Grand Opera: The Story of the Met
Page 9
Well before Mary Garden’s Salome, Hammerstein offered the composer generous terms for Elektra, his still-to-be-produced next opera. On May 29, 1908, Kahn wrote to Strauss acknowledging the Met’s disastrous handling of Salome, placing the blame largely on the broad shoulders of J.P. Morgan. He hoped to divert Strauss’s “lust for revenge” by appealing to the composer’s famed cupidity: “Since you aim your wrath at us you affect Mr. Morgan not at all; instead you harm us first of all and second, yourself, financially at least . . . your works will be done only by Hammerstein and not in both houses.” Kahn’s entreaties went unheeded; in January 1910, Hammerstein staged the American premiere of Elektra.14
Fifteen years after the Salome debacle, Kahn pleaded with the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company for a reprieve. The opera was a specialty of his new favorite, Maria Jeritza, “an artist of the highest attainments and of dignity and refinement.” His request came with the pious assurance that he would “be unwilling to sanction any performance which could give just offence to the moral or religious sentiments of the community.” Kahn was again rebuffed, and this time there was no question of not being co-opted. On the contrary, the matter was considered settled when Kahn put his name to a joint communiqué upholding the continued proscription. On January 13, 1934, twenty-seven years after her stand-in had shed the seventh veil, Fremstad was in the audience to witness the famous dance, at last reprised at the Met. Soprano Göta Ljungberg executed the number herself, as have all Salomes since, scandalizing no one, with the exception of Terpsichore; she did little more than drop the scarves she had tucked into her costume moments before. Conductor Artur Bodanzky was “the most refulgent star of the evening.” Strauss’s opera had finally entered the company’s repertoire. But Fremstad aside, it was not until the debut in 1949 of Ljuba Welitsch that Salome was rendered in full, both histrionically and vocally. Variety came up with one of its irreverent headlines: “Met’s Sensational New Soprano, Welitsch, Puts 52d St. [New York’s burlesque district] Shimmy to Shame” (Feb. 9). Unlike Fremstad and most of her Met successors, Wagnerians with instruments weighted for the midrange heroic perorations of Isolde and Brünnhilde and often taxed by the high-lying moments of their jubilation or fury, Welitsch was a finely focused spinto (a lyric soprano with incisive potential), firm throughout her range, free and incandescent in an upper register that cut through Strauss’s orchestral mass without apparent effort. Here was the youthful sound Strauss had wanted for the spoiled and murderous teenager. The fifteen-minute ovation was followed by the print hosannas of the morning-after reviews. Fritz Reiner’s precise baton shared in the triumph, repeated in the air check of the March 12 broadcast and the commercial recording of the final scene made at that time. For those of us in the audience on January 19, 1952, the force of the conductor-singer collaboration was overwhelming—although, if truth be told, the soprano’s voice was a shade less vivid than her flaming red hair. The Reiner-Welitsch Salome is the opera’s touchstone.15
SECOND OPERA WAR: 1906–1908
The four-year second opera war pitted the by now entrenched Metropolitan against the upstart company lodged in the more recent of the two venues that Oscar Hammerstein named the Manhattan Opera House. His headquarters stood on 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, just a short walk south and west of Conried’s. The campaign would be waged half by the Met’s current intendant and half by his successor, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. On one of many of the period’s extraordinary nights, January 2, 1907, 6,720 persons were reported to have made their way to 34th Street to hear Nellie Melba, Alessandro Bonci, and Maurice Renaud in La Traviata or to 39th Street to hear Emma Eames, Enrico Caruso, and Antonio Scotti in Tosca. On occasion, and no doubt on purpose, the two managers scheduled the same work at the same hour, for instance, January 26, 1910, when the operaphile was presented with a wrenching choice: whether to cheer Caruso’s Rodolfo at the Met or John McCormack’s at the Manhattan. For four stunning seasons, New York witnessed hundreds of performances at very high standards as once again two major companies sought to outdo and, above all, to outlast each other. If in this contest and the one with Mapleson the Met was the last house standing, its survival was due not so much to its facilities, its roster, or its repertoire as to the backing it enjoyed from the New York families that called it their own.16
The no-holds-barred feud of 1906 was fed by the bad blood between the men in charge. Their rivalry dated back several decades to the first stage assignment of the freshly emigrated Conried, when fate willed that Hammerstein bankroll his show. The dueling impresarios may have had both too little and too much in common. Like Conried, Hammerstein was an immigrant and Jewish. He had landed as a teenager in 1863, fourteen years before Conried’s arrival. German, not Austrian, he had had training in music rather than in drama. Once in the United States, he went to work making cigars and eventually turned his trade into a fortune by inventing machines for their manufacture. In the 1870s, he began to back shows of all sorts. By the late 1880s, he had become obsessed with building theaters. The first of his astounding series was the Harlem Opera House, completed in 1889. It was followed by the Columbus Theatre in 1890, also in Harlem. In 1892 came the original Manhattan Opera House, located on 34th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, home to opera for only two weeks. The most profitable of the several legitimate and vaudeville houses whose construction Hammerstein financed was the 1899 Victoria, at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street. There would be others, in New York and elsewhere, most particularly the second Manhattan Opera House, of course, and the Philadelphia Opera House, a thumb in the Metropolitan’s eye. Hammerstein rushed it to completion in record time in 1908, the midpoint of the four-year contest. The Met had been performing regularly down Broad Street at the Academy of Music, then as now as beautiful a theater as any in the country.17
Whether Hammerstein’s first season ended in the black or not, which is a matter of dispute, the Manhattan was judged to have gained the upper hand thanks to the illustrious and colorful troupe the impresario assembled, to the musical leadership of conductor Cleofonte Campanini (brother of Italo, the Met’s leading tenor in 1883–84), and particularly to the defection of Melba from the Metropolitan. But Hammerstein labored under two crippling disadvantages. The company had been unable to attract the cohort of German singers necessary to Wagner. And, at least as enfeebling, Puccini was strictly off-limits. The composer’s publisher, Casa Ricordi, had ceded exclusive American rights to Puccini’s works to the Metropolitan, and this time legality was not in question, as it had been in Bayreuth’s claims against Conried’s Parsifal three years earlier. Hammerstein’s strategy to circumvent the prohibition so as to mount La Bohème for Melba was both cumbersome and chancy, cumbersome because the score had to be reconstructed from a mutilated copy (with help from Campanini’s prodigious memory), and chancy because to provoke Ricordi invited a lawsuit, which was indeed filed and ultimately ended in the predictable injunction.18
In his second year Hammerstein took a bold turn. With Wagner and Puccini off the table, he opted for recent French works never before performed in the city and engaged artists who could do them justice, Mary Garden in particular, in her first New York appearances. In short order, the Manhattan took on the cachet of a “Parisian” theater. Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, refused by Conried “with a contemptuous wave of his hand,” was premiered with nearly the very cast that had introduced the work at the Opéra-Comique in 1902. Garden gave New York not only its first Mélisande, but its first Thaïs and its first Louise. Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, not yet heard at the Met, sold out its eleven Manhattan performances. The public embraced these novelties as firmly as it had resisted Grau’s French premieres not five years earlier. Was it the glamorous and compelling Garden that accounted for the difference? Or was it the quality of the works? By any measure, La Navarraise, Salammbô, and Messaline paled before Pelléas et Mélisande, Thaïs, and Louise. In his first year, Hammerstein scheduled French opera for
25 percent of the Manhattan’s performances; in 1907–08, he went to 48 percent, in 1908–09 39 percent, in 1909–10 54 percent. The corresponding percentages at the Met were substantially lower: 16 percent, 9 percent, 9 percent, 12 percent. Hammerstein found yet another way to outmaneuver his antagonist: he stole Luisa Tetrazzini from Conried. Two years earlier, the Met’s general manager had negotiated a contract with the coloratura that he carelessly left unsigned. From the moment of her debut as Violetta, Tetrazzini had New York at her feet as she had had London the year before.19
The two indendants fought over everything: over repertoire, over casts, and over the always thorny issue of the audience that opera was duty bound to serve. Hammerstein’s seating plan spoke volumes for his position. He wanted nothing like the Diamond Horseshoe or, for that matter, any horseshoe at all. What he hatched was a comfortable auditorium holding thirty-one hundred, three hundred fewer than the Met, with increased proximity to the well-equipped stage, good sight lines, and acoustics that many preferred to those of the older house. His refusal to bend to the frivolous demands of the gentry proved risky; so was the proposition that the growing immigrant population would fill the void. By 1910, the Manhattan’s last season, the number of Italian-born New Yorkers, roughly 340,000, up dramatically from 145,000 ten years earlier, was approximately equal to the number of German-born New Yorkers at the time of the Met’s German seasons, 1884–1891. Assuming affection for opera by many transplanted Europeans and their first-generation offspring, an enormous pool was theoretically available to Hammerstein for what he fervently believed to be a popular art form. Still, that New York would sustain two such high-rolling competitors as the Manhattan and the Metropolitan remained a long shot.20
PREMIERES: 1903–1908
Seven of eleven premieres of Conried’s half-decade tenure, excluding Parsifal and Salome, were Italian. Of these, two looked to bel canto, and the five remaining to the contemporary generation of composers. Old or new, all seven were sung by Caruso. He had been an overnight sensation, the darling of audiences of all social and economic strata.
Bel Canto
The bel canto novelties were Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and his Lucrezia Borgia. None of Caruso’s thirty-seven Met roles better suited the tenor’s chunky physique and legendary sense of fun than the endearing bumpkin of the comic Elisir. His Nemorino and Sembrich’s Adina filled the Met’s coffers; they succeeded in the daunting enterprise of softening the hearts of the Wagnerites, so long hardened in contempt of bel canto. Reverting to form, critics shot the poisoned arrows they reserved for bel canto tragedy at Lucrezia Borgia, “a repetition of empty formulas and passages . . . absolutely without a trace of dramatic characterization” (Tribune).
Verismo
Composed by the masters of la giovane scuola (the young school, a group of late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century post-Verdi Italian composers) during the Belle Époque, Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly, Iris, Fedora, and Adriana Lecouvreur, all Conried premieres, belonged to a manner that continues to carry the problematic brand of “verismo.” They have in common the signature feature of the “hidden” aria. To be sure, and to the relief of singers and record companies, verismo admits excerptable pieces designed to invite applause and timed to the capacity of early disks. But the two-part structure of the bel canto aria, the slow cavatina capped by the fast cabaletta embellished with intricate fioritura and stratospheric high notes, gave way to a shorter-breathed and shorter-ranged arioso embedded in an ongoing fabric of dramatic recitative accompanied by orchestral comment. Sung phrases often approached the rhythms of spoken dialogue. At the same time, the subjects of Conried’s five verismo premieres fit uncomfortably under a single umbrella. An Italian outgrowth of French literary naturalism, verismo applies accurately to the plebeian characters and locales of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, but much less well to the exotic Iris and Madama Butterfly, to the ancien régime of Manon Lescaut’s young lovers, to Adriana Lecouvreur’s aristocrats, or to Fedora’s contemporary European nobility.21
Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly reaped the lion’s share of press attention and its most fulsome praise. Puccini’s stock had risen rapidly in the wake of the 1900–01 first nights of La Bohème and Tosca. For the Times, Manon Lescaut, which predated La Bohème by three years, was the title that had lifted Puccini above his giovane scuola cohort. Even Krehbiel was willing to succumb to its allure: “fresher, more spontaneous, more unaffected and more passionate in its climaxes” (Tribune). Caruso’s Des Grieux met the usual high expectations. Manon exposed the vocal and dramatic limits of Lina Cavalieri, better known for her looks than for her art. Another great beauty, Geraldine Farrar, made a phenomenal impression as Cio-Cio-San, the most important assignment of her debut season. Winning “the tribute of tears from many eyes . . . her triumph was complete” (Tribune). The extended excerpts recorded by Victor a couple of years later capture the commitment of the inaugural cast. Puccini had been happy with the production of Manon Lescaut and with Cavalieri’s performance; he was disappointed in Madama Butterfly. He complained about the inadequately prepared orchestra and its conductor, Arturo Vigna, but most especially about Farrar, who sang out of tune and failed, in his view, to make the desired impact in the large auditorium. For sixteen consecutive seasons, Met audiences disagreed; Farrar portrayed Puccini’s tragic geisha a record 139 times.22
The role of yet another Japanese woman abused by a callous lover, the unfortunate Iris, fell to Emma Eames. She had more success than the work bearing the victim’s name. Caruso in kimono (much to the amusement of the spectators) made the most of limited opportunities. And the pioneering Mascagni, who had blazed the trail of verismo with Cavalleria rusticana, suffered in the inevitable comparison with Puccini. Iris was generally dismissed as a collection of Eastern effects with a few lyric effusions, an excess of tired symbolism, and an unsavory subject. The Met’s décor and lighting received special mention; admired particularly was the metamorphosis of a trash heap, the site of the heroine’s death, into a field in bloom. It was not the first time Iris had been heard in New York or, for that matter, the first time it had been staged at the Met. Mascagni had brought his opera to the city and to the house with his own touring company in October 1902 during a three-month-long visit that Krehbiel called the “most sensational fiasco ever made by an artist of great distinction in the United States.” The composer had contracted to prepare and conduct “not more than eight operas or concerts a week,” including productions of Cavalleria rusticana, Zanetto, Iris, and Guglielmo Ratcliff. The last never saw American footlights. “It was foolishly reckless in the composer to think that with such material as he had raked together in his native land and recruited here he could produce four of his operas within a week of his arrival.” When Mascagni moved on to Boston, he was arrested for breach of contract. He countersued for damages. “The scandal grew until it threatened to become a subject of international diplomacy, but in the end compromises were made and the composer departed to his own country in bodily if not spiritual peace.”23
Giordano and Cilea fared more poorly still than Mascagni. Reviewers noted uncharitably that their music detracted from the plays on which Fedora and Adriana Lecouvreur were based, both previously staged in New York with Sarah Bernhardt. Cavalieri was unequal to the challenge of the eponymous roles. But Farrar herself could not have saved either title from its excruciating reception. Caruso, who had appeared in their world premieres, did his superlative best, as evinced in his recordings of Fedora’s “Amor ti vieta” and in an excerpt from act 4 of Adriana.
German Operetta and Opera
Conried produced five German novelties, two of which, Parsifal and Salome, set off the mayhem we recall above. Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeunerbaron came in for attack. Only Hänsel und Gretel emerged unscathed.
The controversy over Johann Strauss’s operettas was two-pronged. Reviewers took up their old refrain: operettas, no matter how charming, even brilliant, had no place at
the Met. Their dialogue was lost in its vast reaches; their scores befit only intimate theaters. And as he had been for Parsifal and would be again for Salome, Conried was chided for pocketing the first-night receipts of Die Fledermaus, designated, like the others, “director’s benefit,” an annual event at which the artists were called upon to make a gift of their services to the boss. The prospect of hearing the Met’s stars during the act 2 ball all but guaranteed a rich haul. The soloists joined the chorus in the “Brüderlein” finale and then, led by Caruso and Eames on one side of the stage, Fremstad and Plançon on the other, proceeded to dance a raucous cancan. But the critics, even as they acknowledged the Fledermaus precedent at some European opera houses, and the luster and merriment of the occasion, were prepared to forgive neither the musical trespass nor Conried’s greed. He repeated the stunt the next season with Der Zigeunerbaron. Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel needed no star wattage to galvanize success. The critics were predisposed to the score’s Wagnerian sonorities. And they agreed that “it did not seem as if there could be anybody in the house to whom [it] did not appeal as something beautiful, something delightful and enjoyable” (Times). Hänsel und Gretel remained in the repertoire until German was banned in 1917; it has returned regularly since 1927–28.