I attended Miss Garden’s reading of the score for my first time, and freely admit my mixed feelings. We were assured by perfectly honorable lobbyists that the last season the Garden version was much better, more temperamental; and one who had overheard her in Paris swore that she was a seething caldron in Act II. Her interpretation seems to us to be “overpainted,” to employ studio argot. Like the canvas in Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, there is little left of the original design, except perhaps a miraculously painted foot. There were bits here and there that are admirable; the slow awakening of her interest in the toreador as he thunders forth that supreme song of table d’hôtes. We see some delicate and definitive notations, yet it is lost in the cloudy chaos of the scene. All the strong theatrical points are deliberately renounced; the first tumultuous entrance, the Habanera, Seguidilla, and the duo in Act II. The renunciation suggests technical heroism, but it doesn’t help us much in the development of the character. Her Carmen is essentially frigid. And it is neither sinister nor sensuous. To be sure, it is different, but then so is Hedda Gabler “different.” We went to see, to hear, Carmen, and Hedda--in a lyric mood--was more often adumbrated than the Mérimée-Bizet gypsy. The disturbing element of the performance was the undeniable fact that, granted her idea of the rôle, she didn’t even “get it across.” She missed fire in Act II, in the card episode particularly. Nor did she look bewitching. We quite understand her avoidance of the conventional posing, hipping, strutting, and inane postures; yet there should have been compensations. (In the days of Calvé the criticism was “Elle se hanche trop.”) These were slim, not her singing, nor yet the beautiful shawl that might have been designed by Sorolla y Bastida. The famous fan we missed. If Mary Garden had but lavished a tithe of her blandishments on her Don José that she so recklessly, so alluringly bestowed upon Marc-Antoine Maguenat in Cléopâtre, we might have been won over a little to her general conception. This Carmen was a distinguished dame. Lilli Lehmann alone outshone her in aristocratic Sevillian courtesy. But Lilli could sing. And Lilli had not the Aberdeen-cum Philadelphia-cum Chicago-cum Boston complex of Mary. We have since learned that the singer was grievously indisposed. And she surely missed the Don José of Dalmores and Muratore. And on this rather chilly note of dissent I prefer to end. Of Miss Garden’s twenty or thirty other rôles it is hardly necessary to speak. Her Louise and Salome, so dissimilar, yet both incomparable, need no belated praise. She is unique. Thus endeth the Book of Mary the Garden. V MÉLISANDE AND DEBUSSY