Silent Wierdness: Born Today February 20: Mary Garden

Saturday, February 20, 2021

Born Today February 20: Mary Garden

1874-1967

Famed Scottish operatic soprano Mary Garden was born in Aberdeen on this day. Though born in Scotland, she spent her formative years in the United States, the family having moved to Chicopee, Massachusetts when she was nine. They subsequently relocated twice, first to Connecticut and finally to Chicago, where she would eventually study music. Gifted from an early age in music (singing, violin and piano), she was noticed by a wealthy couple who agreed to pay for her operatic singing studies. In 1896, she was able to transfer her studies to Paris; and it was in Paris that she made her professional opera debut in the spring of 1900. By the following year, she was one of the leading sopranos at the Opéra-Comique and after 1901, she was a frequent performer across the channel to London's Covent Garden. In 1907 she made a change and began performing at New York's Manhattan Opera House, staying only one year before returning to the Paris and the National Opera there. Finally from 1910 through 1913, she sang in her second hometown for the Chicago Grand Opera Company. This made her a national star in the United States; known even in households that did not regularly pay any attention to opera. By 1915 she was with the Chicago Opera Association, often guesting in performances in New York. It was during this time that she was first filmed. Garden did eventually appear in two scripted films, but her first filmed visage came in the form of a newsreel. In 1913 and 1914 she was featured in two Pathe news shorts. The first of these was Pathe's Weekly, No. 73 (4 December 1913) in which she is not singing/performing at all, but taking in a performance by a "band of Indians from Glacier Park" (editorializing a little here: it is rather disturbing to read the description of a famous opera singer taking in a native dance, placed in a newsreel that also includes reporting on a horrible anti-Semitic trumped murder trial in Keiv "Russia" at the instigation of Russian monarchical fascists!) Secondly, in April of 1914 she appears in the Pathe's Weekly, No. 28 taking part in the departure of a troupe of opera singers in Boston about to sail back to Europe after a sojourn working Stateside. Garden was considered one of the best operatic actors of her time and that acting did, in fact, make it into two films. The first was a Goldwyn production of Thais co-directed by Frank Hall Crane and Hugo Ballin in 1917. The following year she also starred in (top billing in fact) The Splendid Sinner, another Goldwyn production; it marks her only acting in a film not opera or music related. This is the extent of her appearances in films; though her performance from Thais was featured (among a host of others) in the short 1939 documentary The Movies March On. She did make two appearance on talk shows, one in 1949 and one in 1954 ("The Ed Sullivan Show" where she appeared along side the likes of Sophie Tucker and Eartha Kitt). At the height of her career in the early 1920's, she was the director of the newly formed Chicago Civic Opera, one of the first women to ever hold such a position. She retired from opera stage performance in 1934 after giving one last performance fittingly in Paris, where her career had so successfully been launched. She did become involved in films in one other way during her lifetime. After her retirement from opera performance, she devoted part of her time to serve as a talent scout for MGM, in addition to giving lectures and recitals. She began a long decline into some form of dementia probably in the early 1950's; sometime along the way, she chose to return to Scotland to stay. She died in the Aberdeenshire town of Inverurie on the 3rd of January in 1967 at the age of 92. She is buried locally at Aberdeen's Saint Nicholas Church Graveyard.