“I sang the patient Griselda first at Aix-les-Bains,” she once told a reporter. “The King of Greece heard me, and said he didn’t think the part a suitable one for me. I wonder what he meant!”
Miss Garden has also sung Manon, and Prince Charmant in Cendrillon.
Massenet’s last inspiration was a contralto, Lucy Arbell, who fired his brain to many creations. She sang the rôle of Perséphone in Ariane. This goddess of the nether world appeared only in one act of this long opera, but into that act Massenet put the most popular air of the score, the air of the roses, “Emmène ta sœur.” After Ariane had been performed sixty times at the Paris Opéra, Massenet asked her how many times she had sung the part, thinking she would have forgotten.
“Sixty,” she answered.
“Wrong,” he replied, “for you have repeated the air of the roses every night. You have sung the part 120 times!”
The part of Dulcinée in Don Quichotte was written for Lucy Arbell. She sang it both in Paris and Monte Carlo. It is said that before the first performance she spent considerable time learning to play the guitar, so that she could accompany her air in the fourth act herself. Thérèse, Bacchus and Roma all contain parts written with Lucy Arbell in mind. One cannot do better than close with the picture evoked by Massenet in describing the effect which the music of Thérèse had on his interpreter when he first played it to her.
“At the first playing of the score to our créatrice, Lucy Arbell, artist that she was, stopped me as I was playing the final scene, where Thérèse, with a cry of fear, sees the terrible cart bearing her husband, André Thorel, to the scaffold, and screams, ‘Vive le roi!’ with all her force, so that she may be sure of joining her husband in his death. It was at this instant that our interpreter, greatly moved, stopped me and said, ‘I could never sing that scene up to the end, because when I recognized my husband, who gave me his name, who saved Armand de Clerval, I should lose my voice. I ask you to let me declaim the end of the piece.’ Great artists alone,” concludes Massenet, “have the gift of divining these instinctive movements.”
October, 1912.
Stage Decoration as a Fine Art
Stage Decoration as a Fine Art