Читать книгу Confessions of an Opera Singer - Kathleen Howard - Страница 11

AT first I had no companionship and very little recreation, beyond the ever fresh wonder and delight of the Paris streets as I saw them in my daily constitutional. One day I went with a girl friend to visit her atelier. I wrote to my mother:

"We spent a long time in the life-class room—nude, (not us but the model). It was a mixed class. A large oblong room, filled with I should think over a hundred students, mostly men. They sat in a circle facing the model throne. The floor is not raised, but the effect of an amphitheatre is produced by rush bottom stools of different heights. They rest their pads or drawing portfolios on a railing in front of them. The room is intolerably hot because of the model. What struck us most was the intense silence and atmosphere of earnestness; no one speaks and there is only the gentle rub-rub of the charcoal, crayon, or pencil against the paper. The students look quickly up and down and never move their glance except from their sketch to the model and back again. She was a very pretty young girl and took graceful half-hour poses. The one interruption was a quiet voice at the end of a half-hour, 'C'est l'heure'; and they stopped for a few minutes' rest. We went into another room, where a picturesque old wretch with long black curls, red velvet waist-coat, long blue cape, well thrown back, black, grimy hands clasped around his knee, and clumsy, rusty boots stuck out in front of him, was seated."

Later one of these old models used to come to my brother. He had a card on which was printed the list of poses he was prepared to take.—"The twelve Apostles," "The Eternal Father" and "The God Jupiter."

I found a little English tea-room about a mile away, and often went there for tea and muffins which in those days were hardly procurable in French places. The tea-habit is only about ten years old in France. The people in the shop soon knew me by sight, which was just as well, as I would begin going over the words of some part in my head and walk out serenely, quite forgetting to pay for my tea. I still go there occasionally when I am in Paris and remind them of that. I sometimes went to the two operas and to the theatre, but not nearly often enough, as I could spare neither time nor money, and the late hours made a concentration on the next morning's work more difficult. The concert world was a great disappointment to me. I think I longed for nothing so much that year, as to hear great orchestral music well performed; but the Lamoreux and Chevillard concerts did little to satisfy this craving, and I was amazed at the roughness of the strings and the narrow scope of the programs. Many of the great artists avoided Paris in their tours, the reason given being lack of suitable concert halls.

On the other hand, a whole new school of composition was opened to me that winter by a fellow pensionnaire. Charles Loeffler and Henry Hadley spent part of the winter in our pension, and Mr. Loeffler introduced me to the French modernists. Later in the winter we often talked over their works together. He used to stroll into my room about tea time, saying he liked to watch me make tea for I had such attractive fingers. He used to take me to the odd corners of his beloved Paris, cafés haunted by long-haired Sorbonne students, and cafés chantants, where the frank improprieties of the ditties were for me so impenetrably disguised by the argot in which they were written that I did not understand a word of them. "When your French gets more colloquial," he used to say, "I shan't be able to bring you here any more. Oh! if you were only a man!" He always ended with this exclamation, and I never knew why, for my woman-hood did not seem to disturb him particularly. Perhaps he felt the want of a sort of Fidus' Achates to confide in. He took me to two famous places, and this is my description of them in a letter to my mother:

"We went first to the famous 'Noctambules' in the Quartier Latin. It is where the wittiest men of their genre are to be found. They are many of them decorated by the government. One hears witty topical songs, chansons d'amour, and absurdities telling of the eels and fishes in amorous conversation, such extravagances as the French love. There is no vulgarity. Their diction is marvellous, and of course they sacrifice, entirely, their tone to their words. All around the walls are posters and drawings of famous artists and caricatures of Parisians. The performers are called on in turn by the master of ceremonies, and take their stand on a little platform in front of the piano half way up the room. When they have finished, if they have been popular, we are all called on to join in the doublement for Monsieur so and so. This consists of clapping to a certain rhythm, which is thumped on the piano: 1 2 3 4 5—1 2 3 4 5—1 2 3 4 5—1 2 3—and over again."

In those days Charles Fallot was still at the "Noctambules" and used to arise, very black and white and thin, and gaze at himself in the big mirror opposite, while he gestured with his long, skinny arms and thoroughly French hands, and delivered himself of his witty double entendre chansons. Another night we went to a famous Montmartre place, Boite à Fursy, but it was not at all the same thing, and we neither of us liked it.

Henry Hadley had the room above me, and often told me my hours of playing "Carmen," etc., nearly maddened him. I always studied in bed or at the piano, without singing, and rarely used my voice when committing rôles to memory. Hadley often had Cyril Scott, the English composer, in his rooms, and I used to listen with joy to Scott's imaginative playing. It was like birds sweeping and swooping, all keys and intervals were interwoven. He always said, one hand on his forehead, "I have no understanding for limitations of harmony or rules of tempo." And indeed why should one have? He liked nothing older than Debussy and was unspeakably bored by Gluck or Beethoven and their ilk, though he loved "Carmen." Hadley still retained a strong admiration for Wagner and respect for the old school, though he much appreciated the moderns and the modern orchestra. I first saw Mary Garden as Mélisande with him. We both sat rapt and spellbound to the end, transported by what was to me a perfect revelation as to scoring for modern orchestra, the intangible operatic form, and most of all the subtle imaginative acting of Mary Garden. Her power of suggestion in those days was capable of conveying any shade of thought or delicate mood to the spectator. That performance has always been and will always be an inspiration to me.

Hadley was always starting off on impossible journeys to Egypt and the Orient, in search of "material." His talk was filled with the strangest scraps of out-of-the-way information, like bright-coloured rags in a dust heap. Bauer lived a door or two away, and I used to hear him practising and then hear his concerts. A wordy war would rage at our end of the table at dinner, while old Madame, from her seat of honour in the centre, would cry, "Mais français, parlez français, mes enfants! You crush my ears with your English!" Of course, no attention was paid to her. Joining passionately in the discussions, though not themselves of the métier, were two American girls, living on the top floor, who were supposed to be writing a play together. One or another of the composers was usually more or less in love with one or other of the girls, and they took sides accordingly, for and against the recognized masters of the past. The two were amusing, always doing something eccentric.

At one time they had an incubator in their room, the gift of a passing admirer, and we engaged passionately in raising chickens. The machine was heated by a huge kerosene lamp, and they were always turning it too high and having it fill the room with blacks and smoke, or letting it go out altogether. However, two or three chicks, more strenuously determined to live than the rest, managed to struggle out at length, and their advent was heralded by the whole pension. We had marked our initials on the eggs, one egg each, and when mine showed the first signs of life, I held it in my hand till it was partly hatched. The little pecks inside the shell were fascinating to feel in one's palm. As soon as the chicks could walk, they were taken downstairs into the cité, and their attempts to scratch gravel were hailed by the assembled inhabitants of the garden in a rapture of several languages. One Englishman wanted to make them little jackets, so he could take them for walks in the Bois.

Discussion was meat and drink to all these people. Their cry was "Sensations, sensations! Let the artist experience everything in his own person!" This doctrine sounded rather a menace to conduct, but talking endlessly about sensations seemed to be equivalent in most cases to experiencing them. Nevertheless, some of them indulged in desperate orgies of black coffee and cigarettes as an invocation to their muse; and one of the composers assured me that the great symphonic poem on which he was at work, had been inspired by breaking a bottle of Houbigant's Idéal in a closed cab and driving for hours in the Bois, inhaling the perfume. They loved to recount these Gargantuan excesses, and were extravagant in praise of midnight oil, attic windows, and the calm inspiration of early dawn after nights of frantic toil. They were dreadfully sincere, and very amusing to watch, but it seemed to me that there was a great deal of stage setting for very little play. They tended the green shoot of their artistic development with such fantastic care, that it was in danger of dying from too much consideration. Personally, I was too busy, either for sensations or the analysis of them, though I used to wonder what this Paris could be like into which they journeyed and from which they returned full of tales of affairs and lovely women and gorgeous houses. It all seemed most romantic and interesting to me.

The other end of the dinner table represented staid conventionality in contrast to our anarchism. In the centre sat Madame and beside her her life-long friend, the editor of one of the Paris newspapers. Some hinted that he was something more than a friend, in spite of Madame's seventy years. Opposite her, was Madame M——, once an American in the days of long ago, but with no trace of it left except in her persistent accent. She was reputed to possess one hundred dresses, and certainly the variety of her costume was amazing; but as she was at least fifty-five and had preserved every gown for the last thirty years, her annual dress expenditure, after all, was probably not extravagant. Her old husband was never allowed a word when she was present, so he revenged himself for the privation by interfering with every game started after dinner in the salon—bridge, poker, patience, no matter what it was, he always insisted that the players were quite wrong and that he could show them how it was done in the clubs.

There was a young Russian girl with a pretty face and pretty clothes, whose hands, however, betrayed her peasant origin. Her beautiful sister was engaged at the Grand Opera, so she was an object of great interest to me. There were some Swedes, and nondescript Americans, and a charming French family, a mother and two daughters, bearers of an historic name, who had come up from their château in the South of France that the girls might have masters in various "accomplishments," and were living in the pension from motives of economy. On Sundays their brother, a young naval officer, used to dine with them. With his pale, aristocratic face, and with little side-whiskers, the high stock of his uniform, his strapped trousers and narrow, arched feet, he was like a John Leech drawing come to life. Then there was a large Frenchwoman, Madame la Marquise de Quelquechose, who lent the lustre of her title and her ancestral jewels to our bourgeois board. At least, she said her jewels were heirlooms, but her ancestors must have had a prophetic taste in jewelry, as I often saw replicas of her ornaments in the shops of the rue de Rivoli. An old Englishwoman completed our list of permanencies. In spite of twenty years' residence in Paris, she would still ask for "oon petty poo de pang" in a high, drawling voice. There were transients of many nationalities, but these were our regular inmates.

An interesting man sometimes dined with us. Writing my mother about him I say:

"Last night Mr. H—— dined here and told us many yarns about Sarah Bernhardt. He said once when he was in California he was asked to meet her and they all went on a hunting picnic together. She dropped her robe when she got to the island where they had déjeuner, undoing a wide, heavy, Egyptian gold and precious-stone belt, and appeared attired in a man's velvet hunting-suit. He says she adores to talk cancan, and referred to the manager as 'that cochon.' After breakfast, she threw the champagne bottles far into the lake and shot them to pieces at the first shot. The only posey thing she did was when she undid her belt and threw it far across the road, and when he asked her if that was the way she treated such beautiful things, she said that the man who gave it to her was domestic! … It is colder than charity here at present, at least I feel it so in the house. I shall start my fire today for the first time. Yesterday I bought a bunch of violets, and do you know why? To keep myself from buying chestnuts, which are bad for the voice. You see, if I spent my sous for violets I could not afford more for chestnuts. Thus prevented I myself."