Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We acknowledge with gratitude our debt to Mary C. Francis, executive editor at University of California Press, for taking on our project and providing informed counsel and friendly support all along the way. We are also grateful to our agent, Ellen Geiger, vice-president at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, who arranged the happy encounter between us and Mary.

  A special thank you is due the Metropolitan Opera Archives. Its resources were indispensable to our research. That the Archives are a model repository of print and visual documents is, in large measure, a testament to the stewardship of Robert Tuggle. Bob has been a remarkable fount of knowledge and encouragement. Archivist John Pennino’s deep acquaintance with the company’s history has been critical to the search for pertinent documents. We also thank Met archivists Jeff McMillan and John Tomasicchio. Other archivists and librarians have facilitated our work: Alexa B. Antopol, Reference and Research Librarian, Opera America; Wilma Jones, Chief Librarian, College of Staten Island-CUNY; Devin Nix, Academic Technology Specialist, NYU Digital Studio; Jane L. Poole, Metropolitan Opera Guild.

  We are especially beholden to friends who gave so generously of their time to read our manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions for its improvement: Rachel Brownstein, Phebe Chao, Miguel Lerin, Bridget Lyons, Robert Lyons, Stephen J. Mudge, Daniel Schlosky, Roger Sorkin. Beatrice Jona Affron lent her expertise in matters of musicology. Si Affron, Zoë Affron, and Miranda Scripp assisted in the preparation of the manuscript. Ralph Tarica and Suzanne Tarica supplied translations from German. Elaine Bowden, David Dik, Russell Frost, Bob Madison, and David Podell were forthcoming with aid and advice. The Metropolitan Opera Press Office made press passes available; Brent Ness of the Press Office cleared permissions for the illustrations of chapter 11.

  Finally, we wish to remember here those who have been part of our operagoing over the years. They have shared our enthusiasm and engaged with us in debates that often continued long into the night: John Albert, Cecilia Bartoli, Jacqueline Carter, Olivier Ferrer, John Haskell, Claudia Lindsey, Allan Novick, Tamar Schneider, François Scott, Michel Slama, Elizabeth Seder, Gilles Venhard.

  Cragsmoor and New York City, November 12, 2013

  ONE

  A Matter of Boxes, 1883–1884

  BEL CANTO

  FIRST NIGHT

  THE CONFUSION OUTSIDE THE NEW OPERA HOUSE on opening night October 22, 1883, and the commotion within, delayed the prelude to Charles Gounod’s Faust. As one wag put it, no one seemed to mind except “a few ultra musical people in the gallery.” On the sidewalk out front, scalpers hawked parquet seats at $12 and $15 each and places in the balcony at $8. Overeager takers apparently failed to notice that as late as 7:30, $5 balcony tickets were still on sale at the box office. “It comes high but we must have it,” read the caption under Puck’s lampoon of the rush for pricey tickets. Ushers in evening dress escorted patrons to their seats. The three tiers of boxes and the parquet were filled, the balcony nearly sold out. Only the $3-a-pop uppermost section, the “family circle,” so renamed to repel roués accustomed to calling it their turf, showed empty seats. When the prelude was over and the curtain rose on the old philosopher’s study, the audience finally fell silent.1

  Before the show was over, the most affluent, the least, and all those in between had cause for complaint. The carriage trade had had to cope with long lines at the three entrances, north on 40th Street, east on Broadway, south on 39th. Many of their seats, despite prime locations, had poor sight lines and equally dismal acoustics. Nonetheless, seventy boxes offered what a set of prominent New Yorkers had demanded and ultimately resorted to buying for themselves: a house that would accommodate the spectacle of their power and riches. The press paid particular attention to the movements of William Henry Vanderbilt, whose two boxes held, among other distinguished guests, the Lord Chief Justice of England. In the course of the evening, Vanderbilt sat by turn in each of his boxes and was seen stopping in at those of friends and relations. His valet was posted at the door to pass on the calling cards of visitors—unfailingly male, women rarely left their seats—who sought an audience with the son of the Commodore. The cumulative wealth of the several Vanderbilts and of the others of their crowd was estimated at upward of $500 million.2

  The building’s design guarded class distinctions most jealously through a feature modeled on European examples: a staircase at street level that segregated the upper galleries from the select precincts of the house, barring holders of cheap tickets from mingling with their betters below. In the family circle, the stage was visible only to those willing to crane their necks. And to these least privileged patrons, the high notes alone were audible. From the overheated rear of the balcony, one tier closer to the stage, the single “animated thing visible to the occupants of a seat was the expanse of [conductor] Signor [Auguste] Vianesi’s cranium. At first the audience knit their brows and cocked their heads, and there was a disposition to lay the blame upon their own ears, which many imagined had suddenly become defective, but during the entr’acte, on comparing notes, it was discovered that persons in each of the various tiers and in all parts of the house—near as well as at a distance from the stage—experienced the same inability to catch the notes of the artists clearly” (Times).3

  Vanderbilt made show of his satisfaction with the occasion: “[He] loomed up against a pallid background and appeared to enjoy the music, though his soul, probably, was filled with a different sort of harmony.” Savvy subscribers would have picked up Life’s wink at the widely circulating story of the birth of the Metropolitan. They would have translated “a different sort of harmony” as the particular gratification the glittering evening promised Vanderbilt, erasing as it did the slight to his name suffered three years earlier when his wife was denied a box at the Academy of Music, since 1854 the dominant venue for opera in New York. His offer of $30,000 had been turned down; there were no suitable boxes to be had. Overflowing the already full Vanderbilt cup may have also been the memory of the ball seven months earlier at which Knickerbocker society, “the Nobs” or “the Old Families,” turned out in numbers at the invitation of his daughter-in-law, Alva. That night had trumpeted the acceptance by the Colonial and Revolutionary gentry of the far wealthier parvenus, “the Tens” (the upper ten thousand fashionable nouveaux riches) or “the Newcomers,” moneyed during and after the Civil War. The process had taken four decades.4

  FOUNDING

  The Academy of Music at 14th Street between Third Avenue and Irving Place was a sufficient home for opera. Its resident impresario, James H. Mapleson, or better, Colonel Mapleson, as he liked to be called, delivered the stars his patrons considered their due. But as the city’s upper crust grew in size and, more to the point, in financial clout, it became apparent that the Academy was saddled with a fatal flaw: its too few boxes could not accommodate New York’s growing elites. And further, on those rare occasions on which a box became available, it went to a member of the tight Knickerbocker circle and not to one of “the Newcomers.” Approached by George Henry Warren, a Vanderbilt lawyer, for a way out of the impasse, leading Academy stockholders offered to increase the number of boxes from eighteen to forty-four, a supply still substantially short of the demand. Worse, the twenty-six additions would not necessarily be in the coveted proscenium. The occupants would be less advantageously exhibited than they thought befit their station. And so the proposed remodeling was rejected and the campaign for a new opera house was on. Within days, Warren had secured the required capital through sixty-two subscriptions. The central committee of the infant Metropolitan Opera Company met on April 10, 1880, and agreed to move forward with the project, later recapitalized by the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Roosevelts, and others. There were bumps in the road: negotiations for a site on 43rd Street and Madison Avenue fell through; at a later point, the anticipated costs had so escalated that there was pressure to abandon the undertaking altogether. In the end, will and fortune prevailed and, amazingly, i
n just two and a half years, between the March 1881 acquisition of the 39th Street block and the October 1883 opening, construction was completed, the boxes (ultimately tagged at $15,000 each) were assigned by lot, an impresario was hired, and the inaugural season launched.

  HOUSE

  As they stepped out of their carriages, some among the box holders may have had buyer’s remorse. The new edifice looked nothing like the stupendous Paris theater dedicated just eight years earlier, an obligatory stop on the grand tour. The Opéra, standing proudly on a pedestal above the pavement, its broad staircase leading to the seven portals of the sumptuously adorned neo-Baroque façade crowned with gilded statues, was the focal point of the principal thoroughfare that bore its name. The exterior of the Metropolitan, in the moderate Renaissance style, aspired to no such magnificence. J. Cleveland Cady and his colleagues, architects of the still extant Romanesque revival southern wing of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, avoided flights of fancy for this, their first theater commission. Their chief concern was that the most capacious auditorium for opera in the world meet the expectations for display, comfort, and safety of its prosperous patrons. And to these desiderata, they bent whatever largesse the budget allowed. The snide sobriquet of “yellow brick brewery” attributed to Mapleson stuck. Others disagreed, finding the “elegance” of the new building admirable: “Architecturally it is a fine creation, imposing not alone by its size but by its dignity, simplicity, and intelligent adaptation to its ends. And if on the exterior we miss the grandeur and beauty which must belong to a building ere it can be called truly monumental, we have a scholarly, quiet, eminently respectable piece of work.”5

  FIGURE 1. Exterior of Metropolitan Opera House, Broadway and 39th Street, 1883 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The five-hour-long Faust allowed first-nighters a leisurely look at the theater’s interior. They found not the traditional stage frame capped by an arch but a nearly square opening, likely inspired by Wagner’s dictates for his 1876 opera house in Bayreuth. The decision to forgo proscenium boxes obviated the difficulty that had precipitated the break with the Academy. The stockholders occupied the first and second of the three tiers, grouped as “a republic of oligarchs with no precedence among themselves, nodding on equal terms all round Olympus.” With the parquet orchestra floor and the two upper galleries, the capacity of the Met exceeded three thousand. Critics grumbled that the cramped staircases, corridors, and lobbies were inadequate to assembly, let alone parade, during the long intermissions. Public spaces had been sacrificed to the volume of the hall. The color scheme that provided the “pallid background” for Mr. Vanderbilt’s posturing met with scorn. The Times, ever attentive to the interests of ostentation, railed against what it judged an unbecoming contrast to “full dress”; the Herald lamented that the diamonds were deprived of “that flashing and blazing of rays that come from a darker setting.” More generally, appreciations of the new Metropolitan ranged from the Mirror’s (Oct. 27) quip that “if Oscar Wilde had a nightmare in which an opera house played a conspicuous part we imagine it would appear to him as the Metropolitan did,” to the encomium of the Critic (Oct. 27, 435): “one of the best-arranged places of amusement in the world.” For the more than eight decades of the building’s life, through the devastating fire of 1892 to the major reconstruction that followed, and subsequent modifications to the seating and décor, sight and sound at the Met continued to be hit or miss.6

  FIGURE 2. Interior of Metropolitan Opera House, 1895. This is the oldest extant photograph of the auditorium. (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  FAUST: OCTOBER 22

  The lease of the house to theatrical manager Henry E. Abbey came with the board’s charge that he assemble a company for the Met’s first season. Abbey’s enviable client list included the actors Sarah Bernhardt, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, and Lily Langtree. The “Italian” of his “Grand Italian Opera” meant that French and German works would be sung in Italian. That was no surprise. Years later, in evoking an 1870s Faust with Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music, Edith Wharton took a jab at this practice: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.” Abbey chose that same Faust and that same Marguerite for his opening fare. He had his conservative patrons in mind. No sooner had Gounod’s original version of the work as an opéra comique, that is, with spoken dialogue, premiered in Paris in 1859 than it was on its way to the top of the operatic charts. At its 1863 landing in New York, Faust “leaped . . . into popularity. . . . All the leading morceaux were encored” (Times, Nov. 30). But unlike the performance retrieved in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, at the lackluster Met premiere, the principals were off their form: “Mme. Nilsson and Signor Campanini sang positively badly.”7

  New Yorkers had reason to expect better from stars they knew well. Nilsson and Campanini had been Mapleson singers; both had been seduced by Abbey’s lucrative offers. Nilsson had made her US debut in 1870, soon after her Paris creation of Gounod’s heroine in the grand opera version of Faust, through-composed, that is, without spoken dialogue, and with lengthy ballet. The high point of the Met opening was the interruption of the garden scene to mark Nilsson’s proprietary relationship to the role. Presented with a sash of golden leaves in a velvet case, “first holding the box down so that the audience obtained a view of its contents, she placed it upon the chair in front of the casket, and kneeling repeated the [aria]” (Times). But for the reviewer, who took note of the soprano’s wonted acting and musical expressivity, the “Jewel Song” “was scarcely rendered with the requisite buoyancy and brilliancy.” Campanini, arguably the world’s leading tenor, had been Italy’s first Lohengrin, London’s first Don José, and New York’s first Radamès. As Faust that night, his “old-time sweetness” was intermittent and his “old-time manly ring” suffered “the evidences of labor” (Tribune). In their subsequent appearances that season, separately and together, in Lucia di Lammermoor, Lohengrin, Mignon, Don Giovanni, and Mefistofele, reservations about Nilsson and Campanini vanished. Their initial reception might have been more sympathetic had the architects gotten their way in situating the orchestra. Borrowing again from Bayreuth, they had sunk the pit below the level of the parquet, though less deeply than the covered “mystic gulf” of the Festspielhaus. But Vianesi and his band objected to the near invisibility to which they had been relegated. The pit was raised, putting maestro and orchestra in full view, obstructing the stage picture for many seated in the parquet, and, of greater import still, undoing the balance of voices and instruments. The orchestra descended to the intended plane two weeks later, and there, with sporadic minor adjustments, it stayed.8

  FIGURE 3. Christine Nilsson as Marguerite in Faust, 1883 (courtesy Photofest)

  LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR: OCTOBER 24

  When Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, as comfortably old-shoe as Faust, had its turn two days later, disquiet about the acoustics had subsided. The Evening Post’s Henry Finck conjectured that on the previous Monday the sound had been dampened by the mass of the near-capacity audience. The far smaller Wednesday crowd compensated for its poor size by its vociferous response to the twenty-five-year-old Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich in her New York debut. Notices pointed to her perfectly placed tone, to her “refinement of expression,” and to a voice of great compass capable of both bel canto brilliance and “velvety softness” (Tribune). Sembrich had learned from the disappointing Faust “to sing her arias as near the footlights as possible” (Evening Post). The scenery was “admirable, the chorus resplendent in voice and real satin” (Sun), the “Sextet” and the “Mad Scene” were encored, and Campanini convinced his critics that “the greatest of living tenors retain[ed] his position at the front” (Times). A mile or so south at the Academy, Sembrich’s formidable competitor, Etelka Gerster, was cast as Gilda in Rigoletto. For t
he second time in three days, New Yorkers took up sides for either Mapleson or Abbey. They had had to choose between Gerster’s Amina or Nilsson’s Marguerite. Adelina Patti, the Academy’s headliner, would enter the fray two weeks later. But for the Times, Sembrich had “nothing to fear from the few popular rivals she now has.” One reviewer went so far as, “[her Violetta] surpasses [Patti’s] in sympathy.” In the age of Patti, there could be no higher praise. Soon after her debut, the company’s first new diva remarked cheerfully, “I have sung never before such an empty house in my life. . . . Naturally, I am not known yet, or rather I was not known until last Wednesday” (Times, Oct. 28).9

  Sembrich was the product of the pedagogy of bel canto, itself derived from the technique of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century virtuosi. Briefly put, bel canto is founded on the most rigorous command of the breath, indispensable to the accuracy of intonation and to the emission of equalized, linked tones from the bottom of the range to the top, whether singing piano (softly), singing forte (loudly), or executing the messa di voce (the swelling and diminishing of a note). The perfection of breath control is also essential to the free and even use of fioritura (embellishment): melismatic trills, turns, appoggiature (grace notes), scales, arpeggios, and other figures of the bel canto rhetoric. Well into the nineteenth century, all students of singing were expected to master the technique and its battery of florid ornaments. Later, the ornaments became the nearly exclusive property of the high soprano.