We got more and more nervous and discouraged. We knew we had rehearsed very conscientiously. This “Missa Brevis” by Palestrina was a masterpiece, and we did sing it well. You just feel such a thing. We also knew that the people who had come to our concerts went away deeply moved, and their words of appreciation were sincere. But something seemed to be wrong with us—what was it? We tried so hard, even if ever so tired, to be nice and peppy at the receptions—to please everybody; still, the pink envelopes came in greater numbers.
At our first visit at his office Mr. Wagner had received us with the news that so far he had been able to arrange only twenty-four concerts out of the forty. This time it was due to the war. But there wouldn’t be any difficulty to book the rest as soon as we had started to sing. Now the pink letters threatened there would be no more dates if the halls continued to remain empty. It was very disheartening.
Otherwise, we had a wonderful time. There was the big blue bus again with the same driver, who continued in his friendly way: “Let me explain something to you.” But this time with our advanced English we understood much more of what he explained.
He noticed with satisfaction that in another point, too, we were advanced: that was our luggage. In vain he had tried to explain to us that when he had driven the Don Cossacks from coast to coast, each one of these grown-up men had carried only one suitcase.
“And these kids don’t seem to get along without three bags every night,” he had sighed.
I hadn’t argued more about this with him for the simple reason that I hadn’t enough English words to argue with. Otherwise I would have tried to make him understand that I had to unpack my three suitcases every night, put the little stacks of nightgowns, shirts, panties, etc., neatly into the drawers, my different framed photographs, alarm clock, New Testament, Missal, rosary, candle holder, and little vase with flowers (fresh ones if we could pick any from the bus, otherwise a little bunch of pussy willows and evergreens, which had to be packed carefully in tissue paper)—on my night table; hang the dresses in the closet, and so on. It is just as well I didn’t even try. I am sure he would never have understood that. But now with the help of the Crawfords’ attic, a lot of stuff was left behind, and each one of us made his entry into and exit out of the daily hotel with only one big, and one small bag. And the big one didn’t even get emptied every evening any more; only when we were in a place more than one night. Well, and the driver didn’t even know that my little overnight bag was only one-fourth the size of the one which had accompanied me over Europe, that expensive, heavy leather affair, in the lid of which were the two score crystal flasks with silver tops, containing everything from a toothbrush to shoeshine equipment, with heavy silver mirrors, tortoise-shell comb, jewelry box. He also didn’t know that our neighbor at home in Salzburg couldn’t possibly travel without taking her own bed and night table along with her. She couldn’t fathom the idea of how one could sleep in a strange bed. Baroness M. M.—was a widely traveled lady. When she went to India tiger-hunting, among other things she took along three of her own milk cows, which saved her from the strain of getting used to different milk, and about seventy hats, to be up to every occasion. Compared with all this, we were fast approaching the example of the Saint of Assisi.
This time my camera was not packed away, but at my right hand always.
“Please—stop!” I could cry at the most inopportune moments, when the driver was just overtaking a big truck on a well-populated highway. Then when we finally managed to halt. I ran back and took a picture of such an exciting item as a huge roadside advertisement, shouting to the world that you can’t live without a Ford. I asked my family to pose in front of it. We would send the photograph back to Europe, where they would gasp at such a thing, which was four times as high as Rupert, and wider than the row of Trapps holding hands with outstretched arms in front of it.
Or I took an American graveyard on the roadside: simply stones stuck into the grass—no little hills covered with flowers, no shrines, no iron or carved-wood crosses; these cemeteries didn’t look as if they were frequently visited and tended. There were no seats or benches beside the graves. There was no wall around the graveyard, and no tender love hovered around the place, all of which made Martina exclaim:
“I wouldn’t want to be buried in America.”
Then there were the rows and rows of cars. When entering a city on a weekend, time and again I had to take a picture of the four-lane highways filled with solid rows of cars with people leaving for the weekend; or a parking place near a factory or a big school. In Salzburg we could count the people who owned a private car, and one of the spectacles of the Festivals had always been the strangers driving up in their limousines to the opera. No one seemed even to waste a look or a thought on this pageant of cars here. They had become a piece of daily necessity, but not yet for us; that’s why I took their pictures.
In Gettysburg we took snapshots of the battlefield. Of the monuments and cannons. In Europe every ancient town has such a memorial as this, but in America it is the only one we remember.
In the South we were enchanted with the Spanish moss and the cypress trees growing out of the water. And with the Negroes. Bashfully and embarrassedly at first, later more and more encouraged by the always hearty and kind reception, I asked whether I might take a picture of this old grandma rocking on the porch with the cutest little darky on her lap, or of that group of sturdy colored boys picking cotton or harvesting peanuts.
What a different kind of sight-seeing! This time it was not cathedrals, galleries, or museums. This spectacle was prepared directly by the hand of God: these huge oak trees, these cypress swamps, these endless woods in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They were not man-made, and neither was the Natural Bridge, nor the caves in Virginia, nor Niagara Falls.
“How does it happen,” mused Agathe thoughtfully one day while we were riding through the endless pine forests in North Carolina, admiring the bright red soil, “that I feel fine and at peace and quite at home here in America as long as I am in the wilds? The minute, however, traces of men show up, these roadside advertisements, for instance, these ugly wooden houses with their scales [she meant clapboards, completely unknown in Europe], the dump heaps around the huts, the car cemeteries [she meant auto dumps]—oh, it makes me so unhappy! It spoils the countryside, it doesn’t fit; then I don’t like America.”
Funny—I felt the same way, and we found out the others did, too. There was some disharmony which man had brought into the ravishing beauty of this country.
“If I think of the villages in Europe,” Rupert entered the conversation, “in the Alps or in France or England or Scandinavia, there the houses fit into the landscape, and the people do, too. They seem to be a part of it.”
“Yes,” said Werner, “that’s true; and those old farms at home look so nice and homey and well-kept, with flowers all around. Look!” and he pointed through the window. We were just passing a run-down farm with rickety barns. “Why don’t these people take better care of their houses for their children and grandchildren?”
“Ah,” put in our driver, who had listened to our spirited conversation, “that’s where you make a mistake. Who wants to live in the country with children and grandchildren? They just want to make some money, for instance, cut a wood lot or get a few good crops, and then move back to town and take it easy.”
“You mean,” gasped Hedwig, “that the people on these farms won’t live there forever?”
“Sure not,” he laughed, and his mere tone of voice said “you crazy Europeans.”
“Who wants to work hard from dawn to dusk if you can make more money much easier in a factory in the next town?”
Well, of course, that solved the riddle why so many houses were not painted.
Anyway—this side of America was very strange to us. We had to learn much more about this country and its people before we could fit the many little pieces together. At the moment it was puzzling.
Our next stop was Hartsville,
North Carolina. There we would learn some more. There was no Catholic church at the place, but on Sunday morning the priest came from the next parish in his car and said Mass in a private home, and we assisted at it. Afterwards we all had breakfast together, and Father Plicunas, the friendly priest of Lithuanian extraction, wanted to show us his church.
“Come on, let’s run over. It’s just around the corner,” he insisted, and packed his car full of as many Trapps as possible. Off we went at hair-raising speed, forty-five miles to his rectory.
“But you said it was…”
“Yes, just around the corner. Why—that’s nothing. My parish is…” and he quoted a fabulous number of miles, length and width, which would have taken care of at least three dioceses in Europe.
More and more as we rode along we were impressed by the foremost quality of America; its terrific size.
One day in December as we drove through the most beautiful winter woods and were admiring the increasing beauty of the landscape as we came farther north, the “Let me explain something to you,” was heard again all over the bus.
“Now we are entering the State of Vermont. No use looking out the window. This is not a progressive State. All they raise is gravestones.”
The last of our twenty-four concerts was in Philadelphia in the Academy of Music in the afternoon. It was two days before Christmas. Afterwards we were invited to dinner at the Drinkers’. Harry Drinker received us radiantly.
“I have a house for you right across the street.”
After supper we all went to look at the house. It was furnished, and he really meant it, we could move in immediately.
“Instead of paying me in cash, pay me in music.” And so it happened: a most perfect exchange of goods. Each one gave what he had: and we sang for him and with him the master works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which he hadn’t discovered yet, and both parties were truly happy.
VIII The Miracle
THE inevitable happened. After Christmas came one more pink letter containing the check with the rest of the money due to us, and notifying us how much Mr. Wagner esteemed us as artists of first rank, but that he did not think we were made for American audiences, and he did not see his way clear to the renewal of his contract, but he wished us God’s choicest blessings for a successful future.
That was a deadly blow.
Georg and I went to New York to talk to Mr. Wagner, but he only quoted sadly a five-figure number, the money he had lost on us.
“You will never be a hit in America. Go back to Europe. You will be a great success there.”
Back to Europe, with the Swastika stretching its black spider-legs all over the map.
Very depressed, we went to the Wellington after a little supper at the Chinese cafeteria. In the lobby we met the husband of an artist whom we knew. They also had come from Austria some time ago. Perhaps he knew the secret of appealing to the American public, and we confided to him our troubles. Something gleamed in his eyes which now, years later, I can distinguish as the genuine joy of getting rid of a rival. He talked very earnestly and very persuasively.
“Mr. Wagner is perfectly right. You must go back to Europe. Let me advise you: go right away before you spend your last dollar. Your art is too subtle. People here will never understand it. This is no place for you. Go back where you belong and be happy. In three days the Normandie sails again. Let me help you to get tickets. May I call for reservations?”
This was perhaps our darkest moment. The star had vanished altogether. But how grateful was I when Georg said: “No, thank you, I can do that myself,” and rather stiffly we parted.
Then we sat upstairs in our room and looked at each other. What now?
“Our Bishop said that it was the Will of God that we go to America. So many people have told us since that our music is more than just earning our living. It has turned out to be a mission. We must keep on singing. Let’s look for another manager.”
Around the time of our first Town Hall concert we had made the acquaintance of several managers. One of them I still remembered very clearly, a Mr. F. C. Schang from Columbia Concerts, Inc. When we had met him, he had talked about the English Singers, whose manager he had been. The very way he spoke of them impressed me. It was not cool and businesslike, but warm, personal, respectful.
“It must be nice to work with a manager who feels that way about his artists,” I had thought then. Now this came to my mind.
Next morning we called Mrs. Pessl to find our how one approaches a manager. So far, managers had approached us, and we didn’t know anything about the other way around.
“Well, that’s easy,” she answered. “All you have to do is ask for an audition,” and she explained to us what that was.
With trembling hands I dialed Circle 7-6900 for the first time and asked for Mr. Schang.
“Am mother of Trapp Family Choir,” I informed him in my halting English. “Want to ask audition. Will be possible? When?”
“Georg, he sounds awfully nice,” I said happily. “Right away he said a week from today.”
Quite consoled, we went back to 252 Merion Road, which from now on was our address. No more “c/o Management Charles Wagner” a real address of our own.
Anxious faces awaited us, and great was the joy when we told them: “A week from today.”
We rehearsed as never before. Three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, and an hour after supper. We chose the most difficult and intricate pieces, and perfected our performance in most conscientious work.
The big day came, and we stood on the stage of Steinway Hall. Our audience consisted of Mr. Schang and Mr. Coppicus, the two managers of the Metropolitan Musical Bureau, a division of Columbia Concerts, Inc. Mr. Coppicus had heard us once in Vienna.
We sang the very best music in the very best way we could, as solemnly as possible, as was fitting for Bach and Palestrina. We sang for half an hour; then the gentlemen arose and went out. They sent word back that they felt very sorry indeed, but they did not think they could manage the Trapp Family Choir.
Silence.
In the train going home we discussed what it might have been that made them refuse us.
“Perhaps we should have sung Josquin des Prés instead of Palestrina. That’s even more difficult and would have shown better what we can do.”
“Or we should have played more on the recorders. Mr. Schang seemed to like them.”
“Next time let’s do…” I said.
“What do you mean, next time?”
Into Georg’s tired eyes came a faint hope.
“Surely you don’t want to give up now,” I said belligerently. “What else is there to do? We’ll study some more, ask them for another audition, and next time they’ll take us!”
It didn’t even occur to me that we could have given auditions to other managers in New York. Two weeks passed in which we rehearsed “Alle Psallite,” an organum from around 1500, the motet “Ave Maria,” by Josquin des Prés, one piece by Dufay, and a difficult trio sonata by Telemann for alto and tenor recorders and spinet. Then we felt up to the occasion and wrote to Columbia Concerts, attention Mr. Schang, for another audition. We held our breath waiting for the answer, which came by return mail: the first envelope with the weighty words, “Columbia Concerts, Inc.” The answer was most cordial: “Come any time. Let us know twenty-four hours ahead.”
We fixed the date. The evening before, we couldn’t go to sleep, it was so exciting. Tomorrow our fate would be decided. If they refused us again, we would have to ask the Department of Labor for permission to earn our living as maids and cooks.
Again we stood on the little stage in the Steinway building. This time there were more people present: girls from the office and others. If a shy smile had crept in between numbers the first time, it certainly was suppressed on this occasion. The quaint chords of the sixteenth century couldn’t afford such worldly gestures.
My heart started sinking when one girl after the other quietl
y left the room. Also the gentlemen left. We were waiting. Then I was called out and informed by Mr. Coppicus’ secretary that it was definitely “no.”
I just couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t bring myself to break this cruel news to my family.
“Will you please wait for me at the Wellington,” I said to them cryptically and disappeared. This was my very last chance. I at least had to find out what was wrong with us. I asked my way through to the nice young lady who had just talked to me.
When I had found her, I said: “Why Mr. Coppicus not take us?”
She looked so kind, so sympathetic; she took me over to the window and explained in a low voice:
“Mr. Coppicus said the Baroness has absolutely no sex appeal. They will never be a real attraction.”
“Oh,” said I, and looked blank, and then quite hopefully, “thank you very much indeed.”
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers Page 19
