Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Tosca

Sandrah Bernhardt

"The Golden Voiced One!" "The Incomparable One!" "The Divine Sarah!"
"The Eighth Wonder of the World!"

Her contemporaries struggled to find accolades sufficient to praise the incandescent genius of Sarah Bernhardt. Endowed with unusual emotional expressivity, creative imagination, and indomitable will, Mme. Sarah forged a career that lasted from her début in 1862 almost to her death bed in 1923.

Reared rather carelessly by her courtesan mother, the illegitimate Sarah could respond to circumstances with alarming ferocity. At the age of four, in an effort to escape the squalor of her mother's care-taking arrangements, she opened a window and flung herself into the path of her aunt's departing carriage, thus guaranteeing rescue of a sort.

By the time Sarah was ten, her mother, a Dutch-born Jewess, decided that a convent would be the most politique place in which to educate her daughter. Sarah flourished under the nuns' calming acceptance and, fascinated by the mystery and ritual, embraced the Roman Catholic Church.

With the help of her mother's influential friends, Sarah obtained an audition for the Conservatoire, the training school for the Comédie-Française. Realizing that having to speak her part with an unprepared partner would compromise the display of her talent, she promptly decided to cancel the scheduled scene, instead reading a substitute fable of La Fontaine's. The audition judges, at first exasperated by the choice of such a schoolchild's staple fare, were in the end completely won over by her rendition.

Sarah's career at the Comédie was not a smooth one. Her début was only satisfactory and a personal quarrel sent her packing after only two years of performing. Determined to act, she struggled along at the boulevard theatres. Also, at this time she had a grand, but short, love affair with a Belgian prince. By the end of 1864 the twenty-year old unemployed actress was the mother of a forever-adored son.

Whatever challenge or defeat, Sarah met it head-on with the pronouncement, "Quand même!" - "Even So!" The almost too slender actress with the unmanageable red hair chose this phrase as her motto and it embodied her spirited response to life and her dedication to her art.

Perseverance and influence finally resulted in employment and happy success at the Odéon (a more modern theatre, second only to the Comédie). In honor of Victor Hugo's return from exile in 1872 the Odéon staged a revival of his Ruy Blas with Sarah as Queen. The critical acclaim and immense popularity of her performance opened the way for her return to the Comédie the same year. There she excelled in both classic and melodramatic roles: Racine 's Phèdre and the heroines of Hugo and Dumas, père and fils.

But by 1880 she was visionary enough to take charge of the own career. She set off on a whirlwind of tours: London, Brussels, Copenhagen, a string of French cities, and then a six-month sweep of the United States . She chose her plays with an eye to box office appeal: Adrienne Lecouvreur, La Dame aux Camélias, and Froufrou. That her personal life and antics were her own best publicity gambits was of no small consequence. Her ménage of monkeys, parrots, and cheetahs, her fragile health (cancellations à la Callas), her aura of amorous involvements, her predilection for sleeping in a coffin, her wit and her charm - all kept her in the headlines wherever she went. This volatile actress who spoke her lines only in French went on to conquer the world.

She captured the imagination of playwrights; Victorien Sardou was above all her playwright. His gift for creating historical spectacle and theatrical death scenes perfectly matched Sarah's talents. The "two S's" triumphed again and again: Fédora (1882), Théodora (1884), La Tosca (1887), Cléopâtre (1890), Gismonda (1894) and La Sorcière (1903).

From Edmund Rostand, Sarah received La Princesse Lointain (1895), La Samaritane (1897), and finally the popular and patriotic L'Aiglon (1900). The poetic Alfred de Musset gave her Lorenzaccio (1898) and La Nuit de Mai (1909). Oscar Wilde, falling under Sarah's spell, wrote Salomé in French expressly for her (although she never produced it). Alexandre Dumas, fils, was so touched by her portrayal in La Dame aux Camélias (a play Sarah kept in perennial revival) that he gave her the letter that he had written to the real-life Marguerite.

Her personal commitments were marked by courage, loyalty and turbulence. Although a Roman Catholic from the time of her convent days, she remained publicly proud of her Jewish heritage, championing the cause of Dreyfus despite the bitter conflicts it brought into her own life. Sarah, always the sought-after one, fell victim only once to infatuation. Her marriage to the egotistical Jacques Dalama, a philandering Greek diplomat and drug addict, was played out in the headlines for two miserable years until she finally threw him out. Yet six years later in 1889 she took him in to nurse him during the last miserable days of his addiction.

Age was never a hindrance to Sarah: at sixty-five she could project the innocence of a sixteen-year-old in Moreau's Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc . Nor was sex an impediment: as sensuous and sexual as even her classic heroines were, just as captivating were the male roles of Hamlet and L'Aiglon. Even physical dismemberment was not a deterrent: despite the amputation of her right leg in 1915 she continued to act, artfully propped up for her performances, often rising heroically to stand. - Quand même!

The public surely thought she would live forever. There had been, after all, four "farewell" American tours, the last in 1916-17. There was yet another European tour in 1920 and a final visit to London . In France she continued to mount new productions. In her last year she was happily rehearsing a new play, but collapsed at dress rehearsal. Only in her last few days did she acknowledge mortality, requesting her son to cover her coffin with lilacs. Thousands upon thousands paid her farewell. Her monument inscribes no accolades. "Bernhardt" is sufficient.

-Helen D'Artois Schmidt

 

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