Garden is all wrong in it, all wrong, she continued. In the first place she can't sing. Of course she's pretty, but she's not my idea of Manon at all. I will really sing the part and act it too.
A month or two later, while we munched sandwiches and drank beer between the acts of Tristan und Isolde in the foyer of the Prinzregenten Theater in Munich, Olive Fremstad introduced me to an American girl, who informed me that a new Isolde had been born that day.
I shall be the great Isolde, she remarked casually, and her name, I gathered, when I asked Madame Fremstad to repeat it, was Minnie Saltzmann-Stevens.
But on the day that Clara spoke of her future triumphs in Manon, I had yet to become accustomed to this confidence with which beginners in the vocal art seem so richly endowed, a confidence which is frequently disturbed by circumstances for, as George Moore has somewhere said, our dreams and our circumstances are often in conflict. Later, I discovered that every unsuccessful singer believes, and asserts, that Geraldine Farrar is instrumental in preventing her from singing at the Metropolitan Opera House. On this day, I say, I was unaware of this peculiarity in vocalists but I was interested in the name she had let slip, a name I had never before heard.
Who is Garden? I asked.
You don't know Mary Garden! exclaimed Martha.
There! shrieked Clara. There! I told you so. No one outside of Paris has ever even heard of the woman.
Well, they've heard of her here, said Martha, quietly, pinching a little worm of cobalt blue from a tube. She's the favourite singer of the Opéra-Comique. She is an American and she sings Louise and Manon and Traviata and Mélisande and Aphrodite, especially Aphrodite.
She's singing Aphrodite tonight, said Miss Barnes.
And what is she like? I queried.