And in fact Paris was en fête at the time of the Louise premiere (Feb. 2, 1900, at the Opéra-Comique, at the newly opened Salle Favart). The Great Exposition of 1900 was in full swing. Here was a new opera of a new kind for the new century—Albert Carré, the company’s just- installed director, had held it back to make sure it was the first new offering of the 20th Century—an opera celebrative of the city, and specifically of the roiling Bohemian culture of Montmartre, written by one of its own, who championed its artistic and social freedoms and worked for the betterment of its citizens.^(I) Louise was an immediate succès fou, and in the decades that followed wracked up performance and attendance records that equalled those of the city’s greatest operatic triumphs. It had not slowed the opera’s progress that at the 23rd performance, on April 10, there was a second triumph associated with its early history. And to remain as sober about that as possible: Mary Garden was thoroughly prepared and rehearsed. Still, it’s an astonishing tale, and a true one. A young Scots soprano who had never performed any operatic role on any stage was called from her seat in the audience to assume the title role of Louise for Acts 3 and 4 (meaning that the first words she sang were “Depuis le jour . . .“, and that the most demanding scenes lay ahead) when the role’s well-regarded creatrix, Marthe Rioton, could not continue. She was wildly acclaimed, and kept possession of the part from that point forward.

Louise was taken up by other European companies and singers soon after its premiere. But the fact that it became a popular repertory opera here in the U. S. was due almost solely to Garden. Her success with its dissemination here is remindful of Chaliapin’s with Boris Godunov throughout the opera houses of the West, and had a similar effect in its awakening of interest in other operas of its native repertoire. Garden brought Louise to New York in the second season of Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company, and made it a cornerstone of the flourishment of French repertory during that company’s short but glorious tenure. A few years later she took it, along with much of the same repertory and many of the same world-class singers, to Chicago, where they all held forth for many more years in a company she came to run. Garden is sometimes compared to Chaliapin as an exemplar of the (then-) modern singingacting ideal—the fusing of voice, declamation, and physical acting into a powerful unit of overwhelming expressive force. As with Chaliapin, we often read of the extraordinary adaptability of her voice from one character to another, of a swallowing-up of any technical reservations into the utterly compelling effect of the whole. One word used to describe her was “disturbing,” in the sense that the informed receptor recognized many violations of musical rules and failings of bel canto technique, yet remained fascinated. And when we contemplate the range of affect necessary for the three roles she sang most often, and to unanimous praise (Louise, Thaïs, and Mélisande), not to mention her successes as Tosca or Salome, or her ability to hold in repertory through many repetitions such specialities as Jean in Le Jongleur de Nôtre Dame, Février’s Monna Vanna, or Katiusha in Alfano’s Risurrezione, we have to acknowledge that something extraordinary happened on many nights in many theatres. Garden proclaimed Louise to be the role she felt closest to. She sang it 175 times.