The New Art Of The Singer

________________________________________________
Title:     The New Art Of The Singer
Author: Carl Van Vechten [More Titles by Van Vechten]

"It's the law of life that nothing new can
come into the world without pain."

Karen Borneman.

The art of vocalization is retarding the progress of the modern music drama. That is the simple fact although, doubtless, you are as accustomed as I am to hearing it expressed a rebours. How many times have we read that the art of singing is in its decadence, that soon there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in public. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825 for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than mine. I have heard this same man for twenty years shouting in the market place that a piece without action was not a play (usually the drama he referred to had more real action than that which decorates the progress of Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model), that a composition without melody (meaning something by Richard Wagner, Robert Franz, or even Edvard Grieg) was not music, that verse without rhyme was not poetry. This same type of brilliant mind will go on to aver (forgetting the Scot) that men who wear skirts are not men, (forgetting the Spaniards) that women who smoke cigars are not women, and to settle numberless other matters in so silly a manner that a ten year old, half-witted school boy, after three minutes light thinking, could be depended upon to do better.

The rules for the art of singing, laid down in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, have become obsolete. How could it be otherwise? They were contrived to fit a certain style of composition. We have but the briefest knowledge, indeed, of how people sang before 1700, although records exist praising the performances of Archilei and others. If a different standard for the criticism of vocalization existed before 1600 there is no reason why there should not after 1917. As a matter of fact, maugre much authoritative opinion to the contrary, a different standard does exist. In certain respects the new standard is taken for granted. We do not, for example, expect to hear male sopranos at the opera. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe admired this artificial form of voice almost to the exclusion of all others. His favourite singer, indeed, Pacchierotti, was a male soprano. But other breaks have been made with tradition, breaks which are not yet taken for granted. When you find that all but one or two of the singers in every opera house in the world are ignoring the rules in some respect or other you may be certain, in spite of the protests of the professors, that the rules are dead. Their excuse has disappeared and they remain only as silly commandments made to fit an old religion. A singer in Handel's day was accustomed to stand in one spot on the stage and sing; nothing else was required of him. He was not asked to walk about or to act; even expression in his singing was limited to pathos. The singers of this period, Nicolini, Senesino, Cuzzoni, Faustina, Caffarelli, Farinelli, Carestini, Gizziello, and Pacchierotti, devoted their study years to preparing their voices for the display of a certain definite kind of florid music. They had nothing else to learn. As a consequence they were expected to be particularly efficient. Porpora, Caffarelli's teacher, is said to have spent six years on his pupil before he sent him forth to be "the greatest singer in the world." Contemporary critics appear to have been highly pleased with the result but there is some excuse for H. T. Finck's impatience, expressed in "Songs and Song Writers": "The favourites of the eighteenth-century Italian audiences were artificial male sopranos, like Farinelli, who was frantically applauded for such circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on to a note, or racing with an orchestra and getting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who entertained his audiences by singing, in one breath, a chromatic chain of trills up and down two octaves. Caffarelli was a pupil of the famous vocal teacher Porpora, who wrote operas consisting chiefly of monotonous successions of florid arias resembling the music that is now written for flutes and violins." All very well for the day, no doubt, but could Cuzzoni sing Isolde? Could Faustina sing Melisande? And what modern parts would be allotted to the Julian Eltinges of the Eighteenth Century?

When composers began to set dramatic texts to music trouble immediately appeared at the door. For example, the contemporaries of Sophie Arnould, the "creator" of Iphigenie en Aulide, are agreed that she was greater as an actress than she was as a singer. David Garrick, indeed, pronounced her a finer actress than Clairon. From that day to this there has been a continual triangular conflict between critic, composer, and singer, which up to date, it must be admitted, has been won by the academic pundits, for, although the singer has struggled, she has generally bent under the blows of the critical knout, thereby holding the lyric drama more or less in the state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to the laws of bel canto and enough singers exist, unfortunately, to justify this assertion) save that the music is not so well sung, according to the old standards, as it was then. No singer has had quite the courage to entirely defy tradition, to refuse to study with a teacher, to embody her own natural ideas in the performance of music, to found a new school ... but there have been many rebells.

The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, as a whole, do not demand great histrionic exertion from their interpreters and for a time singers trained in the old Handelian tradition met every requirement of these composers and their audiences. If more action was demanded than in Handel's day the newer music, in compensation, was easier to sing. But even early in the Nineteenth Century we observe that those artists who strove to be actors as well as singers lost something in vocal facility (really they were pushing on to the new technique). I need only speak of Ronconi and Mme. Pasta. The lady was admittedly the greatest lyric artist of her day although it is recorded that her slips from true intonation were frequent. When she could no longer command a steady tone the beaux restes of her art and her authoritative style caused Pauline Viardot, who was hearing her then for the first time, to burst into tears. Ronconi's voice, according to Chorley, barely exceeded an octave; it was weak and habitually out of tune. This baritone was not gifted with vocal agility and he was monotonous in his use of ornament. Nevertheless this same Chorley admits that Ronconi afforded him more pleasure in the theatre than almost any other singer he ever heard! If this critic did not rise to the occasion here and point the way to the future in another place he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolution: "There might, there should be yet, a new Medea as an opera. Nothing can be grander, more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini's setting of the 'grand fiendish part' (to quote the words of Mrs. Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, as music, it becomes simply impossible to be executed, so frightful is the strain on the energies of her who is to present the heroine. Compared with this character, Beethoven's Leonora, Weber's Euryanthe, are only so much child's play." This is topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, but at the same time it is suggestive.

The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach between the two schools. Wagner called upon the singer to express powerful emotion, passionate feeling, over a great body of sound, nay, in many instances, against a great body of sound. (It is significant that Wagner himself admitted that it was a singer [Madame Schroeder-Devrient] who revealed to him the possibilities of dramatic singing. He boasted that he was the only one to learn the lesson. "She was the first artist," writes H. T. Finck, "who fully revealed the fact that in a dramatic opera there may be situations where characteristic singing is of more importance than beautiful singing.") It is small occasion for wonder that singers began to bark. Indeed they nearly expired under the strain of trying successfully to mingle Porpora and passion. According to W. F. Apthorp, Max Alvary once said that, considering the emotional intensity of music and situations, the constant co-operation of the surging orchestra, and, most of all, the unconquerable feeling of the reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing actors did not go stark mad, before the very faces of the audience, in parts like Tristan or Siegfried.... The critics, however, were inexorable; they stood by their guns. There was but one way to sing the new music and that was the way of Bernacchi and Pistocchi. In time, by dint of persevering, talking night and day, writing day and night, they convinced the singer. The music drama developed but the singer was held in his place. Some artists, great geniuses, of course, made the compromise successfully.... Jean de Reszke, for example, and Lilli Lehmann, who said to H. E. Krehbiel ("Chapters of Opera"): "It is easier to sing all three Brunnhildes than one Norma. You are so carried away by the dramatic emotion, the action, and the scene, that you do not have to think how to sing the words. That comes of itself" ... but they made the further progress of the composer more difficult thereby; music remained merely pretty. The successors of these supple singers even learned to sing Richard Strauss with broad cantilena effects. As for Puccini! At a performance of Madama Butterfly a Japanese once asked why the singers were producing those nice round tones in moments of passion; why not ugly sounds?

Will any composer arise with the courage to write an opera which cannot be sung? Stravinsky almost did this in The Nightingale but the break must be more complete. Think of the range of sounds made by the Japanese, the gipsy, the Chinese, the Spanish folk-singers. The newest composer may ask for shrieks, squeaks, groans, screams, a thousand delicate shades of guttural and falsetto vocal tones from his interpreters. Why should the gamut of expression on our opera stage be so much more limited than it is in our music halls? Why should the Hottentots be able to make so many delightful noises that we are incapable of producing? Composers up to date have taken into account a singer's apparent inability to bridge difficult intervals. It is only by ignoring all such limitations that the new music will definitely emerge, the new art of the singer be born. What marvellous effects might be achieved by skipping from octave to octave in the human voice! When will the obfusc pundits stop shouting for what Avery Hopwood calls "ascending and descending tetrarchs!"

But, some one will argue, with the passing of bel canto what will become of the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti? Who will sing them? Fear not, lover of the golden age of song, bel canto is not passing as swiftly as that. Singers will continue to be born into this world who are able to cope with the floridity of this music, for they are born, not made. Amelita Galli-Curci will have her successors, just as Adelina Patti had hers. Singers of this kind begin to sing naturally in their infancy and they continue to sing, just sing.... One touch of drama or emotion and their voices disappear. Remember Nellie Melba's sad experience with Siegfried. The great Mario had scarcely studied singing (one authority says that he had taken a few lessons of Meyerbeer!) when he made his debut in Robert, le Diable and there is no evidence that he studied very much afterwards. Melba, herself, spent less than a year with Mme. Marchesi in preparation for her opera career. Mme. Galli-Curci asserts that she has had very little to do with professors and I do not think Mme. Tetrazzini passed her youth in mastering vocalizzi. As a matter of fact she studied singing only six months. Adelina Patti told Dr. Hanslick that she had sung Una voce poco fa at the age of seven with the same embellishments which she used later when she appeared in the opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers are freaks of nature like tortoise-shell cats and like those rare felines they are usually females of late, although such singers as Battistini and Bonci remind us that men once sang with as much agility as women. But when this type of singer finally becomes extinct naturally the operas which depend on it will disappear too for the same reason that the works of Monteverde and Handel have dropped out of the repertory, that the Greek tragedies and the Elizabethan interludes are no longer current on our stage. None of our actors understands the style of Chinese plays; consequently it would be impossible to present one of them in our theatre. As Deirdre says in Synge's great play, "It's a heartbreak to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same things only." We cannot, indeed, have everything. No one doubts that the plays of AEschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are great dramas; the operas I have just referred to can also be admired in the closet and probably they will be. Even today no more than two works of Rossini, the most popular composer of the early Nineteenth Century, are to be heard. What has become of Semiramide, La Cenerentola, and the others? There are no singers to sing them and so they have been dropped from the repertory without being missed. Can any of our young misses hum Di Tanti Palpiti? You know they cannot. I doubt if you can find two girls in New York (and I mean girls with a musical education) who can tell you in what opera the air belongs and yet in the early Twenties this tune was as popular as Un Bel Di is today.

Coloratura singing has been called heartless, not altogether without reason. At one time its exemplars fired composers to their best efforts. That day has passed. That day passed seventy years ago. It may occur to you that there is something wrong when singers of a certain type can only find the proper means to exploit their voices in works of the past, operas which are dead. It is to be noted that Nellie Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely unfitted to sing in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas, Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here is an entirely paradoxical situation; a set of interpreters who exist, it would seem, only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the past. What would we think of an actor who could make no effect save in the tragedies of Corneille? It is such as these who have kept Leo Ornstein from writing an opera. Berlioz forewarned us in his "Memoirs." He was one of the first to foresee the coming day: "We shall always find a fair number of female singers, popular from their brilliant singing of brilliant trifles, and odious to the great masters because utterly incapable of properly interpreting them. They have voices, a certain knowledge of music, and flexible throats: they are lacking in soul, brain, and heart. Such women are regular monsters and all the more formidable to composers because they are often charming monsters. This explains the weakness of certain masters in writing falsely sentimental parts, which attract the public by their brilliancy. It also explains the number of degenerate works, the gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of expression, the neglect of dramatic properties, the contempt for the true, the grand, and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepitude of art in certain countries."

So, even if, as the ponderous criticasters are continually pointing out, the age of bel canto is really passing there is no actual occasion for grief. All fashions in art pass and what is known as bel canto is just as much a fashion as the bombastic style of acting that prevailed in Victor Hugo's day or the "realistic" style of acting we prefer today. All interpretative art is based primarily on the material with which it deals and with contemporary public taste. This kind of singing is a direct derivative of a certain school of opera and as that school of opera is fading more expressive methods of singing are coming to the fore. The very first principle of bel canto, an equalized scale, is a false one. With an equalized scale a singer can produce a perfectly ordered series of notes, a charming string of matched pearls, but nothing else. It is worthy of note that it is impossible to sing Spanish or negro folk-songs with an equalized scale. Almost all folk-music, indeed, exacts a vocal method of its interpreter quite distinct from that of the art song.

We know now that true beauty lies deeper than in the emission of "perfect tone." Beauty is truth and expressiveness. The new art of the singer should develop to the highest degree the significance of the text. Calve once said that she did not become a real artist until she forgot that she had a beautiful voice and thought only of the proper expression the music demanded.

Of the old method of singing only one quality will persist in the late Twentieth Century (mind you, this is deliberate prophecy but it is about as safe as it would be to predict that Sarah Bernhardt will live to give several hundred more performances of La Dame aux Camelias) and that is style. The performance of any work demands a knowledge of and a feeling for its style but style is about the last thing a singer ever studies. When, however, you find a singer who understands style, there you have an artist!

Style is the quality which endures long after the singer has lost the power to produce a pure tone or to contrive accurate phrasing and so makes it possible for artists to hold their places on the stage long after their voices have become partially defective or, indeed, have actually departed. It is knowledge of style that accounts for the long careers of Marcella Sembrich and Lilli Lehmann or of Yvette Guilbert and Maggie Cline for that matter. It is knowledge of style that makes De Wolf Hopper a great artist in his interpretation of the music of Sullivan and the words of Gilbert. Some artists, indeed, with barely a shred of voice, have managed to maintain their positions on the stage for many years through a knowledge of style. I might mention Victor Maurel, Max Heinrich (not on the opera stage, of course), Antonio Scotti, and Maurice Renaud.

A singer may be born with the ability to produce pure tones (I doubt if Mme. Melba learned much about tone production from her teachers), she may even phrase naturally, although this is more doubtful, but the acquirement of style is a long and tedious process and one which generally requires specialization. For style is elusive. An auditor, a critic, will recognize it at once but very few can tell of what it consists. Nevertheless it is fairly obvious to the casual listener that Olive Fremstad is more at home in the music dramas of Gluck and Wagner than she is in Carmen and Tosca, and that Marcella Sembrich is happier when she is singing Zerlina (as a Mozart singer she has had no equal in the past three decades) than when she is singing Lakme. Mme. Melba sings Lucia in excellent style but she probably could not convince us that she knows how to sing a Brahms song. So far as I know she has never tried to do so. A recent example comes to mind in Maria Marco, the Spanish soprano, who sings music of her own country in her own language with absolutely irresistible effect, but on one occasion when she attempted Vissi d'Arte she was transformed immediately into a second-rate Italian singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily fully of grace and meaning, had become conventionalized.

If this quality of style (which after all means an understanding of both the surface manner and underlying purpose of a composition and an ability to transmit this understanding across the footlights) is of such manifest importance in the field of art music it is doubly so in the field of popular or folk-music. A foreigner had best think twice before attempting to sing a Swedish song, a Hungarian song, or a Polish song, popular or folk. (According to no less an authority than Cecil J. Sharp, the peasants themselves differentiate between the two and devote to each a special vocal method. Here are his words ["English Folk-Song"]: "But, it must be remembered that the vocal method of the folk-singer is inseparable from the folk-song. It is a cult which has grown up side by side with the folk-song, and is, no doubt, part and parcel of the same tradition. When, for instance, an old singing man sings a modern popular song, he will sing it in quite another way. The tone of his voice will change and he will slur his intervals, after the approved manner of the street-singer. Indeed, it is usually quite possible to detect a genuine folk-song simply by paying attention to the way in which it is sung.") Strangers as a rule do not attempt such matters although we have before us at the present time the very interesting case of Ratan Devi. It is a question, however, if Ratan Devi would be so much admired if her songs or their traditional manner of performance were more familiar to us.

On our music hall stage there are not more than ten singers who understand how to sing American popular songs (and these, as I have said elsewhere at some length,[33] constitute America's best claim in the art of music). It is very difficult to sing them well. Tone and phrasing have nothing to do with the matter; it is all a question of style (leaving aside for the moment the important matter of personality which enters into an accounting for any artist's popularity or standing). Elsie Janis, a very clever mimic, a delightful dancer, and perhaps the most deservedly popular artist on our music hall stage, is not a good interpreter of popular songs. She cannot be compared in this respect with Bert Williams, Blanche Ring, Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Fannie Brice, or Marie Cahill. I have named nearly all the good ones. The spirit, the very conscious liberties taken with the text (the vaudeville singer must elaborate his own syncopations as the singer of early opera embroidered on the score of the composer) are not matters that just happen. They require any amount of work and experience with audiences. None of the singers I have named is a novice. Nor will you find novices who are able to sing Schumann and Franz lieder, although they may be blessed with well-nigh perfect vocal organs.

[Footnote 33: In an essay entitled "The Great American Composer" in my book, "Interpreters and Interpretations."]

Still the music critics with strange persistence continue to adjudge a singer by the old formulae and standards: has she an equalized scale? Has she taste in ornament? Does she overdo the use of portamento, messa di voce, and such devices? How is her shake? etc., etc. But how false, how ridiculous, this is! Fancy the result if new writers and composers were criticized by the old laws (so they are, my son, but not for long)! Creative artists always smash the old tablets of commandments and it does not seem to me that interpretative artists need be more unprogressive. Acting changes. Judged by the standards by which Edwin Booth was assessed John Drew is not an actor. But we know now that it is a different kind of acting. Acting has been flamboyant, extravagant, and intensely emotional, something quite different from real life. The present craze for counterfeiting the semblance of ordinary existence on the stage will also die out for the stage is not life and representing life on the stage (except in a conventionalized or decorative form) is not art. Our new actors (with our new playwrights) will develop a new and fantastic mode of expression which will supersede the present fashion.... Rubinstein certainly did not play the piano like Chopin. Presently a virtuoso will appear who will refuse to play the piano at all and a new instrument without a tempered scale will be invented so that he may indulge in all the subtleties between half-tones which are denied to the pianist.

It's all very well to cry, "Halt!" and "Who goes there?" but you can't stop progress any more than you can stop the passing of time. The old technique of the singer breaks down before the new technique of the composer and the musician with daring will go still further if the singer will but follow. Would that some singer would have the complete courage to lead! But do not misunderstand me. The road to Parnassus is no shorter because it has been newly paved. Indeed I think it is longer. Caffarelli studied six years before he made his debut as "the greatest singer in the world" but I imagine that Waslav Nijinsky studied ten before he set foot on the stage. The new music drama, combining as it does principles from all the arts is all-demanding of its interpreters. The new singer must learn how to move gracefully and awkwardly, how to make both fantastic and realistic gestures, always unconventional gestures, because conventions stamp the imitator. She must peer into every period, glance at every nation. Every nerve centre must be prepared to express any adumbration of plasticity. Many of the new operas, Carmen, La Dolores, Salome, Elektra, to name a few, call for interpretative dancing of the first order. Madama Butterfly and Lakme demand a knowledge of national characteristics. Pelleas et Melisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue require of the interpreter absolutely distinct enunciation. In Handel's operas the phrases were repeated so many times that the singer was excused if he proclaimed the meaning of the line once. After that he could alter the vowels and consonants to suit his vocal convenience. Monna Vanna and Tristan und Isolde exact of their interpreters acting of the highest poetic and imaginative scope....

It is a question whether certain singers of our day have not solved these problems with greater success than that for which they are given credit.... Yvette Guilbert has announced publicly that she never had a teacher, that she would not trust her voice to a teacher. The enchanting Yvette practises a sound by herself until she is able to make it; she repeats a phrase until she can deliver it without an interrupting breath, and is there a singer on the stage more expressive than Yvette Guilbert? She sings a little tenor, a little baritone, and a little bass. She can succeed almost invariably in making the effect she sets out to make. And Yvette Guilbert is the answer to the statement often made that unorthodox methods of singing ruin the voice. Ruin it for performances of Linda di Chaminoux and La Sonnambula very possibly, but if young singers sit about saving their voices for performances of these operas they are more than likely to die unheard. It is a fact that good singing in the old-fashioned sense will help nobody out in Elektra, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Pelleas et Melisande, or The Nightingale. These works are written in new styles and they demand a new technique. Put Mme. Melba, Mme. Destinn, Mme. Sembrich, or Mme. Galli-Curci to work on these scores and you will simply have a sad mess.

We have, I think, but a faint glimmering of what vocal expressiveness may become. Such torch-bearers as Mariette Mazarin and Feodor Chaliapine have been procaciously excoriated by the critics. Until recently Mary Garden, who of all artists on the lyric stage, is the most nearly in touch with the singing of the future, has been treated as a charlatan and a fraud. W. J. Henderson once called her the "Queen of Unsong." Well, perhaps she is, but she is certainly better able to cope artistically with the problems of the modern music drama than such Queens of Song as Marcella Sembrich and Adelina Patti would be. Perhaps Unsong is the name of the new art.

I do not think I have ever been backward in expressing my appreciation of this artist. My essay devoted to her in "Interpreters and Interpretations" will certainly testify eloquently as to my previous attitude in regard to her. But it has not always been so with some of my colleagues. Since she has been away from us they have learned something; they have watched and listened to others and so when Mary Garden came back to New York in Monna Vanna in January, 1918, they were ready to sing choruses of praise in her honour. They have been encomiastic even in regard to her voice and her manner of singing.

Even my own opinion of this artist's work has undergone a change. I 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.

[The end]
Carl Van Vechten's essay: New Art Of The Singer

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN