Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  From the New York Protestant establishment, through its spokesperson, the Rev. Dr. George L. Shearer, Secretary of the American Tract Society, came the charge that the work itself was sacrilegious. Shearer’s slippery case for censorship took the form of a loaded question: “If Christianity is the law of the land, and is protected by that law, because its morality is the foundation of the government, would not this proposed travesty of the most sacred things of our worship be indictable under the statute which authorizes the suppression of whatever is an offense to public decency?” His “Anti-Parsifal Crusade” was launched in defense of the “most sacred things of our worship.” Shearer’s brief held that the flower maidens were nothing other than a “red light legion”; Parsifal he likened somewhat more credibly to Jesus, Gurnemanz to John the Baptist, Kundry to the Magdalen. He railed against the representation of the “Lord’s Supper” as an “amusement . . . for the sake of gain”; the washing of Parsifal’s feet he decried as an impious reference to an episode in the life of Christ (Tribune, Nov. 11, 1903). The Eagle had its own take on Shearer’s screed: “They [Shearer and a second New York minister] . . . say that if anybody is allowed to produce it [Parsifal] he should be a Christian and not a Jew. . . . As for denouncing Mr. Conried because he is a Jew, that is an unworthy business for a Christian clergyman. . . . We can conceive no earthly or celestial difference in the effect to be produced on the spectator by the nationality or belief of the man who hires the singers and pays the rent” (Nov. 11, 1903). The Metropolitan counsel, the same attorney who failed to exonerate Caruso, argued that Parsifal had already been presented in concert form in Brooklyn in 1890, with Anton Seidl conducting, and again in concert in Boston; the Wagners, he noted, had voiced no objection on these occasions. The case was ultimately thrown out on a simple finding: the Parsifal copyright did not extend to the United States. The city’s mayor, petitioned to uphold Shearer, refused to revoke the license issued to the Met.6

  By the time Judge Lacombe rendered his decision, November 24, 1903, preparations for Parsifal were well along. Most astounding had been the advance ticket sales, reputedly the greatest ever seen in New York. Weeks before the opening, the American Journal reported melodramatically, “Women Faint amid Crush for Seats to Parsifal. Many of Them Took Places in Line before Daylight and Were Too Weak to Reach the Window When It Was Opened” (Nov. 11, 1903). Mail orders were delivered so thick and fast that their processing required a room of its own. The paymaster was sequestered for the three days it took to address the refund envelopes. A special police guard was called to be on hand for the opening performance. The Evening Telegram published a special edition, the “Parsifal Extra” (Dec. 24, 1903), that included a front-page story, “Great Crush to See Parsifal,” and a series of drawings of scenes from the opera.

  The premiere began at the unlikely hour of five o’clock in the afternoon. The doors were shut at the start of the prelude and, again exceptionally, no one arrived late. A hush was reported to envelop the auditorium at the end of the almost two-hour-long act 1, in imitation of Bayreuth’s reverent response to the consecration of the Holy Grail. The audience filed out for the dinner intermission, a concession to the more than five-hour-long score. Many returned in evening clothes (one answer to the question of what to wear to a performance that begins in late afternoon and ends just before midnight) for the second act flower maidens, for Kundry’s attempted seduction of Parsifal, for the spectacle of a deadly spear arrested in midair, and for the collapse of the castle of Klingsor, the reprobate knight. It was here that soprano Milka Ternina disclosed Kundry’s contrasting identities most artfully: “the strange fascination of a Greek maenad . . . a soul racked and torn with an anguish that freezes the blood . . . a figure of wondrous charm” (Times, Jan. 1, 1904). Seven minutes of applause and shouts for the cast and production staff were followed by calls for Conried himself, who obliged with an uncharacteristically modest bow before the curtain. At the end of act 3, the impresario came forward again to congratulate “American operagoers” for the discerning enthusiasm they had displayed for “a great, solemn, beautiful work like this” (Tribune). Critics acquainted with the Festspielhaus production pronounced the Met’s superior. Devout Wagnerite Henry Finck consigned much of his notice to the décor—which, as he put it, “at every moment dovetailed with the orchestral score, and [was] an essential part of the total effect, arousing deep emotions, and constituting a succession of real works of art.” He marveled in particular at the transformation from forest to temple as Parsifal and Gurnemanz traversed the stage (Evening Post, Dec. 26, 1903). The engagement of leading contralto Louise Homer for an off-stage, six-word phrase was one more sign of the impresario’s profligate showmanship. Against odds of all sorts, Conried had brought off an operatic coup as memorable as any to be found in the annals of the Metropolitan before or since. Barely a month into his first season, he had reached what in retrospect would be thought the high point of his tenure. Met stockholders had eleven Parsifal performances to thank for their dividend. The twelfth filled the general manager’s purse.7

  Salome, January 22, 1907

  Ever ready to stir the pot, Conried announced on his return from his summer 1906 European rounds that the coming Metropolitan season would see the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome, the first of the composer’s operas to be staged in the United States. Conried had attended a Dresden performance and had been struck by its effect on the audience. Soon after, he began haggling in correspondence with Strauss over royalties for prospective Metropolitan dates and terms that might induce the composer to make a second trip to New York. In winter and spring 1904, Strauss had led several local orchestras at venues as disparate as Carnegie Hall and Wanamaker’s department store. The negotiations concluded with an agreement for ten shows without Strauss, at what Conried protested were unheard-of, “ridiculously high” fees. In October, the general manager advertised the first performance, at double the usual prices, of the one-act opera that had, “for more than a year, been the storm center of the musical world.” Salome would be presented as the second half of his annual benefit, the first part a starry concert. Conried expected another personally lucrative succès de scandale. What he got was more than even he bargained for. Based on Oscar Wilde’s notorious 1894 French play, Salome had been first performed in Dresden in 1905 to an extraordinary number of curtain calls. While Conried could claim without dissembling, and did, that the opera had been produced in twenty houses throughout Europe, including decorous German court theaters, it was also the case that it had been censored by the Kaiser, if briefly, and banned in Vienna and London. The impresario himself had qualms about the work’s New York reception. He wrote to Strauss, “I . . . don’t know how the American people will take to the subject, and I have simply said that, even at the risk of my audiences not liking the material, I, as Director of the Metropolitan Opera House, would be bound to produce your opera before my audiences—an opera which I, personally, and unendingly, admire.”8

  Preparations for the premiere began in fall 1906. To add to the drama, the general manager had been taken ill, seriously so; at his insistence, some rehearsals were conducted at his bedside. On a Sunday morning, two days before the January 22, 1907, premiere and little more than three years after the cheeky Christmas Eve Parsifal, Conried scheduled a semipublic dress rehearsal of Salome, a repetition of his earlier scheduling gaffe. Many of the one thousand invited guests—Met stockholders, subscribers, friends and relations of the management and cast, journalists, and music critics—had come to the opera house directly from their devotions. This misstep would haunt discussions of the propriety of staging Salome for decades to come. Two days later, on January 22, a capacity audience was treated to the much ballyhooed preopera concert starring, among others, Caruso, Farrar, and Scotti; Sembrich sang two Strauss songs. The last selection was the redemptive climax of Faust, “as though to make the maximum contrast with what would follow,” Salome’s erotic encounter with saintliness and death.9


  Those who went to the trouble and expense of buying tickets surely knew what they were in for. The Gospel tale of the depraved daughter of Herodias was very much in circulation. There had been persistent press coverage of Strauss’s controversial work; there was also the more immediate buzz surrounding the dress rehearsal. And, to gild the lily, on January 21, the day that separated the rehearsal from the gala, the Sothern-Marlowe Company had opened at the Lyric Theatre up the street with Julia Marlowe as Salome in John the Baptist. Many operagoers would have read the review of Hermann Sudermann’s play in the Tribune: “This is a repulsive drama . . . in which a wanton woman can perform a lascivious dance, in the presence of a lewd despot, in order to inflame his passions and so entirely to enslave him that he will become a rabid monster of lust and cruelty” (January 22). Two days earlier, the same newspaper had carried a large photo of Fremstad costumed as Salome, holding a silver platter on which sat the papier-mâché head of John the Baptist, the spitting image of Anton van Rooy’s, the baritone of the occasion. All this, and notices of the “Dance of the Seven Veils” as a danse du ventre (belly dance) to be executed not by the soprano but by a company ballerina, and of yet many “other sensational features, brought a throng of men and women such as no previous opera [had] drawn to the Metropolitan” (Times). Librettos sold at quadruple the usual price (Times, Jan. 28, 1907). And once again, police reinforcements were called in to control the crowd (Times, Jan. 23, 1907).

  The audience recoiled in revulsion, we are told, when Fremstad “presse[d] her teeth into the gelid flesh” of the severed head with only somewhat less ardor than she had exhibited at the dress rehearsal, although still at the very front of the stage. The Swedish-American dramatic soprano had leapt at the chance to play the Judaean princess once Farrar refused the role. Searing as Isolde and Kundry, she was known to be fiercely dedicated to her art. Her studies for Salome had included a much publicized trip to the city morgue to gauge the weight of a human head, far heavier, she learned, than the prop she was to fondle. Moments before Salome demanded “den Kopf des Jochanaan [the head of John],” women en masse had averted their eyes from the other famously outré scene, the iconic dance. As for the men, “very few . . . seemed comfortable. They twisted in their chairs, and before it was over there were numbers of them who decided to go to the corridors and smoke.” But when Fremstad began to address the Baptist’s head, “the horror of the thing” sent occupants of the front rows and boxes from the auditorium to call for their carriages. The galleries responded with greater equanimity. No one walked out. “Men and women left their seats to stand so that they might look down upon the prima donna as she kissed the dead lips. . . . Then they sank back in their chairs and shuddered” (Times). Still, many accounts conceded, the company had recorded “one of the most remarkable achievements in the way of a lyric production ever accomplished in this country” (Times). Among Salome’s partisans was Henderson, now writing for the Sun. He held the work up as a “perfect adaptation of the musical expression to the scene” (Jan. 27, 1907). But surprisingly, his reading of audience reaction ran counter to the majority report: “On Tuesday [Fremstad] moderated her transports so that even little girls . . . were not shocked. As for the society women, they viewed the spectacle with perfect calmness.” With the passing days, Henderson changed his tune. On February 3, he called Salome a “fester on the body operatic” and, adopting Krehbiel’s language, “a stench [in] the nostrils of society.” The events that followed Conried’s benefit no doubt persuaded Henderson to this awkward reversal.10

  The Metropolitan board had sidestepped the Parsifal controversy, remaining largely silent in the face of accusations of illegality and blasphemy brought against its lessee. Salome’s degeneracy was another matter. While Conried had worried about the response of his public, he had failed to reckon with the puritanical sensibilities of his patrons. Not only did the Metropolitan directors weigh in, they intervened quickly and decisively. Three days after the premiere, on January 25, they effectively demanded that Conried cancel the three non-subscription performances he had announced at the conclusion of the benefit. Their resolution read: “The directors of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company consider that the performance of Salome is objectionable and detrimental to the best interests of the Metropolitan Opera House. They therefore protest against any repetition of this opera.” It was one thing to take on Cosima Wagner and a handful of New York ministers, however vociferous. It was another to resist the orders of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, called by one commentator the “moving spirit and virtual dictator of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company,” and his powerful cronies. Led by Morgan, whose daughter, Louisa Satterlee, had been deeply offended by Salome and prodded her father to take action, the executive committee was unanimous in its condemnation. One member, D. Ogden Mills, threatened more than termination of contract: “I understand that if Mr. Conried attempts to put the opera on in spite of the objections which have been made the board is quite likely to use force to prevent his doing so” (Times, Jan. 28, 1907). Several pastors took advantage of Sunday sermons to vent their outrage. Methodist Episcopal Rev. Dr. Charles Edward Locke, for one, came to the dubious conclusion that “such productions were responsible for such tragedies as the Stanford White case” (Tribune, Jan. 28, 1907).11

  FIGURE 10. Olive Fremstad as Salome, 1907 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The “protest” of the board of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company was, in essence, an interdiction that the board of the Conried Metropolitan Opera Company, principally Otto H. Kahn and Robert Goelet, attempted in vain to have rescinded. In a letter of January 30, 1907, Conried’s board argued that Salome was “recognized by the consensus of the most competent critics of modern music as a monumental work, probably the greatest which musical genius has produced in this generation.” They argued further that in opera, as everyone knew, it was the music that counted, that the text was inconsequential and, in any case, “sung here in a foreign language.” Strauss himself was known to consider the libretto “so subordinate to the orchestral composition that, when told that the orchestra augmented to over 100 men would drown the voices on the stage, he said: ‘I don’t care if it does, never mind the voices or the words, bring out the music of the orchestra regardless of the singers.’” As to the opera’s source, the letter to Morgan and his allies made clear that Conried had no interest in defending Wilde, now several years dead. Strauss was the issue. In the future, Conried promised, the head of John the Baptist would be all but hidden from view. Besides, early sales predicted brisk business. Fremstad threw herself into the debate. She confessed that she too had been appalled when she first encountered the work in Cologne but had come to appreciate the grandeur of the score. In her evocation of the final scene, as Salome “sees his severed head she feels the only love of which she is capable, and her feeling is partly passionate and partly ideal. Strauss tells me this. Wilde tells me nothing” (Times, Jan. 27, 1907).

  FIGURE 11. Salome banished, Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1907

  At one point, there was talk that if the opera could not be performed on 39th Street, the contract with the composer would be honored on tour in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston (Times, Jan. 28, 1907). That fell through. Conried spoke of moving Salome to another house; the New Amsterdam Theatre was mentioned (Tribune, Jan. 30, 1907). That too failed to materialize; Conried’s own board was opposed. More than once, the Metropolitan directors offered to share in losses estimated at $30,000 in production costs and $50,000 in missed box-office receipts. Morgan declared himself ready to make Conried whole on his own. The Conried Metropolitan Opera Company would not be co-opted. To the credit of the Times, its editorial of January 29, 1907, sided with Conried and Kahn in protesting the censorship: “We tremble to think what the result may be if the newly aroused conscience of the Directors of the Opera House and Realty Company, seeking what it may devour, should be turned in this direction. Not only Salome, but a good many other
musical masterpieces would be put upon the Index.”12

  In 1907, Salome danced but a single night at the Metropolitan. Here are three footnotes to that story. On February 17, the Sun kept the polemic going with a page-wide spread, “Salomes of Many Lands,” featuring photographs of singers and actresses who had taken on the role and extensive notes on their costumes and interpretations; the next month, Conried exacted some small revenge on Morgan and the others by producing the Wilde play in German at his old hunting grounds, the Irving Place Theatre; and soon after, France decorated Fremstad as an Officer of Public Instruction for her service to art in the recent Paris production of Strauss’s Musikdrama (Tribune, July 19, 1907).

  Two years after its Metropolitan premiere, Salome returned to New York, this time in an opulent French-language edition at the Manhattan Opera House. News of the run must have been a bitter pill for Conried to swallow. Although much had changed in the intervening seasons, the 1909 reviews of Strauss’s score and libretto varied little from the notices of 1907. Observers described the responses of the overflowing opening night audiences in strikingly similar terms. Prominent clergy dusted off their thundering sermons. Nonetheless, the Manhattan put on ten performances of Salome in 1909 and four the next year. In the end it came to this: Hammerstein owned his own theater, answered to no executive committee, was beholden to no investors, and the show went on. There was another important difference, and that was Mary Garden. In the obligatory pairing with Fremstad, critics agreed that Garden came up impossibly short. The “plain truth,” as Henderson condensed it, was “that Miss Garden [could not] sing a phrase of Strauss’ music” (Sun, Jan. 10). But her magnetism, her extraordinary acting, and her own unabashed interpretation of the erotic dance carried the day.13