Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (14 page)

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.

FIGURE 13.
La Fanciulla del West
, act 3, Enrico Caruso as Dick Johnson in center, and on the right, Emmy Destinn as Minnie, and Pasquale Amato as Jack Rance, 1910 (White Studio; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

Puccini was delighted with Caruso (“grande”), Destinn (“benissimo”), Amato (“ottimo” [very good]), and Toscanini (“un vero angelo” [a real angel]). The New York critics concurred. They had only praise for the artists and the mise-en-scène. Many did, however, fault the music. Krehbiel sniped, “nine-tenths of the time his [Puccini’s] vocal melody is nothing”
(Tribune)
. For Aldrich, who noted Puccini’s embrace of Debussian harmonies, the loss of sustained lyricism was regrettable: the “scraps of melody . . . are commonplace, impotent to express what they are associated with and frankly dull . . . there is little that is characteristic of the Puccini of earlier years”
(Times)
. The composer was taken to task for the irritating contrast between his musical idiom and the familiar “Western” ditties sprinkled throughout the score. But to judge by the consistently high box-office returns, the public remained faithful through the initial four-season run. Since then,
Fanciulla
has had sporadic revivals. The work, a milestone in the composer’s steady evolution toward a more modern lyricism through the expansion of his harmonic palette, has secured a permanent place in the repertoire.
¹⁷

Other Premieres

In December 1910, odds would have favored the Met’s other world premiere. For the Wagnerite critics, there was no contest:
Königskinder
was “the work of a master of his art and of his material, a melodist of the first water,” and Humperdinck was congratulated on having “been able to . . . attain results of such pure beauty”
(Times)
. Finck pronounced
Königskinder
nothing less than “the greatest operatic work that has come from Germany in three decades—since the production of
Parsifal
”
(Evening Post)
. Humperdinck, who had demonstrated the viability of the fairytale opera with
Hänsel und Gretel,
here added dimensions of interest to an adult audience: a love story and a social message that decried the defeat of idealism at the hands of materialism. If Puccini asked for galloping horses, Humperdinck wanted a gaggle of waddling geese, “which last night did what was required of it with exemplary fidelity”
(Times)
. By all accounts, Farrar’s Goose Girl was exquisite. In their four-year runs,
Königskinder
far surpassed the number of performances racked up by
Fanciulla,
but after 1910–11 it dropped below the season’s box-office average. Never revived at the Met, it has turned up infrequently elsewhere.

In his first seven years, in addition to
La Fanciulla del West
and
Königskinder,
Gatti bet on fully thirty company premieres, of which only five had significant life spans. Franco Leoni’s one-act melodrama,
L’Oracolo,
was retired with Scotti in 1933. Italo Montemezzi’s
L’Amore dei tre re
was given regularly until 1949. The durable legacies of this period are Jacques Offenbach’s
Les Contes d’Hoffmann,
Richard Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier,
and Modest Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov
.

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE

Toscanini left New York suddenly in spring 1915. Farrar had pushed him to choose between his mistress and his family. And since divorce, from his point of view, was unthinkable, he was left with no choice at all. The diva’s ultimatum was not the only consideration. There was also the escalating conflict with Gatti, the conductor unmovable in matters of quality, never mind the cost; the intendant fixated on the balance sheet to the last penny. One of their many rows had erupted during the preparation for the 1913
Un Ballo in maschera,
tied to the centennial celebration of Verdi’s birth. Toscanini
insisted on a stage band for the act 3 masked ball. Gatti maintained that the music could just as well emanate from the pit. There were endless conflicts over rehearsal time. The camel’s back was broken, the story goes, by a mediocre
Carmen
. The infuriated Toscanini announced that he was canceling his six remaining performances. Besides, he was eager to return to Italy, by now at war with Austria-Hungary. Thus it was that the great man and his wife and daughters were not, as had been planned, on the
Lusitania
sailing from New York on May 1 and sunk by a German U-boat on May 7. Kahn and Gatti did their best to lure the irreplaceable conductor back to the Met, even at the price of naming him “General Musik Director” with increased power over repertoire, casts, and schedule. Toscanini refused to rejoin the company. In fact, he would never again conduct an opera at the Metropolitan.
¹⁸

Two years after Toscanini’s departure, during the third intermission of the April 2, 1917, performance of De Koven’s
The Canterbury Pilgrims,
the audience was thunderstruck by the news that Woodrow Wilson had appeared before Congress to call for a declaration of war against Germany. Late editions of New York papers circulated from hand to hand in the Diamond Horseshoe. The recently recalled ambassador to Berlin James Gerard, a guest in one of the boxes, exhorted the crowd to cheer the president; from another box came a shout for cheers for the Allies and the US Army and Navy. The orchestra struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As act 4 began, the mezzo-soprano Margarete Ober, “one of a dozen German stars [more accurately, two stars and a handful of comprimarios] on the stage at the time, had the leading part with Mr. [Johannes] Sembach in the final scene. She was singing a phrase of the Wife of Bath when she stopped and fell full length upon her back, striking heavily on the floor. Sembach and [tenor] Max Bloch lifted her, but she sank again, and the two men carried her out through the stage crowd, considerably to the detriment of the Wife of Bath’s bridal gown” (
Times,
April 3, 1917). The cast sang on without her or her character to the opera’s end. In the years of America’s neutrality, 1914–1917, Ober and her compatriots had had no problem singing with French and British colleagues, nationals of countries with which Germany was at war. Nor was there any serious threat of anti-German feeling affecting the repertoire. Among the premieres of the period were two works performed in German, Hermann Goetz’s
Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung (The Taming of the Shrew)
and Gluck’s
Iphigénie en Tauride,
in a version arranged by Richard Strauss.

The challenge to the customary multinational casting lay principally in the perils of transporting European artists to the United States and back
again; passports and safe-conducts were precious commodities. By 1916, the dangers of ocean travel had been brought home to the extended Met family by the tragic death of Spanish composer/piano virtuoso Enrique Granados. On his return from New York following the world premiere of his opera
Goyescas,
the ship on which Granados and his wife were crossing the English Channel was torpedoed by a German submarine. Still, the Met carried on its programming very much as usual. As late as October 16, 1917, six months after the disrupted performance of
The Canterbury Pilgrims,
Olive Fremstad had signed to sing Isolde. A week before opening night and only nine days before her homecoming after a three-year absence, Fremstad was told that all opera in German was canceled for the season and so, therefore, was her engagement. The long-awaited
Tristan und Isolde
turned into
Boris Godunov
. The action was taken, according to the official explanation, “lest Germany should make capital of their [operas in German] continued appearance to convince the German people that this nation was not heart and soul in the war.” Though no one could have guessed it at the time, the last performance in German from the Met stage for the duration and beyond had taken place on April 13, 1917. On that occasion, Isolde was sung by Fremstad’s archrival, Johanna Gadski, a fixture at the Met from 1900 to 1917.
¹⁹

In May 1915, a day after the attack on the
Lusitania,
a gala for the benefit of the German Red Cross, a performance of
Die Fledermaus
not sponsored by the company, was scheduled for the house. Gadski, who had lately made no secret of her ill will toward the United States, was to sing “Deutschland über Alles.” But in light of the immediacy of the outrageous act of German aggression, she thought better of it. In the same year, the soprano’s husband, Captain Hans Tauscher, was charged with conspiracy to blow up the canal between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; he was acquitted. Gadski herself was alleged to have said publicly that, given half a chance, she would happily blow up New Jersey’s munitions plants. In an editorial titled “Overriding Tolerance,” the
Globe
urged Gadski’s ouster from the company for hosting a 1915 New Year’s Eve party at which her colleague, German baritone Otto Goritz, was reputed to have sung a parody in celebration of the sinking of the
Lusitania
. At war’s end, Gadski sued the
Tribune,
claiming that Krehbiel, in response to protests over her impending Carnegie Hall concert, had made libelous statements. Krehbiel had simply repeated what had been previously reported and Gadski lost at trial.
²⁰

The press was, of course, correct in separating the denunciation of Gadski and her fellow revelers from the defense of German opera in time of war. The
newspapers had engaged the issue for months. A
Tribune
headline read, “German Opera Is Still Welcome at the Metropolitan” (Sept. 23, 1917). The
Sun
was confident that the public did not “think of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner as exclusively representing the Teutonic people.” The
Mail
declared, “Art knows no frontiers.” A ban on German opera would, for the
Times,
be analogous to “excluding the great classics of German literature from the public libraries.” Signed contracts and the views of influential music critics notwithstanding, in a charged climate the board bowed to war hysteria, voting to exile the German language from its auditorium and Fremstad and other leading Wagner specialists from its roster.
²¹

Subscribers who objected to the new policy and demanded refunds were refused on the grounds that the company had “made no definite promise as to the complete and precise repertoire of its present season.” They were informed that “the decision of the Board of Directors to withdraw opera sung in the German language was dictated not only by a sense of patriotic duty but also by a desire to safeguard the interests of our patrons and to prevent possible disorder.” The German-language repertoire tentatively announced for 1917–18,
Fidelio, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, Meistersinger, Parsifal, Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried,
and
Götterdämmerung,
was scratched. The company premiere of
Saint Elisabeth,
a Liszt oratorio staged as an opera, was done in English, not in the anticipated German;
Martha
was given in Italian as usual. In 1916–17, forty-six performances had been sung in German. To compensate for the boycott, in 1917–18 the Italian total rose from eighty-eight to 122, the French from thirty-three to forty-eight. The premieres represented Great War allies Italy, France, Russia, and the United States: Mascagni’s
Lodoletta,
Henri Rabaud’s
Mârouf,
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Le Coq d’or,
and
The Robin Woman: Shanewis
by Charles Wakefield Cadman, a specialist in Native-American music.
²²

The November 11, 1918, armistice converged with the opening of the season; the company celebrated offstage and on. In the afternoon, a procession to Times Square of Met administrators (Gatti-Casazza included), instrumentalists, and singers followed a “dummy” Siegfried, hung in effigy from a gibbet and helmeted to resemble Kaiser Wilhelm. Between acts of the evening’s opera,
Samson et Dalila,
national anthems rang through the house, “The Star-Spangled Banner” capped by Caruso’s high B flat.

The reintegration of Wagner began in 1919–20 with
Parsifal,
in English; in 1920–21,
Lohengrin
and
Tristan
were on the program, also in English; all did well at the box office. In 1921–22, with the lifting of the linguistic ban,
Italian maintained its plurality, although performances in German increased gradually through the 1920s. In the mid-1930s, with the coming of Kirsten Flagstad, German reclaimed its prewar share of approximately 30 percent.