Odette, Where Is Thy Sting?

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

Being a Journey (Around Robin Hood's Barn) to the Shore of Penzance

IF I approach any new uncharted musical comedy with something akin to trepidation, it is for many reasons—including the fact that, after all, there is just a chance that Odette Myrtil will be in it.

Mile. Odette Myrtil comes from France. Or at least I suppose she does. One never feels quite sure. After discovering that one's favourite Russian actress was born in Hoboken or after learning, for instance, that the exquisitely Slavic Sokolova was, prior to becoming prima ballerina of the Ballet Russe, none other than Miss Hilda Munnings, daughter of a Chiswick grocer, one never can feel quite sure. But, for all I know to the contrary, Odette Myrtil first saw the light of day in the Butte Montmartre or haply in some fair village of the LoireInférieure.

Anyway, she long since forsook such natal haunts in favour of these lucky United States where, for some years past, she has gained an arduous but, I fear, lucrative livelihood by acting and playing the violin. That may strike you as in no sense a large repertoire of accomplishments and indeed I am not even insisting that she does either particularly well.

I have no doubt that many of our mummers can do both as skilfully. But it is Mile. Myrtil's chief claim to managerial attention and her sole means of maddening your correspondent that, earnestly always and, at times, even violently, she docs them both at once.

IN the libretto of the evening she may be cast as a passionate Polish countess or as a passionate gypsy girl. It does not matter. In either character, she always happens to have a violin on her person at the crucial moments of the role's development. The climax of her evening usually comes when she seduces some coy boy baritone with her fiddling. She will come wheedling towards him with a G string that fairly coaxes. With face and body both hard at work registering paroxysms of rage, jealousy, despair and high blood pressure, now crouching like a panther, now crawling like • a pythoness, now leaping like a tigress, she fiddles away furiously, the while the violin sobs, curses, wails. Acting and playing the violin? Indeed, yes.

When, at the last note, she falls exhausted on the divan, or—in some cases—on the baritone, the applause of the audience comes like a thunderclap. That applause, I judge, is an expression of the audience's pleased astonishment at her being able to do it so well (which she certainly does) without any consideration being given to whether they might not have liked it better if she had not done it at all. However, I am bound to report their abundant enthusiasm if only as a preamble to the statement that I myself am always made more than a little ill by the exhibition.

I cannot possibly explain why I should be thus painfully affected by a woman's combining a tour de force of emotional pantomime with a neat performance on the violin. But then if even the less gentle readers need an explanation at all, they would adore Odette Myrtil anyway.

What seems to me the horrid and faintly monstrous incongruity of her art does lie in the undebatable ground of taste.

I need no more explain my own feeling of deep distaste than I need explain why, despite my orthodox relish for the lovely lines of the Venus de Milo and my morbid passion for having a lot of striking clocks in the house, I nevertheless shared the general shudder when some manufacturer proudly placed on the market a Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach. Yet Heaven knows, that was a striking clock if ever there was one.

Only in lesser degree am I pained when a concert singer breaks loose and flings himself around the stage, clasping his hands, rolling his eyes, stamping his feet and, as dear Tessa used to say, "putting in the expression". Ever the best of frenzy, I suppose, but somehow terrible. Which must be, come to think of it, why I am so restive during performances of grand opera and why, except when a genius akin to Chaliapin's or Raquel Meller's breaks all the rules and bridges the most sundering flood, do I find the seats at the Metropolitan so penitential.

I AM not thinking merely of the little palpable absurdities which keep the Metropolitan season grotesque. For instance I am not thinking especially of the moment when the mortallywounded Valentine in Faust retains enough strength for his death scene to suggest the Bull of Bashan in uncommonly good health. Nor of the scientifically curious access of wind by which the wasting consumptive in Traviata not only gains in lung power as her ailment advances but, when wasted away utterly, dies with mouth flung wide on the loudest and lustiest note in the entire opera.

I am not thinking especially of the first-act flight of Carmen whose hot chase by the nearest regiment is complicated by the fact that the pursuing soldiery are not allowed to run fast enough to catch her during that long pause which the fugitive devotes to a good parting aria. I am not even thinking of the killing episode when Isolde's husband comes suddenly upon the guilty pair up to no good in his garden and, rather pointedly ignoring the lady, delivers one of the longest and most punitive solo passages in all opera at poor Tristan who (thereby considerably weakened, I suppose) is then easily slain by the king's henchman.

No, these extra grotesqueries are mere spotlighted exaggerations of something afflicting, incongruous, preposterous in the form itself. And at the Metropolitan, though I would trudge miles through the snow just to hear and see the great penultimate scene of Boris Godunov and though some unmanly weakness makes me acquiescent all during the second scene of Louise, I am never completely happy there except when that troupe is doing its one perfect job. That is the production of the flawless and endlessly delightful Coq d'or. In Coq d'or, if Odette Myrtil appeared, they would take her violin away from her and make someone else fiddle while she lunged and swooned and threw her talented fits. In Coq d'or, there are two persons for every role—one to act it and the other to sing it. Coq d'or recognizes that opera is essentially a monstrous hybrid. There really is only one word which fits (as though it had been made for it) all the foul spawn of this scandalous mesalliance between the arts. The word is bastard.

And that, my dears, is how I came to marry your grandmother—no, that's another story. And that, I meant to say, is why I have such fathomless, inexhaustible enjoyment at the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. For their incomparable scores are music from a composer fertilized by a wag who felt—who must have felt—just the way I do about opera, whose best libretti are urchin derision of opera as such and whose every scene took pains to wink and say "What cock-eyed stuff this opera business is, now isn't it?"

Ruddigore, Pinafore, Iolanthe, The Gondoliers, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience—all mocked, with infinite gaminerie, the grave didoes going on up the street at Covent Garden all mock, with unwearying good humour, the grave didoes going on down the street at the Metropolitan. Among the best works these immortal partners did, there is one notable exception. That is the lovely, pensive, persuasive Yeomen of the Guard. Many love it. I do. Some say they enjoy it more than any of the others. That is their privilege. But to the band of devotees, old faithfuls and new converts, who have kept the goose hanging high at the Plymouth Theatre in New York for a year past—to this band such heretics do not belong. They are not Gilbertians. Just as the man who says he likes the marvellous but quite atypical Tale of Two Cities best of all the yarns Charles Dickens spun is thereby outlawed as a Dickensian. He may like A Tale of Two Cities but he doesn't like Dickens. He doesn't belong.

BUT for the most part, the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory is just a sly travesty on all opera everywhere. Sometimes the derision is underscored, as when the bad grey-green poet, Reginald Bunthorne, rushes into the garden in Patience, peers melodramatically behind all the bushes and then roars:

Am I alone and unobserved.

I am

Then let me own I am an aesthetic Sham.

Or when Major General Stanley, having had all his daughters seized by the Pirates of Penzance, so appeals to the practical better natures (as by pointing out that he himself is an orphan, for instance) that they all (pirates, daughters and everybody) kneel at once on the beach and sing a brief hymn in praise of that "divine emollient", poetry. Or when, with terrific banging of cutlasses and other menacing hardware, the pirates come stamping into the castle, roaring, as they enter, in a most deafening manner:

With cat-like tread

Upon our prey we steal, In silence dread

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Our cautious way we feel No sound at all

We never speak a word A fly's footfall

Would be distinctly heard.

But the slyer instances are endless. And lest any one say the great Savoyards were making fun of something they could not do themselves, you should listen to the exquisite songs by which, at least once in each opera, Gilbert and Sullivan held their franchise—such a song, for example, as Iolanthe's heart-breaking appeal to the Lord Chancellor or the lovely duet between Mabel and Frederick in the second act of The Pirates.

The special frequency of these references to The Pirates of Penzance: or The Slave of Duty can be traced to the fact that, even as these lines arc being written, a new generation is thronging to hear this old favourite which had first been produced here, with Sullivan himself conducting the orchestra, forty-seven years before. So America's love of it, like the love of the piratical maid-of-all-work for Frederick, "has been accumulating forty-seven year".

The present revival is the second step in the formation of Winthrop Ames's Gilbert and Sullivan Company. It follows Iolanthe, or rather, joins it in the repertory. And it has been so beautifully produced that nightly I find myself calling attention in my prayers to the desirability of Winthrop Ames keeping his health.