V
What is to become of Mary Garden? What can she do now? What is there left for her to do? Those who complain of some of the dross in her répertoire can scarcely have considered the material available to her. In Pelléas et Mélisande, Louise, and Salome she has given much to the best the contemporary lyric stage has to offer. On other occasions she has succeeded in transfiguring indifferent material with her genius. Monna Vanna is not a great opera, but she makes it seem so. But where is there anything better? Can she turn to Puccini, whose later operas seem bereft of merit, to Mascagni, to Strauss, to any other of the living opera composers?
Ravel's one opera is not particularly suited to her, but why, I might ask, does not Ravel write something for her? Why not Strawinsky? Why not Leo Ornstein? Why not John Carpenter? The talented composer of The Birthday of the Infanta might very well write an opera, in which her genius for vocal experimentation might have still further play.
In the meantime I can make one or two suggestions. I have already begged for Isolde and Isolde I think we shall get in time. But has it occurred to any one that the Queen in The Golden Cockerel is a part absolutely suited to the Garden genius? Not, of course, The Golden Cockerel as at present performed, with a double cast of singers and pantomimists but as an opera, in the form in which Rimsky-Korsakow conceived it. And I hope some day that she will attempt Gluck's Armide, perhaps one of the Iphigénies, and Donna Anna. Why not? Of all living singers Miss Garden is the only one who could give us the complete fulfilment of Mozart's tragic heroine. Oscar Hammerstein, whose vision was acute, once considered a performance of Don Giovanni with Maurice Renaud in the title part, Luisa Tetrazzini as Zerlina, Lina Cavalieri as Elvira, and Mary Garden as Anna. It was never given. But I hope at the next revival of the work at the Opéra-Comique Miss Garden will undertake the part, and I see no reason why the opera should not be added to the already extensive répertoire of the Chicago Opera Company.
Her stride, her lithe carriage, her plastic use of her arms and her body, give Mary Garden a considerable advantage over a sculptor, who can in the course of a lifetime only capture perhaps ten perfect examples of arrested motion, while in any one performance she makes her body a hundred different works of art. Of course, some of us, fascinated by the mere beauty of the Garden line, more slender now than it was even in her most youthful past, delighted with her irreproachable taste in dress, would rest content to watch her walk across the scene or form exquisite pictures in any part, in any opera. But unless one of the best of the moderns writes a great rôle for her, it would be a great satisfaction to see her in one of the noble classic parts of the past, and that satisfaction, I hope, will be vouchsafed us.
March 18, 1920.
New York.
On the following pages you will find descriptions of two other interesting books by Mr. Van Vechten.
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
(12mo., 343 pages, $2.00 net.)