Mary Garden

Published on Wednesday 8 February 2006 16:24

FROM the north of Scotland to the glittering lights of Paris, Mary Garden's life is a story of extremes and contradictions that encompassed great success and wealth, but also poverty and criticism.

Born in Aberdeen in February 1874, the daughter of a clerk in a local iron works, Mary Garden emigrated to America in 1883 where her father had begun a more lucrative career selling bicycles and motor cars.

Her singing voice attracted the attention of a well-known teacher, Sarah Robinson-Duff, who arranged for young Mary to go to live in Chicago with the wealthy department store owner David Mayer and his wife Florence as a nanny for their children. In return Garden received free singing lessons from Robinson-Duff who saw in her the potential for a career as an operatic soprano.

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The young Scot made such an impression that she was taken by her teacher to Paris in 1896 (where the Mayers also owned a department store and continued to fund her training). In Paris, Garden began further vocal studies but speculation reached Chicago that she was leading a life of leisure rather than concentrating on her singing and had even reputedly given birth to an illegitimate child.

The Mayers immediately withdrew their support and Garden was thrown penniless onto the streets. Fortunately, Paris had a large American community and Garden's plight came to the attention of the great soprano Sybil Sanderson who arranged to provide her with food and shelter, and a piano with which to learn suitable operatic roles. In time Sanderson introduced her to the director of the Opra-Comique, and was so impressed with Garden's singing that he quickly set about grooming the future diva for her debut in professional opera.

It was planned that she would take over the leading role in Gustave Charpentier's opera Louise at the Opra-Comique, as the leading soprano had begun to show signs of stress and illness. In April 1900, following the first act of Louise, Garden took over the lead and with it embarked on a glittering career whose most memorable achievement came in 1902 when she created the role of Mlisande in Claude Debussy's opera Pellas et Mlisande, apparently landing the role as much for the mysterious attraction of her Aberdonian accent as her singing. Following this success she went on to sing at Covent Garden and at the Paris Opra.

Meanwhile, she had been enticed by Oscar Hammerstein to work in America at his Manhattan Opera House, then locked in a fight for survival with its deadly rival, the Metropolitan Opera House.

Garden's dramatic range was astonishing; she played a young boy in Jules Massenet's Le jongleur de Notre Dame and then both scandalised and riveted America with her acting and singing in Richard Strauss' Salome, in which she kissed the severed head of John the Baptist lustfully and seduced the menfolk of America with her Dance of the Seven Veils wearing a tantalising pink body-stocking.

Two disastrous appearances in films produced by Goldwyn Pictures followed - a silent version of Massenet's Thas in 1917 and The Splendid Sinner a year later. By this point she had become a household name in America, giving her name to face powder, make-up, hotel suites, and even the highway leading to Mount Rushmore.

In the early 1920s she served as a controversial director of the Chicago Opera Association, the first woman to both direct and sing leading operatic roles. The financial and personal strain, however, led her to relinquish this post after two years, reputedly having spent $1 million provided by her backer Harold F McCormick of the International Harvester Company.

After retiring from the stage in 1934, she worked as a talent scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and gave lecture-recitals and talks, mainly on Debussy and an industry address she called Music, Men and Money.

Apart from her powerful stage presence and her ability to convey character through movement and song, Garden was a consummate manipulator of the media and understood only too well the importance of image. She knew how to shock and tease.

"I am a volcano on the stage but an iceberg off it," was among her best-known aphorisms. Garden would swear she was going to become a nun one moment and then soon hinted she was about to be engaged to a Turkish pasha. Beneath this artifice, Garden displayed a finely honed musical mind, imagination and ferocious dedication to her art. Writing in the New York Times, the music critic James Huneker described her as "a condor, an eagle, a peacock, a nightingale, a panther."

Unfailingly generous and not one to keep track of her finances, she never married but was linked romantically with J Ogden Armour, director of the Armour meat-packing company. Garden made more than 50 recordings and played some 35 operatic roles. Quite sadly, in January 1967 she died in poverty and confusion, strapped to her bed in a psycho-geriatric ward near Aberdeen.