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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.