MY FIVE RÔLES IN "JULIEN"

Geraldine Farrar

"Geraldine Farrar has been offered $7,500per week to sing in vaudeville on the Keith and Orpheum Circuits. The offer is for ten weeks, after the close of the opera season. This is the largest salary ever paid in vaudeville."

A New York Daily.

THIS is all news to me. I'm glad that I chanced to see the paragraph, as I was about to make other plans for the spring. But then I'm constantly learning interesting facts about myself. I have only to glance at the Sunday papers in order to discover new traits in my character, new plans for my future, new ambitions in my soul, and new adventures in my past. I suppose, though, that I ought not to complain. After all, there are artists on the newspapers as well as on the operatic stage, and hunger presses us all alike, and we must all live.

Vaudeville! I wonder what could have given them that idea? Perhaps—yes—I have it! It's all clear to me now. They have witnessed those fleeting, lightning, character-silhouettes of mine in "Julien," that fantastic and symbolic dream-opera of Gustave Charpentier's. Four times only has it been given in New York and each time I have tried to fill in it the role of a sort of vocal Louise Balthy, that chameleonic lightning change artist of the Folies Bergeres—and no living artist her equal.

But I am not considering singing "Julien" in vaudeville, eyen if my five roles in it have suggested the idea to others. Think of it! To act five characters, twice a day, for six days a week, and for ten consecutive weeks! Six hundred characterizations.

I should be dead at the end of the first week. Dead and unable to spend my first $7,500. To sing a few performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, these performances always distributed with due regard to the nerves of a temperamental songbird, is all that I care to undertake just now, thank you very kindly.

LAST year I spent some interesting hours with Charpentier, who wrote both the libretto and the music of this "lyrical poem," as he likes to call it. I wanted to learn what he had to teach me in regard to that changing, feminine mirage, which he calls his heroine. That vision which, through four long and nervewracking acts haunts and eludes poor Julien, the hero of the opera and the unhappy victim of unsatisfied ambition, perturbed mind and over-mastering passions.

In this opera I cannot help feeling desperately sorry for Caruso—I mean for Julien—because he is so miserable, so constantly haunted by Louise in his wanderings. First by Louise as herself, and then by Louise in all her various reincarnations. But I am sorry, too, for myself, as I'm called upon at every turn, and with very little time, to change my costume, my face, my habits, and, indeed, my very soul. The characters which I am forced to assume have no logical sequence whatever. Louise is not first a child, then a maiden, then a woman of middle age, and then a grandmother, all of them knit together by certain unifying similarities of nature. Far from it! Each role is a separate woman, a new soul, and a new problem in personality.

AS THE critics have already pointed out, Louise is "discovered," in Act I, recumbent, but in a very lady-like position, in a bed-chamber (with, incidentally, a fearful draught of air sweeping over her, which will probably cause her serious throat trouble in the morning). Julien is in another wing, as it were, of the chamber and sings sadly of his unhappiness as his heroine slumbers. As he finally sinks off to sleep, she awakes and, in her turn, sings of her own troubles. Nothing could be more melancholy—and correct—than the conduct of the two emancipated lovers up to this point. As the scene is about to end, Louise sinks into a chair and, with a wary eye upon the descending curtain, ducks her head just in time to avoid decapitation.

It is merely the end of a scene, however, and the curtain is only down for a minute, but it leaves Louise at one side of the stage and her dressing-room happens to be at the other, quite a long way off. Fortunately Monsieur Gilly, the obliging high-priest, peasant-father, and fakir in the opera, is kind enough to allow, her the use of his dressing-room for an instant or two while she clothes herself in more festal draperies. In a few seconds, as it seems, the curtain has gone up and she has rushed to the stage and joined the singing throng of the chorus. I have been told by feminine friends that in this scene my beautiful blonde hair looks "sickly," and that my glorious crown of flowers casts "a hideous shadow under my right eye." Alas! I know that this may be so, but I must, nevertheless, continue to stand in the hot glare of the spotlight, as patient—and quite as foolish—as Griselda, until the moment arrives for the curtain, and for my third change of costume and second change of rôle.

THIS particular role is an extremely trying one for a modest woman to assume, the part being nothing more or less than "A Vision of Beauty!" To the accompaniment of thunder and the crash of Signor Polacco's orchestra, Beauty is revealed (naturally) on a pedestal. The lights play about her in a most confusing way and, altogether, the scene is a trying one for Beauty.

Charpentier told me that what was needed in the scene was a truthful, splendid and classical vision of beauty. I gathered that if I wanted perfectly to realize his conception of the part I should have to impersonate some Greek Venus from an Italian Museum. I must confess that it was most difficult to invent a material toilette, which should at the same time appear to carry out the composer's conception of the role. Apparently—perhaps because of my rose-colored draperies and two discreet diamond straps over my right shoulder—I have not offended any considerable number of opera-goers with this costume.

The curtain descends again and I hurriedly increase the amount (and solidity) of my dress, and join my comrades in the curtain calls. In this entire "Beauty" scene the draught, to which I have already alluded, pursues me quite as relentlessly as the calcium!

TO MY mind, my third role, the peasant girl, is the most charming of all my character-silhouettes. Her silence, modesty, and gentle behavior, while upon her Slovanian farm, have won her—so I've been told-—much sympathy and even a little affection from confirmed opera-lovers.

The girl's simple heart is breaking as she leans from her balcony to gaze sadly after Julien—spick and spruce in his hunting togs, and wending his way through the mysterious canvas forest. Yes, her heart is breaking. There is only one thing that can at all comfort her and that is the knowledge that the spotlight glows upon her golden head, and, being a prima donna, that knowledge is bound to soften a little the agony and bitterness of her grief.

MY FOURTH role is that of an old Breton woman, Julien's grandmother, if you please. In this part I am expected to be a model of religious fervor and of aged pathos and tenderness. I have been told that in this character my make-up is not well conceived. This may be true, but I must explain that I only have a few minutes in which to change, and, as I always do my own make-up—my maid merely looking after my hair and my costume—I really haven't time to do more than indicate the character, somewhat roughly.

Personally I think I am right in making up the grandmother to be more of a shadow than a real woman. That seems to me to be the truest interpretation of the part. With every tooth in grandmother's head quite sound—and this is a most inartistic touch—it is difficult to convey the idea of a very aged woman.

MY FIFTH role! The wanton! The drab! Ah, that is quite another story! What a part to have to play 1 There has been a great deal said about the careful study which I gave to this part. Well, it so happens that I never studied it at all. I was not strong enough at the time to complete consecutive rehearsals of all four acts of "Julien," and the truth is that until the final dress-rehearsal I had never acted or even seriously considered the part at all.

The role, absurd as it may sound, sprang into being only when the cherries were put into my hair, the cigarette tucked between my lips, and when the awful drab's rags were folded about me. Then, when I heard the ribald music, realized the low surroundings, and beheld my degraded lover, and only then did the part begin to dominate and obsess me. It came to me, literally, like a flash. It is a dreadful part, I know. In fact the whole act is a dreadful act, a sordid ending to an opera which, in its final analysis, is a beautiful and lyrical dream-poem.

BUT have you noticed a singular thing? The audience actually remains until the end of the very last act of the opera. As for myself, I long to see the five Louises, to be somebody else and to see them behave and misbehave, "from the front." It would be a curious and interesting experience to note the effect that they made upon me.