Grand Opera: The Story of the Met
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Performed in Abbey’s new raiments, some of the “old style” operas made strong impressions. On the third night of the season, Il Trovatore introduced Roberto Stagno. The tenor thrilled the audience with his long-held high B at the end of “Di quella pira.” The Azucena of Zelia Trebelli “was a triumph of high vocal art worthy of being ranked with Madame Sembrich’s brilliant performance on Wednesday” (Tribune). On hearing the Leonora of Alwina Valleria, the Met’s first American-born diva, the Tribune declared, “there can be no ‘off night’ at the Metropolitan so long as she relieves either Madame Nilsson or Madame Sembrich” (Tribune). Soprano Emmy Fursch-Madi had glowing notices for her Alice in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. Fursch-Madi was also compelling as Ortrud to Nilsson’s Elsa and as Donna Anna in a Don Giovanni that flaunted Nilsson as Donna Elvira and Sembrich as Zerlina. Abbey’s Met had its fair share of disappointing evenings as well, many occasioned by the weak contingent of male singers. Stagno soon found that his reliable high notes did not suffice to trigger favorable reviews for his Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni), Jean de Leyde (Le Prophète), Lionel (Martha), and Enzo (La Gioconda). Italian baritone Luigi Guadagnini was trounced as Rigoletto: “It is a thousand pities that the poor man came so far to do so little” (Times). In an underprepared Mignon, Nilsson was judged to have fallen short of her own more youthful and graceful performance of thirteen years earlier, when she had introduced Ambroise Thomas’s portrait of Goethe’s touching waif to America. Trebelli’s Carmen compared unfavorably to Minnie Hauk’s, New York’s first, in 1878. Thomas’s take on Hamlet was denounced as lèse-Shakespeare in its solitary New York hearing. With the exception of Nilsson, Campanini, and Scalchi, the principals of Les Huguenots were “simply earnest, correct, and lifeless” and the orchestra “almost continuously irresponsive to Signor Vianesi’s baton” (Times).
TABLE 1. The Metropolitan's Inaugural Season, 1883–84 (all operas given in Italian)
TABLE 1. (continued)
FALL AND RISE OF BEL CANTO
The lesson of the Met’s first season was that Thomas, Bizet, and Meyerbeer, not to mention Wagner, Gounod, Boito, and Ponchielli, had eclipsed “old” Italian opera. Verdi’s Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata and the bel canto works fell well below the 1883–84 box-office average, trailing far behind Faust, Lohengrin, Mignon, La Gioconda, Les Huguenots, and Don Giovanni. No one, not even Marcella Sembrich, could stem the tide. In the interest of protecting their investment, the pro–bel canto box holders took a grudging back seat to the ticket-buying public. The influential coterie of Wagnerite critics that had railed often and loudly against the dramatic implausibilities and musical shallowness of Italian opera, together with the “ultra musical people in the gallery,” had won the day. In a moment of particular hauteur, Krehbiel dismissed Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, throwing in Verdi for good measure, for clinging to “the petty world of feelings,” the “skeleton” for their abiding and exclusive interest in melody (Tribune, Nov. 6, 1883). For the next seven years, the war would be waged not between two houses and two companies, but as a latter-day “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.” Lucia, Elvira, and their sisters lived on at the Academy for the remaining season-and-a-half of Mapleson’s tenure. At the Metropolitan from 1884 until 1891, its German years, Donizetti was absent, Rossini was represented only by his French grand opera, Guillaume Tell, and Bellini was confined to just three performances of Norma. When Lucia di Lammermoor was revived for the formidable Nellie Melba in 1893, Henderson, unmoved, pronounced the opera “dead to the world” (Times, Dec. 5). And so it went for decades. Caruso himself was unable to shield the 1904 premiere of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia from the vituperations of Krehbiel (“a mouldering corpse”) and Henderson (“empty formulas . . . without a trace of dramatic characterization”). In fact, bel canto programming continued to be so spotty that partisan critical attacks were largely moot.
The beginning of the turnabout came with the February 18, 1918, revival of I Puritani. Without explanation, the Bellini that Krehbiel had once pilloried was suddenly a model to be emulated: “If only the composers of Francesca da Rimini or Mârouf could exchange three-quarters of their orchestral mastery for a tithe of the lyric ecstasy which floods the operas of Bellini, the world of modern opera would take on a more hopeful aspect” (Tribune). Krehbiel’s conversion aside, I Puritani served the critic’s present purpose: to bludgeon Riccardo Zandonai and Henri Rabaud, whose operas had had recent Met premieres. A week later, Krehbiel devoted an entire column to a summary of I Puritani notices, nearly all glowing (Tribune, Feb. 24). When Olin Downes became principal music reviewer for the Times in 1924, bel canto found a true champion. He took the occasion of the January 18, 1926, production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia to celebrate Rossini. The next year, it was Bellini’s turn. Norma retained “a surprising amount of its formal strength, its beauty and eloquence” (Nov. 17, 1927). And he loved La Sonnambula: “The music unfolds one faultless melody after another, always appropriate in warmth or pathos or tenderness to the emotion of the text, yet never violating the shape of the formal musical speech” (March 16, 1932). By the mid-1930s, the bel canto operas most frequently revived at the Met, Lucia di Lammermoor, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, L’Elisir d’amore, Norma, and Don Pasquale, were no longer wanting for rehabilitation by the critical establishment. They had stood the test of time and belonged to the ages.
It took another couple of decades for the neglected operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini to emerge from near oblivion. Their rediscovery turned on the confluence of two phenomena, a soprano, Maria Callas, and a technology, the long-playing record. In January 1949, soon after the start of her career, Callas stunned the Venetian public by following a run of Walküre Brünnhildes with her first Puritani Elviras. During these performances at La Fenice, a role unquestionably the property of the soprano leggero (a light, flexible soprano voice) was triumphantly reinvented by a soprano drammatico d’agilità (a soprano voice of both power and agility). Her recording of Bellini’s then unfamiliar opera was released on the heels of the familiar Lucia. Callas went on to breathe new musical and dramatic life into other works long in limbo as Italian theaters mounted rarities specifically for her, Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia and Armida, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Poliuto, and Bellini’s Il Pirata, all captured live or in the studio. The conservative Met trod more timorously than did venues abroad. During her all-too-brief string of twenty-three performances with the company, the only bel canto roles Callas sang were Norma, her calling card, and Lucia. The December 8, 1956, broadcast finds her in less than optimal form. Still, the poignancy of Lucia’s predicament explodes at the intersection of bel canto ornamentation and Callas’s incisive accents and diction. She brings the plangency of a “Lacrimosa” to the “Soffriva nel pianto” duet; for the “Mad Scene,” she summons despair and ecstasy at will. Many sopranos, mostly leggero like her predecessors, have followed Callas as Lucia at the Met; few have been deaf to her lessons.19
Least of all Joan Sutherland. And she had none of Callas’s instability in the upper register, none of the weakness of most coloraturas in the lower. Her 1961 Met debut as Lucia was front-page news (Herald Tribune, Nov. 27). Twelve minutes of curtain calls saluted the “Mad Scene.” Alas, cameras and microphones were absent. Two months later, television’s Bell Telephone Hour documented her star turn live, preserving not only the voice of “la Stupenda,” but the impact of her interpretation. As her career progressed, Sutherland was often perceived as an indifferent actress. In this telecast, she makes vivid the young woman’s hallucination, the encounter with her beloved by the fountain, her joy at hearing the wedding music, the tender evocation of love, the febrile search for the invisible flute. For the nearly fourteen minutes of scrutiny by the cameras, the singer’s virtuosity serves the drama. Sutherland’s complete Lucia was captured in a Met telecast on November 13, 1982. At fifty-six, less nimble of foot and, naturally, less fresh of voice, hers remained the standard to be met.
FIGURE 5
. Lucia di Lammermoor “Mad Scene,” Joan Sutherland as Lucia, 1961 (courtesy Photofest)
It was the drive to find vehicles for Sutherland that called back works not heard at the Met for at least three decades: La Sonnambula (1962–63), Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (1971–72), I Puritani (1975–76), and new productions of Lucia di Lammermoor (1964–65) and Norma (1969–70). She had become one of the company’s most potent and ultimately most durable attractions. Marilyn Horne was the raison d’être for Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri (1973–74) and Semiramide (1990–91), both long absent. The newsworthy debut of Beverly Sills at La Scala in The Siege of Corinth propelled the soprano and Rossini’s opera onto the Met stage for the first time (1974–75). Cecilia Bartoli secured a place for Rossini’s La Cenerentola (1997–98). For Renée Fleming, keen to add bel canto credentials to her title of Mozart-Strauss specialist, the management scheduled Bellini’s Il Pirata (2002–03) and Rossini’s Armida (2009–10). Juan Diego Flórez, the sole tenore di grazia (a light, flexible tenor voice) in Met history to spearhead a bel canto premiere, was matched by Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau in the pyrotechnics of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory (2010–11). Donizetti’s Anna Bolena (2011–12) provided another opportunity for Anna Netrebko to extend her lyric voice into the domain of the coloratura. And DiDonato shone in the title role of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda (2012–13). Callas had worked her magic. The appetite for unfamiliar bel canto she reawakened has continued to be satisfied by ensuing generations of artists trained to negotiate the most difficult embellishments with amazing virtuosity. The feast continues.20
TWO
Cultural Capital, 1884–1903
THE GERMAN SEASONS AND FRENCH OPERA
THE GERMAN SEASONS: 1884–1891
AS THE 1883–84 SEASON CAME TO AN END, there was no clear decision as to which impresario, Mapleson or Abbey, or which house, the veteran Academy or the rookie Metropolitan, would emerge the victor in what was in retrospect the city’s first opera war. The outcome would have little to do with the tiff between the Nobs and the Swells that had set it off. Nor would the endgame be other than marginally affected by the much publicized face-off between sparring divas. It would, instead, have everything to do with the economics of producing opera on an internationally competitive scale in New York.
When the smoke cleared, Mapleson was left weakened but standing, if only until Christmas 1885. Abbey was gone. His Grand Italian Opera had run up a heavy deficit for which he was personally responsible. Not that he was extravagant; he was actually quite frugal. But by neglecting to factor into his equation that the upper tiers held half the seats of the house, and that they accounted for one-third of the receipts of sold-out performances, he had made a costly miscalculation: at $2–$3 each, tickets were beyond the grasp of the popular, largely immigrant audience. Sales fell sharply as curiosity surrounding the new house dwindled. By the time Abbey adjusted prices downward it was too late. He offered to return for a second season with the proviso that the stockholders shoulder his losses; the directors refused to levy the requisite assessments. The board received bids from two managers based in England, and another from Leopold Damrosch, founder and conductor of the Oratorio Society of New York and of the New York Symphony Society, rival of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society led by Theodore Thomas. German-born like Thomas, Damrosch had been a musical force in the city since his arrival in 1871. His proposition departed radically from conventional arrangements between owners and leasing impresarios. For an annual salary and a percentage of the profits, Damrosch agreed to put on a season of fourteen operas at ticket prices cut by half and more, and at an anticipated average cost per performance less than half that incurred by Abbey—all the while balancing the books. Risks and rewards would accrue to the stockholders in their new capacity as producers.1
German New York
Damrosch had in mind a season of opera not in Italian, but in German, its repertoire principally consigned to works composed on German texts, with casts recruited in Germany at fees far lower than Abbey’s stars had commanded. The orchestra would be drawn from the German players of his New York Symphony Society, by all accounts superior to the Italian instrumentalists Abbey had hired. Damrosch would do all the conducting. In making his case, he contended that the German speakers of New York, the population he was confident of luring to the half-empty upper tiers, were interested neither in Italian opera nor in German opera sung in Italian. Ultimately, and despite resistance from influential box holders, the bottom line won out. On and off the stage for the next seven years, German was in every way the lingua franca of the Metropolitan.
Damrosch had come to New York to direct the by then well-established Arion Society, one of the many singing groups active in the United States in the second half of the century. The influx of German intellectuals and cultural workers, musicians in particular, had begun with their flight from Europe following the aborted 1848 revolutions. In 1855, the Philharmonic was 79 percent German; by 1892, 97 percent of its players were of German descent. German music dominated programming; until World War I, 70 percent of the repertory of US orchestras was German or Austrian. The 1880 federal census recorded 360,000 persons of German origin in Manhattan alone, roughly 30 percent of the population. Had their Lower East Side Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) been an independent municipality, it would have been the fourth largest in the United States. New York had become the third German-speaking metropolis in the world, outstripped only by Berlin and Vienna. The immigrant audience that was still too small to support Palmo in 1844 and that, in spite of its greater numbers, had eluded Abbey in 1883 would become Damrosch’s target market. By that time, the German community had established cultural institutions of all sorts. The Atlantic Garden on the Bowery was a favored destination where “German families sang songs of the fatherland and listened to orchestras perform Strauss, Wagner, and Beethoven.” The Stadt Theater, founded in 1854, and later the Germania, the Thalia, and the Irving Place Theatre brought distinguished German actors to New York for seasons of classical drama: Schiller’s Don Carlos, Hauptmann’s Die Weber, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Two, three, and sometimes more professional repertory companies were active in Manhattan from mid-century to 1918 or so, when anti-German sentiment put them out of business. The most prominent and durable of the twenty-eight German-language papers that could be found on New York newsstands in the early 1850s was the Staats-Zeitung; it carried extensive reviews of Met performances well into the twentieth century.2
The trans-Atlantic exportation of its musical culture as a matter of Germany’s national interest began in the last decades of the nineteenth century with maneuvers to draw the United States to its side—and away from England and France. The implications of this policy “were vast, political, and universal, and extended far beyond the development of American musical life.” The calling of German musicians to spread their native canon from coast to coast intersected with the Kaiser’s imperial agenda. Through their engagement with German music, audiences advanced the conflicting intentions of liberal German musicians and nationalist German expansionists. In the end, “while the efforts of Theodore Thomas and Walter Damrosch [Leopold’s conductor-composer son] may not have represented a diplomatic act, they clearly had a diplomatic effect. For the art of the three Bs or Wagner evoked precisely the respect for German greatness, Heimat [homeland] and emotionalism that Reich officials wanted to convey, and their legacy lasted much longer than the German Kaiserreich [empire].”3
Culture Wars
Leopold Damrosch signaled his intention to promote the cause of Wagner by scheduling Tannhäuser for opening night 1884 and lavishing his best effort on the preparation of Die Walküre. Although neither was new to New York, never before had either been heard to such advantage. The early, Italianate Tannhäuser was a safe choice; Walküre, the most accessible component of the “Ring,” represented the more mature Wagner. Henderson pointed to Lohengrin, the season’s third Wa
gner opera, as proof of his axiom: that the “sincere and realistic” interpretation of German artists was in all ways superior to the Italian practice of privileging “a few tuneful numbers” (Times, Dec. 4). It was Walküre, reportedly up to the Bayreuth production standard, marvelously cast with Bayreuth regulars Amalie Materna and Marianne Brandt, that made the deepest impression. In the spirit of ensemble that divided Damrosch’s German troupe from Abbey’s assembly of stars, Brandt, who had already sung leading soprano roles in Fidelio and Don Giovanni and the principal contralto and mezzo-soprano parts in Le Prophète and Lohengrin, and had done comprimario duty to boot in Rigoletto and William Tell, impersonated both the powerful goddess Fricka and one of Wotan’s well-nigh anonymous daughters in Walküre.