Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  The flaws of the spring seasons emerged in an informal survey. Regular patrons, who declared themselves in favor of the program’s ideals, would not attend, absent “big stars” in “superb performances.” Precious few votes were cast for the novelties. To make matters worse, the recently installed system of air circulation failed to render the auditorium bearable in the often hot and humid days of May. Attendance was sparse. On July 7, 1937, Ziegler wrote to Johnson, “I have whipped Mr. Cravath up to a point of realization that unless the Juilliard assumes some of the loss, that they are not helping us but crucifying us.” The high-minded, ill-conceived, and poorly executed experiment was quietly terminated on January 5, 1938. The one requisite of the Juilliard Foundation grants that might have expanded opportunities for operagoing and opera training in New York had been a dud.37

  Opera in English

  Pushback against opera in English translation kept this requirement out of the Juilliard decree. Otto Kahn, for one, had been a staunch defender of the nexus between the original language and the music. He had argued, half seriously, that the absurdities of many librettos were better left untranslated, and had boasted that the “best informed artistic leaders” of Europe envied the Met’s policy of linguistic authenticity, at least as it applied to works originally in Italian, German, and French. Not only did the United States lack a state-sanctioned official language, but it was a country of immigrants, and these very same immigrants were counted on to fill the top tiers of the opera house. They would cringe at hearing Aïda invoked as “Heavenly” rather than “Celeste” or Lohengrin’s “Lieber” swan addressed as “Beloved.” Russian and Czech operas had long been given in translation, but still not in English. Boris Godunov vented his sorrows in Italian, Jenufa transgressed in German, Zolotoy Pyetushok (The Golden Cockerel) crowed in French. The early 1930s board was divided on the question of English translation: Bliss was in favor and Cravath opposed. Skirting the question, Ziegler foresaw (mistakenly, as it happened) that, in any case, patriotic fervor would soon sound the call for English. He suggested that Gianni Schicchi, both short and comic, would be a good fit for an English version. Gatti could not be budged: Giuseppe De Luca was his choice for the title role, and De Luca would sing it only in Italian. Gatti would reconsider if “nationalistic demand” persisted. But with Gatti gone, so was the impediment, and Johnson was free to schedule Gianni Schicchi in English for Tibbett in 1935–36 and in 1937–38. Through the end of the decade, the Met mounted only four other translated productions, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball (Amelia al ballo done in English even at its 1937 Philadelphia world premiere), The Bartered Bride, Mârouf, and Il Matrimonio segreto. Prospects for opera in English would improve in the coming decade.38

  Buying the House

  The Met’s fiscal crisis set off in October 1929 was resolved a decade later through the remarkable coalition formed to buy the house and its assets. The system that favored the original seventy box holders had unraveled bit by bit. By 1932, with the reorganization that gave rise to the Association, its edges were badly worn; by 1935, it was clear that the Real Estate Company was coming apart. The founders had died, their estates were immune to assessments, and descendants could not be made to assume the obligations of deceased shareholders. The Real Estate Company was at risk of defaulting on its taxes and on the mortgage it had incurred for facility upgrades imposed by the building code. By spring 1939, the Real Estate Company board concluded that it was no longer in a position to lease the theater to the Association. The building would have to be sold. On March 29 of that year, Cornelius Bliss, who had taken Paul Cravath’s seat as head of the board in 1938, received a letter from the Real Estate Company advising that “the only recourse of the company is the sale of . . . shares, for which at present, there appears to be no market.” The whole of the truth was that many a new Nob was unwilling to swallow the presence of a nouveau Swell in the neighboring box. And besides, boxes had lost much of their mystique. On May 5, 1939, Bliss drafted a response. He could contemplate only one solution: the purchase of the house and its warehouse on West 40th Street either by the Association “or by a group it would enlist for the sake of the future of opera in New York.” He requested a one-year option. The amount proposed was $1.5 million, subject to $500,000 in cash and the assumption of a first mortgage of $470,000. The balance would be covered by a second mortgage. There was bound to be dissension among the stockholders. A vocal group, indifferent to the public purposes of the institution, pressed for the better return that could be had on the open market. The dissenters sued and lost. In November 1939, the Association approved the deal; two months later, 68 percent of the outstanding shares were voted yes, barely more than the two-thirds majority needed.

  Now it was a question of raising roughly $1 million before the option expired, half to cover the cash payment due the Real Estate Company and half as a cushion against expenses, the most immediate and telling of which was the replacement of the grand tier boxes with conventional seats. Foundations, banks, and corporations were dunned for contributions, as were subscribers, directors of the Association, Met artists, the managers and other company employees, members of the Metropolitan Opera Club, and labor and theatrical organizations. The Metropolitan Opera Guild coordinated the efforts of its affiliates. Fiorello LaGuardia, long a subscriber and since 1936 mayor of New York City, chaired a fund-raising committee of 175 civic and educational leaders. But it was the radio audience that would constitute the largest single source of funds, $327,000. Olin Downes wrote, “This is the development due in large part to the epochal effect upon our culture of radio and records, which have democratized and disseminated upon a previously unheard of scale great music” (Times, May 19, 1940).39

  On June 28, 1942, the title to the 39th Street property was transferred to the Metropolitan Opera Association. After fifty-seven years, the company was at home in its own house.

  REPERTOIRE: 1935–1940

  The repertoire of Johnson’s first half-decade, sung mostly by the Met’s veteran stars, had the ring of Gatti’s final years. The 1935–36 season opened with La Traviata in a new investiture, a gift to Bori, who had announced her retirement. Pons spiced her usual diet of Lakmé, Lucia di Lammermoor, Rigoletto, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia with Le Coq d’or; Pinza was King Dodon to her Queen of Shemakha. Ponselle took on Carmen and little else. To his warhorses, Tibbett added the four villains of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, as well as the vainglorious Falstaff. Fearful that an exciting new Ford might repeat his own 1925 upstaging of the principal baritone, he nixed the young Leonard Warren. Sopranos Gina Cigna, Maria Caniglia, Zinka Milanov, and Licia Albanese made their debuts, enlivening the Italian side of the repertoire, the latter two for decades to come. European tenors came and went. The truly memorable of these, Jussi Björling, returned at war’s end, and then sporadically until his death in 1960.40

  Between 1935 and 1940, Johnson hazarded a skimpy total of four novelties; taken together, they eked out only fifteen performances of the nearly nine hundred presented by the company. Richard Hageman’s Caponsacchi was roundly ignored. It had made the news during rehearsal when Tibbett accidentally stabbed a chorister in the hand: the wound was slight, but within five hours, the victim died of cardiac complications. Il Matrimonio segreto, imported in Juilliard’s English-language version, was lost in the vast house. Amelia Goes to the Ball played cleverly with the conventions of opera buffa, Italian comic opera, but it too was undersized for the theater. The Man without a Country was dismissed out of hand as uninspired, retrograde. Among the six new productions of revivals, two corrected errors of omission. On December 22, 1937, Otello, wonderfully served by Martinelli, Tibbett, Rethberg, and Panizza, reclaimed its place of privilege after twenty-four years. Following a similar interval, Le Nozze di Figaro made its comeback on February 20, 1940, again conducted by Panizza. Pinza in the title role and Bidú Sayão as Susanna, his bride, were the nucleus of an ensemble that sparked the Mozart revival of the 1940s.


  TABLE 10. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1935–36 to 1939–40

  Johnson had hoped to crown his initial season with Kirsten Flagstad as Norma. A past Met Wagnerian had already had a go at Bellini’s heroine. Lilli Lehmann, the company’s first Siegfried and Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde, had also been the first to sing “Casta diva” on its stage. And Flagstad had heard the only other Norma, Ponselle, in act 3 of the opera during Gatti’s farewell gala. In fact, much of act 3—the legato of the recitative “Teneri figli,” the andante section of the duet “Mira, o Norma”—was well suited to Flagstad. But there was reason for caution: she had never undertaken a bel canto role or a role that demanded dramatic coloratura. Besides, she had never sung a role in Italian. Ziegler urged the soprano on, predicting “a great triumph,” and Flagstad was game to give it a try. In fall 1935, after an encouraging run-through with Panizza, a coach was enlisted to infuse her delivery with the apposite style. But Flagstad soon determined that Norma was not for her and asked to be released from the commitment; Johnson consented. He scheduled Dusolina Giannini in her place. Following Giannini’s dress rehearsal, for reasons still not clear, the February 26, 1936, Norma morphed into La Bohème and Martinelli exchanged Pollione’s helmet for Rodolfo’s beret. The next season, he sang the Roman proconsul to Cigna’s Druid priestess. As for Flagstad, she never again strayed from the Wagnerian manor to which she was born, except, like so many Brünnhildes, for incursions into the dank prison of Fidelio, and in 1952, the temples of Gluck’s Alceste.41

  WAGNER: 1929–1940

  Once the ban on opera in German was lifted in 1921, Artur Bodanzky had a magnificent crew of Wagnerians at his command. Maria Jeritza, Elisabeth Rethberg, and Maria Müller were all expert interpreters of the lighter lyric roles, the jugendlich dramatischer Elsa, Elisabeth, and Eva. Friedrich Schorr, the world’s leading heldenbariton (heroic baritone) was there for Hans Sachs, Wotan, Wolfram, Amfortas, Kurwenal, and the Dutchman, and dramatic mezzo Karin Branzell for Ortrud, Fricka, and Brangäne. Among the heldentenors was Lauritz Melchior, just coming into his own. There was weakness in one crucial rank: the hochdramatischer. The foremost Wagnerian dramatic soprano of the time, Frida Leider, was under contract to Chicago. Brünnhilde and Isolde were left to the able Gertrude Kappel and to the disappointing Elisabeth Ohms. Thanks to the demise of the Chicago Civic Opera in 1932, the Met’s Wagner goblet ran over. Lotte Lehmann came to New York for the jugendlich roles, Leider for the hochdramatisch. The air check of March 11, 1933, preserves Leider’s Isolde, her warm, finely centered voice alert to the character’s shifting moods. On the March 24, 1934, broadcast, Melchior, Leider’s Tristan, is Lohengrin to Rethberg’s ethereal Elsa. Maria Olszewska—she, too, lately from Chicago—although squally in Ortrud’s highest notes, exudes terrifying authority. As for Lehmann’s Meistersinger Eva, having exhausted his reservoir of superlatives, Gilman could only exclaim, “But this is the real thing!” (Herald Tribune, March 16, 1934). Less than a year later, Gilman was present for Flagstad’s first New York Isolde. His notice, he said, was not as much a review of the performance as it was the exercise of what Swinburne called “the noble pleasure of praising” (Herald Tribune, Feb. 7, 1935).

  Other critics, too, spent themselves in panegyrics over Flagstad’s Isolde—over her voice, of course, but also over her acting. The youthful sound she adopts as “Irlands Maid” at the beginning of act 1 comes through in the broadcast of March 9, 1935. Minutes later, she captures all of Isolde’s confusion and despair, rising to the wrath of the “Narrative and Curse” without resorting to the shrieks so often emitted in the execution of these trying pages. The long lines of the act 2 love duet hover on her phenomenal column of breath; the “Liebestod” builds gradually to its two climaxes as Flagstad rides the great orchestral wave, and then climbs to the ecstatic, pianissimo transport of the final note. On this spectacular afternoon, she was supported by Branzell, who delivers a rock-solid act 2 “Warnung” (Warning). Although stretched by the highest notes, Schorr’s Kurwenal is heartbreaking in the act 3 tending of his master. And the master, Tristan, takes the measure of his Isolde, tireless as he bends his pliant voice to the character’s inner conflicts. He ascends with ease from a baritonal lower register to luminous high notes and, perhaps most remarkable, given his enormous instrument, summons a dulcet pianissimo legato for Tristan’s yearnings. If Flagstad is one of the very greatest dramatic sopranos of the twentieth century, Melchior’s gifts defy comparison. No other tenor has come close.

  The historic Flagstad-Melchior partnership and their collaboration, individually and as an operatic couple, with other artists are preserved in many transcriptions of early broadcasts. We consider a sampling here. Flagstad’s Elisabeth of January 18, 1936, is striking most particularly for the purity of tone at fortissimo on high. Paul Jackson points to this performance, and specifically to Tannhäuser’s “Rome Narrative,” as demonstration of “the enormous range of expression of [Melchior’s] splendid instrument.” Also in this Tannhäuser, Tibbett, in his sole broadcast of a Wagnerian role, negotiates the lyric stanzas of the minnesinger Wolfram as convincingly as he had the outbursts of Scarpia. Siegfried is, of course, the tenor’s show. On the afternoon of January 30, 1937, Melchior, after hours of singing at full tilt, remains primed for the act 3 duel with Flagstad, who had spent those hours resting in her dressing room. She strikes the treacherous high C of “Ewig war ich” as she would a giant bell, although she opts for the lower octave at the end of the duet. Lotte Lehmann, in the Lohengrin of December 21, 1935, invests the virginal Elsa with desire for the mysterious knight. Marjorie Lawrence, as Ortrud, is her worthy antagonist. In the January 11, 1938, Götterdämmerung with Melchior, the Australian soprano made news with an athletic coup de théâtre at the end of the “Immolation Scene.” The first Brünnhilde in Met history to obey Wagner’s stage directions almost to the letter, this valkyrie leapt onto her faithful steed and galloped offstage.42

  That audiences were mad for Wagner is the story of the 1935–1940 box office; receipts came in consistently and significantly above average. In 1937–38, the predominantly Wagnerian German repertoire claimed approximately the same percentage of the total subscription gross as the Italian, in the lead since the days of Conried. And Tristan und Isolde was the most popular draw of all five seasons. In fifty-six performances, Flagstad was the sole Isolde, Melchior her Tristan in all but three. In the course of its seven Met seasons, the team of Flagstad and Melchior racked up 202 performances, a company record: they outdistanced Nordica and de Reszke, more than doubled the output of Farrar and Caruso. The coincidence of the Norwegian soprano and the Danish tenor was as serendipitous for the Met’s balance sheet as it was for the history of Wagner performance.43

  The 1930s closed with a power struggle over a Wagner conductor, Erich Leinsdorf. Assistant to Toscanini in Salzburg and Bruno Walter in Florence, the well-credentialed Leinsdorf came to the Met in the same capacity under Bodanzky. His January 21, 1938, Die Walküre debut was a success; there were no significant caveats. During the remainder of this season and the whole of the next, Leinsdorf conducted six more operas, of which thirty or so performances featured Flagstad or Melchior or both. Bodanzky’s death on November 23, 1939, just four days before opening night, thrust upon the young conductor substantial responsibility for the German wing. And suddenly, Leinsdorf was no longer acceptable to the famous pair he had led without incident, and apparently without complaint, for nearly two years. It all revolved around Tristan und Isolde. Flagstad incited the revolt. She insisted that her accompanist, Edwin McArthur, be assigned the podium. She took the poorly timed occasion of a condolence cable on the very day of Bodanzky’s death to pitch the case for her protégé to Ziegler: “I know that Melchior will join me in requesting that you give Edwin McArthur the opportunity to conduct our Tristan performances which he did so brilliantly in California [at the San Francisco Opera] and in which opera we both feel so perfectly at ease with him in the pit.”

  FIGURE 19. Kirs
ten Flagstad as Isolde and Lauritz Melchior as Tristan, c. 1940 (Morton; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The feud made the front page on January 25, 1940: “Wagnerian Rift at Opera over Leinsdorf Revealed” (Herald Tribune). In support of Flagstad, Melchior mounted his own attack, alleging that Leinsdorf was “not yet ready to be senior conductor of the finest department of the greatest opera house in the world.” Flagstad threatened to walk out if Leinsdorf was not replaced, claiming first that his conducting “made her ill” (Mirror, Jan. 26, 1940), later expatiating on her malaise: “Since Mr. Leinsdorf is inexperienced in playing Wagner, he watches the music. I see his arms moving, but I can’t tell where the music is.” The normally compliant Johnson would not be budged by “some old boats in the company.” Four days after the affair became public, during the first intermission of Die Walküre, board member David Sarnoff arranged a photo-op handshake between Leinsdorf and Melchior, to which he appended jokingly, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you can see for yourselves this is truly a house of harmony. If we could get Hitler and Stalin, Daladier and Chamberlain to come on this stage and shake hands, the war soon would be over and all would be lovely” (Times). The Met mollified Flagstad by engaging McArthur for a total of six performances of Tristan und Isolde over this and the next season, during which period she was obliged to submit to Leinsdorf’s baton fifty-six times.44