Thirty years ago the talk of Paris was an opera called Louise, the music and libretto by Frenchman Gustave Charpentier. Parisians liked Louise because it was about Paris. Paris scenes were painted on the backdrops; a tart Paris bourgeois was its heroine, an impoverished poet its hero. Stage pictures of an old woman ironing or shaking out rugs, young women costumed in shirtwaists and skirts and sailor hats, music written to suggest the whirring of sewing machines—all these seemed then, the most daring realism. Actually Charpentier's opera succeeded because it was tuneful, sentimental.
Since its beginning, the role of Louise has been considered the unique property of Soprano Mary Garden. She it was, an ambitious young Chicagoan* studying in Paris, who saved one of the first performances when the leading soprano collapsed. Mary Garden had never before sung on any stage. Her voice was curiously husky, uneven. But she played the part that night with peculiar understanding, made her name with it and sang it thereafter many times in Paris, in Manhattan when she appeared with Oscar Hammerstein's company, in Chicago. Geraldine Farrar sang the role a few times at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House but with her retirement it was dropped from the repertoire. Only last week was it revived there, this time for Soprano Lucrezia Bori.
Even Soprano Bori's greatest admirers agreed that her Louise in no way threatened the Garden prerogative. Her singing, usually far "better, was last week shrill. Her acting was pretty but stilted, as was that of tenor Antonin Trantoul who was Julien, her lover. Better characterizations were those of Contralto Marion Telva as the ill-tempered mother; of Basso Leon Rothier as the father so dumbly doting that he drove Louise back to Julien and the free-and-easy Paris. The audience appeared to appreciate most Max Bloch who as an old-clothesman stalked on the stage and off wearing half a dozen toppling, ill-assorted hats.
*But Mary Garden was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, 53 years ago; came to the U. S. when six.