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.
MONNA VANNA
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 the present 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 as uttering 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.
[Illustration:
_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 grasps the 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.
GISMONDA
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 personal beauty 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.
THAÏS
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--and it 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.
CARMEN
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 in Paris 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.
V
MÉLISANDE AND DEBUSSY
George Moore has remarked that we never speak of Shakespeare or Hugo
or Flaubert as the authors of any particular work. Simply to utter
their names suffices. I give the illustrations haphazard. Any great
artist will do. From Claude Debussy we never ask of what he is the
composer. Pelléas and Mélisande is his monument; rather, Mélisande and
Pelléas; as, in the case of Isolde and Tristan, it is the woman who is
protagonist. Is it because in creating characters of our mother’s sex
that the Eternal Masculine is projected across the feminine soul? Or,
is woman the genuine, the aboriginal force, that we unwittingly obey,
all the while calling her “little woman”? (condescendingly, of course).
Oh, what a joke of almost cosmical proportions it would be if the
latter supposition be the truer one! But mere male mortals may always
console themselves with the ineluctable fact that it is man who has
endowed woman with a vital figure in the arts. He has created Ophelia
and Gretchen, Beatrice and Francesca, the Milo Venus, the Winged
Victory and Isolde, Lady Macbeth and Emma Bovary, Carmen and Mélisande.
Honors, then, are even. Even if models existed in nature, the art of
man it was that shaped them and breathed life into their clay. But
Mélisande is the protagonist in the drama.
The music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s strangely haunting play is so wedded
to the moods and situations that as absolute music it is unthinkable.
And these moods are usually “con sordino.” Despite his musicianship,
Debussy is obviously a “literary” composer; his brain had first to
be excited by a dramatic situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, an
episode in fiction, or the contemplation of a picture.
Why demand if the initial impulse be the Monna Lisa or a quatrain by
Verlaine? A composer who can interpret in tone the recondite moods
of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, or the dramatic prose-poem of
Maeterlinck, need not have been daunted by criticism; in sooth, it
is the angle of critical incidence that must be shifted to adapt
itself to the new optique. Pelléas and Mélisande is a study in musical
decomposition; the phrase is decomposed, rhythms are dislocated, the
harmonic structure melts and resolves itself into air. His themes are
developed in opposition to the old laws of musical syntax. But what
have laws in common with genius? Once assimilated, they may be broken
as were broken the stone tablets by the mighty iconoclast, Moses.
Besides, every law has its holiday. In the Debussyan idiom there
seems to be no normal sequence. I say seems, for much water has gone
under the bridge since his appearance, and compared with Schoenberg,
Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff he is a conservative; in another
decade he may be called a reactionary. Life is brief and art is swift.
Our ears were not accustomed to his novel progressions and the forced
marriage of harmonies. His tonalities are vague, but his values just.
The introduction to the forest scene when Golaud discovers Mélisande is
of an acid sweetness. Without anxious preoccupation Debussy has caught
the exact Maeterlinckian note. As it is impossible to divorce music
and text--Debussy seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self--so it
is needless to dwell upon the characteristic qualities of the score.
It is like some antique and lovely tapestry that hypnotizes the gaze.
It has the dream-drugged atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe; the Poe of the
dark tarn of Auber, of Ligeia, of Ellenora, of Berenice, and Helen,
those frail apparitions from claustral solitudes and the Valley of the
Many-Colored Grass, all as exotic as they are incorporeal. It is the
complete envelopment of the poem by an atmospheric musical haze shot
through with gleams of light never shown before on land or sea.
We pardon the monotone of mood and music, the occasional muffled
cacophonies, the lack of exterior action, and the absence of climaxes;
after so long waiting for a passionate outburst, when it does come it
is overpowering in its intensity. In music the tact of omission has
never been pushed so far. From the pianoforte partition little may be
gleaned of its poetic fervor, its reticences, its delicate landscapes,
psychologic subtleties. The pattern seldom obtrudes, as the web is
spun “exceeding fine.” The orchestration reveals the silver-greys of
Claude Monet and the fire-tipped iridescence of Monticelli. His musical
palette proclaims Debussy a symbolist, one in the key of Verlaine,
who loved nuance for its own sake and detested flauntingly brilliant
hues. “Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance ... et tout le reste est
littérature,” sang Paul of the asymmetrical jaws and supernal thirst.
Debussy is the most interesting of contemporary music-makers and
the most subtle composer for the pianoforte since Chopin. His
originality is not profoundly rooted in the history of his art, but
his individuality is indisputable. He is a musician doubled by a
poet. He is almost as Gallic as Chopin is Polish. Debussy shows race.
His artistic pedigree stems from a grafting of old French composers
upon ultramodern methods. Wagner, Chopin, certain aspects of Liszt,
and Moussorgsky. The visit he made to Russia in 1879 had important
consequences. He read the manuscript score of Boris at Rome, he
absorbed Moussorgsky and the whole-tone scale, and this influence
contributed to the richness and complexity of his style. Above all, he
is a stylist. He has Wagner at his finger-tips, and, like Charpentier,
he can’t keep Tristan out of his music; it is his King Charles’s head.
Naturally such highly peptonized aural diet is not nourishing. Like the
poetry and prose-poems of Stéphane Mallarmé, too much Debussy becomes
trying to the nerves. Schumann has spoken of the singularly irritating
effect of muted dissonances. Pelléas is nearly all muted. The mental
and emotional concentration involved in the hearing of this music
fatigues as does no other music; not even Tristan.
The range of ideas, like the dynamic range, is limited. Yet there is
magic in his music, the magic of evocation. Not to describe, but to
evoke, in effortless imagery, is the quintessence of his art. He is
a painter of cameos and aquarelles. Never does he carve from the big
block; an exquisite miniaturist, he does not handle a bold brush, nor
boast the epical sweep of his predecessors; Berlioz for one. But he
is more intimate, he is the poet of crepuscular moods. The sadness of
tender, bruised souls is in his pages. Of virility there is little
trace, it is music of the distaff, and seldom sounds the masculine
ring of crossed swords. Chopin, too, had his nocturnal moments, but
he also wrote the A flat Polonaise, with its heroic defiance of a
Poland crushed yet never conquered; with its motto: “Jescze Polska nie
zginiela!”
Long before his death this French master was critically ranged.
Lawrence Gilman, the most sympathetic of his commentators, is also
the fairest. To his essays I go for delectation. It would be rash
to say that Debussy had achieved his artistic apogee; he may have
had surprises in store, but it is safe to conclude that Pelléas and
Mélisande is his masterpiece, that the dewy freshness of L’Après
Midi d’un Faune would never have been recaptured. The symphonic
suite, Printemps, the Nocturnes, La Mer, and Images, at once reveal
the strength and limitations of Debussy, who was not a builder of
the “lofty rhyme,” though he is a creator of complex rhythms; not a
cerebral composer--like Vincent d’Indy, for example--but an emotional
one; not a master of linear design, but a colorist; a poet, not an
architect. His vision is authentic. He knew that the core of reality
is poetry; he lived not at the circumference but the hub of things. He
loathed the academic. He is the antipodes of Saint-Saëns. He gave us
a novel nuance in music, as did Maeterlinck in literature. (Think of
Interior with its motive--again Poe--the fear of fear!) Debussy is a
composer of nuance, of half-hinted murmurings of “the silent thunder
afloat in the leaves,” of the rutilant faun with his metaphysical
xenomania, of music overheard, and of mirrored dreams. Little wonder
he sought to interpret in his weaving tones Baudelaire and Verlaine,
Mallarmé and Maeterlinck. He was affiliated to that choir of sensitive
and unhappy souls, of which Maurice Maeterlinck is the solitary
survivor. A poet himself, Claude Achille Debussy, even if he had never
written a bar of music.
One summer evening in 1903 I was introduced to him at a café on the
Boulevard des Italiens. Debussy spoke a few polite words when I told
him that I belonged to the critical chain-gang. He had written much
musical criticism, chiefly memorable for its unsympathetic attitude
toward Schubert and Wagner, not because of reasons chauvinistic, but
doubtless the result of a natural reaction against the principal
educative forces in his life. At least once in his career an artist
curses his artistic progenitors. Wagner must have hated Weber because
of his borrowings from him, and I am quite sure Chopin despised Hummel;
internal evidence may be collated in the Pole’s wide departure from
the academic patterns of Hummel’s passage-work. However, Debussy
never went so far as his friend Jean Marnold, who in the Mercure de
France concludes a comparative study of Pelléas and Tristan in these
words: “Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard; si tard, qu’il semble
aujourd’hui, à sa place adéquate en notre Opéra toulousain.” Yet if
Tristan came so late, how is it that there is so much of its music
in Pelléas? a fact that Philip Hale doubts. There’s the score. Who
steals my idea steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis
his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my
style robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed!
(This is reorchestrated to suit the simile.) Tristan always seems to
be waiting in the wings when Pelléas is played, awaiting his cue to
enter. It never fails to be given by Debussy.
Later I asked Maurice Maeterlinck his opinion of Debussy’s music to
Pelléas and Mélisande. It was an imprudent question, for Lucienne
Bréval had captured the rôle of Mélisande, not Georgette Leblanc.
Maeterlinck is a polite man, and his answer was guarded; nevertheless,
his dislike of the music pierced his phrases. To him it was evident
that his play needed no tonal embellishment, that it was more poetic,
more dramatic, without the Debussy frame. He is quite right. And yet
the spiritual collaboration of poet and musician is irresistible. And
in the garden of the gods there is only one Mélisande. Some little
dramas, like little books, have their destiny. The composer of Pelléas
and Mélisande suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal, suffered
from homesickness for his patrie psychique, the land of fantasy and
evanescent visions. The world will not willingly forget him.
VI
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
It was twenty minutes to Eternity on a sunny morning in Gotham. The
breakfast room was large, airy, and the view of upper Manhattan from
the various windows gave one a joyous sense of our quotidian life,
its variety and spaciousness. Central Park, a square of dazzling
emerald, the erect golden synagogue on the avenue, the silver hubs of
the wheels on passing carriages across the East Drive, were pictures
for eyes properly attuned. The four eyes, however, in this particular
apartment, were busily engaged in devouring, not the dainty breakfast
spread before them--eyes eat, too--but the morning newspapers. On
the walls were framed photographs. She as Juliet. He as Tristan.
She as Isolde. He as Faust. She, Carmen. He, Siegfried. A versatile
pair. Theirs had been a marriage prompted by love. A magnificent, a
devastating passion had amalgamated their destinies--Paul Bourget would
have said “sublimes.” They still loved despite the poignant promiscuity
of matrimony, although married nearly a year. They also loved others.
And in the morning hours they hated one another with the holy
hatred engendered by perfect sympathy. And they were so consumedly
happy that they couldn’t stay indoors for a day. It is easy to love
fervidly; it is hard to hate intelligently. On one point, however,
this wonderful soprano and glorious tenor were united--they despised
musical criticism, even when it was unfavorable. Banishing Mildred,
the pretty English maid--she was too pretty about six in the evening,
so He noticed--to the bedroom, they read the newspapers undisturbed.
They read aloud, and occasionally as a duet. She freely embroidered her
commentaries. He embellished his with indignant outbursts.
* * * * *