AEgisthus, and by identifying them with everything evil and cruel, with
all that needs must hate the highest when it sees it, with hideous
domination and coercion of the higher by the baser, with the murderous
rage in which the lust for a lifetime of orgiastic pleasure turns on its
slaves in the torture of its disappointment, and the sleepless horror
and misery of its neurasthenia, to so rouse in us an overwhelming flood
of wrath against it and a ruthless resolution to destroy it that
Elektra's vengeance becomes holy to us, and we come to understand how
even the gentlest of us could wield the ax of Orestes or twist our firm
fingers in the black hair of Klytaemnestra to drag back her head and
leave her throat open to the stroke.
"This was a task hardly possible to an ancient Greek, and not easy even
for us, who are face to face with the America of the Thaw case and the
European plutocracy of which that case was only a trifling symptom, and
that is the task that Hofmannsthal and Strauss have achieved. Not even
in the third scene of _Das Rheingold_ or in the Klingsor scene in
_Parsifal_ is there such an atmosphere of malignant, cancerous evil as
we get here and that the power with which it is done is not the power of
the evil itself, but of the passion that detests and must and finally
can destroy that evil is what makes the work great and makes us rejoice
in its horror.
"Whoever understands this, however vaguely, will understand Strauss's
music. I have often said, when asked to state the case against the fools
and the money changers who are trying to drive us into a war with
Germany, that the case consists of the single word 'Beethoven.' To-day I
should say with equal confidence 'Strauss.' In this music drama Strauss
has done for us with utterly satisfying force what all the noblest
powers of life within us are clamouring to have said in protest against
and defiance of the omnipresent villainies of our civilization, and this
is the highest achievement of the highest art."
Mme. Mazarin was the torch-bearer in New York of this magnificent
creation. She is, indeed, the only singer who has ever appeared in the
role in America, and I have never heard _Elektra_ in Europe. However,
those who have seen other interpreters of the role assure me that Mme.
Mazarin so far outdistanced them as to make comparison impossible. This,
in spite of the fact that _Elektra_ in French necessarily lost something
of its crude force, and through its mild-mannered conductor at the
Manhattan Opera House, who seemed afraid to make a noise, a great deal
more. I did not make any notes about this performance at the time, but
now, seven years later, it is very vivid to me, an unforgettable
impression. Of how many nights in the theatre can I say as much?
Diabolical ecstasy was the keynote of Mme. Mazarin's interpretation,
gradually developing into utter frenzy. She afterwards assured me that a
visit to a madhouse had given her the inspiration for the gestures and
steps of Elektra in the terrible dance in which she celebrates Orestes's
bloody but righteous deed. The plane of hysteria upon which this singer
carried her heroine by her pure nervous force, indeed reduced many of us
in the audience to a similar state. The conventional operatic mode was
abandoned; even the grand manner of the theatre was flung aside; with a
wide sweep of the imagination, the singer cast the memory of all such
baggage from her, and proceeded along vividly direct lines to make her
impression.
[Illustration: MARIETTE MAZARIN AS ELEKTRA
_From a photograph by Mishkin (1910)_]
The first glimpse of the half-mad princess, creeping dirty and ragged,
to the accompaniment of cracking whips, across the terraced courtyard of
the palace, was indeed not calculated to stir tears in the eyes. The
picture was vile and repugnant; so perhaps was the appeal to the sister
whose only wish was to bear a child, but Mme. Mazarin had her design;
her measurements were well taken. In the wild cry to Agamemnon, the
dignity and pathos of the character were established, and these
qualities were later emphasized in the scene of her meeting with
Orestes, beautiful pages in von Hofmannsthal's play and Strauss's score.
And in the dance of the poor demented creature at the close the full
beauty and power and meaning of the drama were disclosed in a few
incisive strokes. Elektra's mind had indeed given way under the strain
of her sufferings, brought about by her long waiting for vengeance, but
it had given way under the light of holy triumph. Such indeed were the
fundamentals of this tremendously moving characterization, a
characterization which one must place, perforce, in that great memory
gallery where hang the Melisande of Mary Garden, the Isolde of Olive
Fremstad, and the Boris Godunow of Feodor Chaliapine.
It was not alone in her acting that Mme. Mazarin walked on the heights.
I know of no other singer with the force or vocal equipment for this
difficult role. At the time this music drama was produced its intervals
were considered in the guise of unrelated notes. It was the cry that the
voice parts were written without reference to the orchestral score, and
that these wandered up and down without regard for the limitations of a
singer. Since _Elektra_ was first performed we have travelled far, and
now that we have heard _The Nightingale_ of Strawinsky, for instance,
perusal of Strauss's score shows us a perfectly ordered and
understandable series of notes. Even now, however, there are few of our
singers who could cope with the music of _Elektra_ without devoting a
good many months to its study, and more time to the physical exercise
needful to equip one with the force necessary to carry through the
undertaking. Mme. Mazarin never faltered. She sang the notes with
astonishing accuracy; nay, more, with potent vocal colour. Never did the
orchestral flood o'er-top her flow of sound. With consummate skill she
realized the composer's intentions as completely as she had those of the
poet.
Those who were present at the first American performance of this work
will long bear the occasion in mind. The outburst of applause which
followed the close of the play was almost hysterical in quality, and
after a number of recalls Mme. Mazarin fainted before the curtain. Many
in the audience remained long enough to receive the reassuring news that
she had recovered. As a reporter of musical doings on the "New York
Times," I sought information as to her condition at the dressing-room of
the artist. Somewhere between the auditorium and the stage, in a
passageway, I encountered Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who, a short time
before, had appeared at the Garden Theatre in Arthur Symons's
translation of von Hofmannsthal's drama. Although we had never met
before, in the excitement of the moment we became engaged in
conversation, and I volunteered to escort her to Mme. Mazarin's room,
where she attempted to express her enthusiasm. Then I asked her if she
would like to meet Mr. Hammerstein, and she replied that it was her
great desire at this moment to meet the impresario and to thank him for
the indelible impression this evening in the theatre had given her. I
led her to the corner of the stage where he sat, in his high hat,
smoking his cigar, and I presented her to him. "But Mrs. Campbell was
introduced to me only three minutes ago," he said. She stammered her
acknowledgment of the fact. "It's true," she said. "I have been so
completely carried out of myself that I had forgotten!"
_August 22, 1916._
Yvette Guilbert
"_She sings of life, and mirth and all that moves_
_Man's fancy in the carnival of loves;_
_And a chill shiver takes me as she sings_
_The pity of unpitied human things._"
Arthur Symons.
The natural evolution of Gordon Craig's theory of the stage finally
brought him to the point where he would dispense altogether with the
play and the actor. The artist-producer would stand alone. Yvette
Guilbert has accomplished this very feat, and accomplished it without
the aid of super-marionettes. She still uses songs as her medium, but
she has very largely discarded the authors and composers of these songs,
recreating them with her own charm and wit and personality and brain. A
song as Yvette Guilbert sings it exists only for a brief moment. It does
not exist on paper, as you will discover if you seek out the printed
version, and it certainly does not exist in the performance of any one
else. Not that most of her songs are not worthy material, chosen as they
are from the store-houses of a nation's treasures, but that her
interpretations are so individual, so charged with deep personal
feeling, so emended, so added to, so embellished with grunts, shrieks,
squeaks, trills, spoken words, extra bars, or even added lines to the
text; so performed that their performance itself constitutes a veritable
(and, unfortunately, an extremely perishable) work of art. Sometimes,
indeed, it has seemed to me that the genius of this remarkable
Frenchwoman could express itself directly, without depending upon songs.
She could have given no more complete demonstration of the inimitability
of this genius than by her recent determination to lecture on the art of
interpreting songs. Never has Yvette been more fascinating, never more
authoritative than during those three afternoons at Maxine Elliott's
Theatre, devoted ostensibly to the dissection of her method, but before
she had unpacked a single instrument it must have been perfectly obvious
to every auditor in the hall that she was taking great pains to explain
just how impossible it would be for any one to follow in her footsteps,
for any one to imitate her astonishing career. With evident candour and
a multiplicity of detail she told the story of how she had built up her
art. She told how she studied the words of her songs, how she planned
them, what a large part the plasticity of her body played in their
interpretation, and when she was done all she had said only went to
prove that there is but one Yvette Guilbert.