Variety

Headliner last week at the Keith Vaudeville Palace, Manhattan, was Emma Calve, billed "The Beloved Diva" and "The World's Greatest Carmen," serving on the same bill with such as Stan Kavanagh (Austrian juggler), Naughton & Gold (funny ones), B. A. Rolfe (Mighty Melodist of the Trumpet), Frank Evers & Greta (tightrope dancers).

The Palace entertained strangers at her 14 performances: some who remembered the Cavalleria at the Metropolitan Opera 34 years ago when Calve made her debut; some who had seen her first Carmen, a slim, sensual hoyden who attracted 15 sold-out houses in a single season. No words were too dear for her then. The late Henry Theophilus Finck of the New York Evening Post has said: "She had everything in her favor that a fairy could possibly bestow on an operatic artist: a beautiful and amazingly expressive face; a voluptuous figure, with a rare grace of movement; a voice which, at its best--and it usually was at its best--was as lovely, sensuously, as Patti's and infinitely more soulful; a skill for acting realistically which amounted to genius, often making one forget the superlative beauty of her voice; and the supreme gift of magnetism." Henry Edward Krehbiel, his rival on the Tribune, accorded her "the most sensational triumph ever achieved by any opera or singer." In Europe it was the same. She sang for the Tsar, for the Sultan, for the Empress Eugenie, the Kings of Sweden and Greece. Queen Victoria entertained her at Windsor and Balmoral, had a marble bust made by her own royal order so that the Great Calve should be remembered at Windsor for all time.

Few were prepared last week for the wide woman draped in metal cloth who fluttered on at the Palace, bowed low as if for great applause, smiling. Now, at 62, there was little voice, little vitality for a Troubadour song, for d'Hardelet's "Lesson of the Fan," for "Swanee River" and "The Spirit of the Air," words and music by herself, dedicated to Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh. "L'amour est une oiseau rebelle. . . ." The customers at the Palace sat alert for the "Habanera" of the World's Greatest Carmen, but the high comb would not stay in the thin bobbed hair, and the flaming shawl was strangely dull. True there was a hint of the old gestures, the old fire, but the Palace audience could not remember, saved their applause for Naughton & Gold, funny indeed, for the triple-tonguing of Trumpeter Rolfe and his slapstick jazz players.

Madame Calve will now tour on the Keith circuit.