Grand Opera: The Story of the Met
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FIGURE 13. La Fanciulla del West, act 3, Enrico Caruso as Dick Johnson in center, and on the right, Emmy Destinn as Minnie, and Pasquale Amato as Jack Rance, 1910 (White Studio; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)
Puccini was delighted with Caruso (“grande”), Destinn (“benissimo”), Amato (“ottimo” [very good]), and Toscanini (“un vero angelo” [a real angel]). The New York critics concurred. They had only praise for the artists and the mise-en-scène. Many did, however, fault the music. Krehbiel sniped, “nine-tenths of the time his [Puccini’s] vocal melody is nothing” (Tribune). For Aldrich, who noted Puccini’s embrace of Debussian harmonies, the loss of sustained lyricism was regrettable: the “scraps of melody . . . are commonplace, impotent to express what they are associated with and frankly dull . . . there is little that is characteristic of the Puccini of earlier years” (Times). The composer was taken to task for the irritating contrast between his musical idiom and the familiar “Western” ditties sprinkled throughout the score. But to judge by the consistently high box-office returns, the public remained faithful through the initial four-season run. Since then, Fanciulla has had sporadic revivals. The work, a milestone in the composer’s steady evolution toward a more modern lyricism through the expansion of his harmonic palette, has secured a permanent place in the repertoire.17
Other Premieres
In December 1910, odds would have favored the Met’s other world premiere. For the Wagnerite critics, there was no contest: Königskinder was “the work of a master of his art and of his material, a melodist of the first water,” and Humperdinck was congratulated on having “been able to . . . attain results of such pure beauty” (Times). Finck pronounced Königskinder nothing less than “the greatest operatic work that has come from Germany in three decades—since the production of Parsifal” (Evening Post). Humperdinck, who had demonstrated the viability of the fairytale opera with Hänsel und Gretel, here added dimensions of interest to an adult audience: a love story and a social message that decried the defeat of idealism at the hands of materialism. If Puccini asked for galloping horses, Humperdinck wanted a gaggle of waddling geese, “which last night did what was required of it with exemplary fidelity” (Times). By all accounts, Farrar’s Goose Girl was exquisite. In their four-year runs, Königskinder far surpassed the number of performances racked up by Fanciulla, but after 1910–11 it dropped below the season’s box-office average. Never revived at the Met, it has turned up infrequently elsewhere.
In his first seven years, in addition to La Fanciulla del West and Königskinder, Gatti bet on fully thirty company premieres, of which only five had significant life spans. Franco Leoni’s one-act melodrama, L’Oracolo, was retired with Scotti in 1933. Italo Montemezzi’s L’Amore dei tre re was given regularly until 1949. The durable legacies of this period are Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, and Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.
THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
Toscanini left New York suddenly in spring 1915. Farrar had pushed him to choose between his mistress and his family. And since divorce, from his point of view, was unthinkable, he was left with no choice at all. The diva’s ultimatum was not the only consideration. There was also the escalating conflict with Gatti, the conductor unmovable in matters of quality, never mind the cost; the intendant fixated on the balance sheet to the last penny. One of their many rows had erupted during the preparation for the 1913 Un Ballo in maschera, tied to the centennial celebration of Verdi’s birth. Toscanini insisted on a stage band for the act 3 masked ball. Gatti maintained that the music could just as well emanate from the pit. There were endless conflicts over rehearsal time. The camel’s back was broken, the story goes, by a mediocre Carmen. The infuriated Toscanini announced that he was canceling his six remaining performances. Besides, he was eager to return to Italy, by now at war with Austria-Hungary. Thus it was that the great man and his wife and daughters were not, as had been planned, on the Lusitania sailing from New York on May 1 and sunk by a German U-boat on May 7. Kahn and Gatti did their best to lure the irreplaceable conductor back to the Met, even at the price of naming him “General Musik Director” with increased power over repertoire, casts, and schedule. Toscanini refused to rejoin the company. In fact, he would never again conduct an opera at the Metropolitan.18
Two years after Toscanini’s departure, during the third intermission of the April 2, 1917, performance of De Koven’s The Canterbury Pilgrims, the audience was thunderstruck by the news that Woodrow Wilson had appeared before Congress to call for a declaration of war against Germany. Late editions of New York papers circulated from hand to hand in the Diamond Horseshoe. The recently recalled ambassador to Berlin James Gerard, a guest in one of the boxes, exhorted the crowd to cheer the president; from another box came a shout for cheers for the Allies and the US Army and Navy. The orchestra struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As act 4 began, the mezzo-soprano Margarete Ober, “one of a dozen German stars [more accurately, two stars and a handful of comprimarios] on the stage at the time, had the leading part with Mr. [Johannes] Sembach in the final scene. She was singing a phrase of the Wife of Bath when she stopped and fell full length upon her back, striking heavily on the floor. Sembach and [tenor] Max Bloch lifted her, but she sank again, and the two men carried her out through the stage crowd, considerably to the detriment of the Wife of Bath’s bridal gown” (Times, April 3, 1917). The cast sang on without her or her character to the opera’s end. In the years of America’s neutrality, 1914–1917, Ober and her compatriots had had no problem singing with French and British colleagues, nationals of countries with which Germany was at war. Nor was there any serious threat of anti-German feeling affecting the repertoire. Among the premieres of the period were two works performed in German, Hermann Goetz’s Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung (The Taming of the Shrew) and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, in a version arranged by Richard Strauss.
The challenge to the customary multinational casting lay principally in the perils of transporting European artists to the United States and back again; passports and safe-conducts were precious commodities. By 1916, the dangers of ocean travel had been brought home to the extended Met family by the tragic death of Spanish composer/piano virtuoso Enrique Granados. On his return from New York following the world premiere of his opera Goyescas, the ship on which Granados and his wife were crossing the English Channel was torpedoed by a German submarine. Still, the Met carried on its programming very much as usual. As late as October 16, 1917, six months after the disrupted performance of The Canterbury Pilgrims, Olive Fremstad had signed to sing Isolde. A week before opening night and only nine days before her homecoming after a three-year absence, Fremstad was told that all opera in German was canceled for the season and so, therefore, was her engagement. The long-awaited Tristan und Isolde turned into Boris Godunov. The action was taken, according to the official explanation, “lest Germany should make capital of their [operas in German] continued appearance to convince the German people that this nation was not heart and soul in the war.” Though no one could have guessed it at the time, the last performance in German from the Met stage for the duration and beyond had taken place on April 13, 1917. On that occasion, Isolde was sung by Fremstad’s archrival, Johanna Gadski, a fixture at the Met from 1900 to 1917.19
In May 1915, a day after the attack on the Lusitania, a gala for the benefit of the German Red Cross, a performance of Die Fledermaus not sponsored by the company, was scheduled for the house. Gadski, who had lately made no secret of her ill will toward the United States, was to sing “Deutschland über Alles.” But in light of the immediacy of the outrageous act of German aggression, she thought better of it. In the same year, the soprano’s husband, Captain Hans Tauscher, was charged with conspiracy to blow up the canal between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; he was acquitted. Gadski herself was alleged to have said publicly that, given half a chance, she would happily blow up New Jersey’s munitions plants. In an editorial titled “Over
riding Tolerance,” the Globe urged Gadski’s ouster from the company for hosting a 1915 New Year’s Eve party at which her colleague, German baritone Otto Goritz, was reputed to have sung a parody in celebration of the sinking of the Lusitania. At war’s end, Gadski sued the Tribune, claiming that Krehbiel, in response to protests over her impending Carnegie Hall concert, had made libelous statements. Krehbiel had simply repeated what had been previously reported and Gadski lost at trial.20
The press was, of course, correct in separating the denunciation of Gadski and her fellow revelers from the defense of German opera in time of war. The newspapers had engaged the issue for months. A Tribune headline read, “German Opera Is Still Welcome at the Metropolitan” (Sept. 23, 1917). The Sun was confident that the public did not “think of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner as exclusively representing the Teutonic people.” The Mail declared, “Art knows no frontiers.” A ban on German opera would, for the Times, be analogous to “excluding the great classics of German literature from the public libraries.” Signed contracts and the views of influential music critics notwithstanding, in a charged climate the board bowed to war hysteria, voting to exile the German language from its auditorium and Fremstad and other leading Wagner specialists from its roster.21
Subscribers who objected to the new policy and demanded refunds were refused on the grounds that the company had “made no definite promise as to the complete and precise repertoire of its present season.” They were informed that “the decision of the Board of Directors to withdraw opera sung in the German language was dictated not only by a sense of patriotic duty but also by a desire to safeguard the interests of our patrons and to prevent possible disorder.” The German-language repertoire tentatively announced for 1917–18, Fidelio, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, Meistersinger, Parsifal, Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, was scratched. The company premiere of Saint Elisabeth, a Liszt oratorio staged as an opera, was done in English, not in the anticipated German; Martha was given in Italian as usual. In 1916–17, forty-six performances had been sung in German. To compensate for the boycott, in 1917–18 the Italian total rose from eighty-eight to 122, the French from thirty-three to forty-eight. The premieres represented Great War allies Italy, France, Russia, and the United States: Mascagni’s Lodoletta, Henri Rabaud’s Mârouf, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or, and The Robin Woman: Shanewis by Charles Wakefield Cadman, a specialist in Native-American music.22
The November 11, 1918, armistice converged with the opening of the season; the company celebrated offstage and on. In the afternoon, a procession to Times Square of Met administrators (Gatti-Casazza included), instrumentalists, and singers followed a “dummy” Siegfried, hung in effigy from a gibbet and helmeted to resemble Kaiser Wilhelm. Between acts of the evening’s opera, Samson et Dalila, national anthems rang through the house, “The Star-Spangled Banner” capped by Caruso’s high B flat.
The reintegration of Wagner began in 1919–20 with Parsifal, in English; in 1920–21, Lohengrin and Tristan were on the program, also in English; all did well at the box office. In 1921–22, with the lifting of the linguistic ban, Italian maintained its plurality, although performances in German increased gradually through the 1920s. In the mid-1930s, with the coming of Kirsten Flagstad, German reclaimed its prewar share of approximately 30 percent.
TABLE 5. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1908–09 to 1917–18
TABLE 5. (continued)
TABLE 5. (continued)
TABLE 5. (continued)
CARUSO AND FARRAR: CELEBRITIES FOR MODERN TIMES
At the very top of the operatic pyramid stood those few whose fame eclipsed the genre itself. The adventures of these artists/personalities made juicy copy for gossip columns and other channels of extramusical discourse. In Caruso’s case, most clamorous were stories surrounding the monkey-house episode and his daring defiance of racketeers of the Black Hand; in Farrar’s, her reputed affair with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, son of the Kaiser. That Farrar was the only diva to command her own dressing room and that she traveled in a private railroad car when the company was on the road were details to pique the public’s curiosity. Spaghetti Chaliapin, Chicken Tetrazzini, Lattuga alla Caruso, Coupe Patti, and Peach Melba showed up on the menus of sophisticates. In a handful of years at the end of the 1920s, likenesses of Melba, Farrar, Jeritza, and Bori appeared on the covers of Time.23
Caruso’s name all but ensured a sold-out house and, in 1913–14, for example, that meant a take of $12,000; Farrar, without Caruso, raked in the next highest receipts. They could salvage even as coolly received a novelty as Julien. From 1906–07 to their last joint appearance, opening night 1919, Caruso and Farrar sang together at the Met and on tour more than ninety times, despite the fact that the bottom line argued against the extravagance of casting the star couple. On the other hand, the pairing of the two could be counted on to turn performance into mega-event, notice into feature article, delight into delirium. In answer to the frequently asked question of which performance in Met history unleashed the greatest number of curtain calls and the longest ovation, the Metropolitan Opera online archive researchers award the palm to the April 22, 1914, Caruso/Farrar Tosca. The Times carried a long account of the show’s reception: “ovation for caruso and miss farrar. Opera Stars Recalled 40 Times after Last Appearance of Season in Tosca. tenor dances jig steps. Audience Refuses to Leave and Miss Farrar Drags in Caruso in Dressing Gown and Makes Speech.” The Tribune put the number of curtain calls at forty-five. Twenty-one minutes elapsed before Farrar consented to address the public: “When we had to make a speech last year, Mr. Caruso ran away and left me in the lurch. So now I will just say, ‘I thank you.’ Thereupon she poked Caruso rather violently in the ribs; making every word count, he said in full, ‘And-I-say-Thank-you.’”
Keeping pace with his mounting popularity was Caruso’s fee. It shot up from $960 per performance in 1906–07 to $2,500 in 1914–15, and there it stayed to the end. Wary of the onerous expectations that came with an exorbitant cachet, Caruso turned down further increases. By way of comparison, in 1920–21, Giovanni Martinelli, with whom he shared many roles, made less than half his wage; arriving on the scene in that season, Caruso’s last, Beniamino Gigli negotiated for $1,600. Amelita Galli-Curci, the highest-paid female star of the time, exacted $2,000 per performance. By 1920, outside the purview of the Metropolitan, the tenor was happy to accept as much as $10,000 a night. But all of this—fame far beyond the operatic sphere, impassioned fans, enormous box-office draw, glamour, power—had been the perquisites of previous generations of operatic luminaries: Lind and Patti, De Reske and Melba. For Caruso and Farrar, the reach of fame would be exponentially greater. As the march of technology would have it, it fell to them to be the first Metropolitan stars of the dawning age of mechanical reproduction.24
Caruso’s Met career spanned seventeen years, from 1903 to 1920, Farrar’s from 1906 to 1922, decades in which the then new media leapt into maturity. Before he had set foot in New York, the voice of the Italian tenor had been introduced to journalists by Conried. The recorded arias the impresario played for the New York press were likely among the ten Caruso cut in spring 1902 at the Grand Hotel in Milan, where, coincidentally, Verdi had died the year before. Caruso could not have dreamed that these wax transcriptions would be the first of 498 (245 are extant) that would net him more than $1 million and the industry twice that amount. A Victor Talking Machine Company advertisement in Theater Magazine (Dec. 1919) depicts Caruso leading a parade of twenty or so Metropolitan—and Victor—singers. Farrar, who made 160 recordings with the company, including duets from Butterfly, Bohème, Faust, Tosca, and Manon with Caruso, is pictured, fittingly, just behind him. The caption reads: “Will Caruso thrill you?” And for each of these recordings, the Metropolitan Opera Company stood to pocket royalties that would go some way toward recovering the salaries of their phonogenic artists.25
Farrar’s disks document a voice of ample power, wit
h a warm, solid middle. Others of her generation, Gadski and Destinn, for example, were more polished vocalists, with more brilliant techniques. But Farrar was the more remarkable singer-actress; she had to be heard and seen. Or even only seen, as some in the (silent) motion picture industry were willing to gamble. Between 1915 and 1920, she made fifteen movies of diverse genres: costume dramas, contemporary melodramas, mysteries, westerns. Carmen, her first released film and her best known, premiered at Boston’s Symphony Hall, a departure for this staid sanctuary of classical music. A telephone hookup was arranged between the auditorium and the Lasky Studio, where producer Jesse Lasky and director Cecil B. DeMille tracked the film’s reception as they watched the movie simultaneously with the east coast audience. In her debut on the big screen, Farrar exhibits the flashing dark eyes, the alluring smile, the supple body, and the singularly uninhibited presence that defined her. And Carmen allows us to assess the crossover lessons from opera to film back to opera that Hollywood taught her. Frances Alda brings to life a 1916 performance of Bizet’s opera: “During the scene with the cigarette girls, Farrar suddenly shook one of them so realistically that the rest of the chorus gasped. ‘Hollywood tricks’ Caruso snorted to me. ‘What does she think this is? A cinema?’” During the act 3 tussle between Carmen and Don José “she turned in [Caruso’s] grasp, bent her head swiftly, and bit the hand that held her. Furious and bleeding, [he] flung her from him. She went down, smack on her btm [sic]! I stood staring, my mouth open, entirely forgetting my cue, until called to my senses by a sharp rap of the conductor’s baton. Then curtain. Immediately the heavy velvet folds hid the stage from the audience, Farrar was up on her feet, and she and Caruso were having it out between them, whilst I tried to soothe them both.” The next day, the headline ran: “Caruso Tells Farrar He’ll Quit If She’s Rough in Carmen” (Tribune, Feb. 19).26