Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Meyerbeer’s opera is set in sixteenth-century Holland and Germany during the uprising of the fanatical Anabaptists. The spectacle devised by the composer and his librettist includes not only the skating ballet derided by reviewers in 1884, but a Bacchic orgy, a cataclysmic explosion, and Jean de Leyde’s coronation in the Münster cathedral. Here, the private drama is enacted in the public arena: Fidès, begging alms of the assembled, recognizes her lost son in the newly crowned king; fearing for their lives, Jean denies that Fidès is his mother; and grasping the danger, she denies him in return. Critics extoled this scene and, in particular, Scalchi’s Italian rendition and, some months later, Brandt’s in German. On New Year’s Day 1892 Le Prophète finally made it to 39th Street in the original French. The cast was led by Polish tenor Jean de Reszke as Jean, the reluctant false prophet, by German soprano Lilli Lehmann, who had often sung the role of Berthe in German at the Met, and by Giulia Ravogli, an Italian contralto, as Fidès, the selfless mother.

  INTERNATIONAL SEASONS, 1891–1903

  On opening night 1891, a fortnight prior to Le Prophète, de Reszke, his brother Édouard, and Emma Eames made their New York debuts in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette—and French was heard at the Metropolitan for the first time. But through the end of the season, Les Huguenots, Faust, Mignon, L’Africaine, and Hamlet, all French, were sung in Italian, the language to which Lohengrin, Der Fliegende Holländer, Die Meistersinger, and Fidelio reverted in the early international years. The reinstatement of Italian opera in Italian was immediate. But only in 1893–94 were Faust and Carmen given wholly in French; Mignon and Les Huguenots continued in Italian. It was not until 1898–99 that the reconversion of Wagner into German was complete. In the intervening years, circumstances called for hybrid solutions, polyglot performances in which one or more of the principals sang in the original language while lesser members of the cast, and more often the chorus, sang in another, or indeed others. But whatever the fits and starts, the Metropolitan was ahead of the world’s great houses by fifty years and more in the practice of setting scores to the texts to which they had first been wed.

  In the initial international season, audiences clamoring for Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Lucia di Lammermoor, Norma, and Rigoletto were placated by fourteen Italian titles, half the program. German opera fell away to a mere sixteen performances of four works, all given in Italian. Between 1891 and 1903, the company mounted sixteen French premieres, exceeding even the quotient of Italian novelties. For these firsts, the managers engaged a cadre of French specialists: Emma Eames, Nellie Melba, and Jean and Édouard de Reszke, whose reputations were cemented in Paris; Jean Lassalle, Pol Plançon, and Emma Calvé, who had created major roles in works by Massenet; Marie Van Zandt, the first Lakmé; and Sybil Sanderson, the first Thaïs. In all, twenty-five French operas were staged. Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau could count on Faust, Carmen, Roméo et Juliette, and Les Huguenots—assuming, of course, that they paraded stellar casts. Werther, Hamlet, L’Africaine, and others languished even when sung by these same artists. Still, the frequency of performance, the new works, the number and glamour of French and Francophone stars, and the generous receipts of the beloved chestnuts conspired to assure pride of place for French opera in the early international years.

  1891–1892

  First-night notices were condescending for the most part, if not out and out inimical. But underlying disdain for Roméo et Juliette as the vanguard of the Met’s new era and the mixed reception of Eames and Jean de Reszke was the invidious comparison of the international chapter just opened with the German chapter just closed. As usual, the Musical Courier reviewer went further than his more judicious colleagues. He let fly with the prognostication that the Gounod performance was the harbinger of what would prove a disastrous regime. His devastating critique of opening night concluded, “Let us hope that the two managers [Abbey and Grau] will not live to rue the day. But we are under the impression that a public which has had seven years of education in a school of opera in which artistic ensemble and dramatic vraisemblance are not sacrificed to the glorification of two or three high salaried stars will not hail the new dispensation with hymns of abiding joy” (Dec. 16, 1891). The Musical Courier’s most venomous diatribes were reserved for the Herald’s francophilic editor and founder of the Paris edition, James Gordon Bennett, whose paper had spoken for the anti-Wagner forces during the German seasons. In its rave of Roméo et Juliette, distilled as “a general impression of beauty, grace and pleasure; a grateful freedom from the fatigue which has almost invariably accompanied even the best performances at the Metropolitan by German singers,” the Herald gave the Wagnerites as good, and with far better humor, as it got: “Dark haired, romantic sons of the South in sky blue hose and doublet, pointed of shoe and plumed of cap, held the stage so lately occupied by stern, blond knights in silver armor; clinging girlhood trembled and thrilled where stalwart demi-goddesses lately strode the boards.” The French repertoire claimed the lion’s share of that season’s New York performances. Nine Fausts, with the de Reszkes and Eames, headed the pack. The two French novelties, neither new to the city, were as lightweight as the voice of Van Zandt, for whom they were staged. Meyerbeer’s opéra comique Dinorah, with its demented heroine and her pet goat, was “too small and unattractive for so vast a house as the Metropolitan” (Herald). Reviewers indulged Léo Delibes’s Lakmé as “exceedingly pleasant” (Tribune), an “exquisite little romantic opera, with the charming little American prima donna” (Herald).

  Two of the three Italian entries got off to disappointing starts in the winter of 1891. That September, a touring company had presented a rough-and-ready edition of Cavalleria rusticana in Philadelphia; Pietro Mascagni was seen as pumping new energy into the spent traditions of Italian opera. At the Met in December, Eames’s patrician Santuzza and the “stridulous” Turiddu of Fernando Valero (Tribune) earned only tepid receipts for the Sicilian melodrama. Just two years later, Calvé, “a woman with hot blood in her veins” (Tribune, Nov. 30, 1893), set Cavalleria on the palmy road it has since enjoyed. As for Otello, first performed at the Academy of Music in 1888 by an Italian ensemble assembled for the purpose, it was immediately acknowledged as the crowning work of Verdi’s immense oeuvre. (Falstaff was yet to come.) But de Reszke himself, as the Moor, could not rescue Otello from the ignominy of the poorest box office of the Met’s 1891–92 season. The opera’s enduring appeal would be realized only many decades later. The third novelty, Semiramide, given only in Boston and never to become a fixture, was an ephemeral showcase for Adelina Patti. Later that year, she would bid yet another of her many “farewells” to her devoted New York public. The “Lesson Scene” of Il Barbiere di Siviglia was an anthology of old favorites, capped by “The Last Rose of Summer.” That was not all: Patti stood before the final curtain and regaled her fans with “Comin’ through the Rye.”15

  In August, a catastrophe befell the house. Fire destroyed the stage, the floors below, and those above all the way to the roof, and damaged parts of the auditorium. The Met’s year-old management had no recourse but to cancel the 1892–93 season. Security measures had been so mindlessly circumvented that it took no more than one vagrant match to ignite the conflagration. The vaunted sprinkler system had been turned off in the cold of winter and remained inactive; in the heat of summer, the asbestos curtain had been raised to better ventilate the stage; iron girders had been replaced by more flexible, and flammable, lumber supports. The estimated cost of rebuilding was far higher than the amount for which the house had been insured; it was precisely the state-of-the-art fireproofing, cavalierly disabled, that had justified the low valuation.

  The board seized the opportunity of the crisis to restructure the Metropolitan Opera House Company as the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company. The number of stockholders was reduced from a cumbersome seventy to a more manageable thirty-five, all of whom had exclusive rights to their boxes. A couple of negative ballots would suffice to block the transfer of shares. And the d
irectors of the reorganized company reserved for themselves unprecedented control over artistic decisions: during the Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau years, and later, they cleaved to the prerogative of endorsing six of the principal singers each season, two of whom were to appear in every subscription performance. The new architects replaced the boxes at the parquet level with an orchestra circle and additional standing room. Seating capacity grew from 3,045 to 3,400; with standees, the theater held 4,000. Following Cady’s lead, the firm of Carrere and Hastings slighted theatrical red—not for the original yellow and ivory, but for cream. This time there was no carping. The new electric lights accented the parures sparkling in the thirty-five coveted boxes to such dazzling effect that the “golden” of the 1883 “horseshoe” appreciated to the more precious “diamond.” And as important as the reinvention of the company and the house that the year off allowed was the time for planning afforded to Abbey and Grau by the calamitous event of summer 1892.16

  1893–1897

  Faust opened the rebuilt theater in 1893 as it had the Met a decade earlier. For the first five of the Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau years, it, together with Roméo et Juliette, held a monopoly on opening night, a sign of the preeminence of French opera under the new administration. Faust, in particular, was performed with such numbing frequency that Henderson famously dubbed the Metropolitan the “Faustspielhaus.” On February 14, 1896, de Reszke and Melba so incited the audience that a piano had to be rolled onto the stage so that Jean might accompany Nellie in her melodious urging that the crowd wend its way “Home, Sweet Home.” Carmen, at last in French, came into its own when the management brought together a cast—Calvé, de Reszke, Eames, and Lassalle—that the Times (Dec. 21, 1893) described as “near to justifying the epithet ‘ideal.’” In 1893–94, Calvé appeared in all but one of the thirty performances of Bizet’s opera, half in New York, half on tour; she set what still stands as the single-season record for a singer in a major role. Abandoning all restraint, Krehbiel called hers “the most sensational triumph ever achieved by any opera or singer.” If, in the course of the hundreds of Carmens she sang all over the world during her long career, Calvé became capricious, even ridiculous, in 1896 Henderson thought her perfect: “Her performance last night was that of a genius” (Times, Dec. 12). Iterations of the 1894–95 Les Huguenots with Melba, the two de Reszkes, Lillian Nordica, Plançon, Scalchi, and Victor Maurel were promoted as “The Night of the Seven Stars.” The price for orchestra seats was raised from $5 to $7 and hyped at $1 a luminary.17

  FIGURE 7. Emma Calvé as Carmen (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  Throughout this period, as before and since, critics petitioned loudly for new music that they then found wanting for one reason or another. It was the rare house premiere that won over the press, or indeed the audience. The nine French novelties introduced between 1893 and 1897 were all box-office failures. To Gounod’s sweetened versions of Goethe and Shakespeare, the company added the composer’s Philémon et Baucis, based on Ovid by way of La Fontaine; it found a tenuous place in the repertoire through the end of the Grau regime. Far more surprising was that Massenet’s sorrowful Werther, with de Reszke and Eames, eked out but one solitary performance on 39th Street. The francophilic Herald, no longer obliged to defend the underdog as it had during the Stanton years, reckoned Werther “a trifle tiresome for all classes of operagoers.” Herman Bemberg’s Elaine, dedicated to Melba and de Reszke, its original interpreters in London, soon disappeared, despite favorable reviews and good box office. Manon (Jan. 16, 1895) was a vehicle for Sibyl Sanderson, a California-born soprano, the darling of Paris and, more particularly, of the opera’s composer, Massenet, incidentally one of Bemberg’s teachers. “A much-advertised woman” (Tribune), with a small voice and “thin and strident” high notes (Times), Sanderson was cited for her charm and beauty, and her costumes, to which the Herald consecrated four detailed paragraphs. De Reszke’s Chevalier des Grieux made off with the few honors there were. The work itself was found ill suited to the cavernous Met. Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila was even more poorly received, attacked as an oratorio passing as an opera. The Herald would have preferred “a little more love in the libretto and not so much Hebrew lamentation!” And during what ought to have been the spectacular finale, “in the midst of wild hilarity” malfunctioning stage machinery hoisted a column that the Samson, Francesco Tamagno, had valorously toppled. Donizetti’s La Favorite, sung in its more familiar Italian translation, was dismissed as beneath contempt by Krehbiel and Henderson. Calvé appeared as Anita, a role written for her, in La Navarraise. The Herald wondered at the good London press for the one-acter: “To be perfectly blunt, Massenet’s opera is no opera at all. . . . Imagine a series of living pictures, with speech and music thrown in.” An abbreviated Les Pêcheurs de perles, also with Calvé, made its debut the same evening as La Navarraise. Bizet’s exotic piece bred rare discord between the Times (“it abounds in lyric beauties”) and the Tribune (“the opera is insufferably stupid”). Le Cid was an occasion for de Reszke to reprise the role he had originated in Paris in 1885; the brickbats for Massenet’s music, his fourth Met flop in successive years, and poor receipts for the second performance foretold the opera’s early demise.18

  Only one of the four new Italian works did any better than the French novelties. Pagliacci was initially programmed with the neoclassical Orfeo, a coupling as odd as that of the Gluck opera with Cavalleria rusticana two years earlier. Ruggero Leoncavallo’s trenchant depiction of a crime of passion within an itinerant commedia dell’arte troupe rang up average receipts until it found its niche that very season as half of Cav/Pag, the most indissoluble of all operatic double bills. The ever prodigal Grau again presented his two top sopranos for the price of one, Calvé, who as Santuzza “fairly outdid herself” (Herald, Dec. 23, 1893), and an indisposed Melba as Nedda. The response of the Times, “the effect of bringing the two operas together in one night was good,” is surely among operatic criticism’s rare understatements. Falstaff, starring Maurel, Verdi’s first “Fat John,” fell far below the season’s average. The modest take of Le Nozze di Figaro was a faulty predictor of its brilliant future. Even the magnetic Fernando de Lucia and Emma Calvé, in the roles they had created in Rome in 1891, were unable to generate enthusiasm for L’Amico Fritz. Mascagni’s romantic comedy had but one complete hearing. Its second act was drafted as a curtain-raiser for, what else, his own inevitable Cavalleria rusticana, Calvé as the sweet-tempered Suzel in the former and the impassioned Santuzza in the latter.

  How to explain the management’s persistence in mounting new works, given the dismal grades racked up by one premiere after another? If pressure came from the might of reviewers, it also came from within. Like all major companies, the Met guarded its prestige jealously and its standing depended, in significant part, on the propagation of opera as a living art. Equally compelling, perhaps more, was the imperative to keep its stars happy by obliging them with the novel and flattering roles they craved. And after all, if Calvé failed to put over La Navarraise or L’Amico Fritz, there was always Carmen; de Reszke could rely on the trusty Faust and Les Huguenots to offset Werther and Le Cid. Then there was the Wagner he demanded to sing in German, seconded by two thousand starved Wagnerites who had lobbied the management for German performances. Abbey and Grau made their case to the board, and a lucrative fifth slot, Thursday evening, was added to accommodate the German repertoire, with Seidl conducting. Of the many resplendent moments of this period, none is remembered as more electrifying than November 27, 1895, when de Reszke sang Tristan in the original for the first time, brother Édouard King Marke, Nordica Isolde. Before the season ended, the tenor had added Lohengrin in the original. The following year, de Reszke continued to grow his Wagnerian laurels with the young hero of Siegfried (for which he shaved his famous moustache), seemingly unperturbed by the drama that surrounded the production. When Melba was announced for Brünnhilde, Nordica, having reason to presume the role to be hers, took understa
ndable umbrage. She held the tenor responsible for the offense and canceled her season. But Melba came to grief in this, her first and only attempt to rise to the warrior maiden (Dec. 30, 1896). She too dropped out of 1896–97, or what was left of it. In the end, it was de Reszke who counted: his assumption of the heroic roles of the “Ring” guaranteed Wagner stage time comparable, if not to the French wing, certainly to the Italian. That he sang only eight performances of Italian opera out of his more than three hundred in seven years with the company attests not only to the primacy of French and German opera at the end of the century, but to the low estate to which the bel canto composers and Verdi had fallen.19