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When she could make herself heard, Raquel Meller began her U. S. career with a simple Spanish folksong, a song which might be the distant Castilian cousin of "Old Black Joe." It was so simple, so undemonstrative, that the connoisseurs after listening intently were conservative in their applause. The lights went up and they rustled their programs to find the condensed translation of the next song. The lights went down, Meller sang; again the applause was careful, a bit puzzled. From 9:15 to 10.45 it continued—songs of love, toreadors, religion, clothes—with one long intermission in which the bespangled audience—Anita Loos and Father Duffy, Al Jolson and His Honor the Mayor, and many another more or less notable who had paid $27.50 to be there— crowded out into the lobby to ogle one another.
But, at about 10:30, something happened. For the next-to-last of her baker's dozen of songs, Meller chose "Flor del Mal" (Flower of Sin). It tells, with the utter simplicity of all Meller's repertoire, the hopeless, disdainful story of a street girl. Her clothes were shoddy, ill-fitting; her hair slovenly, black about her forehead. Midway in the singing Meller moved out on a little platform almost over the heads of the first row, and lighted a cigaret. She smoked it singing and walked over to lean, dejected, against the stage wall. The song ended and she disappeared.
By now the applause was no longer conservative. The charm of an irresistible personality, smoldering through the evening, never revealing more than a flicker of its hidden fire, had burned home its deep impression. When she sang her most famous piece, "Violetera," where she goes among the audience with little violet bunches to offer musingly, withdraw capriciously, bestow impetuously, the starched and bejeweled Manhattanites arose and cheered. Her acknowledgment was—a quiet curtsy. More cheers. She sang an encore. The final "Brava!" The audience went home to talk it over, a new fad that promises to last weeks after Meller's departure.
It cannot be said that they were swept away utterly by the strange, quiet Spanish singer. Her art was too subtle to sway a shrewd U. S. audience that had paid $27.50* a seat to be amused. It had been a great occasion in the theatre; one of the few supreme personalities of entertainment had fulfilled her promise, and Meller, who carries eight golden bracelets as mementos of her great successes, was fully entitled to purchase a ninth golden bangle. Yet the barrier of language and the unfamiliarity of a charm that has fathomless depths but no tumult had obtruded themselves. The audience had been appreciative, engrossed, deeply stirred; but they did not drag her coach home to the hotel.
Critics said:
"A fine actress, a rare artist of the kind that comes but once in a generation, a bit of a sorceress, if you ask me."—Alexander Woollcott.
"Her art is an exotic radiance, less than music, less than great acting, but more than these put together."—J. Brooks Atkinson.
"An amiable sorceress, dark, inscrutable, good to look upon and exercising the benign witchcraft of a fascinating and highly advertised woman."—Percy Hammond. "The hands are like faces."— Arthur Hopkins.