Geraldine Farrar
The autobiography of Geraldine Farrar is a most disappointing document; it explains nothing, it offers the reader no new insights. Given the brains of the writer and the inexhaustibility of the subject, the result is unaccountable. Any opera-goer who has followed the career of this singer with even indifferent attention will find it difficult to discover any revelation of personality or artistry in the book. Geraldine Farrar has always been a self-willed young woman with a plangent ambition and a belief in her own future which has been proved justifiable by the chronological unfolding of her stage career. These qualities are displayed over and over again in the book, together with a certain number of facts about her early life, teachers, and so on. Of that part of her personal experience which would really interest the public she gives a singularly glossed account. Very little attention is paid to composers; none at all to operas, if one may except such meagre descriptions as that accorded to Julien, “a hodge-podge of operatic efforts that brought little satisfaction to anybody concerned in it.” There are few illuminating anecdotes; no space is devoted to an account of how Mme. Farrar composes her rôles. She likes this one; she is indifferent to that; she detests a third; but reasons for these prejudices are rarely given. There is little manifestation of that analytic mind with which Mme. Farrar credits herself. There are sketchy references to other singers, usually highly eulogistic, but where did Mme. Farrar hear that remarkable performance of Carmen in which both Saleza and Jean de Reszke appeared? For my part, the most interesting lines in the book are those which close the thirteenth chapter: “I cannot say that I am much in sympathy with the vague outlines of the modern French lyric heroines; Mélisande and Ariane, I think, can be better intrusted to artists of a less positive type.”
Notwithstanding the fact that she has written a rather dull book, Geraldine Farrar is one of the few really vivid personalities of the contemporary lyric stage. To a great slice of the public she is an idol in the sense that Rachel and Jenny Lind were idols. She has frequently extracted warm praise even from the cold-water taps of discriminating and ordinarily unsympathetic critics. Acting in opera she considers of greater importance than singing. She once told me that she ruthlessly sacrificed tone whenever it seemed to interfere with dramatic effect. As an actress she has suffered from an excess of zeal, and an impatience of discipline. She composes her parts with some care, but frequently overlays her original conception with extravagant detail, added spontaneously at a performance, if her feelings so dictate.
This lawlessness sometimes leads her astray. It is an unsafe method to follow. Actors who feel the most themselves, unless the feeling is expressed in support of carefully thought-out effects, often leave their auditors cold. It is interesting to recall that Mme. Malibran, who may have excelled Mme. Farrar as a singer, had a similar passion for impromptu stage “business.” She refused to give her fellow-artists any idea of how she would carry a part through, and as she allowed her feelings full sway in the matter misunderstandings frequently arose. In acting Desdemona to the Otello of the tenor, Donzelli, for example, she would not determine beforehand the exact point at which he was to seize her. Frequently she gave him a long chase and on one occasion in his pursuit he stumbled and cut himself on his unsheathed dagger. Often it has seemed that Mme. Farrar deliberately chose certain stage “business” with an eye to astounding, and not with any particular care for the general roundness of her operatic performance. It must also be taken into consideration that no two of Mme. Farrar’s impersonations of any one rôle are exactly similar, and that he who may have seen her give a magnificent performance is not too safe in recommending his meticulous neighbour to go to the next. Sometimes she is “modern” and “American” in the deprecatory sense of these words; in some of her parts she exudes no atmospheric suggestion. There are no overtones. The spectator sees exactly what is before his eyes on these occasions; there is no stimulation for the imagination to proceed further. At other times, as in her characterization of the Goosegirl in Königskinder, it would seem that she had extracted the last poetic meaning out of the words and music, and had succeeded in making her audience feel, not merely everything that the composer and librettist intended, but a great deal more.
At times she is a very good singer. Curiously enough, it is classic music that she usually sings best. I have heard her sing Zerlina in Don Giovanni in a manner almost worthy of her teacher, Lilli Lehmann. There is no mention of this rôle in her book; nor of another in which she was equally successful, Rosaura in Le Donne Curiose, beautifully sung from beginning to end. Mme. Farrar is musical (some singers are not; Mme. Nordica was not, for example), and I have witnessed two manifestations of this quality. On one occasion she played for me on the piano a good portion of the first act of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, and played it brilliantly, no mean achievement. Another time I stood talking with her and her good friend, Josephine Jacoby, in the wings during the last act of a performance of Madama Butterfly at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There was no air of preoccupation on her part, no sense on ours that she was following the orchestra. I became so interested in our conversation, for Mme. Farrar invariably talks well, that I did not even hear the orchestra. But her mind was quite capable of taking care of two things at once. She interrupted a sentence to sing her phrase off stage, and then smilingly continued the conversation. I shall never forget this moment. To me it signified in an instant what Mme. Farrar has taken the pains to explain in pages of her autobiography and which is all summed up in her own comment, written at the time on the programme of the concert of her Boston début, May 26, 1896: “This is what I made my début in, very calm and sedate, not the least nervous.”
But Mme. Farrar’s vocal method is not God-given, although her voice and her assurance may be, and she sometimes has trouble in producing her upper tones. Instead of opening like a fan, her high voice is frequently pinched, and she has difficulty in singing above the staff. I have never heard her sing Butterfly’s entrance with correct intonation, although I have heard her in the part many times. Her Carmen, on the whole, is a most successful performance vocally, and so is (or was) her Elisabeth, especially in the second act. The tessitura of Butterfly is very high, and the rôle is a strain for her. She has frequently said that she finds it easier to sing any two other rôles in her répertoire, and refuses to appear for two days before or after a performance of this Puccini opera.
Mme. Farrar is a fine linguist. She speaks and sings French like a Frenchwoman (I have expert testimony on this point), German like a German, and Italian like an Italian; her enunciation of English is also very clear (she has never sung in opera in English, but has often sung English songs in concert). Her enunciation of Maeterlinck’s text in Ariane et Barbe-Bleue was a joy, about the only one she contributed to this performance. And in Königskinder and Le Donne Curiose she was equally distinct. In fact there is never any difficulty about following the text of an opera when Geraldine Farrar is singing.
The rôles in which Mme. Farrar achieves her best results, according to my taste, are Manon, the Goosegirl, Margherita (in Mefistofele), Elisabeth, Rosaura, Suzanna, and Violetta. Cio-Cio-San, of course, is her most popular creation, and it deserves to some extent the applause of the populace, although I do not think it should be put in the above list. It is certainly not to be considered on the same plane vocally. Other rôles in which she is partially successful are Juliette and Marguerite (in Gounod’s Faust). I think her Ariane is commonly adjudged a failure. In Madame Sans-Gêne she is often comic, but she does not suggest a bourgeoise Frenchwoman; in the court scenes she is more like a graceful woman trying to be awkward than an awkward woman trying to be graceful. Her Tosca is lacking in dignity; it is too petulant a performance, too small in conception. In failing to find adequate pleasure in her Carmen I am not echoing popular opinion.
I do not think Mme. Farrar has appeared in La Traviata more than two or three times at the Metropolitan Opera House, although she has probably sung Violetta often in Berlin. On the occasion of Mme. Sembrich’s farewell to the American opera stage she appeared as Flora Bervoise as a compliment to the older singer. In her biography she says that Sarah Bernhardt gave her the inspiration for the composition of the heroine of Verdi’s opera. It would be interesting to have more details on this point; they are not forthcoming. Of course there have been many Violettas who have sung the music of the first act more brilliantly than Mme. Farrar; in the later acts she often sang beautifully, and her acting was highly expressive and unconventional. She considered the rôle from the point of view of make-up. Has any one else done this? Violetta was a popular cocotte; consequently, she must have been beautiful. But she was a consumptive; consequently, she must have been pale. In the third act Mme. Farrar achieved a very fine dramatic effect with her costume and make-up. Her face was painted a ghastly white, a fact emphasized by her carmined lips and her black hair. She wore pale yellow and carried an enormous black fan, behind which she pathetically hid her face to cough. She introduced novelty into the part at the very beginning of the opera. Unlike most Violettas, she did not make an entrance, but sat with her back to the audience, receiving her guests, when the curtain rose.
It has seemed strange to me that the professional reviewers should have attributed the added notes of realism in Mme. Farrar’s second edition of Carmen to her appearances in the moving-picture drama. The tendencies displayed in her second year in the part were in no wise, to my mind, a result of her cinema experiences. In fact, the New York critics should have remembered that when Mme. Farrar made her début at the Metropolitan Opera House in the rôle of Juliette, they had rebuked her for these very qualities. She had indulged in a little extra realism in the bedroom and balcony scenes of Gounod’s opera, of the sort with which Miss Nethersole created ten-minute furores in her performances of Carmen and Sapho. Again, as Marguerite in Faust (her Margherita in Mefistofele was a particularly repressed and dreamy representation of the German maiden, one instinct with the highest dramatic and vocal values in the prison scene), she devised “business” calculated to startle, dancing the jewel song, and singing the first stanza of the Roi de Thulé air from the cottage, whither she had repaired to fetch her spindle of flax—this last detail seemed to me a very good one. In early representations of Madama Butterfly and La Bohème her death scenes were fraught with an intense realism which fitted ill with the spirit of the music. I remember one occasion on which Cio-Cio-San knocked over the rocking-chair in her death struggles, which often embraced the range of the Metropolitan stage.
These points have all been urged against her at the proper times, and there seemed small occasion for attributing her extra activities in the first act of Bizet’s opera, in which the cigarette girl engaged in a prolonged scuffle with her rival in the factory, or her more recent whistling of the seguidilla, to her moving-picture experiences. No, Mme. Farrar is overzealous with her public. She once told me that at every performance she cut herself open with a knife and gave herself to the audience. This intensity, taken together with her obviously unusual talent and her personal attractiveness, is what has made her a more than ordinary success on our stage. It is at once her greatest virtue and her greatest fault, artistically speaking. Properly manacled, this quality would make her one of the finest, instead of merely one of the most popular, artists now before the public. But I cannot see how the cinema can be blamed.
When I first saw the Carmen of Mme. Farrar, her second or third appearance in the part, I was perplexed to find an excuse for its almost unanimous acclamation, and I sought in my mind for extraneous reasons. There was, for example, the conducting of the score by Mr. Toscanini, but that, like Mme. Farrar’s interpretation of the Spanish gypsy, never found exceptional favour in my ears. Mr. Caruso’s appearance in the opera could not be taken into consideration, because he had frequently sung in it before at the Metropolitan Opera House without awakening any great amount of enthusiasm. In fact, except as Des Grieux, this Italian tenor has never been popularly accepted in French opera in New York. But Carmen had long been out of the répertoire, and Carmen is an opera people like to hear. The magic of the names of Caruso, Farrar, and Toscanini may have lured auditors and critics into imagining they had heard a more effective performance than was vouchsafed them. Personally I could not compare the revival favourably with the wonderful Manhattan Opera House Carmen, which at its best enlisted the services of Mme. Bressler-Gianoli, the best Carmen save one that I have ever heard, Charles Dalmores, Maurice Renaud, Pauline Donalda, Charles Gilibert, Emma Trentini, and Daddi; Cleofonte Campanini conducting.
At first, to be sure, there was no offensive over-laying of detail in Mme. Farrar’s interpretation. It was not cautiously traditional, but there was no evidence that the singer was striving to stray from the sure paths. The music lies well in Mme. Farrar’s voice, better than that of any other part I have heard her sing, unless it be Charlotte in Werther, and the music, all of it, went well, including the habanera, the seguidilla, the quintet, and the marvellous Oui, je t’aime, Escamillo of the last act. Her well-planned, lively dance after the gypsy song at the beginning of the second act drew a burst of applause for music usually permitted to go unrewarded. Her exit in the first act was effective, and her scene with Jose in the second act was excellently carried through. The card scene, as she acted it, meant very little. No strain was put upon the nerves. There was little suggestion here. The entrance of Escamillo and Carmen in an old victoria in the last act was a stroke of genius on somebody’s part. I wonder if this was Mme. Farrar’s idea.
But somehow, during this performance, one didn’t feel there. It was no more the banks of the Guadalquivir than it was the banks of the Hudson. Carmen as transcribed by Bizet and Meilhac and Halévy becomes indisputably French in certain particulars; to say that the heroine should be Spanish is not to understand the truth; Maria Gay’s interpretation has taught us that, if nothing else has. But atmosphere is demanded, and that Mme. Farrar did not give us, at least she did not give it to me. In the beginning the interpretation made on me the effect of routine,—the sort of performance one can see in any first-rate European opera house,—and later, when the realistic bits were added, the distortion offended me, for French opera always demands a certain elegance of its interpreters; a quality which Mme. Farrar has exposed to us in two other French rôles.
Her Manon is really an adorable creature. I have never seen Mary Garden in this part, but I have seen many French singers, and to me Mme. Farrar transcends them all. A very beautiful and moving performance she gives, quite in keeping with the atmosphere of the opera. Her adieu to the little table and her farewell to Des Grieux in the desert always start a lump in my throat.
Her Charlotte (a rôle, I believe, cordially detested by Mme. Farrar, and one which she refuses to sing) is to me an even more moving conception. This sentimental opera of Massenet’s has never been appreciated in America at its true value, although it is one of the most frequently represented works at the Paris Opéra-Comique. When it was first introduced here by Emma Eames and Jean de Rezske, it found little favour, and later Mme. Farrar and Edmond Clément were unable to arouse interest in it (it was in Werther, at the New Theatre, that Alma Gluck made her operatic début, in the rôle of Sophie). But Geraldine Farrar as the hesitating heroine of the tragic and sentimental romance made the part very real, as real in its way as Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” and as moving. The whole third act she carried through in an amazingly pathetic key, and she always sang Les Larmes as if her heart were really breaking.
What a charming figure she was in Wolf-Ferrari’s pretty operas, Le Donne Curiose and Suzannen’s Geheimness! And she sang the lovely measures with the Mozartean purity which at her best she had learned from Lilli Lehmann. Her Zerlina and her Cherubino were delightful impersonations, invested with vast roguery, although in both parts she was a trifle self-conscious, especially in her assumption of awkwardness. Her Elisabeth, sung in New York but seldom, though she has recently appeared in this rôle with the Chicago Opera Company, was noble in conception and execution, and her Goosegirl one of the most fascinating pictures in the operatic gallery of our generation. Her Mignon was successful in a measure, perhaps not an entirely credible figure. Her Nedda was very good.
Her Louise in Julien was so fine dramatically, especially in the Montmartre episode, as to make one wish that she could sing the real Louise in the opera of that name. Once, however, at a performance of Charpentier’s earlier work at the Manhattan Opera House, she told me that she would never, never do so. She has been known to change her mind. Her Ariane, I think, was her most complete failure. It is a part which requires plasticity and nobility of gesture and interpretation of a kind with which her style is utterly at variance. And yet I doubt if Mme. Farrar had ever sung a part to which she had given more consideration. It was for this opera, in fact, that she worked out a special method of vocal speech, half-sung, half-spoken, which enabled her to deliver the text more clearly.
Whether Mme. Farrar will undergo further artistic development I very much doubt. She tells us in her autobiography that she can study nothing in any systematic way, and it is only through very sincere study and submission to well-intended restraint that she might develop still further into the artist who might conceivably leave a more considerable imprint on the music drama of her time. It is to be doubted if Mme. Farrar cares for these supreme laurels; her success with her public—which is pretty much all the public—is so complete in its way that she may be entirely satisfied with that by no means to be despised triumph. Once (in 1910) she gave an indication to me that this might be so, in the following words:
“Emma Calvé was frequently harshly criticized, but when she sang the opera house was crowded. It was because she gave her personality to the public. Very frequently there are singers who give most excellent interpretations, who are highly praised, and whom nobody goes to see. Now in the last analysis there are two things which I do. I try to be true to myself and my own conception of the dramatic fitness of things on the stage, and I try to please my audiences. To do that you must mercilessly reveal your personality. There is no other way. In my humble way I am an actress who happens to be appearing in opera. I sacrifice tonal beauty to dramatic fitness every time I think it is necessary for an effect, and I shall continue to do it. I leave mere singing to the warblers. I am more interested in acting myself.”
There is much that is sound sense in these remarks, but it is a pity that Mme. Farrar carries her theories out literally. To me, and to many another, there is something a little sad in the acceptance of easily won victory. If she would, Mme. Farrar might improve her singing and acting in certain rôles in which she has already appeared, and she might enlarge her répertoire to include more of the rôles which have a deeper significance in operatic and musical history. At present her activity is too consistent to allow time for much reflection. It would afford me the greatest pleasure to learn that this singer had decided to retire for a few months to devote herself to study and introspection, so that she might return to the stage with a new and brighter fire and a more lasting message.
Farrar fara—forse.
July 14, 1916.