Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Don Giovanni, Le Prophète, Les Huguenots, and Rigoletto were holdovers from the inaugural season. Apart from the Wagner firsts, there were two other German novelties, Fidelio and Der Freischütz. The premieres of three French operas, a response to the preference of the public, confirmed that the Met had become home to a serious company, devoted to serious music. Reviewers underscored the historical interest of Auber’s Masaniello (usually titled La Muette de Portici) and Rossini’s William Tell (born Guillaume Tell), formative influences on the development of le grand opéra français, and Halévy’s La Juive, a telling example of the genre’s maturity. Henry Finck went so far as to shower Auber with reflected glory; the composer was credited with leaving his “mark on a much greater master, Richard Wagner, whose enthusiasm for Masaniello was unbounded” (Evening Post). The scenic and dramatic effects of French grand opera productions, in particular the eruption of Vesuvius in the Auber and the transformation from moonlit night to Alpine “rosy morn” (Tribune) in the Rossini, impressed critics and public. Damrosch had delivered more than he had promised. Not only had he kept to his budget, but he had presented, in opulent settings and compelling stagings, a talented ensemble of singing actors in a challenging repertoire. New York had never before experienced so rich an operatic season.4

  On February 15, an exhausted Leopold Damrosch died suddenly of pneumonia. True to his word, he had conducted every performance, fifty-two in three months, including in a last burst of nine days five Die Walküres, a Le Prophète, and a Lohengrin. Shocked and disconcerted, the board turned to its secretary, Edmund C. Stanton, who had come to opera—and to Wagner—only lately and almost by chance. Stanton was named executive director and general manager. But as novelist Louis Auchincloss, his great-nephew, put it years later, “Something in the haunting strains of Tristan und Isolde . . . or in the stirring motifs of the ‘Ring’ . . . must have penetrated the polished surface of this well-mannered and obliging young man to turn him into the ardent champion of operas detested by the frivolous but powerful society of which he had once been so compliant and affable a member.” Walter Damrosch, twenty-three years old, was made assistant manager and assistant conductor. It was Walter who had led most of the remaining performances of the season, and it was he who was dispatched to Europe to find a successor to his father. For the upcoming season, 1885–86, he conscripted the Hungarian-born Anton Seidl, assistant to Wagner in the years just prior to the composer’s death in February 1883.5

  By the time he landed in New York with his wife, soprano Auguste Seidl-Kraus, Seidl, who had been central to the preparation of the first “Ring” cycle in 1876, was an accomplished conductor, poised to fulfill Wagner’s prophecy: that he would become the master’s American apostle. In the German seasons to come, he would be responsible for the momentous US premieres of Die Meistersinger (1886), Tristan und Isolde (1886), Siegfried (1887), Götterdämmerung (1888), and Das Rheingold (1889). Critics were unfailingly dithyrambic: Seidl’s “impulse dominated reflection, emotion shamed logic. . . . As for the rest, professional and layman, dilettante and ignorant, their souls were his to play with.” The company’s leading soprano, the acknowledged prima donna assoluta Lilli Lehmann, incomparable in her exploration of the entire repertoire, was a surpassing Isolde and Brünnhilde. The other Seidl/Stanton novelties, and as often their execution, evoked a mixed response. Aïda was admired for its modernity and for its sumptuous décor, but only Brandt, the Amneris, emerged unscathed, and Seidl was chastised for his “dragging” tempos (Times). Another Verdi masterpiece, Un Ballo in maschera, headed by the always exceptional Lehmann, was buried in scorn, its “more than familiar music wedded to a plot almost comic in its lack of ideas” (Herald). To add insult to injury, the act 3 festivities were “beefed up” by the interpolation of Massenet dance tunes. Norma was dismissed as a relic. The two French premieres—Spontini’s Fernand Cortez (“a good deal like an attempt to resuscitate a mummy” [Tribune]) and L’Africaine (“There are plenty of good musical judges who think it was a pity Meyerbeer lived to complete this opera” [Herald])—provided opportunities to applaud the scenery, if little else. German pieces, Wagner and Weber’s Euryanthe aside, were chosen for their spectacle or their gemütlichkeit, their amiability. Among the offerings intended to leaven the heavy dose of Wagnerian music-drama, Die Königin von Saba was the only hit, its exotic melodies and décors creating sufficient demand to justify a whopping twenty-five performances in its first season. Reviewers who showed indulgence toward Goldmark’s Biblical extravaganza were merciless toward his Arthurian Merlin. The lighter pieces, Ignaz Brüll’s Das Goldene Kreuz, Viktor Nessler’s Der Trompeter von Säkkingen, and Peter Cornelius’s Der Barbier von Bagdad, pleased only the Germanophile press corps.6

  TABLE 2. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1884–85 to 1890–91 (Italian and French operas given in German)

  TABLE 2. (continued)

  TABLE 2. (continued)

  In 1892, looking back, Stanton rehearsed his apology for German opera one last time. He began by opposing “old favorite operas” (namely, bel canto) to the “new,” the “modern” (namely, Wagner above all). He aimed his sharpest barbs at the star system; in its place, he had advocated repertory casting and the thorough preparation of chorus and orchestra. He was persuaded that New York operagoers, who had come to expect the high musical and dramatic standards of the German ensemble, “could no more sink back into the enthusiasms that satisfied the audiences of a quarter of a century ago than could our modern theatregoers applaud the mouthing and strutting of the dead histrionic heroes of melodramatic fame.” The public’s affinity for “modern orchestration,” that is, for more contemporary music, had been cultivated by exposure to the symphony. The point of no return was long passed. In conclusion, he taxed the Abbey prescription of stars singing an “old favorite” repertory with “prohibiting the production of opera as an Art-Work.”7

  In Stanton’s first season, and for the next two, 50 percent of the repertoire was given over to Wagner, 70 percent to German works. The German share dipped to over 50 percent in 1888–89, about 60 percent in 1889–90 and 1890–91. In the period 1886–1891, Wagner receipts were higher by 21 percent than the average take of the non-Wagner repertoire, German or not. By the end of the seven years, all the operas of Wagner had been produced by the Met with the exception of two early works, Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot, and Parsifal, until 1903 staged only at Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus. Four years into Stanton’s regime, Henderson gave a rhapsodic assessment of what he considered the ennobling effect of German opera: “Musical amateurs are beginning to understand that this is a serious art form, capable of mighty purposes and almost fathomless meanings. . . . It is beginning to stand in the estimation of thinking men and women beside the most elevated drama and poetry” (Times, Jan. 19, 1888).8

  Class Strife

  Throughout the German seasons and after, box holders waged a tug-of-war with yet another segment of the operagoing public, “culturist” habitués of the parquet. The two classes squared off on the code of conduct appropriate to the opera house, a front related to the ongoing culture war over musical taste. Early on, Musical Courier (Dec. 10, 1884) threatened to publish the names of those who, like the occupants of prominent boxes at the season’s first Lohengrin, chatted and laughed during performances. Two years later, nothing had changed. A satirical piece in Harper’s (April 1886) turned the volume up a notch, urging that the philistines who treated the opera house as their private salon repair to “the congenial circles of miners and Indian reservations upon the frontier,” an allusion to the West, where so many recent fortunes had been made. In a reversal of class typology, it was the ill-behaved, well-born, well-heeled, and stubbornly middlebrow box holders who were shown up by the well-behaved, modestly born, middle-class, and highbrow ticket holders. The reviewer goes on to pity those “whom an unkind fate dooms to sit near [the noisemakers].” More circumspect observers, such as Henderson, attempted to mediate what had become “continual warfare” by not
ing that “like most questions in this world, this has two sides. The stockholders built and maintain the opera house and they have undeniably the right to derive as much pleasure as possible from the fruits of their enterprise.” And after all, compared with the prestige that the presence of high society lent the cause of German opera, “a matter [not] to be lightly considered,” turning the house into a “social resort” was “by no means so heinous a procedure” as some irate opera lovers protested. He proposed a middle ground: “No one objects to talk which is not too loud. If the occupants of the boxes will bear that in mind, neither they nor their valuable friends in the other parts of the house will be annoyed” (Times, Dec. 29, 1887). The compromise fell flat. And three years later, the board was obliged to issue the following notice: “Many complaints having been made to the directors of the Opera House of the annoyance produced by the talking in the boxes during the performances, the board requests that it be discontinued.”9

  The stockholders remained disinclined to moderate their deportment. They demanded long intermissions timed not to scene changes, but to leisurely social intercourse, complete with refreshments delivered from a nearby restaurant. Their power was such that the lights in the auditorium were turned up when they complained about the dark, the effect on theatrical illusion be damned. Here Henderson drew the line: “This last fact is a sufficient commentary on any professions of devotion to the laws of art” (Times, Jan. 22, 1889). But despite the outrage of much of the public, the lights stayed on. Sightings of those who mattered would have otherwise been foiled, above all the entrance of Mrs. Astor into box 9 (box 7 after 1892) at precisely 9:00 p.m. on Monday nights. “What she did was copied slavishly by the rest of society,” commented soprano Frances Alda. As a result, more often than not, the first act was sung to a half-empty auditorium; occasionally, the curtain would be held until she arrived. Alda described the moment thus: “As nine o’clock drew near, there would be the swish and rustle of silk trains, the tramp of feet coming down the orchestra aisles, the scrape of chairs being moved to better positions in the boxes. Interest in happenings on the stage dwindled. Opera glasses were raised and focused on the curtains of Box Seven. . . . Mrs. Astor came in and took her seat. An audible sigh of satisfaction passed through the house. The prestige of Monday Night was secure. Only, then, was the attention of all but the ardent music-lovers in the audience turned to the singers and orchestra.” With the same regularity that marked her entrance, at the close of the second intermission, Mrs. Astor made her exit—in time for the competing Monday night Patriarch or Assembly balls.10

  The Waning German Hegemony

  As early as spring 1885, the Wagnerites declared the campaign won. German opera was no longer an “occasional and curious experiment on off evenings and with a chance-medley company,” but a repertoire whose interpretative style had been “approved by and accepted by ‘fashion’ and ‘the town.’” In truth, less than halfway through the German seasons, grumbling among “fashion,” audible from the first, grew louder as stockholders became ever more exasperated with “the town” and what they experienced as a surfeit of Wagner. Nostalgia for the Italian operas of the past kept pace with their increasing hostility. Rising costs rubbed salt into the wounds inflicted night after night by the repertoire. Salaries of German artists had mushroomed over time: Lilli Lehmann’s fee was $600 per performance, Albert Niemann’s $1,000. At the January 21, 1888, meeting of the board, the directors determined that two alternatives be put before the stockholders: to cancel the 1888–89 season, which would have entailed an assessment, or to continue German opera at more than three times the current price per box. The option of an Italian season was judged an extravagance not worth considering. The stockholders agreed to continue German opera. By opening night 1890, Stanton was in still deeper trouble: he had lost his most bankable stars, Lehmann and tenor Max Alvary.11

  FIGURE 6. The war between the German and the Italian/French wings, Puck cartoon, February 11, 1891 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  On January 7, 1891, Henry Abbey, this time with Maurice Grau (a lawyer by training, he had managed the American tours of Anton Rubinstein, Henri Wieniawski, and Jacques Offenbach) and John B. Schoeffel (a silent partner), offered to lease the house once again, guaranteeing a season of sixty shows in Italian and French, and promising Jean de Reszke, Édouard de Reszke, and Nellie Melba, all for $2,000 per performance. With the understanding that there would be no additional assessment, the stockholders voted a decisive yes. As Auchincloss described it, the “revolt . . . against . . . the longueurs of Wagner” had succeeded. “Lilli Lehmann [had] tried to warn Edmund of it; she begged him to make some concessions.” But he had refused. Stanton submitted his resignation. The German era had come to an end. In a long lament for the seven seasons gone by, Henderson held out this caution to Stanton’s successor: “The Italian singer is always a singer, and he conceives it to be his divine right to face the footlights, sing directly to the audience, and dwell on all his high notes. . . . This style of thing, however, is dead in New York” (Times, March 22, 1891).12

  Maybe so. But there was no question that Stanton had presided over a disastrous final German year. In a desperate move to address one of the crushing criticisms leveled at his stewardship, that he had failed to deliver on novelties as stipulated, he staged three New York premieres. The season opened with Alberto Franchetti’s Wagnerian Asrael; it ran for five performances to feeble box office and to weak and, in at least two instances, overtly anti-Semitic reviews: “The modern Hebrew composer has the faculty of absorbing, assimilating, call it what you will, the dominating influences of his environment. . . . Look at Meyerbeer and Halévy, consider Mendelssohn and Goldmark, and Franchetti has the advantage over them all—he comes last” (Musical Courier, Dec. 3, 1890). Krehbiel, too, was driven to the Meyerbeer analogy: weren’t the two composers both Jewish and wealthy? The second novelty was Anton Smareglia’s Il Vassalo di Szigeth, which had four performances and an uneven reception. And finally, and fatally, Stanton presented the thirty-year-old Diana von Solange, the inspiration of Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. A public outcry forced the cancellation of the run after two performances. Fearing a boycott by the Wagnerites following the announcement of the impending changeover to French and Italian, Stanton scheduled a flurry of twenty-five performances of Wagner out of the season’s remaining thirty-five. Audiences came and vented their anger at the board by cheering Seidl and the German casts at every curtain call.13

  THE THREE PROPHETS

  Meyerbeer’s Il Profeta (March 21, 1884), Der Profet (Dec. 17, 1884), and Le Prophète (Jan. 1, 1892) mark the transitions that define the slice of history we cover in the first two chapters of this book: from the Grand Italian Opera to the German seasons to the international house the Metropolitan became in 1891. Il Profeta was on Abbey’s bill for the inaugural season, Der Profet on Damrosch’s program for the first German season, and Le Prophète on the boards on Abbey’s return. Meyerbeer, who in 1815 traded the Jakob he was given at birth for the Italian Giacomo, was arguably the most cosmopolitan of his peers. He composed operas on Italian and German texts (Il Crociato in Egitto and Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, for example), and most memorably on French librettos. His works range in style from bel canto to the grand opéra he is credited with founding, in the company of Auber and Rossini. Le Prophète shared with his Les Huguenots, Bizet’s Carmen, and Gounod’s Faust the distinction of trilingual hearings in the Met’s Italian, German, and early international years.

  The positive reception of the March 21, 1884 Il Profeta was buried under three distractions. The first was the misguided staging of one of the opera’s best-known pages; the second, the misbehavior of the box holders; and the third, a suit brought by the impresario against his star contralto. The Times reported affably on the “general merriment” provoked by “the evolution of the [roller] skaters, one of whom fell twice” during what the composer and his librettist, Eugène Scribe, intended as a coup de théâtre, a s
pectacular ice-skating scene. The reviewer took a less genial tone toward the “indifference or servility of the multifarious management” vis-à-vis arrogant box holders who “considered themselves privileged to indulge in conversations which are heard over half the house.” And lastly, the contralto sued by Abbey for damages was Sofia Scalchi; she had refused to replace an ailing colleague. Abbey was forced to cancel. The defense protested that “Mme. Scalchi was and is but human, and had eaten a hearty breakfast. It was impossible for her to appear at so short a notice as Fidès, but she offered to sing in anything else and even two or three acts of The Prophet.” Delighted to strike a blow for the Academy, Mapleson testified in favor of Scalchi and, more to the point, against Abbey: “His experience, you know, was only obtained in 1883 and 1884. Before that he knew nothing of operatic management” (Times, Dec. 18, 1884).

  The New York press seized the opportunity to bask in its pro-German biases by contrasting the December 17, 1884, Der Profet to the earlier Il Profeta. The Mail and Express drew out the parallel: “Last year’s interpretation of it at the same house sinks into insignificance compared with last night’s. Then it seemed merely a show opera. Now it is revealed as a musical and dramatic composition of solid and substantial worth.” The German-language performance had disclosed the opera’s previously obscured qualities. Putting aside his contempt for the composer in the interest of the larger agenda, Krehbiel proclaimed Der Profet “an extraordinary work,” a judgment absent from his review of Il Profeta. He went on to cite “the great amount of really fine dramatic writing, both vocal and instrumental, with which Meyerbeer has enriched Scribe’s poor libretto” (Tribune, Dec. 20). For the Times, Marianne Brandt, as Fidès, “acted . . . with a mastery of the methods of expression quite foreign to the exponents of Italian art.” The press corps’s declaration of unconditional German superiority rings hollow: the year before, the same newspaper, and in all likelihood the same reviewer, had lauded the performance of Scalchi in the same role in approximately the same terms. And although one critic asserted that “the Prophet was given with a magnificence of ensemble last night at the Metropolitan that made it one of the notable representations of Dr. Damrosch’s already notable season” (World), another pointed out that Damrosch conducted from a piano score and failed to cue musicians, to the detriment of the musical product (Musical Courier, Dec. 24, 1884). This much is clear: that during the inaugural and German seasons, Il Profeta/Der Profet ran a close second to the thirty-three performances chalked up by Faust, the period’s leading title, excepting the Wagner entries, of course.14