Debussy's Melisande: The Lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte. By Gillian Opstad
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gcq099
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
Resumo‘Never in the world would I take a curtain call after the death of Mélisande. I never did, because, you must understand this, I really died’ (Mary Garden and Louis J. Biancolli, Mary Garden’s Story (New York, 1951), 65). Thus wrote Mary Garden, and for all the manifest absurdities of her autobiography, ‘60 per cent drivel’, according to her clear-eyed successor in the role, Maggie Teyte (quoted in Gillian Opstad’s new study, p. 66), in this instance we accept the hyperbole. Her artistry, in acting as well as singing, was by all accounts extraordinary, and in those three emphatic words, ‘I really died’, speaks the authentic voice of the artist, enabling an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Debussy would have found his own suspension of disbelief almost impossible, but for Garden. He too, for a different reason, hated curtain calls, and he invariably hid himself away after performances he forced himself to attend. The actual manifestation of his dream was torture to him, coming face to face, as it had to, with the reality of the Opéra-Comique. ‘The scenic realisation of a work of art, no matter how beautifully done, is nearly always in conflict with the interior dream whence it was born’, he wrote, recalling his fears when Pelléas et Mélisande at last reached the stage in 1902. ‘And above all, Mélisande’s voice which I had dreamed of as being so tender—how was that going to turn out? Even the most beautiful voice in the world could have been quite antipathetic to the special feelings her character requires.’ But with Garden as his Mélisande he ‘awaited the performance in complete confidence, yet still curious. At last came the fifth act, a breath-taking event whose emotions cannot be rendered in words. There I heard the voice I had secretly imagined—full of sinking tenderness, and sung with such artistry as I would never have believed possible’ (Musica, January 1908, translated by Richard Langham Smith in Debussy on Music (London, 1977), 226–7).
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