Grand Opera: The Story of the Met
Page 17
Lawrence Tibbett
Tibbett’s Metropolitan career began inauspiciously. His knees shaking during the whole of the audition, as he recounted it, he cracked on the high F-sharp of “Eri tu” from Un Ballo in maschera. In the dark, cavernous theater sat the hulking general manager; the baritone was dismissed with a curt “thank you.” Three weeks went by before Gatti, at the insistence of his wife, soprano Frances Alda, agreed to a second hearing. A far less agitated Tibbett sang the “Credo” from Otello. This time, Gatti was impressed enough to hire the twenty-seven-year-old Californian who had never sung in opera, not in New York, not anywhere. Tibbett’s elation turned to dismay when Gatti offered a paltry $50 a week. At Alda’s urging, the salary was upped to $60. That was not all. His boilerplate contract stipulated that whereas the company was responsible for costumes, “gloves, feathers, wigs, tights, boots, shoes, and other similar articles shall be furnished by the Artist himself.” And what is more, Tibbett was expected to master twenty-seven roles, mostly comprimario and secondary parts, two leads (Amonasro and Escamillo), and one role for bass (King Dodon in Le Coq d’or). For the next year and a half, he was little noticed by public or press.30
In fall 1924, Tibbett got his big break. Gatti cabled Alda, on a concert tour with Tibbett, to ask if her protégé was up to Ford, the second baritone role in Falstaff. She replied yes, definitely, and did her best to help her young colleague. But rehearsals went poorly for the inexperienced singer, who was challenged by a weak musical memory and a difficult score. The formidable, almost all-Italian cast included Antonio Scotti, as Falstaff, and Gigli; the venerated Serafin was the conductor. To top it all off, the revival had been staged expressly for Scotti’s twenty-fifth anniversary with the company. During rehearsal, annoyed that Tibbett’s on-the-job training was slowing things down, Scotti and Gigli engaged in mocking exchanges over the novice’s histrionic and vocal difficulties. Although he had never set foot in Italy and did not know Italian, Tibbett got the drift. He was furious. Then came the night of the first performance, January 2, 1925. Tibbett sang the bitter aria that concludes the first scene of the second act (“È sogno? o realtà’?”) with an extra dose of passion. During the ovation that followed, the scene’s principals took their bows. Then Scotti came out alone. But the audience kept up the clapping, stamping, whistling, and, finally, to make its will perfectly clear, began shouting, “Tibbett, Tibbett.” For once, the claque was not the instigator of the commotion. Meanwhile, assuming the tribute was for Scotti, Tibbett had repaired to his dressing room two floors above. Serafin did his best to carry on with the performance, but the audience, presuming that Tibbett had somehow been kept from appearing before the curtain alone, would not let up. A member of the orchestra was dispatched to plead that he be allowed to acknowledge the applause. Gatti acceded reluctantly; attention had shifted from the veteran Italian baritone, the honoree of the evening, to the humble newcomer: “An American audience had decided that one of its own nationality should be properly recognized for his talent” (Times). The sixteen-and-a-half-minute demonstration subsided at last and the curtain rose on the interior of Ford’s house. From then on, Tibbett was given increasingly important assignments. He became the cornerstone of Gatti’s American opera initiative, and with his assumption of the title role in the Met’s first Simon Boccanegra, he was uncontested as the company’s leading baritone in the Italian and French repertoires. He sang the last of his 603 Met performances on March 24, 1950.
FIGURE 18. Lawrence Tibbett as Ford in Falstaff, 1925 (Herman Mishkin; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)
Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air
Kahn’s 1925 rejoinder of “absurd” to charges that the Met had been unfair to Americans was understandable. That very year, there were forty native singers on a roster of ninety-five. The eccentric examples of Ponselle, Talley, and Tibbett offered little guidance for the company’s further Americanization: Talley was an experiment that did not bear repeating, Ponselle and Tibbett phenomena that defied repetition. What was needed was a broadly based and systematic process for the discovery of talent. The answer was the “Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air.” The opening broadcast of the competition took place on December 22, 1935, the first week of the season. Hosted by Johnson himself and sponsored by Sherwin-Williams, the paint company, the fifteen-week-long series (expanded to twenty-six the next year) featured “the hit tunes of opera brought down to the level of Mr. Average John Q. Public.” However condescending, the copy was intended to reassure diffident audiences that opera was no longer the exclusive domain of the highborn or the highbrow. The “tunes” would be rendered by “finely trained singers who are at the threshold of stardom.” Beyond publishing the company’s brand, and increasing familiarity with already familiar music, the program would help satisfy the Juilliard prescription that the Met provide opportunities to young American singers. As winning soprano Eleanor Steber later pointed out, Americans “had as yet no regional opera companies or, for the most part, conservatory opera schools.” For many, Europe was out of bounds for reasons of budget and, for all starting in 1939, for reasons of security. The Auditions promised Americans a foot in the door of the country’s major opera company.31
The Auditions fielded roughly seventy contestants each year. First place carried with it a prize of $1,000, a plaque, and a contract; runners-up were often asked to join the company as well. The untried aspirants were thrust onto the stage, occasionally for as little as a Sunday night concert, but more often in a role that led to a Met career in the cadre of comprimarios, where the company had particular need of local talent. One of the 1936 finalists was Risë Stevens, who turned down the Met’s offer, opting instead for training in Europe; she came back as a principal artist in 1938–39. Stevens, Steber, Leonard Warren, Patrice Munsel, Regina Resnik, and Richard Tucker all became stars of the 1940s. Merrill Miller failed to place in 1939; in 1945, as Robert Merrill, he won. On the radio, and briefly on television, the Auditions chalked up a twenty-three-year run. The banner year of 1958 produced Martina Arroyo and Grace Bumbry. Since then, although gone from the air, the Auditions have continued to thrive under the auspices of the National Council of the Metropolitan Opera, founded like the Metropolitan Opera Guild by Mrs. August Belmont. In the last many generations it would be the rare American member of the company who missed this rite of passage.32
Anti-Americanization
If Gatti’s exit in 1935 accelerated the Americanization of the Met’s roster, his departure also prompted a wave of italianità within a swath of the Italian-American community. Nostalgia for the old management and hostility toward the new served the right wing of the Italian-language press as a rallying point for the chauvinism of its editorial policies and its colony of subscribers. The relentless comparison between Italy and the United States devolved into the affirmation of Italian cultural superiority. Gatti had been gone two years when La Settimana (March 14–21, 1937) published a piece titled “Naufragio al Metropolitan” (Shipwreck at the Metropolitan); La Sentinella (March 1, 1940) varied the metaphor three years later with “Il Tramonto del ‘Met’” (The Sunset of the Met). Their authors lamented the “golden age” of Gatti-Casazza and decried the present Johnson era, in which the “great Italian musical tradition [has] been suffocated little by little.” Italians who thought themselves “citizens of the Metropolitan” were now again “foreigners” in the “magno teatro,” as they had been in the years of German and French dominance. The strain of ethnic journalism sympathetic to the Italian regime accused the “Juilliard dictatorship” of annihilating Italian opera in New York and, with it, Italian casts.
The injudicious Gigli took aim at the United States and then at the Metropolitan before zeroing in on several of its most prominent American stars. He had left the Met in 1932 only to return under Johnson for a handful of performances in early 1939. If his colleagues had somehow forgotten his refusal of salary cuts in the darkest days of the Depression, they must have found it impossibl
e to forgive the vicious statements he made on his Italian reentry: “There are those who foresee in the not far distance something like civil war” in the United States; the unions “in the hands of Jews” were to blame; as for the Metropolitan, hard times had obliged the company to engage singers who “cost less and substitute notoriety created by publicity for intrinsic value, namely Moore, Tibbett, and Crooks” (Times, Feb. 26, 1939). Moore diagnosed Gigli as having “a case of sour grapes.” Tibbett parried, “Gigli is a great tenor. High notes must go to the head.” And Crooks responded, “Mr. Gigli should have learned by now to use his mouth for singing only. It sounds better” (Times, Feb. 27, 1939).
DEMOCRATIZATION
For one reason or another—often to loosen purse strings—operatic discourse during the Depression inclined toward the perennial question of the place of opera in the American order. The arguments made in the 1930s found their way into the March 5, 1941, issue of Variety, whose headline, “Urge Not So Grand Opera,” said it all. Those “urging” were Johnson, Gaetano Merola (head of the San Francisco Opera), Walter Damrosch, and Metropolitan singers Melchior, Pons, Moore, Pinza, and Tibbett. Asked to speak to the future of opera in America, their statements coalesced around the fond hope that an American city of any size have “a municipally-owned, subsidy-encouraged, tax-free opera house” dedicated to serving as a training ground for “embryonic” singers. The cities named were Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, Des Moines, St. Paul, Omaha, Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, and Hartford. Variety argued that Americans had been “initiated into the idea of government subsidy for cultural undertakings through the Federal Theatre and Music and Radio Projects and more recently the National Youth Administration.” That same spring of 1941, the Texaco Corporation, which had taken on the sponsorship of the radio broadcasts the previous December, wrote to Johnson that it had received “30,000 letters of which 3,884 contained expressions of preference for certain operas.” The astonishing response attested to the Metropolitan’s conquest of a truly national audience. Less surprising were the titles of favored works: Carmen was first, then came Aïda, La Traviata, Faust, Rigoletto, La Bohème, Tristan und Isolde, Madama Butterfly, Lucia di Lammermoor, and, tied for tenth, Lohengrin and Manon. Although Tristan registered seventh in the rankings, the number of letters fell off by half after the Wagner broadcast. Texaco wondered whether the decline might not be taken “to mean it is a little long and hard going for the radio audience.”33
Metropolitan Opera Guild
Among the transformative events of spring and summer 1935—the Juilliardization of the Met, the imposition of Witherspoon and his agenda, his death, the naming of Johnson to the post—was the inception of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the brainchild of Eleanor Belmont. With the onset of the Depression, she had chaired the Women’s Division of the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee on whose behalf Eleanor Roosevelt, Otto Kahn, and others solicited contributions from the Met stage. And she became one of the pillars of the “Save the Met” campaign. In 1933, she joined the Association board with the intent to help “to avert unemployment [among Opera House workers], with which I was all too familiar, rather than any lofty idea of preserving art.” Her signal contribution, the founding of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, was seeded with a $5,000 Association grant. The Guild’s formal mission read, “to develop and cultivate public interest in opera and its allied arts, and to contribute to their support; to further musical education and appreciation; and to sponsor and give assistance to operatic, musical and cultural programs and activities of an educational character.”34
The Guild’s first annual report, dated April 7, 1936, pointed to impressive achievements: a dress rehearsal of Flagstad’s Fidelio open to members; a ticket service, again a member benefit; a fund to provide needy music students discounted tickets; a costume exhibition; and its first publication, The Metropolitan Opera Guild Primer, a slim volume of one-sentence plot summaries. A Guild-sponsored poll uncovered that, unlike the wider radio audience that would voice its partialities in 1941, its membership of aficionados appreciated La Traviata and Rigoletto least and Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde most. The organization’s accomplishments of the following year, 1936–37, were a balanced budget, the doubling of its rolls from two thousand to four thousand, and an increase in out-of-town adherence. The introduction of junior memberships via schools was synchronous with the first Met performance offered expressly to students, an Aïda with Rethberg and Bruna Castagna underwritten by a $2,000 Guild donation. There were fund-raising luncheons, public lectures, Operagrams, pamphlets devoted to single titles, and “Operalogues” (later “The Metropolitan Opera Guild on the Air”), short radio programs designed to prepare listeners for the upcoming Saturday afternoon broadcast. In gratitude for the Guild’s gift of a cyclorama, the company treated members to an evening of arias and skits.35
Between 1935 and 1940, activities increased further in number while remaining essentially constant in kind. Publications of the late 1930s included Opera Cavalcade, a brief history of the Met, and The Metropolitan Opera Guide, synopses intended for the radio audience. Student performances thrived for decades. They surrendered to censorship at least once when several schools objected to Carmen “on the basis of an immoral libretto”; the less raw, equally licentious Il Barbiere di Siviglia took its place. Student performances slackened in the 1980s, and ended altogether in 1996; school groups continue to attend open rehearsals. Boosted by a $3.00 “National” category, membership exceeded twelve thousand by 1940, the year the Guild was rewarded with a room of its own on the Grand Tier level. Membership reached twenty-four thousand in 1945 and upward of one hundred thousand in 2010.36
The face of the Guild, almost from the start, has been Opera News. Its progenitor, the “Bulletin,” was first distributed on December 7, 1936, as a modest broadsheet folded into four pages; it grew into a twelve-page magazine two months later. In 1940, the editors of what was by now Opera News settled on a template that would take it through the next quarter of a century: thirty-two pages published twenty-four times annually, with a focus, during the season, on the week’s broadcast. A representative example, the February 5, 1941, issue devoted to Tristan und Isolde depicts a smiling Kirsten Flagstad on the cover. In “Names, Dates and Places” we find a plug for Risë Stevens’s new movie, The Chocolate Soldier, and the note that the war in Europe has prevented Joel Berglund and Germaine Lubin from joining the company. One feature article, on the Alceste dress rehearsal, is the submission of the winner of a letter-writing contest. Another recounts the sometimes conflicting memories of the Misses Wetmore, boxholders since 1883. The new coloratura Josephine Tuminia traces her itinerary from St. Louis to 39th Street. The issue also carries book reviews, squibs on a chorister and on the state of American opera. “Arias on the Air” is a detailed schedule of radio programs, both live and transcribed. The Saturday broadcast is documented by photographs and descriptions of the artists in costume, the text of the “Liebestod” in German and English, a guide to related readings and recordings, a cast list replete with transliterations (“E-soul’-duh,” “Keer’-shten Flag’shtat,” actually the Germanized pronunciation of her name), and an essay by the recently deceased critic Lawrence Gilman on the beauties of the score. The Met schedule for that and the coming week reflects the prominence of Wagner, Flagstad, and Melchior. If, at the time, Opera News was a self-congratulatory house organ, it was also, and continues to be, the often literate and informative agent for the initiation and instruction of budding operaphiles.
Spring Seasons
The first of what would turn out to be just two popularly priced spring seasons had a promising start on May 11, 1936. The house was full. Admission to the family circle set its occupants back only $.25; the parterre and the boxes, pegged at $3.00, had drawn those eager to sit in desirable and, for once, affordable seats. Gilman noted the heterogeneous, “unmistakably democratic” audience: “a lady of African ancestry, wearing a sailor hat was seated a few rows in front of a wh
ite-haired grande dame in low neck and pearls. The parquet was sprinkled with business suits” (Herald Tribune). But for the moment, and for the sake of a smashing opening night, a basic Juilliard tenet was put aside. Castagna, a stunning Carmen, was the beneficiary of flattering comparisons with Rosa Ponselle, who had had her capricious way with the role during the regular season. Castagna was known to New York from popular-priced performances at the Hippodrome and at the yet more capacious Lewisohn Stadium; she had made her tremendously successful Met debut as Amneris just two months earlier. But Castagna was neither American nor a neophyte. In fact, only one of the principals, the Micaela, Natalie Bodanya, could be counted as a young American singer.
With few exceptions, the tyros thrust into leading roles in the big theater for the spring seasons were wanting in voice, in technique, in experience, and in presence. The bargain-basement budget that yielded most principals the munificent sum of $50 per week got the company what it paid for. When it came to the familiar operas, economies plagued the stage direction (nonexistent), the lighting (erratic), and, most conspicuously, the scenery, much of which had been retired early in Gatti’s regime. The “Triumphal Scene” of Aïda sported a backdrop “which was so peppered with rents and holes that it looked as if the royal palace had suffered a long siege before the entry of the victorious army of Radamès” (Times, May 28, 1936). Only the novelties enjoyed a measure of care. The Bartered Bride, in a colloquial translation, was a big hit; Mârouf and Il Matrimonio segreto, also in English, were not. A modernist Orfeo ed Euridice, mimed and danced by George Balanchine’s American Ballet, the resident troupe, relegated the singers to the pit, a conceit reviewers trounced mercilessly. The best that could be said for the single world premiere, Walter Damrosch’s The Man without a Country, was that it launched Helen Traubel, a dramatic soprano who would become an indispensable member of the company in the 1940s.