Scan 22
Musical Courier 1895-12-25: Vol 31 Iss 825, 1895
88 lines. Read by computer on 25 September 2026, twice; the two readings disagreed in places. Printed page 23. See the scan on archive.org.
1certain words so that they sound naked, ashamed and sinful.
3She is the most depraved woman the world ever held, because in her is distilled the wickedness of all dead, wicked women. And the weariness of her regard and pose is because she is tired of her multiple pasts, the pasts she slaved and swam through before she entered her present shape.
5She would have pleased Botticelli, and Burne-Jones would like to paint her in sad gray and green, and Rossetti would call the picture "Our Lady of Vain Virtue." She suggests in flex and pose the mural figures of Puvis de Chavannes and she is wholly modern, with canary trimmings and wears long black gloves.
7Yvette sang many stories. Sometimes she acted with her face, and Pilar-Morin, back of me, held her breath and then cried:
8"What pantomime!"
9Her gestures are simple, elementary. She is sinuous, yet, again, as unyielding and thinly angular as a playing card. She reminded me once of a lascivious lead pencil.
11Her singing is a series of pictures. She paints with her voice; it is the canvas upon which she embroiders sinister and sad designs; designs throbbing with joyful vulgarity, designs full echoes of misspent lives. Regret! Ah, she says that word so wonderfully! Regret, and you conjure up the dear, dead, sweet days when you were so unhappy, and the face—pi-ouit! You are whirled away on the wings of a coarse laugh, and Yvette has fled the stage.
13She first sang of "les ingénues," then of the misery of "la soularde." This last was a powerful dramatic poem, acted before you, vibratile with life, true as steel. You cried that a great tragic actress is lost, forgetting that you have just seen one. Then, without any stage accessories, she is transformed by the power of her overmastering imagination into the grandmother of Béranger.
15Oh! what a naughty, naughty grandmother! She has more than one lover—two! horrors, and at the same time Yvette turned forward the clock of her life forty years without the slightest make-up or trickery.
17There is art for you, the art that is the outcome of a powerful imagination.
19She was "La Pierreuse," a dreadful creature, a woman sung of by Walt Whitman, the scum of the nether world, yet proud in the possession of a young scoundrel. She sees his head fall at La Roquette, and then goes back to the fortifications for another such. Pi-ouit!
21I liked "A la Villette." It is filthy, but true. This singing girl tells the truth. She smashes the varnish of our superficial civilization. She is depressing, pessimistic, but with her melodious lantern of a voice she lights up moral sewers. It is unpleasant, revolting, but again truth—naked, undisguised truth.
23Don't say Cui bono! Yvette Guilbert is a voice crying not in the wilderness, but in crowded market places where men do most congregate. She is a lyric Diogenes in petticoats, and if she finds few honest people, is it her fault or ours?
25She is dainty, capricious, reckless and gay in the song with the refrain Ça fait toutjour plaisir. What cynical tones, what cold exuberance! I confess I cannot fathom this sphinx with the gêld address, the depraved, sorrowful glances. She is a complete theatre in herself, and sings the comédie humaine in six numbers. She is a microcosm and a singing Zola. Not to see her would be missing a new thrill!
27A portly philistine at Olympia said to me that Monday night:
28"You call this Yvette Guilbert a 'disease,' don't you? I call her a 'disease,' a moral leprosy." And the good man unloaded a Parkhurstian smile on me. I answered him tartly:
29"Yes, that's very clever, of course; but as a matter of fact, morality is not geographical, let Edgar Saltus say it twenty times over. Bad morals are the same all the world over—in Paris, in Bucharest, in Philadelphia, and in Athens. Here in New York Yvette Guilbert is welcome, because she gives us a new whirl to the kaleidoscopic art of the music hall. If you object to what she says the remedy is simple."
30"Stay away, I suppose. But there's the rub. How can I stay away when the world goes mad? I, too, am subject to the influence of mob mania. It wouldn't surprise me some night to see Dr. Parkhurst and Anthony Comstock sitting cheek by jowl in Olympia. Curiosity, you know, breeds bedfellows."
31"Hello!" I cried. "Yvette is making even you epigrammatic. Dr. Parkhurst could spend a profitable half hour watching Guilbert's face go slumming. Talk about Lombroso and Nordau! Here is a woman who coolly dissects the evils of life and serves up her lyric vivisection smoking hot."
32"Hang your aesthetics!" said my friend. "Come and drink the bitter brew and forget all about Guilbert, Nordau and the other evils of life."
34But I can't forget her. She is ravishing.
36The thing that pleased most—there is no disguising the brutal truth—was the drivelring bit of tuneless alliteration, Linger Longer, Lucy. It was redemanded, and I liked Guilbert the least, for it was a pure bit of commonplace, clever mimicry, such as Cissy Loftus could do. It was jerky and over accentuated, and so was understood. Art there was none, only burlesque English. one of two readings
37The thing that pleased most—there is no disguising the brutal truth—was the driveling bit of tuneless alliteration, Linger Longer, Lucy. It was redemanded, and I liked Guilbert the least, for it was a pure bit of commonplace, clever mimicry, such as Cissy Loftus could do. It was jerky and over accentuated, and so was understood. Art there was none, only burlesque English. one of two readings
39The "Johnnies" were out in full force, and vied with Teddy Marks in speaking French with a Twenty-eighth street accent.
41Rapturous was the laughter when Yvette—they are calling her Glenlyvette now, because she is so dry and spicy—said, "Ça fait toujours plaisir." The last word caught the Tenderloin by the throat, and it gurgled itself to a fine rich purple. Ah, the joy of life, that Ibsen sung out, the joy of life and its matutinal complement—splitting headaches! How those boys do love it all, and Guilbert is their heroine, because she sings of their world—to be!
43Only, it is not the demi-monde she chants, not even the quarter world, but the dirty goddesses of back alleys—alleys at which any clean, self-respecting policeman revolts. Yvette is the present fad; and Maestro Oscar is to be congratulated.
45I hear that she refuses to sing in private for $600 a performance. Like Richard Mansfield she asks a cool $1,000.
46Elle est très Yankee, cette dame!
48The pretty sonnet to Yvette by Arthur Symons is called "At the Ambassadeurs," the café chantant wherein Guilbert sang with much clat. It notes the tragic side of her art—for a great artist she is. I don't know whether she debases or elevates art by her performances; I never was clever at discerning the ethical uses to which lyric and mimetic art could be put, but I do know that she makes me feel, and and feel strongly, whatever she says. It is her misfortune to be a "fad," and also Paderewski's. But no one dare deny the power of these rare artists.
50Even people who understand French thoroughly were at sea when Yvette "slanged" them, but that did not obscure the beauty of her work.
52I confess that I do not see the immorality in her songs. She sings of depraved people, and she occasionally says equivocal things; rather hints than says; but the wealth of meaning in her art, its rich reticence and its eloquent finish, are they not something to be noted and approved?
54Yvette Guilbert critically considered is a "qualité." She is very modern, a new, dangerously spiced condiment in our end-of-century cuisine. I am quite sure that she is highly indigestible, yet too delectable to be withstood. I spoke to you of her one depraved eye. Since I first saw her I noticed with sorrow that her right eye has succumbed to the evil influence of its sister optic. Thursday night it was wholly and unconscionably wicked.
56Remember your conscience is your own. If you find Yvette especially wicked, the fault may lie within the walls of your own skull. I found her seductive, devilish and devoted. She is a wonderful mimic, and perhaps the basis of her art is a mere parrotlike ability, but this I can hardly credit. She creates before you. She is an improvatrice, who needs no mise-en-scene to heighten the illusion. Such is the potency of her spoken word, straightway the situation is revealed to you. And she supplies the imagination, for even a dullard can fathom her story. The finer sides of her art I have dwelt upon. She is not pretty, yet she can make herself lovely by merely thinking that she is. Duse had the same chameleon gift, the gift of projecting her thoughts so that they became concrete expression. It is largely a natural gift, and then Guilbert has, as has Duse, great magnetism.
58I trembled the other night at the opera for one second and a half. It was when Calvé faints away after singing the toy mad scene in Hamlet. She was pelted with flowers and cheers. Yet she remained motionless until hisses rebuked the noisy demonstration.
60I thought of Melba in Brussels the night she made her début as Ophelia. She sang the mad scene as no one else can, and then she laid herself carefully down and had a feint faint.
62Of course she was hurrahed, and straightway her dramatic temperament asserted itself. She arose, advanced to the footlights and smiled sane, sweet smiles, got all her bouquets in line and then went musically mad, and so the scene ended.
64What a histrionic triumph!
66Calvé, however, did nothing of the sort. She remained in the part, and the ballet—an Elsinore ballet, ye gods and giuris!—strewed her with the flowers so abundantly showered upon the stage. Then, in Ophelia fashion, she ruthlessly picked some of them to pieces, and finally rushed to her last bath. It was very pretty and effective. one of two readings
67Calvé, however, did nothing of the sort. She remained in the part, and the ballet—an Elsinore ballet, ye gods and guris!—strewed her with the flowers so abundantly showered upon the stage. Then, in Ophelia fashion, she ruthlessly picked some of them to pieces, and finally rushed to her last bath. It was very pretty and effective. one of two readings
69I asked Reginald De Koven the other night at the opera how much he estimated Robin Hood to have been worth to Harry Smith and himself. It was not a polite question, but I was curious, because I knew that the bright operetta is still the drawing attraction for the Bostonians.
71Mr. De Koven thought a moment and then said, in banker-like tones:
72"About $100,000."
73Phew! And it is the truth. Think of it, you slaves of the pen and pencil! One hundred thousand dollars in a few years, not counting returns from Rob Roy and The Fencing Master.
75No wonder Reggie De Koven views the world optimistically, and a De Koven-Smith opera company is formed with capital and brains back of it!
77Max Heinrich was in town last week, and of course the town knew it. He sang for me with his vibrant, virile voice some songs by Brueckler, Schumann, Dvorák, and Brahms. What an artist! His temperamental intensity, marvelous expression of occult emotions, are they not unique? I was overmastered by Brahms' Eternal Love. Heinrich should give New York a song recital. His power as an artist is waxing with years. He is one of the greatest of living Lieder singers.
79In John Davidson the London poet's new prose volume I find this: "It is difficult to sympathize with the French and German musical analysts who examine every note in the scale, and pulverize every feeling and idea experienced through the influence of music, in order to discover its soul; as satisfactory a methods one would think, as that of the biologist of Gotham who put a body through a mincing machine in hopes of detecting the vital principle."
81How absurdly amateurish is the above! An old-fashioned and exploded notion that to criticise is to cease enjoyment. Mr. Davidson is a poet whose wing strokes are sure and strong, but he probably believes in epileptic contortions when music is talked of instead of sane, sound criticism.
83Scribner sent me the fourth volume of Masters of Italian Music. It is devoted to the Italians and is written by R. A. Streatfield. Later I shall review it at length. Its contents are devoted to Verdi, Boito, Mascagni, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Sgambati, Bazzini, Martucci, and some of the minor composers. It appears to be a well written and entertaining volume.
85In Notes and Queries I find this little note:
86"In Grove's Dictionary may be read: 'Divisions in the musical nomenclature of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were rapid passages, slow notes divided into quick ones, as naturally takes place in variations on a theme or ground. Hence the word can be applied to quick consecutive passages like the long semi-quaver run in Händel's bravura songs.'
87'The phrase is of interest—first, because it seems to be exclusively English. The Italian language might be
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.