Yet: from Chaliapin’s many records, we derive experiences of such emotional and imaginative significance that we feel in touch with what must have been his theatrical and musical power, whereas from Garden’s relatively few, we do not. This is partly because she did not record any of the big emotional climaxes of her parts—there’s no equivalent of The Clock Scene or Death of Boris, let alone what we might call the New Virtuoso displays of Mefistofele—and the folkish song material she recorded, while charming if you’re in the mood, has none of the Russian Soul depths of the legacy available to Chaliapin. I suspect, too, that while Chaliapin seems to have taken uninhibitedly to the recording studio from the start, Garden may have found it uncongenial. Finally, physical acting and theatrical personality aside, Chaliapin was a great singer with a prodigious voice, and on both the recorded evidence and the written record, we can’t say that of Garden.

This doesn’t mean that she was negligible as a vocalist. If we listen attentively to her “Depuis le jour” (keeping in mind that this is now 1912 at the Columbia studios in New York, not 1900 on the stage of the Opéra-Comique), we hear a soprano well in command of the aria. Of course, it is very much her idea of the aria, especially in terms of tempo variations, broadenings of phrase, and so on, and this idea, by that time well set as Her Way through many performances, is often quite different from what’s on the page (and Charpentier was specific with his indications). Her voice, like those of many contemporaneous sopranos, is an essentially bright one, “pure” except that it exhibits more than a touch of evident vibrato. Her French rates at best a C-plus. (Vowels are very well formed in singing terms, but are frequently the wrong ones, or at best approximations. Most French observers seem to have looked on this with an amused, even affectionate, tolerance.) Her tone has a shine, but not the sort of “lushness” or “warmth” that is now taken for allure. On the many downward intervals, she opts for an almost severe, sharply angled connection, not a portamentoed one. Though she takes the pp G at “de ton premier bai-SER” in what may sound like a detached head-voice, her engagement with support is always firm—on the sustained G-sharps and A-naturals, and then on the B of “je suis heu-reu-se,” she develops the notes with a surefooted messa di voce technique. In short, this sounds to a modern listener like a rhythmically eccentric but otherwise “classical” (as opposed to “Romantic”) treatment of the piece. Nor can we discover in it anything in the way of the overtly emotional, coloristically guided textures we associate with great singing-actresses of the then-oncoming generation, e. g., Muzio or Lotte Lehmann. Save for the vibrato one could even hear it as “cold,” as in the common complaint about the records of Emma Eames—and clearly, that is the last adjective anyone would have applied to the impression Garden left in the theatre. So that impression was of the singingactress totality, and from her recordings we can observe only that the singing we hear on them—in its musical freedoms, its tonal and timbral format, and its technical aplomb—was a major component of that totality. However peculiar this combo of cool, classical vocalism with theatrical naturalism may seem to us, it formed the identity of Louise (and a number of other passionate female characters) when she first made her way in the world. ^(I)