equally interest New Yorkers. Her chief successes, moreover, had been won in such ultra-Parisian and ultra-modern operas as Massenet's "Thaïs," Charpentier's "Louise," and, above all, Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande." Would these please American opera-goers? Other managers had doubted this, but Mr. Hammerstein believed, or at least hoped, they would; and being as fearless as Siegfried, he went ahead with his experiment-an experiment the more to be commended because the Metropolitan Opera House had strangely neglected French opera ever since Mr. Conried assumed the directorship. "Thaïs" was the first to be tried. On November 25 the Manhattan Opera House held a throng of eagerly expectant spectators. They saw Mary Garden in the rôle of a famous Alexandrian stage beauty and priestess of Venus, in an age when queenly homage was rendered to such courtezans. At a feast in the house of one of her admirers, Nicias, her attention is arrested by the sight of a stranger of austere aspect whose fierce eyes are fixed on her with an expression new to her. It is Athanael, a monk, who has left the desert for the express purpose of saving her soul. She parries his words at first with banter and an attempt to intoxicate his senses by her charms. She continues her efforts when he visits her, being piqued by the presence of the first man who resists her fascinations, even as he is piqued by the thought of how glorious it would be to vanquish her whom no other woman equaled in beauty or profligacy. The one bitter drop in her cup of heathen bliss is the fear of death, and it is by revealing to her the evangel of the life everlasting that he effects a sudden change in her attitude and feelings-a change which, after a night's meditation, prayer, and weeping, becomes so vital that she breaks away from her worshipers and goes with him to the desert, to become one of the white-robed nuns of the monastery in the oasis. But in making a saint, Athanael has himself become a sinner; the arrow of sensual love has entered his heart, and at the couch of Thaïs, who is dying of remorse and fasting, he implores her to live and love. Like Sibyl Sanderson, for whom this rôle was written, Mary Garden is favored LXXVI-15 with the full yet slender form of a Phryne, the sinuous charms of which are enhanced by a fine feeling for plasticity and a rare art of picturesque posing. Every step and gesture is part of a harmonious whole subtly contrived to secure verisimilitude. At the beginning of the second act, the mingled weariness of her triumphs and dread of losing her beauty form a fine contrast to the ironic playfulness and wanton challenge in the preceding scenes. The struggle in her soul with all the changing emotions is charmingly mirrored in her features; the offer of a kiss, the appeal to Venus, the sudden pallor, fear, weeping, the nervous laugh at the last moment of revolt, the despair when the monk smashes the image of Eros, the last link with her past life,— all these are portrayed with an art that introduced Miss Garden as a consummate, unique actress, an individuality to be reckoned with. With all its audacity, her enactment of the rôle of this priestess of Venus was free from vulgarity; it was sensual, yet not offensive. As a singer she revealed a voice the lower and middle registers of which were always agreeable while some of the high tones had a harsh quality. The most admirable thing about her singing was its genuine dramatic quality, its passionate intensity of utterance, its emotional realism. The proud priestess of Venus in "Thaïs" becomes a plain Parisian working girl in "Louise," the second of the operas in which Miss Garden appeared before an American audience. Louise is employed in a dressmaker's establishment, and she loves Julien, a young poet, whose suit for her hand does not meet the approval of her parents. The mother upbraids her for bestowing her heart on this "starveling," this "tavern supporter, whose existence is the scandal of the quarter." In the second act we see Louise among the working girls in the busy shop. She hears a serenade below, which gradually hypnotizes her; she pleads illness, and pretends she is going home. but the skeptical girls at the window, to their amusement, see her going off with the serenader. Julien takes her to a little house he has found for their honeymoon, on the Butte Montmartre, overlooking Paris. Here their friends assemble one evening with Japanese lanterns; there is dancing, and Louise is crowned Muse of Montmartre. In the midst of the festivities her mother arrives and implores her to return to her father; he is very ill, and she alone can cure him. Louise obeys, after the mother has promised Julien she will be allowed to return to him. This promise is not kept. Louise finds her old home more and more irksome, intolerable. The call of Paris comes to her ears; she raves about her lover, her life of bliss in his cottage, till her father's patience is exhausted. He opens the door, bids her begone, and throws a chair after her; then he sinks down in heart-breaking remorse: but it is too late to bring her back; she is lost in Paris, a needle in a haystack. Mary Garden has lived in Paris long enough to understand thoroughly the kind of girl Charpentier depicts in the libretto. he wrote for his opera. She represents her as heartless, vain, fond of finery, impulsive, yet not really degraded. As she has herself remarked, Louise is not a Tenderloin type. "She loves life, its froth and fun, which does not necessarily mean anything vicious. She is a cheery little. skater on the edge of an abyss, like the Mimis in general, who are so well understood on the boulevards and in Montmartre, who are loved for that very quality of unthinking gaiety, and who often end their butterfly career by marrying." In the last scene, Miss Garden rises to a splendid height of dramatic impersonation. The call of Paris-her Paris, "splendeur de mes désirs,” her “encore un jour d'amour," and the whole delirious scene where her memories overpower her till her mother cries "She 's going mad!" -all this was acted with entrancing art, and her impassioned singing intensified the impression. It is in Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande," however, that Mary Garden has won her .greatest triumph. She confesses that she is a little tired of the rôle of Louise after singing it over 220 times. Mélisande she loves more and more after over eighty impersonations, and she is convinced it will never weary her. Nor is it likely ever to pall on the admirers of Debussy's opera, or rather, music-drama; for an opera it is not, having no arias, duos, choruses, or processions. The composer himself has repeatedly testified to his admiration for her art. In 1903 he dedicated a volume of his songs to "Miss Mary Garden, the unforgettable Mélisande." Into the copy of the score of his opera which he gave to her he wrote: "In the future others may sing Mélisande, but you alone will remain the woman and the artist I had hardly dared hope for." And in "Musica Noël," dated January 8, 1908, he has an article in which he refers to the hours spent in rehearsing "Pelléas et Mélisande" as among the pleasantest in his life. "I have known," he adds, "cases of great devotion and great artists. Among the latter there was an artist curiously personal. I had hardly anything to suggest to her; by herself she gradually painted the character of Mélisande; I watched her with a singular confidence mingled with curiosity." Maeterlinck's play on which Debussy's opera is based must be read to be appreciated. To give a summary of it would be to miss its very essence-its intangible, dreamlike, vague, elusive atmosphere. Mélisande is a princess who has fled from some mysterious palace. Prince Golaud finds her in the forest, takes her home, and marries her; he never finds out who she is or whence she came. He is graybearded, and she is young; young also is the prince's half-brother, Pelléas. The two fall in love. The jealous Golaud surprises them at what was to have been their last meeting, and slays Pelléas. Mélisande dies soon after, leaving a daughter to take her place. "I killed without reason," Golaud exclaims; "they kissed like children." The mystic, shadowy remoteness and unreality of the Mélisande which Miss Garden presents, recalls the paintings of Rossetti, making a striking contrast to her Thaïs, which is so intensely human. Her voice-even in the declaration of love and her motions are wonderfully consistent, giving one the impression of vague yet definite dream-person. She is as lithe and sinuous as a snake; she keeps a singular virginal atmosphere about her, despite the beautiful outlining of her figure, which is almost as frank as in "Thaïs." She wears at first a quaint and appropriate costume, close-fitting, white with overwork of pink. Is it a bit of symbolism that when her husband abuses her because her eyes feign, as he thinks, such "a great innocence," and when she meets Pelléas, at last acknowledging her love, she no longer displays her glorious body, but veils it with heavy lines and wraps it in dull colors, instead of displaying its unspoiled beauty and wearing the early white and rose of the young and possibly happy wife? Thaïs, too, wore rose-color and blonde hair, but what a tremendous chasm exists between the victorious courtezan, with her clinging flesh-colored draperies and audacious golden head and the girlish Mélisande, with her glorious hair meekly parted in the middle, pouring over her like a flood of sunlight! She seems unaware of the glory of this hair, to have only a dim idea of its effect on Pelléas, even in the window scene when it falls over his head and neck and he caresses it as if it were living; but later she seems to realize this effect, and when she gives up the rose and white gown, she confines the golden flood in long braids which hang in melancholy lines along her white. cheeks and over the sad-hued draperies. How can this woman with her exuberant vitality change herself so completely, become a monochrome in look, in voice— which but once rises to real song-in gesture, as passionless, in spite of her forbidden love, as an angel of Fra Angelico? There is a forlorn groping for the tangible, a weird, uncomprehending sadness which envelops her like a mantle, but withal she strongly conveys the impression of a terrified shrinking from the actual, a horror of being touched which may spring from fear-the fear so well shown in the very first scene, but which seems still more to express the mysterious contradictions of a character incomprehensible to herself as well as to those about her. The three new characters presented by Miss Garden have given the opera season of 1907-08 a unique distinction. Next year she promises to add three more rôles, which doubtless will give further opportunity of admiring the beauty of her movements, which reminds one of Emerson's lines: Thou canst not wave thy staff in air forth the noises of hell-the sounds of wailing souls fighting demon hordes; a rattling as of countless chains on shaking fortress walls; a clanging as of many bells on falling towers; a rushing and crashing as of a thousand chariots over the rock-paved streets of a smoking city. The turmoil grows until the heavens themselves stand aghast, open the gates of their torrents, and quench the fires of the tempest, while all beneath begin to breathe once more. But this is not the tropic storm I wish to describe just now. The one I mean occurs on land, generally near the outer edge of a city or town. Here it is: Old X'Leut sat on a rock in front of her palm-thatched "na," combing her long but scanty locks with a big-toothed wooden comb. Things had gone wrong with her that morning, and as a climax for it all, an owl had perched on her roof just before daylight and awakened her by its unholy screeching. Everybody that knows anything of such things knows that the perching of an owl on the housetop forebodes some great disaster to its inmate.. X'Pet Iuit, in the little tumbledown hut opposite, was in a bad humor that morning, too. It had rained heavily the night before, and the rain had come through the big holes in the rotten thatch until the inside of the hut was as wet and nasty as the outside. Worse, for outside all things were washed bright and clean by the heavy rain. The very weeds were green and fragrant, the old tin cans showed gleaming spots of tin through their rust, and even the big sea-turtle shell, where the solitary duck took his infrequent bath, lay clean and gleaming white, like the virgin shield of some newmade knight. In the house, in the tumbledown hut that to X'Pet and drunken, light-hearted Bruno was home, the rain had worked a different way. The great drops had pounded through the rotten palm-leaves and carried the leaf bits down with them, where they lay in little heaps on the floor beneath. Worse still, the drops had trickled along the smoke-stained rafters, and then had dropped on to a snowy pile of freshly washed clothes that X'Pet had heaped to gether in a basket to carry to their owners early in the morning. Now the great black stains meant hours of hard work before she could tie in her handkerchief the silver she so much needed for her clothes. Thus X'Pet felt mean and bitter as she opened her door, to sweep out the wet rubbish into the street. She saw old X'Leut sitting in moody silence on the rock, slowly passing the comb through her snaky locks; but the old woman, never looking up, only went on combing. X'Pet looked on in malicious silence for a moment, and then leaning on her long-handled broom, shouted as if to some one inside the hut,-her own daughter X'Mat,-and said: "Ha! ha! X'Mat, you make me laugh! Six hairs on one side, and twelve on the other, and yet you sit where the whole world can see you combing the hairs, as if you were a girl of twelve. Are you crazy, X'Mat?" Well did old X'Leut know that X'Mat was not at home, and had not been for many a day, and well did she know that the words of X'Pet were meant for her and for her alone. The trick was an old and familiar one to her, for she was old, and had used it herself often. She said nothing, her lips tightened until her mouth was a narrow slit, and her eyes closed until they were a pair of narrow slits; but she went on slowly combing her locks until she had finished. Then she slowly looped it up after the manner of her people for unnumbered centuries, tucked in the straggling ends, and stood up. X'Pet was, comparatively speaking, a new-comer to this particular barrio, and it is hardly to be believed that she would have tackled the old woman so freely if she had known what was coming, or, to put it in the figurative expression of the native, if she had known "how much wood it was going to take to cook the sweetmeat." Old X'Leut had been in her day a famous fish-woman at the port. Fish-women since the days of the immortal Charlemagne have been noted as uncomfortable creatures to stir up with a verbal pole. But a port fish-woman! Ah! What is the use of attempting to describe the undescribable! A gleam of satisfaction shot athwart the old woman's features, followed by a disappointed one as X'Pet entered her house, and shutting the door with a bang, securely barred it. Old X'Leut shook her dress to free it of stray hairs, stretched her skinny arms as if to embrace the universe, and then the slit of a mouth became straightway a cavern, revealing long and yellow fangs. The eyes opened wide, and from them shot fire; and from the mouth At first she indulged only in generalities, and these, too, in a low, monotonous voice, almost without inflection, like the purring of a cat, that simply yawns and stretches out her claws just a tiny bit, to see if they are in good shape. Behind the closed door, in the security of her own house, as she thought, poor, deluded X'Pet, with her head against the door, listened calmly. The monotonous voice, hardly raised above a conversational tone, soothed her, and she was almost smiling, when a word flitted by that cut the smile short. Old X'Leut had left the generalities, and raising her voice to a higher pitch, began on the personalities. She scanned the annals of X'Pet's immediate ancestry, and discovered parallel traits between it and canines of a certain sex, the feline tribe, and the common pole-cat. And now her voice rose still higher,—not loud, because of the dozing policeman on the corner of the near-by crossing, but shrill and insistent. She figuratively snatched up these relatives one and collectively, and held them up to the view of the public; she tore them ferociously apart to see what they were made of, and what made them go. Then suddenly throwing their mangled remains to one side, she addressed herself to prophecy. She told what would be the beginning and the end of X'Pet's nearest relatives and remotest descendants. Ah, old X'Leut, when in the full tide of her eloquence, was unique, she was weird, she-but what is the use? X'Pet grew restive and uneasy, and threw anxious looks around. The door, securely barred, as it was, was not so safe as it looked. The ugly words slipped through the cracks and crevices like quicksilver, and then they burned her badly. She stopped the keyhole with a rag, but by that time it was too late; the tide was on, with the resistless force of all tides. The flood of words rushed forth overwhelmingly. They beat through the wooden fabric of the door, they filtered through the rotten palm thatch. They crept up under the careless eaves, and dropped red hot and scorching upon the shrinking X'Pet, as she cowered beneath them. Finally X'Pet could stand it no longer, and pallid and trembling, almost hysterical, she fled through the back door, down the yard, and into the little thatched hut where the hens roosted on the rotting poles. There, sheltered by the great mustard plants, she crouched tired and spent on a fallen door of withes. The motherly cluckings of the maternal. hens, the sleepy scoldings of the brooding one, and the solicitous bustlings of the roosters soothed her, and she actually fell asleep and slept soundly until the bickerings of two quarrelsome hens awoke her with an anxious start. She caught the feathered termigants and cuffed them soundly; then she went slowly and shakily toward the house. A knock at the door made her start and tremble, but another and a louder one made her open it. There stood old X'Leut, with jolly eyes and kindly mouth, holding in her hands a steaming bowl of atole gruel. "Are you still bitter against me?" she asked in the vernacular. "If not, let 's be friends again. Here is a gourd of hot atole; it's good for a headache. know." I She nodded her old head understandingly. Knew? Of course she knew. And so the tropic tempest passed, and all was clear and serene once more. |