page_title: Mary Garden
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Garden / Biography / Early life and rise to stardom in Europe / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Opera singer Mary Garden dressed as Melisande for the opera, Pelleas and Melisande.
context_page_description: Mary Garden was a Scottish operatic soprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century. She spent the latter part of her childhood and youth in the United States and eventually became an American citizen, although she lived in France for many years and eventually retired to Scotland, where she died.
  Described as "the Sarah Bernhardt of opera", Garden was an exceptional actress as well as a talented singer. She was particularly admired for her nuanced performances which employed interesting uses of vocal color. Possessing a beautiful lyric voice that had a wide vocal range and considerable amount of flexibility, Garden first arose to success in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century. She became the leading soprano at the Opéra-Comique; notably portraying roles in several world premieres, including Mélisande in Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. She worked closely with Jules Massenet, in whose operas she excelled. Massenet notably wrote the title role in his opera Chérubin for her.
  In 1907, Oscar Hammerstein convinced Garden to join the Manhattan Opera House in New York where she became an immediate success.
context_section_description: Mary Garden was born on 20 February 1874 at 35 Charlotte Street, Aberdeen, Scotland, the oldest of the four daughters of Robert Davidson Garden (b. 1851), a cashier at the Blaikie ironworks, and his wife Mary (née Joss) (1852–1948). Her parents married a little over a month before her birth. Two of her sisters were born in Scotland while another was born in the United States.
  The family moved to Chicopee, Massachusetts, United States when she was nine years old. They then moved to Hartford, Connecticut a few years later, and then to Chicago in 1888 when Mary was 14.
caption: Mary Garden, 1908
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