Garden, Mary

NAME: Garden, Mary.

ACHIEVEMENT(S): Soprano who made European opera popular in the United States.

NICKNAME/ALIAS: 'Molly' to her family.

DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 20th February 1874, Aberdeen, Scotland.

DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 3rd January 1967, Inverurie,  Scotland.  Aged 92.

DISCIPLINE: Operatic soprano.

FIELD: Music

LANGUAGE: English.

PARENTS: Robert Davidson Garden and Mary Joss, married January 1874.

SIBLINGS: 3 younger sisters, Amy , Agnes and Helen.

SPOUSE: None.

CHILDREN: None.

EDUCATION: St. Margaret's School for Girls, Aberdeen.

MAJOR WORK: Melisande in Debussy's 'Pelleas et Melisande', 1902.

LIFE AND TIMES:

In 1883, when Garden was nine, the family emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland to New York,  and then moved to Chicopee, MA, where a fourth sister, Helen, was born in 1884.  Garden was by all accounts a child given to theatrical performances from an early age and she greatly enjoyed her singing and violin lessons in nearby Springfield.

On 11th June 1886, at the age of 12, she gave her first public performance at the Chicopee Town Hall, singing a character song, 'Little old woman' and playing violin selections from 'The Bohemian Girl'.

In 1889, the family returned to Aberdeen,  Scotland for a year, where Garden attended St Margaret's School for Girls and was taught the piano by a noted organist, Walter Smith.  Back in America later that year they moved to the Hyde Park area of Chicago. 

In 1894, Garden was introduced to the wealthy Florence Mayer, wife of the junior member of the dry goods firm Schlesinger and Mayer, who was greatly impressed by her singing and became her much-needed patron.  In 1895, she moved in with the Mayers and in May 1896, they paid for her to accompany Mrs Duff to study in Paris.

There, Garden studied singing with the Marquis Ange-Pierre de Trabadelo, a distinguished teacher and composer of romantic songs.  In the spring of 1897 she met the Californian soprano Sibyl Sanderson and they became friends.

In April 1898, Trabadelo announced that he had done as much for her as he could,  and placed her in the hands of Lucien Fugere, the bass-baritone of the Opera-Comique.  The following year Garden’s allowance was stopped by the Mayers,  and for six months she lived in near poverty in Paris.  She was saved by Sibyl Sanderson, who invited her to live in her apartment in the Champs Elysees.

Sanderson's home was one of the centres of the art life of Paris and within a week Garden had met a variety of important and interesting people, including Albert Carre, manager of the Opera-Comique, who agreed to let her audition at the opera house.

He first invited her to watch a rehearsal of the production he was preparing, a new opera, 'Louise', written by the bohemian composer, Gustav Charpentier.  This experience so excited her that she immediately bought a copy of the score and learned the part by heart.

Carre later auditioned Garden and gave her the part of Micaela in 'Carmen' for October 1900, so from 30th January 1900, she had free access to the theatre and was registered as an employee of the Opera-Comique.

Meanwhile, the first performance of 'Louise' with Martha Riotin in the title role took place on 2nd February, but shortly afterwards Riotin became ill.  Carre knew that Garden knew the part of Louise,  and on 10th April she sang the last two acts to a full house, following which she was given a two year contract.

In the summer of 1901, she visited Aix-les-Bains, where she met the Danish-born King George of Greece.  Then,  in December 1901, she achieved the leading role in Debussy’s opera, 'Pelleas et Melisande’, written to a libretto by the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck. She premiered as Melisande on 30th April 1902, and <sang for> Debussy* inscribed on her score, 'In the future, others may sing Melisande, but you alone will remain the woman and the artist I had hardly dared hope for.'

In July 1902,  Garden was invited to sing at London's Covent Garden Theatre, where she performed as Massenet's 'Manon' and as Violetta in Verdi's 'La traviata', to great acclaim.  A year later, she began recording Debussy songs. Her performance as 'Manon'  persuaded <written for  by> Massenet* to write 'Cherubin' for her.  She performed it in Monte Carlo on 14th February 1905.

Following Sibyl Sanderson's death in May 1903, Garden decided to return to the United States.  After fulfilling her five-year contract with the Opera-Comique, appearing in the title roles of Leroux's 'La Reine Fiammette' (1903), Saint-Saens' 'Helene' (1905) and causing a sensation as Chrysis in Camille Erlanger's 'Aphrodite' in 1907, she accepted a five-year contract from Oscar Hammerstein of the Manhattan Opera House. 

Garden sailed for America in October 1907.  Her debut at Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House was in the American premiere of Massenet's 'Thais' and she was hailed as the supreme singer-actress.  She went on to great success as Louise and Melisande and then, in 1908, she returned to Europe to appear at the Opera-Comique and to visit <sang for> Strauss*.

Strauss had written 'Salome' in 1905, after an 1893 text by Oscar Wilde, was looking for a new soprano, so he had tentatively approached Garden. She agreed to take the part, then returned to Paris, where she appeared at the Opera as Ophelie in 'Hamlet'.

On 28th January 1909,  Garden debuted as Salome at the Manhattan Opera House, which became one of her most celebrated roles, shocking audiences with her 'dance of the seven veils'. 

Then came her first Chicago appearance as Salome in November 1910, when the Chief of Police violently protested against her "disgusting" dance and the opera was banned.  Despite this unpromising beginning, Garden became the leading soprano of the Chicago Grand Opera for the next twenty years.

During World War I she became a Red Cross nurse in Paris but performed again, in 1918, in Samuel Goldwyn's film version of  'Thais'.  She became director of the Chicago Opera Association in 1921-22 and was responsible for the creation of <staged work of> Prokofiev*'s 'The Love for Three Oranges'.

Garden retired from the stage in 1930, but made several further appearances as Jean in Massenet's 'Le Jongleur' and then in Alfano's 'Risurrezione' at the Opera-Comique in 1934.   From 1937, having returned to Scotland,  she settled in Aberdeen, but remained active in musical circles until the mid-1950s, returning to the United States to give Debussy lectures and recitals, despite the gradual onset of Alzheimer’s Disease from around 1945.

She died in a nursing home near Inverurie, Scotland.

ASSESSMENT: Garden was a major figure in the development of American Opera. 

EXTRA CONNECTIONS: She sailed to New York in October 1909 with <fellow-passenger with> Gustav Mahler* as a fellow passenger.

Her voice is preserved on a number of recordings made for the Gramophone Company (including some with Debussy at the piano), Edison Records, Pathé, Columbia Records and the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1903 and 1929.^[4]

Mary Garden

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the plot of land surrounding a statue of Mary, Mother of Jesus, see Mary garden.

Mary Garden (20 February 1874 – 3 January 1967) was a Scottish-American operatic lyric soprano, then mezzosoprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century. She spent the latter part of her childhood and youth in the United States and eventually became an American citizen, although she lived in France for many years and eventually retired to Scotland, where she spent the last 30 years of her life and died.^[1]

Described as "the Sarah Bernhardt of opera", Garden was an exceptional actress as well as a talented singer. She was particularly admired for her nuanced performances which employed interesting uses of vocal color. Possessing a beautiful lyric voice that had a wide vocal range and considerable amount of flexibility, Garden first arose to success in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. She became the leading soprano at the Opéra-Comique; notably portraying roles in several world premieres, including Mélisande in Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). She worked closely with Jules Massenet, in whose operas she excelled. Massenet notably wrote the title role in his opera Chérubin (1905) for her.^[2]

In 1907, Oscar Hammerstein convinced 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.

Additionally, Garden appeared in two silent films made by Samuel Goldwyn.^[3]

After retiring from the opera stage in 1934, Garden worked as a talent scout for MGM. She also gave lectures and recitals, mostly on the life and works of Claude Debussy, until 1949. She retired to Scotland and in 1951 published a successful autobiography, Mary Garden's Story.

Her voice is preserved on a number of recordings made for the Gramophone Company (including some with Debussy at the piano), Edison Records, Pathé, Columbia Records and the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1903 and 1929.^[4]

Recordings and films

Mary Garden made about 40 gramophone records between 1903 and 1929 for G & T, Columbia and Victor. They continue to be reissued and are of interest to connoisseurs of historical recordings—although Garden herself was said to have been generally disappointed with the results. Of special interest are the four 1904 Black G&T recordings she made accompanied by Claude Debussy in Paris. There are also a small number of recordings made from radio broadcasts.^[16]

She made two silent films, Thais (1917) and a World War I romance entitled The Splendid Sinner (1918). Without her singing voice, her acting was criticized and neither film was a success. In the 1930s, Garden appeared on Cecil B. DeMille's Lux Radio Theater. One such airing had Garden and Melvyn Douglas reading the play Tonight or Never which had recently been made into a motion picture.^[17]

Literary references

Garden is cited with other artistic figures of the period in Hugh MacDiarmid's poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (ll.30–2):

Whaur's Isadora Duncan dancin nou,

Is Mary Garden in Chicago still

And Duncan Grant in Paris – and me fou?

Allen Ginsberg contrasts the relative silence surrounding Garden's death with the uproar caused by the death of Jack Ruby in "Bayonne Turnpike to Tuscarora," from the 1973 award-winning collection The Fall of America:

Mary Garden dead in Aberdeen,

Jack Ruby dead in Dallas -

Sweet green incense in car cabin

...

New Years' 1967 come,

Reynolds Metals up a Half

Mary Garden, 92, sleeping tonite in Aberdeen

Garden and Ruby both died on January 3, 1967.

ONELINER: Mary Garden, soprano who made opera popular in the US

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Fletcher, Richard D., "Garden, Mary", in The New Grove Dictionary of  Music and Musicians, London: Macmillan, 1983.

Turnbull, Michael T.R.B., Mary Garden, Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1997.

Mary Garden - Wikipedia