Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (12 page)

PUCCINI

HERE IS THE STORY
as Giulio Gatti-Casazza tells it in his memoirs: The first intimation that he was being spoken of as a successor to Heinrich Conried came in a letter of June 1907 from an unnamed woman writing on behalf of an unidentified “very important person” not known to him. Was he disposed to enter into negotiations with the Metropolitan, she asked? That evening, Gatti, general director of La Scala for almost a decade, happened to be at dinner with Arturo Toscanini, La Scala’s music director. Gatti showed his host the letter. He was, of course, well aware that some years earlier Toscanini had declined an invitation from the Met. Toscanini urged Gatti to test the American waters: should Gatti take the position, this time the conductor would be prepared to leave Milan; they would go to New York as a team. At the mysterious woman’s subsequent suggestion, Gatti met in Rome that same month with Count di San Martino di Valperga, president of Santa Cecilia, the Royal Conservatory, who was to be named to the board of the Metropolitan Opera Company later that year. San Martino advised Gatti to meet with Otto Kahn, which he did in July in Paris.
¹

Back in New York in late summer, Conried was issued an ultimatum: things would have to change. Above all, he would have to provide a steady presence, whether in good or ill health (
Sun,
Aug. 1, 1907). Rumors began to fly, as did names of replacements: Gustav Mahler (said to have refused the offer), Jean de Reszke, Cleofonte Campanini, André Messager (lately head of Covent Garden), Italian music publisher Tito Ricordi, and Met tenor Andreas Dippel. On January 4, 1908, the
Times
carried Conried’s resignation, although no official announcement had been made. Negotiations
between Gatti and the Met continued in trans-Atlantic secrecy. On January 25, Gatti denied reports that he would be coming to the Met. On that same day, Campanini, who had worked under Gatti at La Scala before moving to Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company, had this to say of his competitor: “He is not a musician and depends entirely on his chef d’orchestra. At La Scala only eight operas are given in a season of five months. What a man of this sort would be capable of doing in New York I cannot imagine”
(Times)
. Krehbiel went further in an opinion piece of February 11: “From the point of view which is likely to be shared by all who have been hoping for years to see New York’s foremost operatic establishment put upon a permanent footing and raised to the plane of a truly artistic institution above the reach of managerial greed, the personal caprices and ambitions of individuals and the whimsies of fad and fashion, the influence of Milan in the American metropolis will be deplored”
(Tribune)
. But by then, despite the opposition of board members and critics who feared the Italianization of the institution, the die was cast. The next day, February 12, Conried’s retirement for medical reasons was announced together with the appointment of Gatti-Casazza as general manager. The surprise was the simultaneous appointment of Andreas Dippel as administrative manager, an awkward and ultimately misguided move to pacify the anti-Gatti forces, whether xenophobic, or Germanophilic, or paradoxically both. Dippel was placed in charge of the German repertoire and the separate German chorus and orchestra. The announcement also named both Toscanini and Mahler music director, a title neither would ever hold. Krehbiel was certain that “Mr. Dippel’s appointment and Mr. Mahler’s retention were obviously made, no doubt in good faith, to allay the fears of a large contingent of the opera’s patrons that the German branch of the repertory, already in the shadow as I have said, was to suffer a total eclipse.”
²

On May 1, the 1907–08 season well over, Gatti arrived in New York on the
Lusitania,
exhibiting energy, optimism, and very little English. In excellent French he declared to the press that the theater was wonderfully suited to opera; yes indeed, he was a staunch Wagnerian; in fact, he admired all modern music, Strauss, Debussy, Charpentier. In response to a reporter who hoped “there [would] be no more
Adriana Lecouvreur
s,” he replied agreeably, “I hope so, too” (
Times,
May 2, 1908). Whatever else, after five years of the impolitic Conried, the Met had hired itself a diplomat. But it would not be long before Gatti made two distressing discoveries: that the stage, back and front, and scenery were in deplorable shape; and worse still, that Dippel had been named administrative manager two months earlier, news that had
somehow not reached him. Kahn promised to address the deficiencies highest on Gatti’s list: an enlarged pit was fitted with a movable floor, the stage machinery was upgraded, some of the many shabby sets were replaced. The issue of dual management was far more troublesome. Dippel’s contract, drawn up when Conried was bought out, named him unambiguously “co-director” (
Times,
Dec. 10, 1908).

Gatti left New York on May 28 for a summer of maneuvers. To begin with, there was the imminent danger of a conspiracy among Italian and South American theaters ready to offer Italian singers full-time contracts so as to block their engagement in the United States and Great Britain. The “trust” had to be foiled, and quickly (
Times,
Aug. 9, 1908). Then there was the untenable Dippel compromise. The crisis came to a head with a letter dated November 25 (the season had begun at the newly completed Brooklyn Academy of Music ten days earlier), engineered by Dippel himself and signed by half the contingent of approved artists of the preceding season: Enrico Caruso, Emma Eames, Geraldine Farrar, Marcella Sembrich, and Antonio Scotti. The text read: “We, the undersigned artists of the Metropolitan Opera Company, hearing of a movement to grant Mr. Gatti-Casazza, the general manager, and Mr. Toscanini, conductor, a three years’ binding contract, do hereby express our desire, in the protection of our artistic interests and the welfare of the Metropolitan Opera House, that Mr. Dippel be granted the same privileges under contract that may be accorded to the above-named gentlemen. Our confidence in the managerial and artistic capabilities of Mr. Dippel gives us sufficient reason to associate ourselves firmly with his ideas, which have been, always will be, and are for the best of the Metropolitan Opera House. Therefore, we heartily endorse Mr. Dippel in whatever measures he may be obliged to take.” What led the five signees to threaten support for Dippel in an eventual legal action against the company? Dippel had been at the Met since 1890 and was a good colleague; he would have made an indulgent manager. By contrast, in the first couple of weeks of the season, Toscanini, surely with Gatti’s backing, had made his demands brutally clear: everyone, stars included, would show up for rehearsal, and on time, and everyone, on stage and in the pit, would be expected to toe the conductor’s line. During several stormy sessions, Toscanini had dared question Eames’s Tosca, an injury now added to the insult of her imminent forced retirement. For her part, Sembrich had often sung with Dippel and was, in any case, herself on the way out. Neither had much to lose. Kahn and others on the executive committee responded tactfully that they were grateful for the “service and
renown” of the petitioners and had every confidence that they would understand that it was “not possible to administer an organization like the Metropolitan Opera House under two heads” (
Times,
Dec. 6). Gatti alone was renewed through 1910–11. A chastened Scotti pleaded that he had signed reluctantly; both he and Caruso had been swayed by Farrar. And Farrar, although smarting from Toscanini’s criticism of her Butterfly, had the good grace to take responsibility. She soon made up with the conductor: their affair became an open secret. The outfoxed Dippel would not go gently into the night. After the meeting in which he was “taken to task for attempting to stir up dissension in the Metropolitan,” he “went to Gatti and asked for assurances on the renewal of his contract. A heated argument is said to have followed, in which the general manager flatly declined to accede to the proposition” (
Tribune,
Dec. 11).
³

The sweeping changes of 1908 had been ratified by the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company at a meeting held in J.P. Morgan’s library. Kahn’s announcement at the session’s close signaled not only the transfer of power from one general manager to another, opposed by training, experience, temperament, and nationality, but a consequential restructuring of the opera company in its relationship to both the Real Estate Company and the manager himself. The freshly incorporated Metropolitan Opera Company was awarded a five-year lease, replacing the impresario-led model of the past. From here on out, the general manager would be a salaried employee, without financial stake in the enterprise. This decision was sealed with the embarrassing discovery that not $130,000, as Conried had averred, but only $30,000 remained in the coffers. Gone would be the gala evenings on behalf of managers or, for that matter, of stars. Whatever such performances there might be would benefit the company itself. Other measures to limit star power were swiftly introduced. No longer would leading singers congregate around the intendant’s desk to grab as many performances as they could. Gatti would decide who would be assigned which role and for which performance. The clout that leeched from the stars and, more significantly, from the Real Estate Company passed to the Metropolitan Opera Company; it would ultimately reside with the general manager and the three executive directors, Kahn, W.K. Vanderbilt (also on the Real Estate Company board), and Bayard Cutting. The new leadership quashed the proviso that two approved artists appear in every subscription performance. More profound was the novel concept that as a matter of policy the opera would be managed not on a profit but on a not-for-profit basis and that any gains realized would “be used for
the establishment of an endowment or pension fund or for some similar purpose for the advancement of the Metropolitan Opera House as an art institution.” Punctual as always, Mrs. Astor died on October 30, a fortnight before the opening of Gatti’s inaugural season, leaving Box 7 dark for a time.
⁴

With the revisions in governance, the great New York families relinquished much of their prerogative, and the Metropolitan’s modern era was launched. Much, but not all. They succeeded, for example, under Morgan’s heavy hand, in enforcing the unwritten ordinance that no Jew could acquire a box at the opera house, whatever his qualities, wealth, or even his standing within the organization. That included Kahn, who joined the opera company board in 1903, Conried’s first year, and became its chair in 1911 and its president in 1918, a position he held until 1931. When he stepped down, he owned well over 80 percent of the company’s stock. John Kobler, one of his biographers, ventures this answer to why Kahn swallowed so much humiliation: “Perhaps his love of opera, the opportunity to take an active hand in its production, stifled any impulse he may have had to resign. (His initials, O.H.K., it was suggested, stood for ‘Opera House Kahn.’) Perhaps, too, he welcomed the prospect of fraternizing with the grandees of New York society. Some seasons he would rent a parterre box from the owner. At times he subscribed to two orchestra seats, one for his hat and coat. Seventeen years after his election to the board, Kahn was allowed to buy Box 14.”
⁵

Otto Kahn was born into a Mannheim family in 1867. To this extent, he would be familiar, years later, in the administrative corridors of the Metropolitan; like Leopold Damrosch, Austrian-Moravian born Maurice Grau, and Heinrich Conried, he was natively a German speaker and Jewish. At an early age, he was tapped to walk in his father’s shoes as a banker and a friend to artists and literati. In his twenties, he went to work for Deutsche Bank in London and became a British subject. In 1893, he moved to New York at the invitation of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., was taken under the wing of Jacob Schiff (the firm’s head), married the daughter of a former senior partner, and made his fortune as financier of railway expansion. He became a US citizen in 1917. On his March 29, 1934, demise, the
Times
carried no fewer than three pieces on his life and accomplishments: a front-page article announcing his sudden death in the private dining room of the private bank of which he had been so long a principal, an editorial in homage to the man
and his work, and a full-page obituary titled “Life as a Boy Made Kahn Arts Patron.” Kahn’s philanthropy supported Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the Habima Players, the Moscow Art Theatre, the Provincetown Players, and the Washington Square Players, later the Theatre Guild; his patronage extended to the composers Georges Enesco, Deems Taylor, and Ernst Krenek. Kahn spoke English perfectly and was at consummate ease in business, political, civic, and charitable circles. The restricted diamond semicircle of thirty-five boxes was a different matter.

Giulio Gatti-Casazza, on the other hand, remained adamantly a foreigner. Although the Met quickly became his home, the United States never became his country; he did not see himself as an American, nor did anyone else. Throughout his unprecedented and unequalled twenty-seven-year tenure, he transacted business in Italian or, if need be, in French, officially because his English was halting, which it was not. More probably, his refusal of English was intended to keep others on the defensive and to distance an uncongenial culture and a tiresome ruling class. In truth, Gatti spoke little in any language. This extract from a
New Yorker
profile published in the very first issue of the magazine is typical of impressions left by the austere general manager: “Six and three-quarter days out of every week he preserves the fiction of a courteous, imperturbable, quite inscrutable Jove. Silence is a great aid to him, there. It is the apron he puts on while kneading, over and over, the personnel and property of his company. It preserves his air, not only of efficiency, but of mystery. He will sit for hours among vivid talkers—even at some dinner in his honor—without spilling more than an occasional monosyllable down upon his embonpoint.” Frances Alda, the New Zealander soprano he married in 1910, recalls their first meeting: “I wondered at the temperament of this grave, middle-aged man with the heavily bearded face in which the dark melancholy eyes seemed to brood on unfathomable things.”
⁶