Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (15 page)

At the very top of the operatic pyramid stood those few whose fame eclipsed the genre itself. The adventures of these artists/personalities made juicy copy for gossip columns and other channels of extramusical discourse. In Caruso’s case, most clamorous were stories surrounding the monkey-house episode and his daring defiance of racketeers of the Black Hand; in Farrar’s, her reputed affair with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, son of the Kaiser. That Farrar was the only diva to command her own dressing room and that she traveled in a private railroad car when the company was on the road were details to pique the public’s curiosity. Spaghetti Chaliapin, Chicken Tetrazzini, Lattuga alla Caruso, Coupe Patti, and Peach Melba showed up on the menus of sophisticates. In a handful of years at the end of the 1920s, likenesses of Melba, Farrar, Jeritza, and Bori appeared on the covers of
Time
.
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Caruso’s name all but ensured a sold-out house and, in 1913–14, for example, that meant a take of $12,000; Farrar, without Caruso, raked in the next highest receipts. They could salvage even as coolly received a novelty as
Julien
. From 1906–07 to their last joint appearance, opening night 1919, Caruso and Farrar sang together at the Met and on tour more than ninety times, despite the fact that the bottom line argued against the extravagance of casting the star couple. On the other hand, the pairing of the two could be counted on to turn performance into mega-event, notice into feature article, delight into delirium. In answer to the frequently asked question of which performance in Met history unleashed the greatest number of curtain calls and the longest ovation, the Metropolitan Opera online archive researchers award the palm to the April 22, 1914, Caruso/Farrar
Tosca
. The
Times
carried a long account of the show’s reception: “ovation for caruso and miss farrar. Opera Stars Recalled 40 Times after Last Appearance of Season in
Tosca
. tenor dances jig steps. Audience Refuses to Leave and Miss Farrar Drags in Caruso in Dressing Gown and Makes Speech.” The
Tribune
put the number of curtain calls at forty-five. Twenty-one minutes elapsed before Farrar consented
to address the public: “When we had to make a speech last year, Mr. Caruso ran away and left me in the lurch. So now I will just say, ‘I thank you.’ Thereupon she poked Caruso rather violently in the ribs; making every word count, he said in full, ‘And-I-say-Thank-you.’”

Keeping pace with his mounting popularity was Caruso’s fee. It shot up from $960 per performance in 1906–07 to $2,500 in 1914–15, and there it stayed to the end. Wary of the onerous expectations that came with an exorbitant cachet, Caruso turned down further increases. By way of comparison, in 1920–21, Giovanni Martinelli, with whom he shared many roles, made less than half his wage; arriving on the scene in that season, Caruso’s last, Beniamino Gigli negotiated for $1,600. Amelita Galli-Curci, the highest-paid female star of the time, exacted $2,000 per performance. By 1920, outside the purview of the Metropolitan, the tenor was happy to accept as much as $10,000 a night. But all of this—fame far beyond the operatic sphere, impassioned fans, enormous box-office draw, glamour, power—had been the perquisites of previous generations of operatic luminaries: Lind and Patti, De Reske and Melba. For Caruso and Farrar, the reach of fame would be exponentially greater. As the march of technology would have it, it fell to them to be the first Metropolitan stars of the dawning age of mechanical reproduction.
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Caruso’s Met career spanned seventeen years, from 1903 to 1920, Farrar’s from 1906 to 1922, decades in which the then new media leapt into maturity. Before he had set foot in New York, the voice of the Italian tenor had been introduced to journalists by Conried. The recorded arias the impresario played for the New York press were likely among the ten Caruso cut in spring 1902 at the Grand Hotel in Milan, where, coincidentally, Verdi had died the year before. Caruso could not have dreamed that these wax transcriptions would be the first of 498 (245 are extant) that would net him more than $1 million and the industry twice that amount. A Victor Talking Machine Company advertisement in
Theater Magazine
(Dec. 1919) depicts Caruso leading a parade of twenty or so Metropolitan—and Victor—singers. Farrar, who made 160 recordings with the company, including duets from
Butterfly, Bohème, Faust, Tosca,
and
Manon
with Caruso, is pictured, fittingly, just behind him. The caption reads: “Will Caruso thrill you?” And for each of these recordings, the Metropolitan Opera Company stood to pocket royalties that would go some way toward recovering the salaries of their phonogenic artists.
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Farrar’s disks document a voice of ample power, with a warm, solid middle. Others of her generation, Gadski and Destinn, for example, were more
polished vocalists, with more brilliant techniques. But Farrar was the more remarkable singer-actress; she had to be heard
and
seen. Or even only seen, as some in the (silent) motion picture industry were willing to gamble. Between 1915 and 1920, she made fifteen movies of diverse genres: costume dramas, contemporary melodramas, mysteries, westerns.
Carmen,
her first released film and her best known, premiered at Boston’s Symphony Hall, a departure for this staid sanctuary of classical music. A telephone hookup was arranged between the auditorium and the Lasky Studio, where producer Jesse Lasky and director Cecil B. DeMille tracked the film’s reception as they watched the movie simultaneously with the east coast audience. In her debut on the big screen, Farrar exhibits the flashing dark eyes, the alluring smile, the supple body, and the singularly uninhibited presence that defined her. And
Carmen
allows us to assess the crossover lessons from opera to film back to opera that Hollywood taught her. Frances Alda brings to life a 1916 performance of Bizet’s opera: “During the scene with the cigarette girls, Farrar suddenly shook one of them so realistically that the rest of the chorus gasped. ‘Hollywood tricks’ Caruso snorted to me. ‘What does she think this is? A cinema?’” During the act 3 tussle between Carmen and Don José “she turned in [Caruso’s] grasp, bent her head swiftly, and bit the hand that held her. Furious and bleeding, [he] flung her from him. She went down, smack on her btm
[sic]
! I stood staring, my mouth open, entirely forgetting my cue, until called to my senses by a sharp rap of the conductor’s baton. Then curtain. Immediately the heavy velvet folds hid the stage from the audience, Farrar was up on her feet, and she and Caruso were having it out between them, whilst I tried to soothe them both.” The next day, the headline ran: “Caruso Tells Farrar He’ll Quit If She’s Rough in
Carmen
” (
Tribune,
Feb. 19).
²⁶

 

FIGURE 14.
Geraldine Farrar (Hartsook; courtesy Photofest)

 

Caruso, too, was seduced by the movies, although he first contemplated with some anxiety the potential loss of prestige should he, as Farrar put it, follow her “towards the concentrated vicinity of the lens.” Ultimately, his foray onto the silent screen was both brief and forgettable. Between July 15 and September 30, 1918, Caruso made two films,
My Cousin
and
A Splendid Romance,
for which he was paid the astronomical sum of $100,000 by Lasky’s Famous Players. Only
My Cousin
was released in the United States. It opens with a series of shots of Caruso as a celebrated tenor in mufti, and then in costume as Rodolfo, Canio, Samson, and the Duke of Mantua. He also plays the part of an impoverished Little Italy sculptor who has made a plaster bust of his cousin, the singer. The sculptor is portly and mustachioed, his face deeply lined, and immensely likable. He smokes a pipe and accompanies himself on the obligatory guitar. As the famous tenor, Caruso resembles his photographs, clean-shaven, sporting a cigarette holder. Throughout the opera sequences there are views of the Met’s family circle, the boxes, the orchestra, the stage, and moments from
Pagliacci
itself. Caruso manages the pantomime of “Vesti la giubba” without excessive expression or gesticulation, not an easy task. In a subsequent scene, as if to underscore his own onstage restraint, he parodies the caricatural Italian tenor, grimaces and all.
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Barely two years later, Caruso’s
L’Elisir d’amore
of December 11, 1920, at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music made the front pages of both the
Times
and the
Tribune,
but not, alas, for the wonder of his artistry. During the first act, the tenor began to cough up blood. From the wings, his wife and physician implored him to leave the stage. He refused and continued to pass red-stained
handkerchiefs to choristers who passed him fresh handkerchiefs in return. At the end of the act, the theater manager stepped in front of the curtain: “‘He assures me that he is willing, in spite of the accident, to finish the performance, and if you wish he will go on with it. It is for you to decide.’ Hundreds of persons rose to their feet, crying ‘No! No!’”
(Tribune)
. Caruso would make just three more appearances with the company, his last in
La Juive
on Christmas Eve 1920. The Brooklyn
Elisir
foreshadowed his death the following August from complications of lung disease. During the critical phase of Caruso’s illness, as hopes of recovery faded, the Metropolitan management was faced with the frightening prospect of a post-Caruso season. On March 5, 1921, Edward Ziegler, assistant general manager and right hand to Gatti, recommended the engagement of the coloratura soprano Galli-Curci
and of the baritone Titta Ruffo, both with the Chicago Opera. “Whatever happens to Caruso,” he wrote to Kahn, “we shall be in a position to offer to those of our subscribers whose first thought is of the ‘stars,’ if not an absolute substitute at least a relative substitute.”

 

FIGURE 15.
Enrico Caruso as Nemorino in
L’Elisir d’amore
, 1904 (White Studio; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

By August 2, 1921, the date of Caruso’s death, the time for signing credible replacements for the coming season was at an end. Gatti wrote to Kahn on August 7, “The loss of poor Caruso is indeed great: we may have now and later tenors possessing some of his qualities, i.e., who may have a beautiful voice, who may be good singers or artists, etc., but I think it will be impossible to have the fortune to find again another personality who possesses in himself all the artistic and moral gifts that distinguished our poor and illustrious friend!” Once the long funeral cortege had followed the crystal coffin from the Royal Basilica of Naples, a replica of Rome’s Pantheon, to the cemetery, Gatti was ready to float the names of tenors who might fill the void: Gigli and Martinelli, already at the Met, and Aureliano Pertile and Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, whom he had auditioned during the summer and would subsequently sign. Gigli took over from Caruso in the Met premiere of
Andrea Chénier
. Pertile made his debut as Cavaradossi on December 1, 1921, the night Maria Jeritza sang her historic first Met Floria Tosca, after which the role was essentially hers for the next decade. The Moravian diva stole the show by redefining the title role that had been created by Ternina, had been favored by Eames and Fremstad, and had lately been jealously guarded by Farrar. The composer, effusive in his praise of Jeritza (“perhaps the most original artiste that I have ever known,” “sublime”), had sanctioned her blonde Tosca despite the “bruna” Floria inscribed in the libretto. The fair-haired soprano invented new inflections and gestures, all of which elicited glorious notices. Her most vivid coup de théâtre, a “Vissi d’arte” sung prone on the floor, was not to the taste of at least one in the audience. Farrar wrote caustically in her autobiography, “From my seat . . . I obtained no view of any expressive pantomime on her pretty face, while I was surprised by the questionable flaunting of a well-cushioned and obvious posterior.”
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