Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Following Lucia, Sembrich went on to play the other bel canto heroines of the 1883–84 season: Vincenzo Bellini’s Elvira (I Puritani) and Amina (La Sonnambula), and Giaochino Rossini’s Rosina (Il Barbiere di Siviglia). Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel leveled his sarcasm at the “lugubrious” I Puritani, charging it with “a simplicity that is almost amusing”; W.H. Henderson (of the Times from 1887 to 1902, then of the Sun until 1937) thought the soprano irreproachable and the orchestra and chorus in better form. The Evening Post extoled the principals of La Sonnambula, Campanini, who, in the space of a few days, sang a lyric Elvino and a heroic Lohengrin, and Sembrich, who lent the sleepwalker the “warm, emotional quality” of her voice, her bravura, her “artistic discrimination and taste.” As for Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the Times opined that “without a great Rosina” it would be “simply unbearable,” to us a startling appraisal. But then, the Met had a great Rosina. During the inaugural season, Sembrich applied her refined art to many other roles: Violetta, Gilda, Zerlina, Martha, Ophélie, Marguerite de Valois, and Juliette.

  Sembrich returned to the company in 1898 after a hiatus of fifteen years. Some time later, thanks to the Met’s librarian, Lionel Mapleson, her voice was captured live from the stage. Between January 1901 and March 1903, Mapleson, the Colonel’s nephew, first placed his recording device, replete with horn, in the prompter’s box, and then in the flies above the stage, an aerie that produced better results. His primitive equipment and makeshift conditions yielded transcriptions rich in the vibrancy of the event. The dim and scratchy sounds emitted by modern transfers of the Mapleson cylinders are the only echoes of “golden age” voices accompanied by full orchestra caught in the ambience of a large auditorium. In the case of two historic artists, Jean de Reszke and Milka Ternina, they are all we have. With Sembrich, we are more fortunate. Her very late commercial “Mad Scene” (1906) and “Sextet” (1908) bear traces of the impression she must have made in 1883. These acoustic records, though superior to Mapleson’s, suffer the shortcomings of attempts to reproduce sound prior to the introduction of electrical processes in 1925. The limited range of frequency cuts the harmonics, impacting negatively on the body and resonance of the tone. Particularly affected were sopranos. But if the quality of Sembrich’s timbre is compromised by crude technologies, her agility, range, and phrasing survive, and they are prodigious.10

  FIGURE 4. Lionel Mapleson with recording horn and cylinders, c. 1901 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  Before making her farewell in 1909, Marcella Sembrich had appeared nearly five hundred times on 39th Street and on tour. Her final Met performance was a splashy exhibition of the range of her artistry: she topped off three acts from her favorite operas by interpolating two show pieces into the “Lesson Scene” of Il Barbiere di Siviglia and then accompanying herself at the piano in Chopin’s “A Maiden’s Wish.” At her retirement banquet, Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Antonio Scotti, Louise Homer, and others of the company sang the titles of many of the twenty-seven operas in her New York repertoire to the tune of “The Merry Widow” waltz, beginning, “Ri-go-let-to, Pu-ri-ta-ni, Hu-gue-nots.” Henderson, who at the time of Sembrich’s death in 1935 had heard everyone from Adelina Patti and Christine Nilsson to Rosa Ponselle and Kirsten Flagstad, wrote in memoriam, “this famous soprano was not only one of the greatest singers of her period, but of all lyric history.”11

  ANTECEDENTS

  With the docking of Manuel Garcia’s troupe on November 7, 1825, well over a half-century before the 1883 Lucia, Italian opera alighted in New York on the wings of Rossini. It was a time of high civic pride and optimism. Three days earlier, the arrival of the Seneca Chief, the first packet boat to make the trip from Buffalo to Albany through the newly completed Erie Canal and then down the Hudson, had been the occasion for a demonstration one hundred thousand strong, the largest yet seen in North America. The canal, waterway to the West, guaranteed the city’s position as the country’s manufacturing, commercial, and financial center. Ambitions to be its cultural capital too had begun to stir. Garcia, a Spanish tenor, composer, and impresario, launched his New World venture on November 29 in Park Row’s Park Theatre with Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. His Rosina was his seventeen-year-old daughter, mezzo-soprano Maria Garcia, soon to be the legendary Maria Malibran. In attendance on that evening were personalities as disparate as Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, instrumental in bringing Garcia to New York; Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, for a time King of Naples and then of Spain, now a resident of New Jersey; and novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whose The Last of the Mohicans was soon to be published. Garcia himself sang Count Almaviva, the role he had created in Rome in 1816. During his one New York season, Garcia introduced the city to nine works, among them Don Giovanni and four more by Rossini.12

  It would be another seven years before New York built a venue expressly for opera, and it would be twenty-two more and three tries before one such effort, the Academy of Music, would become firmly embedded on the city’s cultural map. However different the three failed enterprises, they had in common the near monopoly of bel canto on their stages. The first, the Italian Opera House, owned and administered by a group of business and civic leaders, was another effort on Da Ponte’s part to bring opera to his adopted country. From the time of Garcia’s visit, Da Ponte had been a vigorous proponent of Italian music and letters, and professor of Italian literature at Columbia College, the first such position in the United States. The Italian Opera House (1833–1835), a small theater located at Leonard and Church streets, opened with Rossini’s La Gazza ladra. Nine years later, Palmo’s Opera House (1844–1847), also small, seating only eight hundred, opened on nearby Chambers Street. For a single season it was owned and operated by Ferdinand Palmo, a former restaurateur, who raised his first curtain on Bellini’s I Puritani. Bellini shared the season’s bill evenly with his two bel canto competitors, Rossini, of course, and Donizetti. In contrast to the Italian Opera House and to its immediate successor, the Astor Place Opera House, Palmo’s mission was to bring opera to the people at prices families could afford. But his target audience of immigrants had not swelled to numbers sufficient to support his intentions. For the next two years, a series of directors and companies made doomed attempts to rescue the project. As with the Italian Opera House, Palmo’s small capacity and mediocre casts were the undoing of the balance sheet. On the heels of Palmo’s demise came the Astor Place Opera House (1847–1852), administered, like the Italian Opera House, by wealthy patrons.

  New York had taken sharp financial, social, and demographic turns between the passing of the Italian Opera House in 1835 and the christening of the opera house on Astor Place in 1847. The accompanying cultural turn was animated by the inauguration of steamship service between Bristol and New York in 1837; it had increased and quickened transatlantic itineraries for goods and persons, including singers and instrumentalists. The establishment of the Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York in 1842, still the oldest orchestra in the United States, had begun to shape the musical taste of the city’s population. The new opera house had pursued the affluent to 8th Street and Broadway, a neighborhood undergoing upscale development. And although bel canto continued to hold sway over the repertoire, the opening night Ernani bore witness to the advance of Giuseppe Verdi. The problems of the eighteen-hundred-seat house were obvious from the beginning: disappointing subscription rolls and ticket sales, unexceptional casts. The fatal blow was the Astor Place riot of 1849, the bloodiest episode in New York theater history. On May 10, armed with stones, nativists in support of the American actor Edwin Forrest, who was playing Macbeth at the Bowery Theatre, laid siege to the theater on Astor Place, where the English actor Charles Macready was performing, he too as Macbeth. The militia, called to reinforce the police, fired into the crowd. Before it was over, the dead numbered around twenty-five—no one could say for sure. Tangential to opera, at least on the surface, the riot raged in front of the opulent edifice built by the
establishment largely for its own gratification. More importantly for our discussion, the issues that provoked the carnage were also central to debates about the place of opera, if any, in the American democratic order. On one side stood the old guard, determined to defend the patrician signs of their European origins. On the other stood the nativists, joined by fiercely anti-English Irish immigrants for whom opera represented a foreign, aristocratic tradition incompatible with their republican slogans.13

  It took three decades for Italian opera to plant lasting roots in New York, the span that separated Garcia’s visit from the 1854 inception of the Academy of Music, the last of the Metropolitan’s antecedents. In the interim, various incongruous factions were on the attack: “populists who disdained aristocratic pretense in Americans, intellectuals who mistrusted music’s power over people, moralists for whom a foreign-language genre could not contribute to theatrical reform, romantic conservatives who wanted to hold onto the ‘palmy days’ of the legitimate stage, and self-proclaimed outsiders who disparaged the wealth and social prestige that attendance at the opera was seen to represent.”14

  Led by German-born banker August Belmont, the subscribers of the Academy of Music made an appeasing gesture in the direction of “populists” and “self-proclaimed outsiders” by attaching “academy” to the name of the impressive new building six blocks north of Astor Place, thereby underscoring the institution’s didactic mission: the promotion of American composers, the training of American performers, and the musical education of the people. Moreover, the enormous initial capacity of the hall, pegged by the press at four thousand and greater (rebuilt after an 1866 fire, it shrank by more than half), was cited as prima facie evidence of the will to accommodate the vast spectatorship of the polis. But high-minded social purposes went largely ignored. Critics focused instead on the miserable sight lines, lighting, and ventilation; while the rich were framed to flattering effect by the extreme pitch of the tiers and the elegance of the setting, fully half the seats, primarily those at prices as low as $.25, offered scant, if any, visibility of the stage.15

  On the Academy’s first night, October 2, 1854, the New York debuts of two undisputed international stars, Giulia Grisi and Giovanni Mario, crowned what was already an event of significance to New York’s standing. The three-month-long inaugural Grisi-Mario season began with Norma and continued with works by the bel canto composers exclusively. Grisi had created the role of Adalgisa in Bellini’s opera, as well as those of Elvira in I Puritani and Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale; Mario was widely touted as the greatest tenor of his generation. The magical resonance of their names is captured by Henry James who, as a boy, lived with his family a stone’s throw from the nascent Academy: “when our air thrilled, in the sense that our attentive parents reechoed, with the visit of the great Grisi and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art of advertisement [James refers to the theater’s billboard] was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called [Monsieur Dubreuil, a comprimario, a singer of secondary roles], thickly sandwiched between them. Such was one’s strange sense for the connections of things that they drew out the halls of Ferrero [a nearby dancing school] till these too seemed fairly to resound with Norma and Lucrezia Borgia, as if opening straight upon the stage, and Europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that we had but to enjoy it on the spot.”16

  Grisi and Mario had sailed in the wake of the fabled Jenny Lind and Marietta Alboni, lured to New York by generous fees. In the years to come, the Academy’s sponsors leased the theater to a series of managers, some for only a season, others returning to try again. Bel canto programs were peppered with the first American performances, soon after their European premieres, of Verdi’s Rigoletto, La Traviata, and Il Trovatore, Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. On February 20, 1861, on his way to his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln’s stop in New York included an Academy performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera; the President-elect left before act 3 and was thereby spared the onstage spectacle of a ruler’s assassination. Less than two months later, on April 12, Fort Sumter would be attacked and the American Civil War would begin. New York would soon enjoy the boom that led to its recognition as a magnet for capital. By the 1880s, the city was no longer a cultural backwater where fading singers could succeed on the strength of a European reputation. A discerning and exigent musical press was ready and able to point out in expert detail a performer’s technical weaknesses, faulty intonation, and stylistic vulgarities. The public had evolved as well. In 1850, P.T. Barnum had created frenzy for Jenny Lind with concerts largely devoted to timeworn melodies; thirty years later, Adelina Patti, the acknowledged “Queen of Song,” undisputed star of Europe’s opera stages, returned to the United States after a two-decade absence, prepared to feed her public a diet of ballads. “But it was another America to which Patti came. It was an America which had half outgrown the Italian opera, and which listened with delight to the music of the future . . . [a] cultivated, intelligent, musically developed America.” On November 8, 1880, to take one spectacular but by no means unique example, Gerster sang La Traviata at the Academy, Campanini was at Steinway Hall, a block or so away on 14th Street, and, at Booth’s Theatre on 23rd Street, Sarah Bernhardt was making her US debut in the Scribe-Legouvé melodrama Adrienne Lecouvreur.17

  FIRST OPERA WAR

  By 1878, the year Colonel Mapleson took over at the Academy, society had again moved northward. Fourteenth Street was no longer the fanciest address in town. Millionaires had marched their mansions up Fifth Avenue, the Astors to 34th Street, the Vanderbilts to 52nd, the Roosevelts to the corner of 57th. The Metropolitan had followed in the footsteps of its stockholders. If the opening round of the opera war was a dustup between the “Old Families” and the “Newcomers,” as soon as the Nobs and the Swells were amicably ensconced in their fauteuils (some had boxes in both houses), a second battle was engaged, on another ground, the stage, and with other contestants, the stars. Sopranos, in particular, would vie night after night on boards little more than a mile apart. The managements had no choice but to compete in ways they knew would perforce end in the ruin of one or the other of their companies. In fact, it ruined both. Mapleson was at an initial disadvantage. He had lost some of his best-known artists to offers from Abbey that could not be refused. But, he held two trump cards, Gerster and Patti. Early on, the [Dramatic] Mirror (Oct. 27) predicted, adopting the inescapable military metaphor, that the Academy would emerge victorious as long as Mapleson would keep “on giving such eminently satisfactory performances as that which opened his campaign.” But sometimes even Patti could not fill more than two-thirds of the auditorium; on Gerster nights, the theater was two-thirds empty. Patti’s fee, the highest of any singer in the world, could simply not be amortized. And what is more, her grip on the company, not to mention on the public’s attention, rankled Gerster and put the mediocrity of other colleagues in unflattering relief. The quality of the Met’s ensemble was decidedly higher and its new sets and costumes beyond the Academy’s reach. Still, Abbey was faced with his own problems. Best estimates put the cost of the Met’s principal singers, comprimarios, orchestra, chorus, and the rest just shy of $7,000 per performance; revenues fell far short of expenses. If Mapleson’s season closed deeply in the red, it also closed in glory: Patti trilled in duet with Sofia Scalchi, who had wandered downtown at the expiration of her Met contract. They, and Rossini, and Semiramide filled every seat and “all available standing room” (Herald, April 25).18

  Each company had presented a fall and spring season of nineteen operas (Abbey added a twentieth for Philadelphia alone); nearly half the titles were identical, for the most part bel canto and early Verdi works. The titles exclusive to Mapleson were Rossini’s La Gazza ladra and Semiramide, Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix and L’Elisir d’amore, Bellini’s Norma, the Ricci brothers’ Crispino e la comare, and Verdi’s Ernani. With the exception of Aïda and Roméo
et Juliette, none of the Academy’s offerings was thought of as modern. The contrasting profile of the Met emerged from relatively recent French works, along with Lohengrin, Arrigo Boito’s 1868 Mefistofele, and the first US performance of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, premiered at La Scala in 1876. Abbey, unlike Mapleson, was bent on demonstrating that his “Grand Italian Opera” was alert to the public’s predilection for Wagner and for contemporary fare.

  Lohengrin showed off the company to marked advantage, and although sung in Italian, of course, this edition of Wagner prompted Krehbiel to make the case for Abbey’s more inclusive policy. A passionate Wagnerite, he cited the audience’s patience as proof “that the patrons of the opera in New York are ripe for something better and nobler than the sweetmeats of the hurdy-gurdy repertory, and that a winning card to play in the game now going on between the rival managers would be a list, not necessarily large, of the best works of the German and French schools” (Tribune). Mefistofele and La Gioconda were, for the most part, well performed. By all accounts, Campanini and Nilsson sang Boito’s Faust and Margherita to far better effect than they had when impersonating the same characters in Gounod’s version on opening night. Krehbiel chose to take issue with the opera itself, “the novelty of Boito’s conception having worn off”; he now found it “bizarre . . . inane, insipid, when it is not positively vulgar in style” (Tribune). Despite the misfire of its act 2 explosion, the premiere of Ponchielli’s sumptuously staged La Gioconda elicited lengthy and mostly positive reactions. Henderson, who thought it “among the most important art occurrences of the season,” placed the composer in “a sort of half-way ground between Verdi’s latest manner and the moderate productions of Wagner,” his score, though unoriginal, containing “much that is beautiful and impressive.” While Henderson judged Nilsson ill cast in a role intended for dramatic soprano, Krehbiel reported that she “kept the audience in a state of almost painful excitement by the vivid manner to which she depicted the sufferings of the street singer” (Tribune). He was harsher on Ponchielli than his colleague, charging the composer with resorting to “the old style.” The two magisterial critics agreed that the enterprise did credit to the fledgling company by offering “grand opera in a style worthy of the metropolis” (Tribune).