Stravinsky or Richard Strauss would have given the screw an enharmonic wrench. Act III saw the Queen attired at once so sonorously and exquisitely that the vast audience gasped with admiration. It is, however, the tavern scene that will save the tawdry work. The anatomical wigwagging of the two golden lads set the lobby buzzing. Cléopâtre is doomed to packed houses in the future. Nothing succeeds like true spirituality. Mary Garden is Cléopâtre, as she is Mélisande and Thaïs. It is not a rôle that taxes her dramatic resources or her personal pulchritude. All she did was to look beautiful and turn on the full voltage of her blandishments. Men went to the ground before that dynamic yet veiled glance, like soldiers facing a machine-gun. It is uncanny, the emotion she projects across the footlights and with such simple but cerebral means. That she would have been burned at the stake a few centuries ago, this lovely witch, is no conjecture. Her nose is not “tip-tilted like the petal of a flower,” as Cléopâtre’s is said to have been; nevertheless, she is the tawny Egyptian. And she has never spoken so eloquently as in this parlando part. Perhaps the most poignant criticism was carelessly uttered by a big policeman who had strayed in during the garden scene. “Some Queen!” he said. And the definitive words had been spoken. Fie on naughty professional opinion after that memorial phrase! MÉLISANDE Once upon a time we called this “precious” lyric work Wagner and Absinthe, for there are many rumors of Tristan and Isolde in it, and the opalescent music, drugged with dreams, has the numbing effect of that “green fairy” no longer permitted in la belle France. Like all epigrams, this is only a half-truth. In the Belgian poet’s The Death of Tintagiles--so wonderfully interpreted in tone by Charles Martin Loeffler--his marionettes are beginning to modulate into flesh and blood, and, like the mermaid of the fairy story, the transformation is a painful one. We note the achievement of a new manner in Pelléas and Mélisande. Played in English first by Forbes-Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the piece created a mixed impression in London, though it may be confessed that, despite the scenic splendor, the acting transposed to a lower realistic key this lovely drama of souls. No play of Maeterlinck’s is so saturated with poesy, replete with romance. There are episodes almost as intense as the second act of Tristan. We listen for King Mark’s distant, tremulous hunting-horns in the forest scene when Pelléas and Mélisande uncover their hearts. [Illustration: _From a photograph copyrighted by Davis and Eickemeyer_ MARY GARDEN AS MELISANDE]