Garden’s Julien in 1900 was Jean Maréchal. But with her to the Hammerstein company, and thence to Chicago, she brought Charles Dalmorès, a dramatic tenor whose repertoire included José, Samson, and Siegfried, along with Julien. His records reveal a brilliant, thrusting voice, fine elocution, command of a firm line and some of the graces (a superb “Ah si, ben mio coll’essere“), as well as a degree of limitation at the top—B-flats or up are audibly work. Julien was thereafter normally cast with voices like those of Vezzani or Maison or Ansseau or, among non-French tenors, Leo Slezak or Aureliano Pertile. George Thill’s was not of that sort. He is probably best described as a “big lyric.” The voice was certainly ample. But for an ample voice, it had an extraordinary freedom of emission, a beautiful timbre, and ring of a certain kind, though little of what we’d call the metallic. Bs and Cs were child’s play for him. All of which makes him eminently qualified for an extremely amiable Julien, often uplifting in its riding-the-tailwinds ease at high altitudes. His singing temperament is on the placid side for Julien’s darker, sharper moments, but then, they are mostly excised here, anyway.

For the surviving sections of The Father’s music (nothing in Act 1 after “Je suis heureux!“, and no “Voir naître une enfant“), Columbia cast André Pernet, the leading basse chantante of the Paris houses following the retirement of Marcel Journet. He had a lovely voice with a somewhat covered technique (but not lacking in solidity or word clarity), and sang an unfluttered legato. Like Thill, he is not one to overtly dramatize. But again like Thill, there is an unforced quality, a trust in the music and words to register their import, that wears well. I like Bigot’s conducting—he moves right along without driving the music—and considering how dull so many of the French recordings of the ’30s sound, this one still has fair life.^(I)

Thill and Pernet assumed their Louise roles again in the 1938 Paramount motion picture based on the opera, but now with Grace Moore as the object of their conflicting affections. The film was directed by Abel Gance, he of the undeniably impressive triple-screen Napoléon, and again Bigot is the conductor, so there was a considerable gathering of relevant talent for the undertaking. But, though it is naturally of at least curiosity value to see these folks in action, and that will justify a viewing for some, there’s little of operatic interest in the movie. It incorporates even less of the music than does the Columbia recording, and not all of that from the score, so potential interest focuses on Moore and on whatever Gance is up to. The latter and his collaborators do some movie-ish inventing—there’s a nighttime thunderstorm; there’s a red-herring romantic rival, Lucienne (a winning actress whose identity I have not pinned down); Julien is writing an opera; etc.—and there are a few atmospheric shots of Montmartre and a couple of big production-number scenes. But as is so often the case with les grands auteurs, Gance seems to have been more intrigued by these and similar matters than by his actors, especially Moore. Or perhaps he was intrigued by her, but in some misconceived, how-to-sell-her way. She was at this point a movie veteran, and not an ungifted one. When not on display, she has moments (as with The Mother’s intrusion into the Coronation of the Muse) that come across well. But display is the ruling idea here, and it’s hard to watch the staging of “Depuis le jour“: Moore with a fixed dental-perfection smile, her upper body at a pained backward tilt and her face horizontal to the sky, like a decorated plate about to receive its ladlefull of le boeuf bourgignon, mechanically adjusting her body to pose left, pose right, while pretending to sing. I will leave it to filmists to extract what they can from the overdecorated sets and overcrowded frames that need the big screen to sort themselves out—though the video quality of the Bel Canto Society release is quite good. Everyone is in representative good form vocally, but that’s pretty much beside the point.