Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  MOSTLY TOSCANINI: 1908–1910

  Toscanini conducted not the inaugural performance of Gatti’s first season, the Brooklyn Academy of Music Faust, but the much anticipated second, the 39th Street opening night Aïda, in which Emmy Destinn also made her debut, and Caruso, Louise Homer, and Scotti joined her in a spectacular new investiture replete with Radamès’s triumphal entrance on a chariot drawn by two white horses. Here was a thrilling first example of what the Evening Post dubbed the grand “Milanese” style (Nov. 17, 1908). One reviewer observed that, mirabile dictu, the singers followed the conductor, and not the conductor the singers, as had been the rule for the Italian repertoire (Sun). A single performance was all it took to convince critics and public that the star in the pit was at least as captivating as those on the stage. Seats at the extreme sides of the theater were suddenly hot; they afforded a full view of the dramatic maestro. As to the orchestra, its members bore stupefied witness early on to Toscanini’s prodigious talent when he rehearsed the six-hour Götterdämmerung without a score, singing along at will note for note, word for word. Farrar gives the following account of the effect Toscanini first made on singers and instrumentalists: “The Maestro . . . was a bundle of concentrated quicksilver. Neatly compressed into his black jacket, he wore a broad-brimmed fedora crammed over deep-set burning eyes. Portentous silence was broken by an occasional and solemn raven’s croak. This was the result of long assault upon protesting vocal cords. We were to experience—later and often—the amazing crescendi to screams and expletives that rose to unparalleled dynamics in rehearsals. However, these tempests became less terrifying by reason of their frequency. We recognized the lightning’s play, sure to be followed by disarming—if unstable—serenity.”8

  For one brilliant season, Toscanini and Mahler, formerly of Milan and Vienna, were on the program in ninety-four of the Met’s 224 performances. In the space of five extraordinary days in February 1909, the public heard Toscanini conduct the Verdi Requiem and Götterdämmerung, and Mahler Fidelio and The Bartered Bride. That year, Toscanini led the Met premieres of Puccini’s early Le Villi and Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally, Mahler those of Eugen d’Albert’s Tiefland and Smetana’s comic opera, the only popular novelty of the season. The inevitable clash between the two star conductors was sparked by Toscanini’s move to have Tristan und Isolde assigned to him. He had made it clear that he was a committed Wagnerian in the stupendous performance of Götterdämmerung, with Fremstad as Brünnhilde for the first time. Mahler prevailed, nonetheless. In his letter to Dippel of fall 1908, he argued, “I have . . . expressly retained Tristan for myself. I lavished a great deal of effort on the Tristan last season and may reasonably assert that the form in which the work now appears in New York is my intellectual property.” The following season, 1909–10, Tristan was Toscanini’s, and Wagnerites got to debate whether Mahler’s version was too pale, Toscanini’s too Italianate. Mahler’s adieu came in spring 1910 when he returned briefly for the US premiere of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, sung in German, the first staged performance of a Russian opera in New York. Krehbiel thought it a triumph, but the public disagreed, and the opera was absent from the Met until 1965.9

  In fall 1909, not content to compete with Oscar Hammerstein, the Metropolitan went into competition with itself at the recently completed New Theatre. The project began in an atmosphere of optimism: sparing no expense, the fabulous edifice would offer all the amenities the performing arts could dream of, along with the educational programs the citizenry had repeatedly been promised. But what New York worthies trumpeted as “the people’s theatre” was soon attacked as “a hobby for millionaires” and “a gilded incubator.” Again, the perceived betrayal of a theater for the common man—and woman—threatened an embryonic cultural institution, as it had the Academy of Music on 14th Street in 1854. The anger of the press and activist theatrical personalities was directed in particular at the thirty founders, who were, to a man, affiliated with the Metropolitan. The early financing was identified with the familiar names of Kahn, Belmont, Vanderbilt, Huntington, and Mackay. In its relationship to the Metropolitan, the New Theatre was modeled on that of the Opéra-Comique to the Paris Opéra. It opened on November 16, 1909, with Werther, starring Farrar and Edmond Clément in his American début, soon followed by the premiere of Alfred Bruneau’s L’Attaque du moulin. A mixed repertoire ranged from the intended “light” operas, Zar und Zimmermann, La Fille de Madame Angot, Fra Diavolo, to works also regularly presented in the larger house, Manon, La Bohème, and Tosca. The Met persevered at the New Theatre through only forty performances in the single season, 1909–10. The sight lines were wonderful, the acoustics awful. The elegance and comfort of the 2,318-seat auditorium, sized to opera somewhat less than grand, could not offset the hostility of the left, inept management, and a location considered hopelessly inconvenient, Central Park West at 62nd Street. Sadly, the splendid building was demolished in 1931.10

  When American composer-critic Reginald De Koven lashed out at the corporate “ambition to make the Metropolitan a central depot for supplying opera in large and small doses to the world at large” (World, Nov. 14, 1910), he was thinking not only of the New Theatre but also of the company’s first international tour, scheduled for the following May and June. The Met brought to Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet its best: Caruso’s Canio, Leo Slezak’s Otello, Fremstad’s Santuzza, Destinn’s Aïda, Scotti’s Falstaff, and a new production of Manon Lescaut, never before heard in France, in deference to Massenet and his own Manon. Adding to the heated coverage of this controversial premiere was the news that the indisposed Lina Cavalieri would be replaced by a young Spanish soprano, Lucrezia Bori, destined to become a pillar of the Met. De Koven’s paper carried glowing news of opening night. It was generally agreed that the heroes of the occasion were Gatti and Toscanini. The first had pulled off the logistical miracle of mounting the opera in two days on a stage inadequate to the grandiosity of the company’s ancient Egypt; Toscanini had conducted incomparably despite only one week of rehearsal with the initially resistant Colonne Orchestra and acoustics inadequate to Verdi’s sonorities (May 28). But that was not the whole story. Rowdies in the gallery had booed Toscanini at the beginning of the second act, ostensibly to protest the absence of even one French principal in the whole of what was tagged the “Italian,” never the “Metropolitan,” visit. When the curtain rose, the cool Louise Homer began to sing over the tumult; her ovation was such that the catcalls were lost in the applause. Musical America carried the headline “Our Opera Hissed by Paris Claque, Brilliant Success Achieved Despite Short Violent Anti-Italian Outbreak” (May 28). The next day, Gatti was pilloried in the literary periodical Gil Blas for refusing to reengage a leading French mezzo-soprano, Marie Delna. The writer contended that behind this decision was the powerful Toscanini, Italian to the core, who had pressed his bias against French artists. It was well known too that Edmond Clément had complained bitterly that only those who would sing Italian parts would be retained at the Met, implying what the numbers did not show, that French opera was unfairly slighted in New York (Times, March 20, 1910). While Gatti declared, perhaps indelicately, that he had brought the company to France to demonstrate the high standard demanded every day on Broadway, Gil Blas alleged that what had actually motivated the impresario and the conductor was the lure of the Légion d’honneur. And while the French, wounded in their national pride, railed against an offending cultural invasion from the south, the far-off American press was busy claiming as its own the altogether Italian triumvirate of Gatti, Toscanini, and Caruso.11

  The defining event of 1909–10, the buyout of Hammerstein at the end of a season of ruinous rivalry, served to cement the power of the Kahn/Gatti directorate. (Kahn himself made up the $500,000 debt incurred in the first two years of the new administration, accruing to himself enormous control over the company in the bargain.) The last straw was Hammerstein’s provocative incursion into Philadelphia, a Met outpost since the year of the company’
s founding. On most Tuesdays, the Met held forth at the Academy of Music on South Broad Street; Hammerstein was positioned defiantly at his new opera house on North Broad. Not content with the Philadelphia power play, Hammerstein boasted that he would acquire yet another house, this time in Baltimore, and spoke of extending his empire even further. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan made no secret of its own imperial agenda, starting with Boston and Chicago. Between November 1909 and April 1910, the company put on 135 shows of thirty-eight works on 39th Street, in addition to those mounted at two other New York venues, the New Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and on tour in the United States and abroad, for the unbelievable total of 360 performances of forty-two works.

  Debilitated by the four-year contest, at the end of his financial rope, and having ripped out the grand tier boxes of his theater to spite his already alienated society supporters, Hammerstein capitulated. In April 1910, the Metropolitan Opera Company forked over the $1.25 million it took to cover Hammerstein’s obligations and to acquire the sets, the costumes, the Philadelphia opera house—in effect his entire operation, excluding only the 34th Street Manhattan. The Hammerstein deal was contingent on his agreement to desist from operatic activity in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago for the ensuing ten years. The Manhattan Opera Company went out in glory on tour in Boston: Garden sang four of her roles, including Mélisande, Tetrazzini and John McCormack starred in La Fille du régiment and La Traviata. The indefatigable impresario turned to London, where he went ahead and built himself, yes, another opera house. The British chapter lasted only two years. In 1913, Hammerstein attempted to circumvent the American injunction with a popularly priced season of opera in English at New York’s Century Theatre, the renamed New Theatre. When the Met stopped him from going forward with his plans, he built yet another opera house, the Lexington, home to moving pictures and vaudeville until 1917, when it was leased by the Chicago Opera. Hammerstein lost the Lexington too. He died in 1919, just six months before the end of his exile, but not before he had announced the imminent resumption of his battle with the Met. Hammerstein represents the only serious challenge the Met faced in New York from the days of Mapleson to the bright years of the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center in the 1960s and 1970s.12

  La Fanciulla del West, December 10, 1910

  Gatti had presided over the fiasco of the world premiere of Madama Butterfly at La Scala in 1904. But within a few months, Cio-Cio-San had endeared herself to Europe’s audiences and solidified Puccini’s claim to the title of the most popular of living opera composers. At the front of the verismo wave, he had “staged a coup d’état and seized control of opera’s commanding heights.” It was to Gatti again, now at the Metropolitan, that Puccini entrusted his next work, La Fanciulla del West. As early as 1907, in New York to oversee Butterfly, he was on the lookout for a wholly American subject. A performance of Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West left him hesitant. Often accused of repeating himself, and most painfully during the catcalls that greeted the La Scala Butterfly, Puccini was bent on avoiding the humiliating charge. As the plot would have it, the act 2 struggle between Minnie, the saloon keeper, and Jack Rance, the sheriff, over Dick Johnson, the bandit, bore a marked similarity to the act 2 confrontation between Tosca, the singer, and Scarpia, the police chief, over Mario, the painter. Moreover, The Girl was an old-fashioned melodrama, and Puccini, alert to cutting-edge contemporaries such as Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss, was eager to be judged modern. It was only when an Italian translation of the Belasco play became available that he was convinced he had found his story. He embarked on the project with enthusiasm: “The Girl may become a second Bohème, but stronger, more daring, with greater scope.” Set in the requisite American locale, the play was alive with action and spectacle animated by a powerful female protagonist. The modernity absent from the plot would be invested in the score. Puccini signed his agreement with Gatti on June 9, 1910, during his visit to Paris for the Metropolitan performances of Manon Lescaut.13

  FIGURE 12. From left to right, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, David Belasco, Arturo Toscanini, Giacomo Puccini (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The dailies devoted lengthy articles to Puccini’s visit to New York for the premiere, to dinner at the Vanderbilt mansion, to the score, to Belasco’s staging of the opera. Skeptical reporters doubted that the colloquial English of Minnie and the brawling miners and the pigeon English of the Amerindian couple Billy Jack Rabbit and Wowkle would survive translation into Italian. Or, in fact, that Puccini could infuse his score with the local color of the Wild West. The Sun recorded Toscanini’s gravelly instructions during rehearsal, Belasco’s volcanic imprecations, Puccini’s air of calm, “an unlighted cigarette between his lips.” When Caruso had to leave for an evening performance, Toscanini barked Dick Johnson’s lines from the pit. The conductor declared, “The opera is flooded with melody. And the melody is of the kind with which Puccini has already won us. But there are new things above all, exquisite new timbres, tones and colors in the instrumentation. It has more vigor, more variety, and more masculinity, than the orchestration of the composer’s earlier operas. It is more complex. In one word, it is more modern” (American, Oct. 18, 1910). Puccini appeared to have gotten it right.14

  Opening night of La Fanciulla del West, the Met’s first world premiere, was the perfect fit for a company poised to leverage its international reputation. The public assembled not only for the inaugural of a major work but for a happening “that could not be equaled, nor even approached by any of the great opera houses in Europe” (Morning Telegraph, Dec. 11, 1910). New York alone could bring together on one glittering stage Enrico Caruso, Emmy Destinn, Pasquale Amato, Arturo Toscanini, and David Belasco. Musical America predicted that “the great composers will learn to make their first appeal for a verdict here, and so show the world that we have taken the lead in presenting the works of the masters, as other great cities of the old world have done hitherto.” Less than three weeks later, the Met would stage the world premiere of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Königskinder with Geraldine Farrar. To top it all off, the composer of the lovable Hänsel und Gretel, like Puccini, would come to New York for his new work. This double coup, unmatched in modern operatic history, was worthy of the cultural Mecca the city had become.15

  A stouthearted crowd gathered to catch sight of the rich and famous as they made their way into the opera house on the bitterly cold December night. Snow covered the frozen sidewalks. Ticket-holders braved both the weather and the prices, which management had doubled for the occasion. The police were on hand to control the crush, while in the lobby, in an effort to discourage intrepid scalpers, ushers checked the signed and countersigned tickets. Kahn, unrecognized, was denied admission until his identity could be confirmed. Chaos delayed the curtain for twenty-five minutes. A profusion of US and Italian flags flew over the heteroclite Italian-American event. After the short prelude, the curtain rose on the Polka, the saloon familiar to the many who had seen the play when it was a hit of the 1905–06 Broadway season. The set had been pumped up to conform to the Met proscenium, three times the size of that of the 42nd Street Belasco, today the New Victory. The playwright/director had worked his magic: he had shaken the secondary singers and chorus from their stock gestures. There they stood, authentically garbed, muddy miners at the bar. On a stage accustomed to the likes of Aïda’s ancient tomb, Brünnhilde’s mythic mountaintop, and Marguerite’s medieval garden, Belasco had simulated Minnie’s 1849 Gold Rush California, filled with cigar smoke, flush with rounds of whiskey and poker. And most amazing, he had persuaded Destinn, dressed in a shirtwaist and a cardinal-red skirt, to sing from upstage while serving drinks, and the holstered Caruso to deliver his opening phrases with his back to the audience.16

  Puccini sat through act 1 in agony, as he would confess. Without a conventional aria conventionally greeted by applause, he had no way of gauging the response of the audience before the first curtain had fallen. He need not have worried. The
act 1 bravos demanded bow after bow, fourteen curtain calls in all. And that was just the beginning. The act 2 blizzard was Belasco’s chance to prove that his brand of realism could cross over from the legitimate to the operatic platform. Thirty-two stagehands were there to assure that the moment Minnie and Dick Johnson embraced, the cabin door would fly open, snow would drift in, the walls would tremble, the curtains would flutter, and ice would form on the window panes. The act’s dramatic climax—Johnson’s blood dripping from the attic, Minnie cheating at cards for his life—met with nineteen curtain calls. For act 3, Puccini had urged his librettists, Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zanganari, to depart from Belasco’s script and add a scene in which Johnson is captured in the redwood forest. The bandit escapes death by hanging thanks only to Minnie’s impassioned plea to her adoring miners. For the first time in Metropolitan history, trees were built in the semiround, with leaves cut from leather. A posse of eight galloped their horses across the stage. According to the libretto, Minnie was to make an equestrian entrance, “her hair flying in the wind, a pistol clenched in her teeth.” That particular coup de théâtre went by the wayside; having taken a spill during rehearsal, and having been saved only by the quick reflexes of baritone Dinh Gilly (her real-life partner), Destinn opted for caution and walked her pony onto the stage. Whether the audience missed this additional thrill we cannot say; it had just roared its approval for Caruso’s big number, “Ch’ella mi creda” (Telegram). Minnie and Dick bid farewell to their beloved California against a background of snow-capped Sierras, pink with dawn’s first light. During the many final curtain calls, Caruso, ever the cowboy, drew his revolver and rubbed his neck, recently delivered from the noose. Puccini was summoned to the stage, where Gatti, breaking his rule by appearing before the public, presented him with a laurel wreath. Belasco received one too. Floral tributes hid the composer from view. The World predicted, far too optimistically as it turned out, that Belasco’s daring would mark a turning point in operatic stagecraft.