Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  In the 1920s and 1930s, between seven and nine of the ten Wagner titles in the repertoire were programmed each season, a bounty greater than that offered pilgrims to Bayreuth. A Wagnerite could count on at least one “Ring” cycle and an Easter Parsifal. By way of comparison, the opening decade of the twenty-first century saw an average of fewer than three works by Wagner per season.45

  SIX

  Strains of War, 1940–1950

  THE CONDUCTOR’S OPERA

  OPENING NIGHT, DECEMBER 2, 1940

  THE 1940–41 SEASON OPENED with Un Ballo in maschera, absent from the Metropolitan for a quarter of a century. Curiosity was directed at both the stage and the Diamond Horseshoe, occupied for the first time not by owners but by subscribers. In fact, the “hereditary holders,” now more democratically holders of season tickets, were largely one and the same. And for the most part, they were settled in the same seats they or their kin had filled since 1883. Family circle standees who had waited from dawn to dusk to buy their tickets looked down on a ring essentially identical to that of the past. On the surface, little had changed. The year’s first performance set an opening night record; receipts exceeded $18,000, nearly $6,000 above the usual capacity gross.

  By fall 1940, it was evident that the Met’s day-to-day operations would be more and more affected by the European conflict. The same front page that carried Edward Johnson’s comment that the war presented the company with both “opportunity and challenge” and Howard Taubman’s review of opening night led with the story that Germany had attacked Greece. Taubman pronounced the season’s opening a shining example of peaceful coexistence: “Last night’s cast was, in its makeup, the Metropolitan’s answer to the nationalist passions that are rampant in Europe. Following its tradition of bringing together the best artists of the world, whatever their race, nation, or politics, the Metropolitan had singers last night who were an international assemblage.” Unlike the houses of Europe, where largely native performers sang in the vernacular of the audience, the Met’s roster was diverse in language and culture. The management had opposed the 1937 Alien Artists Exclusion Bill, citing limited opportunities for opera training in the United States and the intolerable price the operagoing public would pay for restrictions on foreign artists. Though section 2 of the bill allowed for a quid pro quo, the provision would be of little use if there were no American seeking engagement in, say, Norway, in exchange for Kirsten Flagstad. As to “whatever their race,” Taubman was probably referring to the Jews on the Met payroll. He could not have foreseen that, fifteen years later, in the very opera that opened 1940–41, Marian Anderson would be the first African-American to be cast in a major role.

  Despite the historic transfer of ownership of the house, the novelty and brilliance of Verdi’s opera, and the voices of Zinka Milanov and Jussi Björling, the most noteworthy event of the season was not opening night but the US operatic debut of conductor Bruno Walter.

  FIDELIO: FEBRUARY 14, 1941

  Walter made his way to a podium that sat high on the raised floor of the pit. Conductor and players were visible throughout the performance. While February 14 is lost to us, an off-the-air recording of the following week’s Saturday matinée is a precious approximation of the extraordinary evening of music and of its impassioned reception. The Leonore Overture No. 3 provoked an outburst that lasted more than a minute; at the opera’s conclusion, the ovation for the cast was punctuated by shouts of “Walter.” European audiences knew him as a conductor of opera as well as symphony; America had known him only in concert, never in the opera house. He first appeared in the United States in 1923 with the New York Symphony Orchestra. He returned frequently as guest from coast to coast. No conductor, with the exception of Arturo Toscanini, had more cachet. According to stage director Herbert Graf, Johnson “was practically trembling before their first meeting.”1

  Walter’s Fidelio belongs to that rarified theatrical category in which history, work, composer, and performer come together to inscribe a single narrative. Here was a moment in which the grave issues confronting the nation converged with those engaged by the masterwork. These same issues intersected with the biographies of the lionized artists. Uncompromising, defiant, Beethoven and Walter were conflated in a common profile whose prominent feature was the massive cranium of genius. The deteriorating situation overseas—an all-too-present story of oppression and persecution—reverberated in the ardent libretto and score. As the conductor put it some years later, “In the first act of Fidelio . . . we witness the hand of the tyrant. In the second, we observe the victim, bent but unbroken. In the finale, we see the Minister of State, representative of goodness, and share in the glorious apotheosis of brotherhood.”2

  FIGURE 20. Bruno Walter (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The media blitz surrounding Walter’s debut imbricated the Fidelio scenario and the exemplary life told and retold in the national press, in newsreels, and on the radio: an illustrious musician of German-Jewish origin, having escaped religious and political persecution by fleeing first Germany, and then Austria, and finally France, takes refuge in the United States, and for the first time in his long career conducts an American performance of a magisterial work by one of nineteenth-century Europe’s titanic composers, a fierce champion of freedom. Fidelio’s place in the Walter mythology was further privileged by the fact that the first work he conducted at the Met was also the last he chose to perform in Munich and then in Berlin. Had Walter not left, like so many who shared his liberal views and/or Jewish heritage, he might have suffered a fate much like that of Florestan, the idealistic hero of Fidelio, imprisoned by order of a tyrant. There the parallel ends. Leonore, Florestan’s loving wife, disguised as the eponymous youth, rescues her husband from the political prison of the villainous Don Pizarro. During the opera’s final scene, a paean to liberty and justice, Leonore removes Florestan’s shackles. A grateful populace salutes her.

  TRIBULATIONS

  Artists

  The cast of Walter’s 1941 Fidelio would never again be assembled. The quandary into which reports from Europe threw many of the company’s inner circle is conveyed in the memoirs of the Swedish-Hungarian-American soprano Astrid Varnay: “At the end of her penultimate prewar season, Kirsten [Flagstad] was on the train to Cleveland to join the Metropolitan tour, already in progress. There, Lauritz and Kleinchen Melchior told her that the Germans were about to attack and occupy both Norway and Melchior’s native Denmark. The Melchiors had decided to wait out the war in America and urged Flagstad to do the same. At the next station, Melchior hopped off to buy a newspaper. When he returned, his expression was grim: Norway and Denmark were now in a state of war with Germany. Arriving in Cleveland, they saw Kerstin Thorborg and her husband, Gustav Bergman, on the platform, weeping uncontrollably. Although their own native Sweden had been allowed to remain neutral, their feelings for their fellow Scandinavians were so strong they were both reduced to tears.” Melchior’s advice went unheeded and in 1941 the Met lost its star soprano.3

  As early as 1933, the routine of Metropolitan affairs had been perturbed by the advance of fascism. The year in which Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany was also the year Luigi Villa, Giulio Gatti-Casazza’s secretary, received a distraught letter from Erich Simon, agent to many leading singers. Simon, a German Jew, had fled to Paris to escape the Nazis “after terrible times and undescribable days.” He had been summarily dismissed, as had all of his Jewish colleagues. He wanted Gatti to know that the Berlin agency to which he had been attached was “absolutely a national-socialistic institution which declines to make any engagements for artists who are not of real German and Christian origin.” Within five years of Simon’s anguished account, the religious affiliation of the Met’s correspondents would be at issue in Italy as well. On May 7, 1938, Milanese agent Attilio Lamponi complained to Villa that he had had no response to his solicitation of Metropolitan business. He explained frankly that the recent growth of his influence had situated him to be
of invaluable service. As things stood, he pointed out, his Jewish competitors would soon find it difficult to work in Europe; artists would be looking elsewhere for the negotiation of their contracts. Not that he, Lamponi, held any animus toward Jews. It was just that as a businessman it was his responsibility to report on conditions objectively. Besides, he had been called to Rome and would soon have official charge of all international theatrical arrangements.4

  By mid-decade, the major German singers who had been at the Met in the early 1930s—Frida Leider, Maria Müller, and Max Lorenz, for example—were gone. And numerous stars of the leading German houses, among them Tiana Lemnitz, Margarete Klose, Helge Roswaenge, and Heinrich Schlusnuss, would miss their chance to sing opera in New York. In return, Jewish and anti-Nazi artists such as Jan Kiepura, Alexander Kipnis, Lotte Lehmann, Jarmila Novotna, and Friedrich Schorr, forced out of European theaters, were available to the Met. In 1939, Italian artists would be barred by their government from traveling to the United States; the question of whether Lamponi or someone else would handle their contracts would be moot. A flurry of telegrams documents the negotiations between the Metropolitan and the State Department, the Italian Embassy in Washington, and the pertinent Italian bureau. On September 28, 1939, a cable from the Federazione Fascista Lavoratori Spettacolo (Fascist Federation of Theater Workers) informed the Met that ten contracted singers would not be honoring their commitments, among them Maria Caniglia, Mafalda Favero, and Carlo Tagliabue, who had already made successful Met debuts, and the much anticipated Ebe Stignani. As the Times (Oct. 7, 1939) explained it, several of those forbidden to travel were contracted to Italian theaters following their projected stints at the Met; there was concern that increasing international tensions might preclude their timely repatriation. Of more diplomatic consequence was the eventuality that Italian artists caught in the United States would be marooned on enemy shores should America enter the war. There was a good deal of back and forth on the matter over the course of many months. The authorities were sensitive to the propaganda value of italianità at the Metropolitan and were, therefore, reluctant to offend the management; they were also loath to forgo the hard currency their nationals would deposit in Italian banks. The Met applied what pressure it could, both at home and in Italy, through numerous intermediaries. One such go-between, the retired Lucrezia Bori, long a US resident and great friend of the company, agreed to bring the Metropolitan’s position to the attention of the Italian Ambassador in Washington: if the ten contracted singers did not come, the management would have no recourse but to redraw the season’s repertoire, with serious consequences for the company and for Italian opera itself. On the other hand, should Johnson receive assurances that the restrictions imposed in 1939–40 would be lifted for 1940–41, he would be favorable to scheduling a greater number of operas by Italian composers than had originally been planned. In May 1940, Johnson received the guarantees he sought from the consul general. In the end, Licia Albanese, who was not one of the ten, was allowed to make her debut. But of the detainees in 1939, only Alessio De Paolis and Salvatore Baccaloni were on the roster in 1940–41. In addition, star tenor Tito Schipa would not return. Well known for his fascist sympathies, Schipa canceled just a month before the United States declared war on Germany and Italy.5

  Ezio Pinza’s tribulations unfolded entirely stateside. He was diligently fulfilling his Met contract for the 1941–42 season when FBI agents showed up at his suburban New York door and placed him under arrest on the accusation of a fellow bass, Norman Cordon. Pinza had been a Met star since 1926 and one of its most popular draws. Furthermore, he had been a permanent resident since 1939 and lately married to an American. Among the charges he faced were that he was a personal friend of Il Duce (they had never met), that his nickname was Mussolini (an invention), that by changing tempos during Met broadcasts he had sent coded messages abroad (too absurd to contest), that he had transmitted radio communications from his boat (he had sold the boat soon after Pearl Harbor), that he had a tortoise-shell ring in the shape of a swastika (it was an antique ring that bore an archaic symbol), that in 1935 he had organized a collection of gold and silver for the benefit of the war in Ethiopia (he had not organized the collection but had contributed a gold ring to the war effort that year). While columnist Walter Winchell went on the attack with his signature malice (Winchell appeared to be particularly seized by what he considered the damning evidence of the ring), many others came to Pinza’s defense, including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Carlo Tresca, editor of the antifascist New York paper Il Martello. So did Bruno Walter. Johnson deposed in Pinza’s favor: “I should indeed be remiss in my duties as an American and as General Manager of the greatest American Opera House, should I tolerate enemies of our country on our staff, no matter how exquisite their talents.” Far from undermining the American cause, Pinza’s gifts, Johnson attested, would fortify the nation in the difficult times ahead. At Pinza’s successful second hearing, colleagues testified that Cordon had bragged about informing on his celebrated competitor. After three month’s detention, Pinza was released. His return to the Met in 1942–43 came in Philadelphia, where, as Don Giovanni, he had the pleasure of murdering Cordon’s Commendatore in a performance conducted by Walter. In his first New York appearance of that season, he sang the message of brotherhood of the wise Sarastro in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, again under Walter.6

  The first major European singer to make his debut after the war was the Swedish tenor Torsten Ralf, a target in 1945 of one of Winchell’s many insidious attacks: “A singer at the Met is said to have entertained the Nazis in Berlin and Vienna until three years ago. And didn’t he make recordings for Goebbels?” According to an official of the US Legation in Stockholm, Ralf had served the Allied cause both in Berlin and in Sweden before and after 1941. He was cleared of all charges. So too in 1947, by authority of the Military Government in Germany, were the bass-baritone Hans Hotter and the coloratura Erna Berger. Berger ran into trouble three years later with the adoption of the McCarran Act of 1950, passed by a dangerously zealous Congress over the veto of President Harry Truman. Among other provisions, the McCarran Act barred entry into the United States to “aliens who are members of or affiliated with . . . the Communist or other totalitarian party . . . of any foreign state.” Berger had not been a member of the Nazi party; she had enrolled in the Reichstheaterkammer, a requirement for working musicians. When Berger first appeared at the Met in 1949, the Reichstheaterkammer was classified a union; the next year it was reclassified a “subsidy” of the Nazi party. For a time, Berger was denied a visa.7

  But no case aroused more consternation than that of Flagstad, who had spent the war years in Norway with her husband, Henry Johansen. At the close of hostilities, Johansen was indicted on charges of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and the Quisling government; he died in June 1946 awaiting trial for treason. Flagstad had sung rarely during the war, and only in neutral Switzerland and Sweden. Nonetheless, rumors were rife that she had performed for German soldiers, made pro-Nazi statements, and called Erich Leinsdorf a “damned Jew.” There were those who lobbied that her reengagement not be delayed; Mrs. Belmont was certain, and said so publicly, that once the State Department granted Flagstad a visa, there would be a place for her on the roster. In 1947, Flagstad was issued the requisite document, and in spring of that year she embarked on an American tour. There was some question of a stop at the Metropolitan. But many of her appearances around the country sparked protests, even angry demonstrations, precisely the reaction that Johnson and his board were determined to avoid. Despite earlier vague overtures, it was not until the January 27, 1950, meeting of the executive committee of the Association that she was approved for the coming season. By then, Johnson would have relinquished the Metropolitan reins.8

  FIGURE 21. Protest against Kirsten Flagstad’s Carnegie Hall appearance, April 21, 1947 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  Money and Labor

  In spring 1942, the Frankfurte
r Zeitung spread the word that the remainder of the Metropolitan season had been canceled: “Money alone does not suffice to maintain grand opera on a sound and artistic basis. The closing of the Metropolitan four months after the declaration of war symbolizes something more than the bankruptcy of a leading private establishment. It exposes to all the world the cultural weakness of a country which is now proclaiming itself the guardian and defender of traditional cultural values” (Times, April 26, 1942). Johnson picked up the gauntlet. In his report to the board on the fiscal year ending May 31, 1942, under the heading “Metropolitan Opera in War Time,” he declared that, yes, “the center of grand opera had shifted from Europe to this side of the Atlantic.” And looking ahead to 1943–44, he answered the Nazi broadside with the rebuttal that the season would be extended to twenty weeks, “not as a retort to you, but because our attendance of more than 405,623 people last year warranted it! And 400,000 Americans can’t be wrong. . . . And you will learn to your destruction that it is by the drums and the trumpets that men march to victory, whether it be to the music of the War March by Felix Mendelssohn or the Radetzky March by Johann Strauss or ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ by Francis Scott Key. America has come into its musical heritage. Let the drums roll. Let the trumpets blow. On with the show!” (Mirror, Aug. 29, 1943).