(See front cover)
One morning five years ago Mary Garden received in her sheaf of mail a note from a fledgling composer asking if he might play her some of his music. Such . notes usually go into Mary Garden's wastebasket. But this one appealed to her. With characteristic terseness she wrote the young man to come next day. The result of that audience was an opera called Camille, written by the young man after the story of Alexandre Dumas fils (as is Verdi's Traviata). The premiere was scheduled for this week at Samuel Insull's year-old Chicago Opera House with Mary Garden in the leading role.
When Composer Hamilton Forrest first went to see Mary Garden he was a lean, wild-eyed youth who, in order to continue his musical studies, had been working as office boy in Mr. Insull's Commonwealth Edison Co. He showed Miss Garden an opera the libretto of which she, theatrer wise, pronounced impossible. But she recognized instantly Forrest's genius for music, told him to find another libretto, a lovestory, and try again. Camille came to his mind because he knew of a similar tragedy which involved two students in a Chicago shorthand school. "But Camille," Mary Garden objected, "is French. You could not expect me to sing it in English." Hamilton Forrest forthwith went to France, learned the language, studied with Composer Maurice Ravel, wrote his opera and had it accepted by the opera company headed by the light & power tycoon whose errands he used to run.
Camille was scheduled for performance last season but postponed because of insufficient time for preparation, some say because the domestic difficulties of Music Director Giorgio Polacco and Soprano Edith Mason last year slowed up the activities of the company. Neither returned this year.
In essence the new opera is like the well-worn play: the lovers Marguerite (Camille) and Armand are separated by Armand's doting father whereupon Marguerite dies of consumption. But most of the detail has been revamped, modernized. Important to the plot is the repeated jangling of a telephone bell. The costumes are modern. Mary Garden wears pajamas in one scene, in another a gorgeous gold-cloth gown of latest cut, bright with blood-red camellias. The spirit of the music is modern: a waltz theme winds through it all. There is a jazz scene in the second act where saxophones, two pianos and a banjo are used. Unlike Traviata there are no set arias, duos or trios. The characters do not express themselves in formal, stilted song. More in the manner of Pelleas et Melisande, they talk back and forth naturally in the intimate, emotionalized musical speech for which Mary Garden has a particular genius.