Garden's Camille

(See front cover)

One morning five years ago Mary Garden received in her sheaf of mail a note from a fledgling composer asking if he might play her some of his music. Such . notes usually go into Mary Garden's wastebasket. But this one appealed to her. With characteristic terseness she wrote the young man to come next day. The result of that audience was an opera called Camille, written by the young man after the story of Alexandre Dumas fils (as is Verdi's Traviata). The premiere was scheduled for this week at Samuel Insull's year-old Chicago Opera House with Mary Garden in the leading role.

When Composer Hamilton Forrest first went to see Mary Garden he was a lean, wild-eyed youth who, in order to continue his musical studies, had been working as office boy in Mr. Insull's Commonwealth Edison Co. He showed Miss Garden an opera the libretto of which she, theatrer wise, pronounced impossible. But she recognized instantly Forrest's genius for music, told him to find another libretto, a lovestory, and try again. Camille came to his mind because he knew of a similar tragedy which involved two students in a Chicago shorthand school. "But Camille," Mary Garden objected, "is French. You could not expect me to sing it in English." Hamilton Forrest forthwith went to France, learned the language, studied with Composer Maurice Ravel, wrote his opera and had it accepted by the opera company headed by the light & power tycoon whose errands he used to run.

Camille was scheduled for performance last season but postponed because of insufficient time for preparation, some say because the domestic difficulties of Music Director Giorgio Polacco and Soprano Edith Mason last year slowed up the activities of the company. Neither returned this year.

In essence the new opera is like the well-worn play: the lovers Marguerite (Camille) and Armand are separated by Armand's doting father whereupon Marguerite dies of consumption. But most of the detail has been revamped, modernized. Important to the plot is the repeated jangling of a telephone bell. The costumes are modern. Mary Garden wears pajamas in one scene, in another a gorgeous gold-cloth gown of latest cut, bright with blood-red camellias. The spirit of the music is modern: a waltz theme winds through it all. There is a jazz scene in the second act where saxophones, two pianos and a banjo are used. Unlike Traviata there are no set arias, duos or trios. The characters do not express themselves in formal, stilted song. More in the manner of Pelleas et Melisande, they talk back and forth naturally in the intimate, emotionalized musical speech for which Mary Garden has a particular genius.

For many a Chicagoan the opera season does not start until Mary Garden returns. This year she is particularly welcome, for Chicago's opera affairs are not in a happy state. Sopranos Rosa Raisa, Claudia Muzio, Lotte Lehmann, Frida Leider have been giving capable performances. But despite expectations the pretentious new house has not proved popular. Beauty is widely conceded to the building. On the northwest edge of the Loop, it rises from the murky Chicago River directly across from the unquestionably beautiful Chicago Daily News Building & Plaza. But the acoustics are not yet so good as in the famed old Auditorium. And it contains, apparently, a grave psychological error: In placing the boxes the architect seems to have forgotten that Society is an essential to successful opera. As in cinemansions the boxes are across the back almost in a straight line instead of in a deep horseshoe. The front railings are high. Socialites are far from the stage. Worse, they cannot be seen by the main floor audience and even find it hard to see one another. Business has been bad. Rear seats are often empty. It is said that the company is $150,000 behind last year in subscriptions. The Sunday matinee series has been discontinued "after a careful inquiry into costs and the probable income." Whether this can all be attributed to hard times is a matter of opinion. Certainly there has been no lack of sales effort in the best Insull manner. But critics contend that too much has been said about the "duty" of supporting the opera, too little about how good the operas are. Chicagoans, whether they approve of Mary Garden or not, agree that she is the one who puts life into the company. For 20 years she has done so. She went to Chi cago with her name made. She was one of four daughters born in Aberdeen, Scot land, to a Mr. & Mrs. Robert D. Garden. Mr. Garden, now a dignified old gentleman with a white goatee, migrated to the U. S., went into the bicycle business (later he was an executive of Fierce-Arrow Motor Car Co.). Mrs. Garden followed with the girls, lived in Brooklyn for a while, then in Chicopee Falls, Mass., then in Chicago. Mary was the determined, aggressive one of the lot. She learned to play the violin, at twelve played in a concert. Then she studied piano, practiced patiently five hours a day. An amateur performance of Trial by Jury in Chicago perhaps hinted first at her dramatic talents. But she wanted to be a singer. To Paris she went, lived with a French family, studied diligently. Her debut at the Opera Comique came at a time when she was practically penniless. She had been engaged to do a small part the following season, meanwhile was permitted to attend rehearsals. One night the soprano singing in the new opera Louise collapsed in the second act. The director remembered the girl who had been watching rehearsals, sent for her, asked if she could finish the performance. Mary Garden had never sung on a stage, never sung with orchestra. But she did not hesitate, said: "M. le Directeur, have no fear. I shall not fail." She recalls now trying postehaste to loop in the costume of the larger soprano, thinking: "My God, in all this huge place, isn't there anybody who has a pin?" Her performance created a sensation. Her voice was curiously husky, uneven, but she played the role with such singular understanding that she sold out 100 performances and was put on a salary of $50 a month. Impresario Oscar Hammerstein (high silk hat, spade beard, big black cigar) played Mary Garden's U. S. debut as his trump card in his operatic feud with Manhattan's Metropolitan (1906-10). Then the talk began. She wore the scantiest of costumes in Thais (she still wears as little as possible under any stage costume), danced lasciviously with the seven veils of Salome. Critics assailed her singing. They were used to the stodgy, conventional ways of big-fronted sopranos. Garden, they admitted, was pleasing to the eye, knew how to move about the stage, had a certain dramatic gift. Few realized then her great contribution to operatic art: that every part she played was recreated, made poignant, personal--her brazen, worldly Thai's (a role she hates); her piteous, questioning little juggler (Le Jongleur de Notre Dame}; her bourgeois, free-loving Louise; her pale, groping Melisande. Significant is the fact that singers with smoother voices have since had small success with any of her great roles. In 1910 she went to Chicago, added other roles, notably Flora in L'Amore dei Tre Re, Katiusha in Alfano's Resurrection. One year (1920-21) she was director as well as leading soprano of the Chicago company, came through unscathed despite tall trouble with the tenors. Three months in Chicago, a tour with the company, a few concerts and a long vacation on the Riviera--so does Mary Garden divide her time. In Chicago she lives on the top floor of the Lake Shore Drive Hotel, works hard, keeps fit, reads widely, plays occasional bridge. She goes out little socially because she refuses to be bored, hates above all things to sit around a table and eat. Forty times she has crossed the Atlantic, has never seen the dining saloon of a ship. On the Riviera she visits with her family, her mother who goes from Manhattan, one sister from Scotland, another from Switzerland, another from Monte Carlo. She plays tennis, tries her luck in the casinos, swims naked in the Mediterranean. She is 53 and does not care who knows it. She has developed a philosophy unusual for prima donnas. Criticism does not disturb her. At a luncheon in Chicago last year she said: "Nobody ever said yet I could sing and I don't give a damn." Yet her characters are as carefully molded as ever, her engagements as conscientiously kept. Between her and her manager Charles L. Wagner there exists no written contract.

With the public Mary Garden has preserved her drawing power. With the newspapers she is as good copy as she was 20 years ago. Like Henry Ford, Albert Einstein and Charles Augustus Lindbergh her most casual utterances are syndicated: She will marry a Turkish pasha. She will not marry at all. She will have a film test and perhaps do Pelleas et Melisande for the movies. She will retire in another two years to the He de Rouge off Corsica, ride mules. . . .

Her keen, independent opinions on matters artistic would make good reading if she ever takes time to write them. "Mechanical repetition is what kills art in the U. S. If a play succeeds, an actor is asked to repeat the performance 300 nights running. No artist can survive such a system.

"Wigs are the most important part of an actress' makeup. She does not disguise herself from the neck down. She must do it from the neck up. I cannot understand the pride American actresses take in always wearing their own hair."

Her own work was best described by Composer Claude Debussy, of whose music she has been a leading exponent. After a rehearsal of Pelleas et Melisande he said: "There was an artist curiously personal."

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