Music: Ideal Interpreter

Many people went to look at her nakedness in Thaïs, to watch her lascivious dancing in Salome. But Mary Garden drew as many operagoers with the emotion in her voice as she did with the perfection of her body. Even her most rabid critics granted her genius for the way she captured the fragile, tenuous spirit of Debussy’s Mélisande.

Mary Garden at 57 must still earn a living. Wisely aware that she is peculiarly fitted for the music of Debussy, she began a Debussy concert tour last week, sang in Monrovia. Calif., later in Los Angeles. After her longtime accompanist, Jean Dansereau, had opened the program with some Debussy piano music, Mary Garden swept on the stage in her oldtime glamorous way. Her singing, as ever, was curiously uneven and husky, a weird combination of song and emotionalized speech. For sensitive listeners who could forget formal vocal technique each of her Debussy songs was a perfect blend of text and music.

But a shrewd showwoman like Mary Garden had more to offer. Halfway through the program she stopped to reminisce about Composer Claude Debussy. She was his first Melisande, although Playwright Maurice Maeterlinck fought to have the part sung by Soprano Georgette Leblanc. One night in Paris Debussy’s young wife Lili wanted the composer to attend a rich woman’s dinner party, asked Mary Garden to exert her influence. Debussy decided to go. A year later he left Lili for the hostess who was better able to provide for his exquisite tastes.†

Ten years later after Claude Debussy had died Mary Garden again sang Melisande at the Opera-Comique. Lili was there and so was the wealthy woman who had taken her husband from her. “I have two seats,” the first Mrs. Debussy told Mary Garden. “Claude is here with me.” After the performance the two wives met and wept together in Mary Garden’s dressing room. For Debussy, as for the world, Mary Garden was his ideal interpreter. In the score of her Pelleas et Melisande he wrote: “In the future others may sing Melisande but you alone will remain the woman and the artist I had hardly dared hope for.”

†Debussy, a big, bearded man with a huge bulging forehead, used rare perfumes, drank expensive wines, had his music published on hand-made parchment.