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The New Art Of The Singer
by
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.