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Geraldine Farrar
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| At the beginning of Edith Wharton's society novel The Age of Innocence It was clear from her early years that America would have to wait.
One contemporary commentator noted in 1912 that 'the public, as represented simply by the Metropolitan Opera House audiences, was not at all interested in watching the slow unfolding of a young singer's talent, and must have everything offered to it fried brown and curled at the edges'.
Farrar herself realised, in an interview given to the New York Sun in 1908, that these audiences were 'accustomed to getting their talent full-blown, ripe from the European opera houses'.
Indeed not until the Great War and the flush of patriotic fervour in its aftermath was the initiative taken to discover and nurture native American talent: Rosa Ponselle and Lawrence Tibbett made their career debuts at the Met in 1918 and 1923 respectively.
By 1898, aged sixteen, Farrar had already sung for three of the Met's great stars of that early era: Jean de Reszke, Lillian Nordica (the American soprano who changed her name to suggest European origins) and Nellie Melba who famously proclaimed, 'I hail you as the coming Jenny Lind of America'. This brought the attention of the Met's director Maurice Grau but a contract offered to sing small parts was swiftly rejected by Mrs Farrar: 'She was playing for bigger stakes than a brief flash of spectacular value only', Geraldine recalled in 1938 in her memoir Such Sweet Compulsion. Melba then advised studies in Paris and so in September 1899 the Farrars sold-up and set sail for Europe. Nordica provided letters of introduction and by the autumn of 1900 Farrar had successfully auditioned at Berlin's Königliche Hofoper (Royal Court Opera), there to make her operatic debut as Marguerite in Faust on October 15, 1901. Karl Muck conducted and the event brought her to the attention of the great Lilli Lehmann. Lehmann became, in Farrar's words, her 'only one great teacher' and these years proved especially formative as it emerged that Farrar was destined to be a singing actress rather than a virtuoso vocalist. In an interview for The Art of the Prima Donna in 1923 she spoke of Lehmann's instruction: 'Her great art left nothing to chance, as regards development on the line of mental vocal culture. Physiologically she went only so far as to create the mental picture... Technical control to her meant everything, while emotional colour was my natural asset and delight'. There was too an element of narcissism in Farrar quite alien to Lehmann's old world method: 'Of what use is the projection of a beautiful mental picture by means of a fine voice if the physical attributes do not correspond, if the singer's appearance contradicts her voice?' These attitudes were evidently too modern for Imperial Berlin, where Farrar recalled Destinn's Salome as looking like a misplaced Valkyrie, but were ideally suited to the new and fashionable verismo operas of the young Italian composers in New York. Here she caught the mood of the times with an equal determination to catch the eye as much as the ear: 'seventy-five per cent of the people who go to 'hear' opera want first to 'hear' it through the medium of the eye', she wrote. Consequently Farrar became increasingly circumspect in her selection of roles. 'The scores of the older repertory', she said in an interview in 1923, 'are more purely vocal in general, their heroines more dramatically quiescent. There is not the same call for passionate acting, for energetic synchronisation of music and physical action'. In her early seasons at the Met she sang but soon discarded roles such as Juliet, Micaëla, Zerlina and Cherubino, although the grace and fluency she brought to Mozart, sung in legendary performances under Mahler, were happily captured by the gramophone. Thereafter Farrar settled on Madama Butterfly, (Cio-Cio-San was the role most closely associated with her in an astonishing ninety-five performances after her debut in the role in February 1907, a production supervised by the composer, with Caruso, Scotti and Homer in the cast) Tosca, Mimi, Marguerite, Manon and Carmen and new roles with as much scope for visual as well as vocal projection: among them the Goose Girl in Humperdinck's Die Königskinder (which she created at the world premiere on December 28, 1910), Charpentier's Louise and Leoncavallo's Zazà, the last part she ever sang on stage. The new roles were hers exclusively as long as she wanted them, while Madama Butterfly and Carmen became virtually her private property, yet this emphatic possession of each served a clear purpose: '...the singer who can make her audience feel that the emotions she is portraying are real, who can make the figure from the libretto live in voice and action, must always carry her part to success'. This demanded, as Farrar put it, singing not from the outside in but from the inside out and here she acknowledged a precedent: 'Calvé was the first to call attention to it by 'being it', and together with Miss Mary Garden and myself, developed the singing actresses of the modern repertory'. Indeed in 1909 Henry T. Finck of the New York Evening Post wrote: 'America too has produced a Calvé. Her name is Geraldine Farrar' and in a review of her Carmen he continued, 'so true to life is it that one forgets she is acting... Once more she suggests Calvé by the amazing mobility of her features; every moment her facial expression changes with the words and the tones'. Bizet's Carmen was eventually second only to Madama Butterfly in the record of operas sung by her. What then is left to those who never saw Farrar on stage? Perhaps one is tempted to concur with Sir Neville Cardus on Chaliapin: 'You can get no more idea of Chaliapin from a gramophone record than you get of a pterodactyl by looking at a skeleton preserved in a museum'. It is fortunate however that many of Farrar's most remarkable performances, the Puccini heroines with Caruso under Toscanini, the Mozart under Mahler, coincided with recording sessions at Victor's New York studios and that she was thoroughly prepared for the process. 'Every effort was made to give the prominent vocal impression', she wrote, continuing that the 'earlier manner [acoustic recording]... allowed each individual a perfect vocal reproduction of the timbre and dynamics'. But there is more than this; an enduring intensity and profound femininity preserved because, as Farrar reflected on her twenty years in opera, 'the experience of singing before people educates the singer who comes to realise that she and her audiences have a soul in common, and that a sincere artistic appeal made to that common gift is seldom made in vain'. |
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