Non, monsieur, je ne suis belle!
Ni belle, ni demoiselle....
a little sigh of pleasure ran through the audience: she won them then and there. It seemed incredible that she was acting—it seemed that she must be real and that the others were trying to surround her with the reality she expected, as best they could. She had the sweet purity of tone—the candour, if I may so call it, often associated with delicate, small voices and singers of cool, rather inexpressive temperaments. But Brünhilde was the part for her, and Brünhilde was not cool and anything but inexpressive.
The only Marguerite I have ever seen since that resembled hers was Mme Calvé's, and the French artist seemed studied and conscious beside Margarita. You see, she was young, she was sincere and ingenuous, she was slender and beautiful—and she had a fresh and lovely voice, well trained, into the bargain. She would never have made a great coloratura soprano. Neither her voice nor her temperament inclined to this. She belonged, properly speaking, to the advance guard of the natural method, the school of intelligence and subtle dramatic skill. I cannot imagine Margarita a stout, tightly laced, high-heeled creature, advancing to the footlights, jewelled finger-tips on massive chest, emitting a series of staccato fireworks interspersed with trills and scales apropos of nothing in this world or the next.
Such performances constituted Roger's main objection to the opera, and though he was considered Philistine once, it is amusing to see how the tide of even popular opinion is setting his way, now.
So in the great final trio, Margarita did not show at her best, perhaps; the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this early scene that we all saw it too, and lived it over again with the poor child.
IT WAS AFTER THE GARDEN LOVE-SCENE THAT SHE WON HER RECALLS
It was the whole of love betrayed, abandoned, yet loving and forgiving, that little phrase; and I staunchly insist that the good Papa Gounod deserves credit for it, sentimentalist though he be!