Grand Opera: The Story of the Met
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14. “lust for revenge”: cited in John Kobler, Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 73.
15. “an artist of”: Jan. 3, 1922, Feb. 14, 1922. “the most refulgent”: W. J. Henderson, Sun. Rarely cast in Wagnerian roles (only once on 39th Street), Lily Djanel, the Met’s Salome of the early 1940s, was also its principal Carmen. For Strauss’s wish that Salome be sung by a youthful voice: “Strauss suddenly said that he thought she [Elisabeth Schumann] should sing Salome. When Elisabeth protested that she was a lyric soprano and could not sing such a dramatic role Strauss replied that the youthfulness of her voice, the silvery quality, was exactly what he wanted in the character of Salome.” Strauss offered to alter the orchestration and transpose sections for Schumann; she refused: Gerd Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann, a Biography, ed. and trans. Joy Puritz (London: A. Deutsch, 1993), 77.
16. For audiences at the Metropolitan and the Manhattan on Jan. 2, 1907, see Mayer, The Met, 93.
17. For the enmity between Conried and Hammerstein, see ibid., 94. Hammerstein’s theater on 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues is now the Manhattan Center.
18. For the enticements that contributed to Melba’s defection, see Therese Radic, Melba, the Voice of Australia (South Melbourne: MMB Music, 1986), 116.
19. “with a contemptuous”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Memories of the Opera (New York: Scribner, 1941), 168. For Hammerstein’s stars and their salaries, see Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera, 179. For the Manhattan’s skyrocketing subscriptions, see John Frederick Cone, First Rival of the Metropolitan Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 122.
20. For New York’s population explosion at the turn of the century, see Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera, 184–85. On losses during the second opera war: “The 1907–1908 season, for example, ended for the Met with a loss of $84,039. . . . [At the conclusion of that same season], Hammerstein commented: ‘My season was successful inasmuch as I lost only $50,000, whereas I expected to lose $75,000.’ ” Kobler, Otto the Magnificent, 71.
21. For a discussion of “verismo” as applied to opera, see Alan Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 42–46.
22. For Puccini on Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly at the Met, see letters to Tito Ricordi, Feb. 18, Feb. 19, 1907, in Carteggi pucciniani, ed. Eugenio Gara (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 339–41.
23. “most sensational fiasco”: Krehbiel, Chapters of Opera, 320, 324, 325.
24. Kahn letter to Conried cited in Mayer, The Met, 95.
25. “public [that] was opera-mad”: Krehbiel, Chapters of Opera, 326.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. “very important person”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Memories of the Opera (New York: Scribner, 1941), 142–48.
2. The Times headline ran, “Appointment of Gatti-Casazza and Andreas Dippel to Succeed Conried Confirmed” (Feb. 12, 1908). “Mr. Dippel’s appointment”: Henry Edward Krehbiel, More Chapters of Opera: Being Historical and Critical Observations and Records Concerning the Lyric Drama in New York from 1908 to 1918 (New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 24.
3. For a discussion of the letter in support of Dippel, see Martin Mayer, The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 104–6.
4. The text of the Kahn announcement following the February 11, 1908, meeting was published in the Times of the next day. For Gatti and casting, see Frances Alda, Men, Women and Tenors (1937; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 116.
5. “Perhaps his love:” John Kobler, Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 51. Kahn was at least as devoted to the company of sopranos as he was to that of “grandees”; he had affairs with Maria Jeritza and Grace Moore (ibid., 166–71).
6. “Six and three-quarter”: Feb. 21, 1925, 9–10. “I wondered at”: Alda, Men, Women and Tenors, 73.
7. “The theatre is”: Gatti-Casazza, Memories of the Opera, 68–69.
8. “The Maestro . . . was”: Geraldine Farrar, Such Sweet Compulsion (New York: Greystone Press, 1938), 116.
9. Toscanini became principal conductor at Milan’s La Scala in 1898 at the age of thirty-one; Mahler became artistic director at Vienna’s Hofoper in 1897 at thirty-seven. Mahler’s letter to Dippel, cited in Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 55.
10. The Met’s activities at the New Theatre were administered by Dippel, another sign that Gatti had taken control of the home base. Widely considered a fatal flaw in 1909, the New Theatre’s uptown address was a stone’s throw from the Met’s present site at Lincoln Center. For a full discussion of the New Theatre, see Mary Jane Matz, The Many Lives of Otto Kahn (New York: Pendragon Press, 1963), 68–78.
11. For a detailed account of the Met’s Paris tour, see Quaintance Eaton, Opera Caravan: Adventures of the Metropolitan on Tour, 1883–1956 (New York: Metropolitan Opera Guild, 1957), 152–56.
12. In 1909–10, the Met also presented twenty-five ballet programs. The growing importance of ballet is signaled by the debuts of Anna Pavlova and Mikail Mordkin. When the Met acquired the Philadelphia Opera House, it was renamed the Metropolitan Opera House. The company performed there regularly until 1920. The building, on Broad and Poplar streets, now houses the Holy Ghost Headquarters Revival Center at the Met. The Academy of Music is home to Opera Philadelphia and to the Pennsylvania Ballet. A hefty share of the $1.25 million was contributed by a Met patron who saw in the payoff a chance to banish Lina Cavalieri, one of Hammerstein’s divas; this extravagance put an end to the involvement of Cavalieri, billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” with the gentleman’s son. Cavalieri had been exiled from the Met in 1908 following her marriage to one of the Astor clan. For Hammerstein’s buyout, see Mayer, The Met, 112.
13. “staged a coup”: John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 316–17. “The Girl may”: Puccini to Giulio Ricordi, n.d., in The Letters of Giacomo Puccini, ed. Giuseppe Adami, translated from the Italian and edited for the English edition by Ena Makin (New York: Vienna House, 1973), 176.
14. The Sun account of the Fanciulla del West rehearsal is cited in Robert Tuggle, The Golden Age of Opera (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 65–71.
15. “the great composers”: John C. Freund, “First Production of Puccini’s Opera,” Musical America (Dec. 1910): 1–4. Königskinder had been scheduled for the previous season, but the composer had failed to complete the score in time.
16. For Belasco on Destinn, Caruso, and staging La Fanciulla del West, see David Belasco, The Theatre through Its Stage Door (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919), 103.
17. For Puccini’s reaction to the Fanciulla cast, letter to Carlo Clausetti, Jan. 1, 1911, in Carteggi pucciniani, ed. Eugenio Gara (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 383. Had it not been for the veto of Tito Ricordi, who had again accompanied Puccini to New York, we might have had an aural shard of the first Fanciulla cast. Ricordi had made himself a nuisance at rehearsals and, most grievous, had barred all recordings in a greedy effort to protect sales of the published score. Soon after the premiere, Casa Ricordi began marketing Fanciulla through, of all things, a piano roll. For Ricordi’s prohibition of Fanciulla recordings, see Tuggle, The Golden Age of Opera, 71.
18. For the incidents surrounding Un Ballo in maschera and Carmen, see Johanna Fiedler, Molto Agitato (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 20. “General Musik Director”: Mayer, The Met, 134.
19. Gatti on ocean travel during World War I: “We docked in New York a day before German submarines sank several ships within the vicinity of the city. All the passengers had been worried. Caruso was with us on the boat. . . . We finished the trip, travelling in a zigzag manner.” Gatti, Memories of the Opera, 179–83. “lest Germany should”: Sun, Sept. 15, 1917, cited in Fiedler, Molto Agitato, 22
. The company’s last German-language performance was the April 28, 1917, Atlanta Siegfried, with Gadski as Brünnhilde; the first following the four-year suspension was the US premiere of Die Tote Stadt, on November 19, 1921, Maria Jeritza’s debut.
20. Goritz parody cited in Musical America (April 21, 1917): 1–2.
21. The Times (Nov. 3, 1917) reported, “In the last few weeks a new turn of affairs appeared to have taken place.” Melanie Kurt, Hermann Weil, Margarete Ober, and Johannes Sembach were not reengaged. Sembach returned in 1920 to sing Tristan in English. German had long been the lingua franca of US symphony orchestras; in 1918, the New York Philharmonic dropped “konzertmeister” in favor of “concertmaster”; see George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 251.
22. “made no definite”: Ziegler to subscribers, Nov. 13, 1917.
23. Met singers on the covers of Time: Melba (April 18, 1927), Farrar (Dec. 5, 1927), Jeritza (Nov. 12, 1928), Bori (June 30, 1930). Also on the covers of Time: Toscanini (Jan. 25, 1926) and Gatti twice (Nov. 5, 1923, and Nov. 1, 1926).
24. For Caruso’s fees, see Michael Scott, The Great Caruso (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1988), 181; and Irving Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1966: A Candid History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1966), 298.
25. For the terms of the agreement between the Met and Victor, see C. G. Child, Victor Recording Machine Co., to Ziegler, March 6, 1917.
26. In 1919, Farrar was briefly the head of her own production company, Diva Pictures, associated with Samuel Goldwyn. For the account of the “rough” Farrar/Caruso Carmen, see Alda, Men, Women and Tenors, 214–15.
27. For Farrar’s witty barbs directed at colleagues at once tempted and reluctant to engage with the movies, see Henry Finck, My Adventures in the Golden Age of Music (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1926) 331–32. For Caruso’s movie career, see Scott, The Great Caruso, 160–61.
28. “perhaps the most,” cited in Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Puccini: A Biography (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 256, 279. “From my seat”: Farrar, Such Sweet Compulsion, 139.
29. Jeritza boosted Die Ägyptische Helena above the season’s average box office. Between 1929–30 and the end of his regime, 1934–35, Gatti introduced eight more twentieth-century operas: Strauss’s Elektra, Felice Lattuada’s Le Preziose ridicule, Jaromir Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper, Italo Montemezzi’s La Notte di Zoraima, Howard Hanson’s Merry Mount, and the world premieres of Deems Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson, Louis Gruenberg’s The Emperor Jones, and John Laurence Seymour’s In the Pasha’s Garden.
30. The Met sold the Turandot production to the Chicago Opera in 1933 for $3,000. It had cost more than $60,000 (Met online archives).
31. “the afternoon off”: W. J. Henderson, Sun, March 11, 1928.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. “Calvary”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza to Bruno Zirato, cited in Martin Mayer, The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 185.
2. Ironically, on the day of Olin Downes’s review of opening night, a front-page story led off with this headline: “Architects Picked to Plan Rockefeller Centre Which May Have Opera House as a Nucleus.”
3. Kahn, The Metropolitan Opera, statement, 20–21. “A considerable number”: Kahn to Real Estate Board, Jan. 5, 1926, attached to the Minutes of the Metropolitan Opera Company, Jan. 4, 1926. Real Estate Board response to Kahn on April 12, 1927 and Dec. 21, 1927, cited in Mayer, The Met, 163. The Parc Vendome apartments built on Kahn’s site are extant. Kahn’s architect for the opera house, Joseph Urban, designed the International Magazine Building commissioned by Hearst in 1926, completed in 1928, to house the twelve magazines Hearst owned. The Hearst Building, reconceived by Norman Foster, was completed in 2006.
4. For finances during the Depression, see Mayer, The Met, 170–79.
5. The opera house was to be positioned where the RCA building now stands. It, too, was to face an ice skating rink.
6. When the Met signed its contract with NBC in 1931, live classical music was already heard regularly on nationwide radio: the Chicago Civic Opera, retransmissions from Dresden, Covent Garden, and Salzburg, and NBC’s own National Grand Opera Company, as well as the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. For the NBC/Metropolitan agreement relative to negotiating with Metropolitan artists for performances outside the Met, see Paul Jackson, Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1931–1950 (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1992), 14.
7. “the deluge”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Memories of the Opera (New York: Scribner, 1941), 313.
8. For the early history of opera on the radio, see C. J. Luten, “Golden Age of Opera,” Opera News (Dec. 18, 1976): 54–58. For the Met broadcasts in 1931–32 and 1932–33, see Jackson, Saturday Afternoons, 23.
9. For the formation of the Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc., see Mayer, The Met, 175. “organized for educational”: minutes, May 14, 1932. “It is this”: Downes, Times, May 22, 1932.
10. For Gatti’s salary, see Irving Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1966: A Candid History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 24. Even with reductions, Gatti was well compensated during the Depression seasons. His salary had risen to $67,057 in 1930–31, fell to $59,169 in 1931–32, $57,736 in 1932–33, and $43,108 in 1933–34. For management’s role in the open letter censuring Gigli, see ibid., 24. Correspondence regarding the termination of Jeritza’s contract, April 30, May 9, July 14, 1932. Jeritza returned to the Met stage on November 8, 1932, under the aegis of the Musicians’ Symphony Orchestra. Led by Fritz Reiner, she sang excerpts from Salome in a concert version prepared by Strauss.
11. “Under the management”: Kahn, The Metropolitan Opera, statement, 7–8.
12. “Peter Ibbetson made”: Ruby Mercer, The Tenor of His Time: Edward Johnson of the Met [discography by J. B. McPherson, W. R. Moran] (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1976), 148. Peter Ibbetson is based on George Du Maurier’s eponymous novel published in 1891 and its dramatization in 1917 by Constance Collier as a vehicle for herself, John Barrymore, and Lionel Barrymore. The apotheosis of Peter and Mary echoed Broadway’s spectral romances of the late 1920s: Outward Bound, The Dybbuk, Berkeley Square, and Death Takes a Holiday. “a tremendous argument”: Leonard Liebling, American. “rather negligible”: Oscar Thompson, Post. “oddly featureless”: Edward Cushing, Brooklyn Eagle. “Strong men actually”: Downes, Times.
13. “Our present form”: cited in Jackson, Saturday Afternoons, 29–30.
14. August Belmont Sr. né Schönberg, born Jewish, curator of the Rothschild interests, married the daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry.
15. For the radio appeals, see Mayer, The Met, 179. For the position taken by Cornelius Vanderbilt, IV, see Quaintance Eaton, The Miracle of the Met (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 249.
16. Individual salaries are listed in the Metropolitan paybooks. For Depression salaries, see Mayer, The Met, 186.
17. “cultivation of vocal”: www.Operaclub.org. “that the people”: cited in Mayer, The Met, 193, from the American, Jan. 8, 1934. “the democratization of”: Eleanor Robson Belmont, The Fabric of Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 266.
18. “could assemble a”: Witherspoon to Stephens, March 12, 1933. “if an appeal”: Stephens to Cravath, March 16, 1933. “Shifting the opera”: Cravath to Stephens, March 17, 1933. “The Juilliard backing”: Stephens to Witherspoon, March 21, 1933. Witherspoon to Erskine, see Mayer, The Met, 202.
19. “I’ve just dumped”: cited in Eaton, The Miracle of the Met, 252–53. Two years before the Juilliard agreement, in a letter of Dec. 5, 1933, Cravath had urged Gatti to introduce a popularly priced supplementary spring season.
20. “in a desperate”: Time (March 18, 1935): 58. Two Juilliard trustees were already Metropolitan directors, Frederick A. Juilliard, the nephew of Augustus, and Allen Wardwell, lawyer for the Real Estate Company.
21. Five years later, Gatti died in Ferrara at the age of seventy.
22. “responsible for the”: Chord and Discord (Dec. 1935), cited in Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera, 361.
23. The Met should have had doubts about Konetzni. Reviewing her in Vienna, the Times found her “superb” voice “imperfectly schooled . . . while to the temperamental, dramatic and intellectual demands of Isolde the singer is woefully unequal” (Herbert F. Peyser, May 20, 1934). The Herald Tribune was even more cutting after her December 26, 1934, New York debut as Brünnhilde: “Of dramatic illusion there was little, while the voice itself was pale and tones none too steady.” Ziegler wrote his brutal assessment to agent Erich Simon: “The press were almost uniformly severe. . . . We are convinced that the New York public, with its memories of the great Isoldes, would scarcely have found Konetzni to their liking. Her face is singularly without expression, and is unfortunately, very round” (Jan. 4, 1935).
24. For Flagstad’s audition and rehearsal, see Mayer, The Met, 195. “Today we are”: cited in Howard Vogt, Flagstad: Singer of the Century (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), 111–12.
25. For Gatti’s losses, see Mayer, The Met, 185–86. Witherspoon’s 1935–36 repertoire included Pelléas et Melisande, Martha, L’Africaine, Boris Godunov, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, La Gioconda, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia; Johnson added Gianni Schicchi, La Juive, and La Rondine.
26. “has lost a”: Witherspoon to Cravath, April 1, 1935. “the outstanding success”: Cravath to Witherspoon, April 12, 1935.
27. “Beneath the surface”: Mercer, The Tenor of His Time, 64.
28. “vocal gold”: James Huneker, Times.
29. Talley’s concert fees were estimated by her former agent, F. C. Coppicus.
30. For an exhaustive account of Tibbett’s career, see Hertzel Weinstat and Bert Wechsler, Dear Rogue: A Biography of the American Baritone Lawrence Tibbett (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1966), 65–70.