It was two years before Liza Bonaventura made her first hit, as Elizabeth in Tannhäuser at Dresden. Then we could follow her course in the papers. I was as proud as if I’d done it myself when I read of the excitement her Tosca created in Berlin. After that there was a series of triumphs in the smaller cities of Germany. She sang Carmen at a special performance where the royal family of something or other (I never can remember those German names, if I did I couldn’t spell them) were present, and the kinglet or princeling of the palace gave her a decoration.
After that the papers began to print stories about her, which is the forerunner of fame. Some of them were very funny, but most of them sounded true. I don’t think her press-agent had to do much inventing. All sorts of distinguished and wonderful men were in love with her, but she would have none of them. There were some anecdotes of her temper that I am sure were genuine: how she once slapped a rival prima donna in the face, and threw her slipper at the head of a German Serene Highness who must have lost his serenity for the moment.
When we came over here we had first-hand accounts of her, from Americans who had been traveling in Germany and were bursting with pride and enthusiasm, and foreigners, who knew more and were more temperate, but admitted that a new star had risen on the horizon. “The handsomest woman on the operatic stage since Malibran,” an old French marquis, who had heard her as Tosca, told me one night at dinner. Then some Italians who had seen her Carmen were quite thrilled—such temperament—such passion! Only Calve in her prime had given such a dramatic portrayal of the fiery gipsy. Opinions were divided about her Brunhilda. A man Roger and I met at the house of a French writer, where we sometimes go, told us that in majesty and nobility she was incomparable, but that her voice was inadequate. Still, she was young, hardly in her full vigor, with care and study, aided by her magnificent physique, she might yet rise to the vocal requirements and then—he spread out his hands and rolled up his eyes.
To-night I have come from the opera after hearing her in Carmen and the effect is with me still—the difficulty of shaking off the illusion and getting back into life.
When I looked round from my seat in the orchestra and saw that house, tier upon tier of faces, hundreds of small pale ovals in ascending ranks, all looking the same way, all waiting to hear Lizzie, I couldn’t believe it. The great reverberating shell of building held them like bees in a hive, buzzing as they found places whence they could see the queen bee. Through my own quivering expectancy I could sense theirs, quieter but keen, and hear, thrown back from the resonant walls and hollow dome, the sounds of fluttered programs, rustling fabrics, seats dropping and the fluctuant hum of voices—the exhilarating stir and bustle of a great audience gradually settling into stillness. They couldn’t have come to see Lizzie—so many people? I was dreaming, it was somebody else.
The curtain lifted, the illuminated stage was set in the gloom like a glowing picture. Figures moved across it, voices sang, and then Carmen came with the red flower in her mouth and it was Lizzie.
She was changed, matured, grown fuller and handsomer, much handsomer—her beauty in full flower. Her voice, too, was immensely improved; a fine voice, full, clear and large, not, as she had once said to me, one of the world’s great voices, but enough for her, sufficient for what she has to do with it. It is she, her personality, her magnetic and compelling self, that is the potent thing.
Just as she used to seize upon and subdue us at Mrs. Bushey’s, she seized upon and subdued those close-packed silent ranks. From the brilliant picture, cutting the darkness in front of us, she reached out, groped for and grasped at every consciousness, waiting to receive its impression. The other singers lost their identity, faded into a colorless middle distance, as we used to fade when Lizzie came among us. She held the house, not so much charmed as subjugated, more as the conqueror than the enchantress. As the opera progressed I, with my intimate knowledge of her, could see her gaining force, could feel her fierce exhilaration, as she realized her dominance was growing secure. Her voice grew richer, her performance more boldly confident. To me she reached her highest point in the scene over the cards, her face stiffened to a tragic mask, the cry of “La Mort” imbued with horror. I can’t get it out of my mind—the Gitana, terrible with her lust of life, suddenly looking into the eyes of death.
I don’t know how to write about music, but it wasn’t all music. It was the woman, the combination of her great endowment with her power of vitalizing an illusion, of putting blood and fire into an imaginary creation, that made it so remarkable. Her portrayal had not the vocal beauty or sophisticated seduction of Calve’s. It was more primitive, farther from the city and closer to the earth. It seemed to me more Merimée’s Carmen than Bizet’s. Of its kind, I, anyway—and Roger agreed with me—thought it superb.
When it ended and she came before the curtain there were bursts upon bursts of applause and “bravas” dropping from the galleries. I dare say I will never again see a dream so completely realized. Then the house began to empty itself down that splendid stairway, a packed, slow-moving, voluble crowd, praise, criticism, comment, flung back and forth in the excited French fashion. I was silent, holding Roger’s arm. A short fat Frenchman behind me puffed almost into my ear, “Quelle femme, mais, quelle femme!” A woman in front in a Chinese opera cloak, leaned back to say over her shoulder to a man squeezing past Roger, “La voix est bonne, mais n’est pas grande chose, mais c’est une vraie artiste.” And an angular girl at my elbow, steering an old lady through cracks in the mass, murmured ecstatically to herself, “Mon Dieu, quelle temperament!” That was the word I heard oftenest, temperament.