FullReads

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?”