Comme un doux trésor

Richard Aldrich in The New York Times:

Miss Farrar comes back to her native land as one of the American singers who have made name and fame for themselves abroad. It is not always easy to establish the same success in this country, and it may be that all she does will not meet with quite so unqualified acceptance as it has abroad. But she went far upon that road in what she accomplished last evening. She made a most agreeable impression in her impersonation of Juliette; for she is full of excellent instincts making for the best things as a lyric actress. She has a charming personality, a graceful and winning one, and her stage presence is alluring and with much of the girlishness of Juliette.

It has been said that by the time an actress has learned the art of denoting the passion and the ecstatic emotion of Juliette she could rarely still be in possession of the juvenile charm that the part needs. But Miss Farrar has it, and has at the same time skill and resource in stage craft. She is a singer of remarkable gifts. Her voice is a full and rich soprano, lyric in its nature and flexibility, yet rather darkly colored and with not a little of the dramatic quality and with a power of dramatic nuance that she uses in the main skillfully. Her singing is generally free and spontaneous in delivery, well phrased and well enunciated, yet she is not a wholly finished vocalist, and there were matters in her singing that could net meet with entire approbation, as in the duet in the fourth act, where she sang with a certain constraint.

There will be more interesting and more important music of the exhibition of her artistic powers before the season is much further advanced, but here was ample cause in her Juliette of last evening for the high expectations that have been raised for her in the musical public of New York.

Happy 81st birthday mezzo-soprano Susanne Marsee.