FIGURE 8. Jean de Reszke as Siegfried in Götterdämmerung (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)
Well before Henry Abbey’s death on October 17, 1896, it was evident that the managing triumvirate was close to bankruptcy. The opera company had held its own, and more; Abbey’s other theatrical ventures were to blame. The board designated William Steinway, principal of the piano firm, to restructure the enterprise as Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau Ltd., and to rebalance the books. The situation continued to deteriorate nonetheless. Following Abbey’s death and Schoeffel’s withdrawal, Grau found himself alone in charge. He refused to lease the house for 1897–98, when the de Reszkes, Calvé, and Melba chose to sing elsewhere, and repaired instead to Covent Garden, where he was also managing director. For the second time in six years, the Met had no resident company. Those who argued for the primacy of music in the German manner over that of the star system endemic to French and Italian practice were, in some perverse way, vindicated by Grau’s desertion of New York for an entire operatic year.20
1898–1903
On Grau’s return in 1898, the star system ruled as aggressively as ever. The five-year tenancy of the Maurice Grau Opera Company is often cited as the apogee of the Met’s “golden age.” And as if to silence the opposing camp, for the first time in seventy-three years of intrepid entrepreneurship, it was Grau who proved opera fiscally viable in New York. The company showed a profit in each of his years. His winning strategy was this: to engage the most celebrated artists of the time for the entire season, and to pay them extravagantly, to the despair of competing houses and on the backs of supporting singers, of the orchestra, and of the chorus; to assemble so large a roster of international singers that he could field casts capable of performing in all styles and operatic languages then current; and to make frequent cast changes so as to oblige reviewers to attend again and again. The public, he knew, would put up with scenery hung interchangeably for Verdi, Wagner, and Meyerbeer as long as it framed the Melbas, the Calvés, and the de Reszkes. As to conductors, he quipped that “no one has ever paid a nickel to see a man’s back.”21
In 1898–99, audiences at last heard an uncut “Ring” cycle, under Franz Schalk, with de Reszke, Lehmann, and Nordica reconciled with the company and her tenor. Sembrich made an emotional return after fifteen years. Melba was absent in 1899–1900 but resurfaced the next year, when, for the first time, the board exercised its right to choose the lead singers, by voting her a contract. She, in turn, cast a ballot of her own: the veto of Sembrich. The following year, with Melba’s defection, Sembrich was again on the roster. Most eagerly awaited was Jean de Reszke as Lohengrin on New Year’s Eve 1900, after a season’s hiatus. Admiration for de Reszke, his style, his acting, his musicality, and his sincerity bordered on delirium. The story of the Met’s golden age is largely his story. It was he who defined the Met primarily as home to the French repertoire and who soon thereafter rehabilitated Wagner. The turn of the first year of the new century would coincide with de Reszke’s adieu. The Gay Nineties were over. So was an extraordinary operatic era. At the April 29, 1901, gala, during which a reported sixteen women were revived by the ammonia providentially dispensed by ushers posted at every door, an astonishing two thousand standees were jammed behind the orchestra seats. The program featured de Reszke, Melba, and Nordica, of course. Ovations for the Polish tenor oscillated from “frantic” to “frenzied” (Times). The gala also blandished two French guests, the actors Sarah Bernhardt and Coquelin, in a one-act comedy.22
La Bohème and Tosca were new to the Met in the 1900–01 season. Henderson and Krehbiel had snubbed Puccini’s bohemians when an Italian troupe of no particular distinction introduced them to New York at Wallach’s Theatre in 1898. And when Melba, in search of suitable new roles, and Albert Saléza sang the doomed seamstress and the impoverished poet on 39th Street, the fractious critics saw no reason to change their minds. Tosca had by far the stronger cast, particularly in the Roman diva of Milka Ternina and the lecherous police chief of Antonio Scotti, who would go on to sing more than two hundred Scarpias with the company. The Tribune decried the opera’s “repulsive” subject; Krehbiel was particularly hard on Puccini’s score, “much of it like shreds and patches of many things with which the operatic stage has long been familiar.” Audience response through the end of the Grau years was unexceptional. It was not until Heinrich Conried took over from Grau in 1903 and Enrico Caruso assumed the tenor leads that these Puccini masterworks would take their undying place in the public’s affections.
TABLE 3. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1891–92 to 1902–03
TABLE 3. (continued)
TABLE 3. (continued)
Reviewers heaped abuse on Ernest Reyer’s Salammbô and Isidore De Lara’s Messaline, the first served up on a scale that vied with the grandiosity of Flaubert’s orientalist novel, the second a personal triumph for Calvé as the Roman empress, a “foul-minded, utterly carnal, and debased woman” (Times). Two German-language works, Manru, Ignacy Paderewski’s sole opera, and Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald, were fresh from their European premieres. Critics faulted the libretto of Manru, “awkward in construction, and at times amazingly silly in language” (Tribune); Paderewski’s score was coddled as “an amazing first opera” (Tribune), “the conception of a genuine composer” (Times). The beloved pianist was called to take repeated bows as early as the second-act curtain. And Sembrich was indebted to her Polish compatriot for a congenial vehicle. Manru failed to survive its initial season. Grau’s final premiere was also attended by the composer, in this case the composer-librettist, a British feminist largely trained in Leipzig. Der Wald was the first and remains the only opera by a woman to be staged at the Met. The one-act piece was given two performances. The Telegraph couched its favorable notice in blatantly sexist terms: “In fact, this little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment.” The World bridled at “an hour of ultra-modern music, strident, formless.” The Times regretted that “Mr. Grau’s long and distinguished career as an impresario should be marked by a production of so little importance.” By then, in declining health, Grau had announced his retirement for the end of the 1902–03 season. The board named Conried to replace him. Five years later, the exasperated directors bought Conried out. High on the list of complaints was that he had strayed from the French path Grau had charted so profitably.
THE PARABOLIC FORTUNES OF THE FRENCH REPERTOIRE
In the Met’s inaugural year, France provided approximately one-third of the operas and performances given by the Grand Italian Opera. The French repertoire claimed an even higher quotient under Leopold Damrosch the following season, when Le Prophète and La Juive gave Tannhäuser and Lohengrin a run for their money. From 1885 to 1891, the six remaining seasons under the leadership and aesthetic bias of Stanton and Seidl, the German juggernaut drove the French roster to a distant second place at 15 percent of the program. The era of French dominance came under the directorships of Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau, as we have seen, and then of Grau alone. Between 1891 and 1903, the Gallic repertoire accounted for one-third of the total performances; it led the box office in all but three seasons, in four exceeding 50 percent of the gross, and in 1893–94 reaching the top of the parabola with a stupefying 70 percent share. The institutional and performance history of the period exhibits the degree to which French opera shaped the Metropolitan’s âge d’or. Through the Conried, Gatti-Casazza, and Johnson years, French works would average around 15 percent of the performances, falling between 10 percent and 13 percent since then.
The inventory of Metropolitan titles from 1883 to 2013 includes sixty-one French works, a number far short of the ninety-eight Italian and slightly greater than the German forty-seven. But by the measure of titles that have tallied more than one hundred performances, only eight are French, while nineteen are German and twenty-nine Italian.
Carmen and Faust have been presented regularly, which is to say, like Lucia di Lammermoor and Il Barbiere di Siviglia, for example, in half or more of 128 Met seasons. Six other works have persisted through good times and bad: Manon, Roméo et Juliette, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Samson et Dalila, Pelléas et Mélisande, and La Fille du régiment. Werther, long dormant, has taken on new life in recent decades. Then there are those operas, once popular, that have been absent since the 1940s, some longer: Mignon, L’Africaine, Les Huguenots, Lakmé, Louise, Guillaume Tell. Neglected at the Met, they have been exhumed elsewhere, occasionally with considerable success. And finally, there are those such as Salammbô and Messaline that lapsed into virtual oblivion after their first exposures.
THREE
Opera Wars, 1903–1908
PARSIFAL, SALOME, AND THE MANHATTAN OPERA COMPANY
HEINRICH CONRIED
THE YEARS 1880 AND 1910 bracket a dazzling chapter in the cultural history of New York City. At one end, the three-decade span is anchored by the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the eastern edge of Central Park and, at the other, by the completion of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The period saw the founding and, in cases such as that of the Museum, the expansion into grand permanent quarters of many of the arts and science institutions that catapulted New York into the orbit of world cultural capitals: the Metropolitan Opera (1883), the New York Music Hall (1891, later Carnegie Hall), the New York Botanical Garden (1891), the New York Zoological Park (1899, later the Bronx Zoo), the Institute of Musical Art of the City of New York (1904, later the Juilliard School of Music), the Jewish Museum (1904), the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1906, later Rockefeller University), the Pierpont Library (1906, later the Morgan Library and Museum), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1908), and the New-York Historical Society (1908). In 1910, the books from the Astor and Lenox libraries were transferred to the new edifice on 42nd Street. Instrumental in the birth and burgeoning of these institutions were the men who served also on the executive committee of the first Metropolitan Opera board of directors: James A. Roosevelt (an uncle of Theodore Roosevelt), William C. Whitney, George G. Haven, William K. Vanderbilt, and Adrian Iselin.1
Whitney, Haven, and Iselin were still on the board in 1903 when its executive committee met to choose a successor to Maurice Grau. On the lists, along with Heinrich Conried, were Walter Damrosch and Andrew Carnegie’s choice, Pittsburgh music manager George W. Wilson. Carnegie’s backing of Wilson carried with it the support of seventy-six other millionaires and the pledge to raise $150,000 for the company in a matter of weeks. But not unexpectedly, “New York plutocrats had no intention whatsoever of allowing Pittsburgh to encroach on their playground.” Passing over Damrosch by the narrowest margin, seven to six, the executive committee settled on Conried, opting for a theater rather than a music professional, just as they had twenty years earlier in selecting Henry Abbey. With Conried’s ascendency, the Metropolitan name was joined to that of an impresario for the first and last time, and for the first time the impresario was accorded a seat on the board of what was now the Conried Metropolitan Opera Company. Born in Silesia, Conried had emigrated to the United States in 1878, as had the very young Maurice Grau from Moravian Austria in 1854 and Leopold Damrosch from Germany in 1871. Only twenty-three at his arrival, Conried nevertheless had sufficient credits as a stage manager and actor in Austria and Germany to have attracted the interest of the director of the Germania Theatre, at whose invitation he came to New York. He would soon be named artistic manager of the Thalia, then of the Casino Theatre, which specialized in operetta, and, in 1893, of the German Theatre in Irving Place, where he developed an exceptional resident stock company. The artistic and financial success of his promotion of German culture on Irving Place, a model of the ensemble repertory adopted by other theater reformers, won him the Metropolitan plum. He brought with him no experience and precious little knowledge of grand opera. His compensation was guaranteed at $20,000 annually and 50 percent of the presumed profits; his expenses included the purchase of Grau’s assets, among these, contracts with Enrico Caruso and Olive Fremstad.2
Conried’s five-year term would be neither the shortest nor the longest in the early history of the Metropolitan. Abbey’s first stint lasted just one year, Leopold Damrosch’s, tragically, even less. Edmond Stanton was in charge for six years, Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau for five, and then Grau alone for five more. But of all the regimes to that point, and arguably since, Conried’s was the most flamboyant and, year for year, the most turbulent. His reign began lavishly with the renovation of the auditorium, its décor finally acceding to the traditional deep red and gold it would preserve for the remaining sixty-three years of the theater’s life. The former stagehand insisted on the revamping of the stage and the upgrading of its machinery to the most modern standard. Newly framing the stage was a proscenium arch inscribed with the names of Gluck, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Gounod, and Beethoven. Public rooms reserved for pampered patrons were fitted with luxurious new appointments. So was the general manager’s extravagant office. Ushers and other employees were dressed in evening clothes, complete with tails, as they had been in 1883. These changes took place in an atmosphere of relative peace. It was the repertoire, though not the repertoire alone, that became the site of conflict.3
FIGURE 9. Metropolitan stage rebuilt for Parsifal, Scientific American, February 6, 1904 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)
No sooner had the choice of Conried been made public in February 1903 than the general manager–elect began dropping hints of an exploit he had been plotting for a while: the first staging of Parsifal outside of Bayreuth. And so by the time the curtain rose on Rigoletto, the 1903–04 season opener and Caruso’s debut, the board found itself caught up in a battle waged against its new lessee from pulpits, courts, and press rooms. In Conried’s second year, a stage bridge collapsed during a performance of Carmen; ten choristers were injured in the nine-foot fall. That same year, the unhappy chorus, demanding a raise in pay from $15 to $25 weekly, shorter hours, and sleeping car instead of coach accommodations on overnight travel, walked out for three days in what was to be the first of the several strikes in Metropolitan history. Eames, Caruso, and other principals filled in for the many choruses of Faust. Engelbert Humperdinck made his initial visit to New York to supervise the November 1905 unveiling of Hänsel und Gretel. Six months later, and throughout the breathless 1906–07 season, one crisis after another, musical and paramusical, made the goings-on at the opera house riveting copy. A less intrepid impresario might have found just one of these happenings more than enough excitement for little more than a single operatic year.4
On April 18, 1906, not long after a performance of Carmen (again!) with Caruso and Fremstad, the company on tour in San Francisco felt the first tremors of the historic earthquake. Contralto Louise Homer suffered a miscarriage. The scenery and costumes for thirteen productions were destroyed, a staggering blow for an already compromised budget. In a characteristic gesture of noblesse oblige he could ill afford, the general manager ordered that the $12,000 advance take of the aborted San Francisco engagement be refunded to whoever claimed to have bought a ticket. Musicians, too, took a devastating hit; many of their instruments were lost in the fire. To make matters worse, that fall, Oscar Hammerstein and his Manhattan Opera Company unleashed a competition so ferocious that the opera war with Mapleson and the Academy paled by comparison. In November, as further bad luck would have it, Caruso was arrested for allegedly accosting a woman in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo. His sensational trial (the charge was disturbing the peace, a misdemeanor) ended in a guilty verdict and a fine of $10. Protestations that it had all been a misunderstanding stemming from the tenor’s awful English, coupled with multiple challenges to the prosecution’s contradictory evidence and to the deeply flawed judicial proceedings, failed to persuade the judge or, indeed, the tribunal that heard the subsequent appeal. Geraldine Farrar, Conried’s other superstar, debuted on
opening night. On January 18, 1907, Giacomo Puccini, an international celebrity, made a delayed entrance into the theater (the liner on which he was traveling had met heavy seas and docked later than scheduled) while the Metropolitan premiere of his Manon Lescaut was underway. Spotted by the audience at the first act intermission, he was saluted with a fanfare and then an ovation insistent to the point that he was obliged to leave his box so that the performance could continue. Four days later at another premiere (with Puccini present), that of Richard Strauss’s Salome, another scandal erupted, and with it the revolt of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company directors, by now at the end of their rope. February 11 brought the company premiere of Madama Butterfly, prepared under Puccini’s stern glance. Gustav Mahler made his debut in the pit on January 1, 1908.5
BLASPHEMY AND DEPRAVITY
Parsifal, December 24, 1903
Conried was ready for the firestorm he knew would be ignited by the special prospectus announcing the premiere of Parsifal for, of all provocative dates, Christmas Eve 1903. This and all subsequent performances of the great work would be outside the subscription schedule, with the best seats at raised prices. Cries of foul and shame originated from legal and religious quarters on both sides of the Atlantic. As the flippant Brooklyn Eagle put it, “The area of low pressure was seen first over the roof of Wahnfried [the home of Cosima, Wagner’s widow], its most natural starting point. Thence it went to Munich and Berlin; thence all over Teutonic Europe, skirting the Latins and the Slavs, and it finally has settled down for real business here in New York” (Nov. 12, 1903). Cosima’s imprecations, befitting her vocation as keeper of the flame, were fueled by the contention that the Metropolitan’s proposed staging was tantamount to piracy committed in violation of copyright law. Following an informal and ultimately futile appeal to the Kaiser, her lawyers went to work, arguing that the Met should be enjoined from producing the opera. Conried’s European colleagues, his fellow intendants, whined that playing Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel (stage-consecrating festival drama) on an ordinary operatic platform was an act of artistic heresy.
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