Mary Garden

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Opera in Chicago

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Mary Garden as Salome

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In 1907, Oscar Hammerstein convinced Mary Garden to join the Manhattan Opera House in New York where she became an immediate success. By 1910 she was a household name in America and Garden appeared in operas in several major American cities; including performing with the Boston Opera Company and the Philadelphia Opera Company. Between 1910 and 1932 Garden worked in several opera houses in Chicago. She first worked with the Chicago Grand Opera Company (1910–1913) and then joined the Chicago Opera Association in 1915, ultimately becoming the company’s director in 1921. Although director for only one year, Garden was notably responsible for staging the world premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges before the company went bankrupt in 1922. Shortly thereafter she became the director of the Chicago Civic Opera where she commissioned the opera Camille by 28-year-old composer Hamilton Forrest. She sang roles at the Civic Opera until 1931, notably in several United States and world premieres.

Mary Garden is a member of the Scottish American Hall of Fame located in North Riverside, Illinois.

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Chicago Examiner, November 15, 1908

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MARY GARDEN, the American prima donna most honored in Europe for her interpretations on the grand opera stage of the masterpieces of modern authors and composers, has added a notable contribution
to the controversy respectiug “Salome.”

For the millions of readers reached by this newspaper Miss Garden sets forth, on this page an artist’s view of a work of art exhibited as a whole, in contrast with the seizing of a sensational detail as an excuse for easy profit from an immodest and sacrilegious display in public which otherwise would be prohibited,

After several months’ deluge of dancing Salomes, and voluminous discussions of them, the ideas of tha actress-prima donna whom Oscar Hammerstein intrusts with the task of presenting to patrons of the Manhattan Opera House a complete view of that character according to the Oscar Wilde conception, cannot fail to interest.

Mary Garden’s place among prima donnas is unique, owing to her exceptional gifts as an actress as well as a singer. These gifts have made her pre-eminent in such roles as the heroines of Cbarpentier’s opera, “Louise”; in the “Pelléas et Mélisande” of Debussy; in “Thais,” “Aphrodite” and “Manon.”

Also, early in the season, she will create the title role m the new French Opera, “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,” who is a youth m the graceful costume of the legendary attendant of the troubadour of the “Moyea-Age”— based on the medieval tale of Anatole France.

In this sympathetic boy character, and in that of Salome, Miss Garden expects to produce her strong impressions of the season upon New York audiences.

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Chicago Examiner, November 13, 1910

Mary Garden was mistaken for an ordinary person yesterday and she never was so mad in all her life. The prima donna of the dynamic intellect actually was asked to take off her hat in a theater. More thau that, she was given the alternative of leaving the playhouse before she had seen Fritzi Scheff half through the “Mikado.” And she took it.

The tragedy occurred at the Lyric matinee. Miss Garden had as her guests in a box three old Chicago friends— Mrs. O. W. Mitchell, Mrs. L. E. Estey and Miss Edith Mitchell. The diva wore an expansive hat of distinctive and wonderful construction and she kept right on wearing it after the curtain went up.

In an intermission an usher, who did not know Miss Garden, tiptoed into the box and whispered:
“Madame, will you please remove your hat?”

“I certainly shall not,” snapped the famous singer.

“Strict Rule of the House.”
“It is a strict rule of the house,” ventured the usher, one of the dainty brunette Shubert maids.

“I don’t care if it is.” answered Miss Garden. “This is a lower rear box and my hat couldn’t possibly be in anyone’s way.’

The usher retreated toward the manager’s office. Soon she returned with the ultimatum:

“I’m sorry, but you must remove your hat or leave the theater.”

“Thanks, I shall leave the theater,” said Miss Garden. Her friends were equally indignant and the four marched out, with heads held high aud eyes flashing.

Miss Garden was still a furious woman when found in her apartment at the Blackstone, in the evening. She was serving tea to her three friends.

She Paid $15 for the Box.
Never did she put more dramatic spirit into a grand opera scene than she did when she arose from her chair, brandishing a silver table knife. Her famous eyes glistened. Her famous lips quivered. The knife itself took on an added gleam that would have made the scullion who polished it famous if the steward could have seen lt. My, but Mary was mad.

“I’d just as soon not have any of the La Tosca stuff,” gasped the caller offrightedly, backing away from the ferocious picture.

“Well, that’s the way I feel,” exclaimed Miss Garden. “In all my life I never was treated so inconsiderately, so shamefully, with such gross indignity. Of course I wouldn’t take off my hat. Why should I? I paid fifteen real dollars for that box and I proposed to do as I pleased in lt. That’s what people sit in boxes for.

Wouldn’t Take Off Hat for King.
“And I wore the hat because I wanted people to see it. I admit it was a big hat, but it was in nobody’s way. That was the best hat I have, one I recently got from Paris. There’s nothing like it in Chicago, or anywhere else for that matter.

“I think it would be well for some persons to find out whom they are talking to befose they do things like they did to me over there at the Lyric this afternoon. Take off my hat. My hat? Why, the idea! I wouldn’t take off my hat for the King of England himself unless I just felt like it.

“The next time I go to the theater I’ll call up the box office and ask:
‘Please, mister, may I wear my new hat?’ before I invest in tickets.”

That wasn’t all Miss Garden said, for even celebrated prima donnas are just plain women in some respects. And Mary was, oh! so angry.

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Chicago Tribune, November 12, 1921

Radio-telephony extended the scope of of the Chicago Grand Opera company 1,500 miles north, east, south, and west yesterday.

Mary Garden, Edith Mason, and Conductor Giorgio Polacco played to the biggest house of their careers—more than 50,000 persons scattered from New York state to Kansas and from southern Kentucky to northern Minnesota—via wireless.

And, shortly after the beginning of the test, radio messages returned from the four points of the compass to the roof of the Commonwealth Edison company—the point of actual wireless transmission from Chicago—reporting “QSA,” which means to the radio wise, “Signals clear and loud.”

How the Trick Was Turned.
The demonstration yesterday was preparatory to inauguration of a season of grand opera by wireless beginning next Monday with the opening of the Chicago opera season.

The test was made under actual opera conditions and consisted of an opening address by General Director Mary Garden, an orchestra selection by Giorgio Polacco, and Miss Mason’s rendition of an aria from “Madame Butterfly.”

High up in the wings above the Auditorium stage a small instrument caught the music and carried it by wire to the roof of the Commonwealth Edison company, where it was dispatched by radio to the widespread audience.

For days the notice of the test had been going out over the wireless to the radio operators, and when the announcement, “This is station K. Y. W., Chicago,” was sent, all were “listening in.”

In The Tribune plant a score or more heard “Our Mary” present the Chicago Opera company to the world.

Tap Opera by Radio.
No longer will it be necessary to dress up in evening togs to hear grand opera and no longer will grand opera consist solely of phonographic selections in towns 500 or 1,000 miles from Chicago.

All that is necessary is to acquire a radio telephone outfit, tune it to the required wavelength of 360 meters, and then enjoy grand opera just as it was sung and at the moment it is sung in Chicago for the appliance will hang above the Auditorium stage through the season.

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Chicago Tribune January 5, 1967

BY CLAUDIA CASSIDY

MARY GARDEN, one of the unique originals whose forte happened to be grand opera, died yesterday at a nursing home in Aberdeen, Scotland. She would have been 90 Feb. 20.

Miss Garden was a world figure from that Paris night in 1900 when she replaced the star of Charpentier’s Louise at the Opera Comique just in time to sing its poignant aria, “Depuis le jour.” Claude Debussy wrote Pelléas et Mélisande for her, and battled Maurice Maeterlinck until the mere author of the book relinquished his dream to have his wife create the role. The Scottish girl who weighed 98 pounds and had fathomless courage strode right out and pinned the world on her bonnet.

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Mary Garden in Pelléas et Mélisande

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Yet she was Chicago’s particular pride. Not just that she had been brought here as a child, or had here begun to study. Rather that when New York’s Metropolitan Opera vanquished Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera, the Manhattan’s adventurous repertory came to the Auditorium to launch Chicago’s resident opera, long high in the most splendid the world had to offer. That Auditorium season opened with Aida, but Mary Garden was up to her old tricks. She waited two nights and stole it.

It was Nov. 5, 1910, when Garden stepped on the Auditorium stage to sing Pelléas et Mélisande, and it was Jan. 24, 1931, when she sang her Chicago farewell at the Civic Opera House in Le Jongleur de Notre Dame. In between lay some of the most radiant night’s music drama has ever known, nights of the Garden Thais, Melisande, Salome, Louis, Judith, Sapho, Carmen, Fiora and a dozen more, none of them more memorable than her boy juggler who performs his tricks for the Virgin.

It is not surprising that in 1921-22 Chicago opera made Miss Garden its managing director—she called herself “directa.” She turned out a scintillating season to the tune of more than a million dollar deficit, which was serious money in those days. Even so, the story was that when Harold McCormick, for years president of our most luxurious opera, wrote a check for a large chunk of it, he said it was a pleasure.

Two of the renowned stars of that special Garden season were particularly saddened to hear of her death. Edith Mason, now Mrs. William E. Ragland, said:

She was one of the greatest artists that ever lived. Nobody could touch her Thais or her Melisande. She was a great woman.

Claire Dux, now Mrs. Hans von der Marwitz, who was brought here from Europe by Garden, said:

Mary Garden was the greatest operatic personality of our age.

It is doubtful that anyone who knew her work would challenge either tribute. There were always people who swore that Garden could not sing. James Gibbons Huneker, too shrewd for that trap, called her voice “a serious mirage.” When she sang a role she put her imprint on it forever, and those who listened bewitched were never quite the same again. Only last summer when Pelléas et Mélisande was being widely revived in Europe, people who never heard her kept asking if her Melisande had not been stiff and cold. The truth was that she could make you shiver in the chill, strange land where mysterious Melisande shivered and died.

Garden had a genius for publicity to get people in the house, but it was a genius for music drama that kept them there once they came. In that first Chicago season she followed Melisande with Louise and Thais—and then came Salome. It blew the roof off. The Chicago Law and Order League fulminated, the chjief of police said Garden “wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip,” and after two performnances Salome disappeared until its star became “directa” and brought it back.

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Left to right: Mary Garden as “Floria Tosca” from The Chicago Examiner, November 25, 1913; Time Magazine, December 15, 1930; Mary Garden as Melisandes, Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. photographer

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A genius for publicity, no doubt. But of another kind of gernius, here is what Percy Hammond wrote in THE TRIBUNE of Mary Garden’s Salome:

She is a fabulous she-thing playing with love and death—loathsome, mysterious, poisonous, slaking her slimy passion in the blood of her victim…She is Salome according to the Wilde formulary—a monstrous oracle of beauty.

The first time Garden came to town she wore a special Paris skirt and rumors of being about to marry a Turkish pasha. She was a femme fatale at least in the headlines. As long ago as 1911 she was threatening to “write a book and roast the critics.” She was always being rescued from drowning, making outrageous remarks ideal for headlines, and engaging in verbal battle those who enjoyed it. Typical was her remark that “Oscar Hammerstein treats me worse than a chorus girl,” and his rejoinder, “Miss Garden owes me $5,000. No chorus girl ever did that.”

The lyric stage was her home, and one of the last new works she gave Chicago was the Hamilton Forrest Camille, a failure whose title would have horrified Sarah Bernhardt, who never could understand how Americans could make Camille out of La Dame aux Camelias. But Garden and Bernhardt were in many ways two of an exotic kind. The legend about them outdistanced the reality, and that took a gifted pair of seven league boots.

Garden sometimes sang recitals, bracelets jingling, long chiffon handkerchief floating, her special “Beau Soir” and “Green” flashing in the air like the conjurations they were. After retirement, she sometimes gave lectures, but they lacked her true magic, which was for the lyric stage.

At the end, when she was in the nursing home in Aberdeen, the story was that she often entertained the old ladies of her life in and out of opera, putting on little shows. She must have been Our Mary to them, too.

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MARY GARDEN RECORDINGS
Company	Matrix No.	Size	Recording Date	Title
Columbia	30695	12-in.	3/14/1911	Ah, fors’ è lui
Columbia	30696	12-in.	3/14/1911	Sempre libera degg’io
Columbia	30701	12-in.	3/21/1911	Il est doux, il est bon
Columbia	30699	12-in.	3/21/1911	Le jongleur de notre dame
Columbia	19886	10-in.	5/17/1912	John Anderson, my Jo
Columbia	19888	10-in.	5/17/1912	Jock o’ Hazeldean
Columbia	36385	12-in.	5/17/1912	Depuis le jour
Columbia	36386	12-in.	5/17/1912	L’amour est une vertu rare
Columbia	19887	10-in.	5/17/1912	Comin’ thro’ the rye
Columbia	19889	10-in.	5/17/1912	Annie Laurie
Columbia	19890	10-in.	5/18/1912	Irish love song
Columbia	19891	10-in.	5/18/1912	Blue bells of Scotland
Victor	BVE-36732	10-in.	10/25/1926	Annie Laurie
Victor	BVE-36731	10-in.	10/25/1926	At dawning (I love you)
Victor	BVE-36753	10-in.	11/3/1926	My ship and I
Victor	CVE-36735	12-in.	10/26/1926	Dieu de grace
Victor	BVE-36733	10-in.	10/25/1926	Over the steppe
Victor	BVE-37329	10-in.	12/24/1926	At parting
Victor	CVE-36734	12-in.	10/25/1926	Depuis le jour
Victor	BVE-40733	10-in.	11/22/1927	Afton water
Victor	BVE-40735	10-in.	11/22/1927	Somewhere a voice is calling
Victor	CVE-40736	12-in.	11/23/1927	Depuis le jour
Victor	BVE-40734	10-in.	11/22/1927	Ma belle enfant, ne chante pas
Victor	CVE-48957	12-in.	4/5/1929	In the gloaming
Victor	BVE-57525	10-in.	11/4/1929	Clair de lune
Victor	BVE-57524	10-in.	11/4/1929	Beau soir
Victor	BVE-57526	10-in.	11/5/1929	En vain pour eviter
Victor	CVE-56801	12-in.	11/7/1929	Jock o’ Hazeldean

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1911 Columbia Print Ad.
Mary Garden “At Parting” (British His Master’s Voice Label) and “At Dawn” (American Victor Talking Machine Co. Label)
1926

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