Chapters of Opera
by Henry Edward Krehbiel · English · Gutenberg #5995 · 869,590 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Chapters of Opera
Author: Henry Edward Krehbiel
Release date: May 29, 2005 [eBook #5995]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAPTERS OF OPERA ***
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CHAPTERS OF OPERA
Being
Historical and Critical Observations
And Records Concerning the Lyric
Drama in New York from Its
Earliest Days Down to
The Present Time
by
HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL
Musical Editor of "The New York Tribune";
Author of "How To Listen To Music,"
"Studies In The Wagnerian Drama,"
"Music And Manners In The Classical Period,"
"The Philharmonic Society Of New York," etc., etc.
To MARIE--WIFE
and
DAUGHTER HELEN
Who have shared with the Author many of the
Experiences described in this book.
"Joy shared is Joy doubled."
--GOETHE.
PREFACE
The making of this book was prompted by the fact that with the season
1907-08 the Metropolitan Opera House in New York completed an existence
of twenty-five years. Through all this period at public representations
I have occupied stall D-15 on the ground floor as reviewer of musical
affairs for The New York Tribune newspaper. I have, therefore, been a
witness of the vicissitudes through which the institution has passed
in a quarter-century, and a chronicler of all significant musical
things which were done within its walls. I have seen the failure of
the artistic policy to promote which the magnificent theater was built;
the revolution accomplished by the stockholders under the leadership
of Leopold Damrosch; the progress of a German régime, which did much
to develop tastes and create ideals which, till its coming, were
little-known quantities in American art and life; the overthrow of that
régime in obedience to the command of fashion; the subsequent dawn and
development of the liberal and comprehensive policy which marked the
climax of the career of Maurice Grau as an operatic director, I have
witnessed since then, many of the fruits of wise endeavor and astute
management frittered away by managerial incapacity and greed, and fad
and fashion come to rule again, where for a brief, but eventful period,
serious artistic interest and endeavor had been dominant.
The institution will enter upon a new régime with the season 1908-09.
The time, therefore, seemed fitting for a review of the twenty-five
years that are past. The incidents of this period are fixed; they
may be variously viewed, but they cannot be changed. They belong to
history, and to a presentation of that history I have devoted most
of the pages which follow. I have been actuated in my work by deep
seriousness of purpose, and have tried to avoid everything which
could not make for intellectual profit, or, at least, amiable and
illuminative entertainment.
The chapters which precede the more or less detailed history of the
Metropolitan Opera House (I-VII) were written for the sake of the
light which they shed on existing institutions and conditions, and to
illustrate the development of existing taste, appreciation, and interest
touching the lyrical drama. To the same end much consideration has been
paid to significant doings outside the Metropolitan Opera House since
it has been the chief domicile of grand opera in New York. Especial
attention has been given for obvious reasons to the two seasons of
opera at Mr. Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House.
H. E. KREHBIEL.
Blue Hill, Maine, the Summer of 1908.
AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THIRD EDITION
For the purposes of a new and popular edition of this book, the
publishers asked the author to continue his historical narrative, his
record of performances, and his critical survey of the operas produced
at the two chief operatic institutions of New York, from the beginning
of the season 1908-1909 down to the close of the season 1910-1911. This
invitation the author felt compelled to decline for several reasons,
one of which (quite sufficient in itself), was that he had already
undertaken a work of great magnitude which would occupy all his working
hours during the period between the close of the last season and the
publication of this edition.
Thereupon the publishers, who seemed to place a high valuation on
the historical element in the book, suggested that the record of
performances at least be brought up to date even if the criticism of new
operas and the discussion of the other incidents of the season--such as
the dissensions between the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House,
the rivalry between them and the director of the Manhattan, the quarrels
with artists, the successes achieved by some operas and the failure
suffered by others--be postponed for the present at least for want of
time on the part of the author to carry on the work on the scale of the
original edition.
It was finally agreed that the author should supply the record for
the period intervening between the appearance of the first edition of
"Chapters of Opera" and the present publication by revised excerpts
from the annual summaries of the activities of the seasons in question
published by him in the New York Tribune, of which newspaper he has had
the honor of being the musical critic for thirty years past. For the
privilege of using this material the author is deeply beholden to the
Tribune Association and the editor, Hart Lyman, Esq. The record may be
found in the Appendices after the last chapter.
H. E. KREHBIEL.
Blue Hill, Maine, Summer of 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION OF OPERA IN NEW YORK
The Introduction of Italian Opera in New York
English Ballad Operas and Adaptations from French and Italian Works
Hallam's Comedians and "The Beggar's Opera"
The John Street Theater and Its Early Successors
Italian Opera's First Home
Manuel Garcia
The New Park Theater and Some of Its Rivals
Malibran and English Opera
The Bowery Theater, Richmond Hill, Niblo's and Castle Gardens
CHAPTER II
EARLY THEATERS, MANAGERS, AND SINGERS
Of the Building of Opera Houses
A Study of Influences
The First Italian Opera House in New York
Early Impresarios and Singers
Da Ponte, Montressor, Rivafinoli
Signorina Pedrotti and Fornasari
Why Do Men Become Opera-Managers?
Addison and Italian Opera
The Vernacular Triumphant
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST ITALIAN COMPANY
Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia
"Il Barbiere di Siviglia"
Signorina Maria Garcia's Unfortunate Marriage
Lorenzo da Ponte
His Hebraic Origin and Checkered Career
"Don Giovanni"
An Appeal in Behalf of Italian Opera
CHAPTER IV
HOUSES BUILT FOR OPERA
More Opera Houses
Palmo's and the Astor Place
Signora Borghese and the Distressful Vocal Wabble
Antognini and Cinti-Damoreau
An Orchestral Strike
Advent of the Patti Family
Don Francesco Marty y Torrens and His Havanese Company
Opera Gowns Fifty Years Ago
Edward and William Henry Fry
Horace Greeley and His Musical Critic
James H. Hackett and William Niblo
Tragic Consequences of Canine Interference
Goethe and a Poodle
A Dog-Show and the Astor Place Opera House
CHAPTER V
MARETZEK, HIS RIVALS AND SINGERS
Max Maretzek
His Managerial Career
Some Anecdotes
"Crotchets and Quavers"
His Rivals and Some of His Singers
Bernard Ullmann
Marty Again
Bottesini and Arditi
Steffanone
Bosio
Tedesco
Salvi
Bettini
Badiali
Marini
CHAPTER VI
THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MUSIC
Operatic Warfare Half a Century Ago
The Academy of Music and Its Misfortunes
A Critic's Opera and His Ideals
A Roster of American Singers
Grisi and Mario
Annie Louise Cary
Ole Bull as Manager
Piccolomini and Réclame
Adelina Patti's Début and an Anniversary Dinner Twenty-five
Years Later
A Kiss for Maretzek
CHAPTER VII
MAPLESON AND OTHER IMPRESARIOS
Colonel James H. Mapleson
A Diplomatic Manager
His Persuasiveness
How He Borrowed Money from an Irate Creditor
Maurice Strakosch
Musical Managers
Pollini
Sofia Scalchi and Annie Louise Cary Again
Campanini and His Beautiful Attack
Brignoli
His Appetite and Superstition
CHAPTER VIII
THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE
The Academy's Successful Rival
Why It Was Built
The Demands of Fashion
Description of the Theater
War between the Metropolitan and the Academy of Music
Mapleson and Abbey
The Rival Forces
Patti and Nilsson
Gerster and Sembrich
A Costly Victory
CHAPTER IX
FIRST SEASON AT THE METROPOLITAN
The First Season at the Metropolitan Opera House
Mr. Abbey's Singers
Gounod's "Faust" and Christine Nilsson
Marcella Sembrich and Her Versatility
Sofia Scalchi
Signor Kaschmann
Signor Stagno
Ambroise Thomas's "Mignon"
Madame Fursch-Madi
Ponchielli's "La Gioconda"
CHAPTER X
OPERATIC REVOLUTIONS
The Season 1883-1884 at the Academy of Music
Lillian Nordica's American Début
German Opera Introduced at the Metropolitan Opera House
Parlous State of Italian Opera in London and on the Continent
Dr. Leopold Damrosch and His Enterprise
The German Singers
Amalia Materna
Marianne Brandt
Marie Schroeder-Hanfstängl
Anton Schott, the Military Tenor
Von Bülow's Characterization: "A Tenor is a Disease"
CHAPTER XI
GERMAN OPERA AT THE METROPOLITAN
First German Season
Death Struggles of Italian Opera at the Academy
Adelina Patti and Her Art
Features of the German Performances
"Tannhäuser"
Marianne Brandt in Beethoven's Opera
"Der Freischütz"
"Masaniello"
Materna in "Die Walküre"
Death of Dr. Damrosch
CHAPTER XII
END OF ITALIAN OPERA AT THE ACADEMY
The Season 1885-1886
End of the Mapleson Régime at the Academy of Music
Alma Fohström
The American Opera Company
German Opera in the Bowery
A Tenor Who Wanted to be Manager of the Metropolitan Opera House
The Coming of Anton Seidl
His Early Career
Lilli Lehmann
A Broken Contract
Unselfish Devotion to Artistic Ideals
Max Alvary
Emil Fischer
CHAPTER XIII
WAGNER HOLDS THE METROPOLITAN
Second and Third German Seasons
The Period 1885-1888
More about Lilli Lehmann
Goldmark's "Queen of Sheba"
First Performance of Wagner's "Meistersinger"
Patti in Concert and Opera
A Flash in the Pan at the Academy of Music
The Transformed American Opera Company
Production of Rubinstein's "Nero"
An Imperial Operatic Figure
First American Performance of "Tristan und Isolde"
Albert Niemann and His Characteristics
His Impersonation of Siegmund
Anecdotes
A Triumph for "Fidelio"
CHAPTER XIV
WAGNERIAN HIGH TIDE
Wagnerian High Tide at the Metropolitan Opera House
1887-1890
Italian Low Water Elsewhere
Rising of the Opposition
Wagner's "Siegfried"
Its Unconventionality
"Götterdämmerung"
"Der Trompeter von Säkkingen"
"Euryanthe"
"Ferdinand Cortez"
"Der Barbier von Bagdad"
Italo Campanini and Verdi's "Otello"
Patti and Italian Opera at the Metropolitan Opera House
CHAPTER XV
END OF THE GERMAN PERIOD
End of the German Period
1890-1891
Some Extraordinary Novelties
Franchetti's "Asrael"
"Der Vasall von Szigeth"
A Royal Composer, His Opera and His Distribution of Decorations
"Diana von Solange"
Financial Salvation through Wagner
Italian Opera Redivivus
Ill-mannered Box-holders
Wagnerian Statistics
CHAPTER XVI
ITALIAN OPERA AGAIN AT THE METROPOLITAN
The Season 1891-1892
Losses of the Stockholders of the Metropolitan Opera House Company
Return to Italian Opera
Mr. Abbey's Expectations
Sickness of Lilli Lehmann
The De Reszke Brothers and Lassalle
Emma Eames
Début of Marie Van Zandt
"Cavalleria Rusticana"
Fire Damages the Opera House
Reorganization of the Owning Company
CHAPTER XVII
THE ADVENT OF MELBA AND CALVÉ
An Interregnum
Changes in the Management
Rise and Fall of Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau
Death of Henry E. Abbey
His Career
Season 1893-1894
Nellie Melba
Emma Calvé
Bourbonism of the Parisians
Massenet's "Werther"
1894-1895
A Breakdown on the Stage
"Elaine"
Sybil Sanderson and "Manon"
Shakespearian Operas
Verdi's "Falstaff"
CHAPTER XVIII
UPRISING IN FAVOR OF GERMAN OPERA
The Public Clamor for German Opera
Oscar Hammerstein and His First Manhattan Opera House
Rivalry between Anton Seidl and Walter Damrosch
The Latter's Career as Manager
Wagner Triumphant
German Opera Restored at the Metropolitan
"The Scarlet Letter"
"Mataswintha"
"Hänsel und Gretel" in English
Jean de Reszke and His Influence
Mapleson for the Last Time
"Andrea Chenier"
Madame Melba's Disastrous Essay with Wagner
"Le Cid"
Metropolitan Performances 1893-1897
CHAPTER XIX
BEGINNING OF THE GRAU PERIOD
Beginning of the Grau Period
Death of Maurice Grau
His Managerial Career
An Interregnum at the Metropolitan Opera House Filled by
Damrosch and Ellis
Death of Anton Seidl
His Funeral
Characteristic Traits
"La Bohème"
1898-1899
"Ero e Leandro" and Its Composer
CHAPTER XX
NEW SINGERS AND OPERAS
Closing Years of Mr. Grau's Régime
Traits in the Manager's Character
Débuts of Alvarez, Scotti, Louise Homer, Lucienne Bréval and
Other Singers
Ternina and "Tosca"
Reyer's "Salammbô"
Gala Performance for a Prussian Prince
"Messaline"
Paderewski's "Manru"
"Der Wald"
Performances in the Grau Period
CHAPTER XXI
HEINRICH CONRIED AND "PARSIFAL"
Beginning of the Administration of Heinrich Conried
Season 1903-1904
Mascagni's American Fiasco
"Iris" and "Zanetto"
Woful Consequences of Depreciating American Conditions
Mr. Conried's Theatrical Career
His Inheritance from Mr. Grau
Signor Caruso
The Company Recruited
The "Parsifal" Craze
CHAPTER XXII
END OF CONRIED'S ADMINISTRATION
Conried's Administration Concluded
1905-1908
Visits from Humperdinck and Puccini
The California Earthquake
Madame Sembrich's Generosity to the Suffering Musicians
"Madama Butterfly"
"Manon Lescaut"
"Fedora"
Production and Prohibition of "Salome"
A Criticism of the Work
"Adriana Lecouvreur"
A Table of Performances
CHAPTER XXIII
HAMMERSTEIN AND HIS OPERA HOUSE
Oscar Hammerstein Builds a Second Manhattan Opera House
How the Manager Put His Doubters to Shame
His Earlier Experiences as Impresario
Cleofonte Campanini
A Zealous Artistic Director and Ambitious Singers
A Surprising Record but No Novelties in the First Season
Melba and Calvé as Stars
The Desertion of Bonci
Quarrels about Puccini's "Bohéme"
List of Performances
CHAPTER XXIV
A BRILLIANT SEASON AT THE MANHATTAN
Hammerstein's Second Season
Amazing Promises but More Amazing Achievements
Mary Garden and Maurice Renaud
Massenet's "Thaïs," Charpentier's "Louise"
Giordano's "Siberia" and Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande" Performed for
the First Time in America
Revival of Offenbach's "Les Contes d'Hoffmann," "Crispino e la Comare"
of the Ricci Brothers, and Giordano's "Andrea Chenier"
The Tetrazzini Craze
Repertory of the Season
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION OF OPERA IN NEW YORK
Considering the present state of Italian opera in New York City (I am
writing in the year of our Lord 1908), it seems more than a little
strange that its entire history should come within the memories of
persons still living. It was only two years ago that an ancient factotum
at the Metropolitan Opera House died who, for a score of years before he
began service at that establishment, had been in various posts at the
Academy of Music. Of Mr. Arment a kindly necrologist said that he had
seen the Crowd gather in front of the Park Theater in 1825, when the new
form of entertainment effected an entrance in the New World. I knew the
little old gentleman for a quarter of a century or more, but though he
was familiar with my interest in matters historical touching the opera
in New York, he never volunteered information of things further back
than the consulship of Mapleson at the Academy. Moreover, I was unable
to reconcile the story of his recollection of the episode of 1825 with
the circumstances of his early life. Yet the tale may have been true, or
the opera company that had attracted his boyish attention been one that
came within the first decade after Italian opera had its introduction.
Concerning another's recollections, I have not the slightest doubt.
Within the last year Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, entertaining some of her
relatives and friends with an account of social doings in New York in
her childhood, recalled the fact that she had been taken as a tiny miss
to hear some of the performances of the Garcia Troupe, and, if I mistake
not, had had Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart's "Nozze di
Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" pointed out to her by her brother. This
brother was Samuel Ward, who enjoyed the friendship of the old poet,
and published recollections of him not long after his death, in The
New York Mirror. For a score of years I have enjoyed the gentle
companionship at the opera of two sisters whose mother was an Italian
pupil of Da Ponte's, and when, a few years ago, Professor Marchesan, of
the University of Treviso, Italy, appealed to me for material to be used
in the biography of Da Ponte, which he was writing, I was able, through
my gracious and gentle operatic neighbors, to provide him with a number
of occasional poems written, in the manner of a century ago, to their
mother, in whom Da Ponte had awakened a love for the Italian language
and literature. This, together with some of my own labors in uncovering
the American history of Mozart's collaborator, has made me feel
sometimes as if I, too, had dwelt for a brief space in that Arcadia of
which I purpose to gossip in this chapter, and a few others which are
to follow it.
There may be other memories going back as far as Mrs. Howe's, but I
very much doubt if there is another as lively as hers on any question
connected with social life in New York fourscore years ago. Italian
opera was quite as aristocratic when it made its American bow as it
is now, and decidedly more exclusive. It is natural that memories of
it should linger in Mrs. Howe's mind for the reason that the family
to which she belonged moved in the circles to which the new form of
entertainment made appeal. A memory of the incident which must have been
even livelier than that of Mrs. Howe's, however, perished in 1906, when
Manuel Garcia died in London, in his one hundred and first year, for he
could say of the first American season of Italian opera what Æneas said
of the siege of Troy, "All of which I saw, and some of which I was."
Manuel Garcia was a son of the Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia, who
brought the institution to our shores; he was a brother of our first
prima donna, she who then was only the Signorina Garcia, but within
a lustrum afterward was the great Malibran; and he sang in the first
performance, on November 29, 1825, and probably in all the performances
given between that date and August of the next year, when the elder
Garcia departed, leaving the Signorina, as Mme. Malibran, aged but
eighteen, to develop her powers in local theaters and as a chorister
in Grace Church. Of this and other related things presently.
In the sometimes faulty and incomplete records of the American stage to
which writers on musical history have hitherto been forced to repair,
1750 is set down as the natal year for English ballad opera in America.
It is thought that it was in that year that "The Beggar's Opera" found
its way to New York, after having, in all probability, been given by
the same company of comedians in Philadelphia in the middle of the
year preceding. But it is as little likely that these were the first
performances of ballad operas on this side of the Atlantic as that the
people of New York were oblivious of the nature of operatic music of
the Italian type until Garcia's troupe came with Rossini's "Barber of
Seville," in 1825. There are traces of ballad operas in America in the
early decades of the eighteenth century, and there can exist no doubt at
all that French and Italian operas were given in some form, perhaps, as
a rule, in the adapted form which prevailed in the London theaters until
far into the nineteenth century, before the year 1800, in the towns and
cities of the Eastern seaboard, which were in most active communication
with Great Britain, I quote from an article on the history of opera in
the United States, written by me for the second edition of "Grove's
Dictionary of Music and Musicians":
Among French works Rousseau's "Pygmalion" and "Devin du Village,"
Dalayrac's "Nina" and "L'Amant Statue," Monsigny's "Déserteur," Grétry's
"Zémire et Azor," "Fausse Magie" and "Richard Coeur de Lion" and others,
were known in Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York in
the last decade of the eighteenth century. There were traces, too, of
Pergolese's "Serva padrona," and it seems more than likely that an
"opera in three acts," the text adapted by Colman, entitled "The Spanish
Barber; or, The Futile Precaution," played in Baltimore, Philadelphia,
and New York, in 1794, was Paisiello's "Barbiere di Siviglia." From
1820 to about 1845 more than a score of the Italian, French, and German
operas, which made up the staple of foreign repertories, were frequently
performed by English singers. The earliest of these singers were members
of the dramatic companies who introduced theatrical plays in the
colonies. They went from London to Philadelphia, New York, Williamsburg
(Va.), and Charleston (S. C.), but eventually established their
strongest and most enduring foothold in New York.
Accepting the 1750 date as the earliest of unmistakable records for a
performance of "The Beggar's Opera" in New York, the original home of
opera here was the Nassau Street Theater--the first of two known by that
name. It was a two-storied house, with high gables. Six wax lights were
in front of the stage, and from the ceiling dangled a "barrel hoop,"
pierced by half a dozen nails on which were spiked as many candles. It
is not necessary to take the descriptions of these early playhouses
as baldly literal, nor as indicative of something like barbarism.
The "barrel hoop" chandelier of the old theater in Nassau street was
doubtless only a primitive form of the chandeliers which kept their
vogue for nearly a century after the first comedians sang and acted at
the Nassau Street Theater. Illuminating gas did not reach New York till
1823, and "a thousand candles" was put forth as an attractive feature
at a concert in the American metropolis as late as 1845. "The Beggar's
Opera" was only twenty years old when the comedians sent to the colonies
by William Hallam, under the management of his brother, Lewis, produced
it, yet the historic Covent Garden Theater, in which it first saw the
stage lights (candles they were, too), would scarcely stand comparison
with the most modest of the metropolitan theaters nowadays. Its
audience-room was only fifty-four or fifty-five feet deep; there were
no footlights, the stage being illuminated by four hoops of candles,
over which a crown hung from the borders. The orchestra held only
fifteen or twenty musicians, though it was in this house that Handel
produced his operas and oratorios; the boxes "were flat in front and
had twisted double branches for candles fastened to the plaster. There
were pedestals on each side of the boards, with elaborately-painted
figures of Tragedy and Comedy thereon." Hallam's actors went first to
Williamsburg, Va., but were persuaded to change their home to New York
in the summer of 1753, among other things by the promise that they would
find a "very fine 'Playhouse Building'" here. Nevertheless, when Lewis
Hallam came he found the fine playhouse unsatisfactory, and may be said
to have inaugurated the habit or custom, or whatever it may be called,
followed by so many managers since, of beginning his enterprise by
erecting a new theater. The old one in Nassau Street was torn down,
and a new one built on its site. It was promised that it should be
"very fine, large, and commodious," and it was built between June and
September, 1753; how fine, large, and commodious it was may, therefore,
be imagined. A year later, the German Calvinists, wanting a place of
worship, bought the theater, and New York was without a playhouse until
a new one on Cruger's Wharf was built by David Douglass, who had married
Lewis Hallam's widow, Hallam having died in Jamaica, in 1755. This was
abandoned in turn, and Mr. Douglass built a second theater, this time
in Chapel Street. It cost $1,625, and can scarcely have been either very
roomy or very ornate. Such as it was, however, it was the home of the
drama in all its forms, save possibly the ballad opera, until about
1765, and was the center around which a storm raged which culminated
in a riot that wrecked it.
The successor of this unhappy institution was the John Street Theater,
which was opened toward the close of the year 1767. There seems to have
been a period of about fifteen years during which the musical drama
was absent from the amusement lists, but this house echoed, like its
earliest predecessors, to the strains of the ballad opera which "made
Gay rich and Rich gay." "The Beggar's Opera" was preceded, however, by
"Love in a Village," for which Dr. Arne wrote and compiled the music;
and Bickerstaff's "Maid of the Mill" was also in the repertory. In 1774
it was officially recommended that all places of amusement be closed.
Then followed the troublous times of the Revolution, and it was not
until twelve years afterward--that is, till 1786--that English Opera
resumed its sway. "Love in a Village" was revived, and it was followed
by "Inkle and Yarico," an arrangement of Shakespeare's "Tempest," with
Purcell's music, "No Song, No Supper," "Macbeth," with Locke's music,
McNally's comic opera "Robin Hood," and other works of the same
character; in fact, it may safely be said that few, if any, English
operas, either with original music or music adapted from the ballad
tunes of England, were heard in London without being speedily brought to
New York and performed here. In the John Street Theater, too, they were
listened to by George Washington, and the leader of the orchestra, a
German named Pfeil, whose name was variously spelled Fyle, File, Files,
and so on, produced that "President's March," the tune of which was
destined to become associated with "Hail Columbia," to the words of
which it was adapted by Joseph Hopkinson, of Philadelphia. On January
29, 1798, a new playhouse was opened. This was the Park Theater. A
musical piece entitled "The Purse, or American Tar," was on the program
of the opening performance, and for more than a score of years the Park
Theater played an important rôle in local operatic history. For a long
term English operas of both types held the stage, along with the drama
in all its forms, but in 1819 an English adaptation of Rossini's "Barber
of Seville"--the opera which opened the Italian régime six years
later--was heard on its stage, and two years after that Henry Rowley
Bishop's arrangement of Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro." At the close of
the season of 1820 the Park Theater was destroyed by fire, to the great
loss of its owners, one of whom was John Jacob Astor. On its site was
erected the new Park Theater, which was the original home of Italian
opera, performed in its original tongue, and in the Italian manner,
though only a small minority of the performers were Italians by birth.
Garcia was a Spaniard, born in Seville. Richard Grant White, writing in
The Century Magazine for March, 1882, calls him a "Spanish Hebrew," on
what authority I am unable to guess. Not only was Manuel Garcia, the
elder, a chorister in the Cathedral of Seville at the age of six, but
it seems as likely as not that he came of a family of Spanish church
musicians who had made their mark for more than fifty years before the
father of Malibran was born. But it is a habit with some writers to find
Hebrew blood in nearly all persons of genius.
The new Park Theater was looked upon as a magnificent playhouse in its
day, and it is a pity that Mr. White, writing about it when it was a
quarter of a century old, should have helped to spread the erroneous
notion that it was quite unworthy of so elegant a form of entertainment
as Garcia brought into it. It remained a fashionable house through all
its career or at least for a long time after it gave refuge to the
Italian muse, though it may not have been able to hold one of its
candles to the first house built especially to house that muse eight
years later. The barrel hoop of the first New York theater gave way
to "three chandeliers and patent oil lamps, the chandeliers having
thirty-five lights each." Mr. White's description of this house after it
had seen about a quarter of a century's service is certainly uninviting.
Its boxes were like pens for beasts. "Across them were stretched benches
consisting of a mere board covered with faded red moreen, a narrower
board, shoulder high, being stretched behind to serve for a back. But
one seat on each of the three or four benches was without even this
luxury, in order that the seat itself might be raised upon its hinges
for people to pass in. These sybaritic inclosures were kept under lock
and key by a fee-expecting creature, who was always half drunk, except
when he was wholly drunk. The pit, which has in our modern theater
become the parterre (or, as it is often strangely called, the parquet),
the most desirable part of the house, was in the Park Theater hardly
superior to that in which the Jacquerie of old stood upon the bare
ground (par terre), and thus gave the place its French name. The floor
was dirty and broken into holes; the seats were bare, backless benches.
Women were never seen in the pit, and, although the excellence of the
position (the best in the house) and the cheapness of admission (half a
dollar) took gentlemen there, few went there who could afford to study
comfort and luxury in their amusements. The place was pervaded with evil
smells; and, not uncommonly, in the midst of a performance, rats ran out
of the holes in the floor and across into the orchestra. This delectable
place was approached by a long, underground passage, with bare,
whitewashed walls, dimly lighted, except at a sort of booth, at which
vile fluids and viler solids were sold. As to the house itself, it was
the dingy abode of dreariness. The gallery was occupied by howling
roughs, who might have taken lessons in behavior from the negroes who
occupied a part of this tier, which was railed off for their particular
use."
This was the first home of Italian opera, strictly speaking. It had long
housed opera in the vernacular, and remained to serve as the fortress
of the English forces when the first battles were fought between the
champions of the foreign exotic and the entertainment which had been so
long established as to call itself native. Its career came to an end in
1848, when, like its predecessor and successor, it went up in flames and
smoke.
Presently I shall tell about the houses which have been built in New
York especially for operatic uses, but before then some attention ought
to be given to several other old theaters which had connection with
opera in one or another of its phases. One of these was the New York
Theater, afterward called the Bowery, and known by that name till a
comparatively recent date. The walls of this theater echoed first to the
voice of Malibran, when put forth in the vernacular of the country of
which fate seemed, for a time, to have decreed that she should remain a
resident. This was immediately after the first season of Italian opera
at the Park Theater. The New York Theater was then new, having been
built in 1826. Malibran had begun the study of English in London before
coming to New York with her father; and she continued her studies with
a new energy and a new purpose after the departure of her father to
Mexico had left her apparently stranded in New York with a bankrupt and
good-for-nothing husband to support. She made her first essay in English
opera with "The Devil's Bridge," and followed it up with "Love in a
Village." English operas, whether of the ballad order or with original
music, were constructed in principle on the lines of the German
Singspiel and French opéra comique, all the dialogue being spoken; and
Malibran's experience at the theater and Grace Church, coupled with her
great social popularity, must have made a pretty good Englishwoman of
her. "It is rather startling," says Mr. White, in the article already
alluded to, "to think of the greatest prima donna, not only of her day,
but of modern times--the most fascinating woman upon the stage in the
first half of the nineteenth century--as singing the soprano parts of
psalm tunes and chants in a small town then less known to the people of
London and Paris and Vienna than Jeddo is now. Grace Church may well be
pardoned for pride in a musical service upon the early years of which
fell such a crown of glory, and which has since then been guided by
taste not always unworthy of such a beginning." Malibran's performances
at the New York Theater were successful and a source of profit, both
to the manager and M. Malibran, to whom, it is said, a portion of the
receipts were sent every night.
Three other theaters which were identified with opera more or less
came into the field later, and by their names, at least, testified to
the continued popularity which a famous English institution had won a
century before, and which endured until that name could be applied to
the places that bore it only on the "lucus a non lucendo" principle.
These were the theaters of Richmond Hill, Niblo's, and Castle Garden.
The Ranelagh Gardens, which John Jones opened in New York, in June,
1765, and the Vauxhall Gardens, opened by Mr. Samuel Francis, in
June, 1769, were planned more or less after their English prototypes.
Out-of-doors concerts were their chief musical features, fireworks their
spectacular, while the serving of refreshments was relied on as the
principal source of profit. Richmond Hill had in its palmy days been the
villa home of Aaron Burr, and its fortunes followed the descending scale
like those of its once illustrious master. Its site was the neighborhood
of what is now the intersection of Varick and Charlton streets. After
passing out of Burr's hands, but before his death, the park had become
Richmond Hill Gardens, and the mansion the Richmond Hill Theater, both
of somewhat shady reputation, which was temporarily rehabilitated by the
response which the fashionable elements of the city's population made to
an appeal made by a season of Italian opera, given in 1832. The relics
of Niblo's Garden have disappeared as completely as those of Richmond
Hill, but its site is still fresh in the memory of those whose
theatrical experiences go back a quarter of a century. They must be old,
however, who can recall enough verdure in the vicinity of Broadway and
Prince Street to justify the name maintained by the theater to which for
many years entrance was gained through a corridor of the Metropolitan
Hotel. Three-quarters of a century ago Niblo's Garden was a reality.
William Niblo, who built it and managed it with consummate cleverness,
had been a successful coffee-house keeper downtown. Its theater opened
refreshingly on one side into the garden (as the Terrace Garden Theater,
at Third Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street does to-day), where one could
eat a dish of ice cream or sip a sherry cobbler in luxurious shade, if
such were his prompting, while play or pantomime went merrily on within.
Writing of it in 1855 Max Maretzek, who, as manager of the Astor Place
Opera House, had suffered from the rivalry of Niblo and his theater,
said:
The Metropolitan Hotel, Niblo's Theater, stores and other buildings
occupy the locality. Of the former garden nothing remains save the
ice cream and drinking saloons attached to the theater. These take up
literally as much room in the building as its stage does, and prove
that its proprietor has not altogether overlooked the earlier vocation
which laid the foundation of his fortune. The name by which he calls it
has never changed. It was Niblo's Garden when loving couples ate their
creams or drank their cobblers under the shadow of the trees. It is
Niblo's Garden now, when it is turned into a simple theater and hedged
in with houses. Nay, in the very bills which are circulated in the
interior of the building during the performances you may find, or
might shortly since have found, such an announcement as the following,
appearing in large letters:
"Between the second and third acts"--or, possibly, it may run thus
when opera is not in the ascendant--"after the conclusion of the
first piece an intermission of twenty minutes takes place, for a
promenade in the garden."
You will, I feel certain, admit that this is a marvelously delicate
way of intimating to a gentleman who may feel "dry" (it is the right
word, is it not?) that he will find the time to slake his thirst.
When he returns and his lady inquires where he has been he may reply,
if he wills it:
"Promenading in the garden."
It is not plain from Mr. White's account whether or not his memory
reached back to the veritable garden of Mr. Niblo, but his recollections
of the theater were not jaundiced like those of Mr. Maretzek, but
altogether amiable. Speaking of the performances of the Shireff, Seguin,
and Wilson company of English opera singers, who came to New York in
1838, he says:
Miss Shireff afterward appeared at Niblo's Garden, which was on the
corner of Broadway and Prince Street, where the Metropolitan Hotel now
stands. Here she performed in Auber's "Masked Ball" and other light
operas (all, of course, in English), singing in a theater that was
open on one side to the air; for Niblo's was a great place of summer
entertainment. It was a great New York "institution" in its day--perhaps
the greatest and most beneficent one of its sort that New York has ever
known. It may be safely said that most of the elder generation of New
Yorkers now living [this was written in 1881] have had at Niblo's Garden
the greatest pleasure they have ever enjoyed in public. There were
careless fun and easy jollity; there whole families would go at a
moment's warning to hear this or that singer, but most of all, year
after year, to see the Ravels--a family of pantomimists and dancers
upon earth and air, who have given innocent, thoughtless, side-shaking,
brain-clearing pleasure to more Americans than ever relaxed their sad,
silent faces for any other performers. The price of admission here was
fifty cents, no seats reserved; "first come, first served."
Last of all there was Castle Garden. Children of to-day can remember
when it was still the immigrants' depot, which it had been for half a
century. Tradition says that it was built to protect New York City from
foreign invasion, not to harbor it; but as a fortress it must have
suffered disarmament quite early in the nineteenth century. It is now
an aquarium, and as such has returned to its secondary use, which was
that of a place of entertainment. In 1830 and about that day it was a
restaurant, but for the sale only of ice cream, lemonade, and cakes.
You paid a shilling to go in--this to restrict the patronage to people
of the right sort--and your ticket was redeemable on the inside in
the innocent fluids and harmless solids aforementioned. A wooden
bridge, flanked by floating bathhouses, connected the castle with the
garden--i.e., Battery Park. North and east, in lower Broadway and
Greenwich Street, were fashionable residences, whose occupants enjoyed
the promenade under the trees, which was the proper enjoyment of the
day, as much as their more numerous, but less fortunate fellow citizens.
There balloons went up by day, and rockets and bombs by night, and
there, too, the brave militia went on parade. To Mr. White we owe the
preservation of a poetical description written by Frederick Cozzens in
an imitation of Spenser's "Sir Clod His Undoinge":
With placket lined, with joyous heart he hies
To where the Battery's Alleys, cool and greene,
Amid disparted Rivers daintie lies
With Fortresse brown and spacious Bridge betweene
Two Baths, which there like panniers huge are seen:
In shadie paths fair Dames and Maides there be
With stalking Lovers basking in their eene,
And solitary ones who scan the sea,
Or list to vesper chimes of slumberous Trinity.
The operas performed in the first season of Italian opera in America
by the Garcia troupe in the Park Theater 1825-1826, were "Il Barbiere
di Siviglia," "Tancredi," "Il Turco in Italia," "La Cenerentola," and
"Semiramide" by Rossini; "Don Giovanni" by Mozart; "L'Amante astuto"
and "La Figlia del Aria" by Garcia.
CHAPTER II
EARLY THEATERS, MANAGERS, AND SINGERS
The first opera house built in New York City opened its doors on
November 18, 1833, and was the home of Italian Opera for two seasons;
the second, built eleven years later, endured in the service for which
it was designed four years; the third, which marked as big an advance
on its immediate predecessor in comfort and elegance as the first had
marked on the ramshackle Park Theater described by Richard Grant White,
was the Astor Place Opera House, built in 1847, and the nominal home of
the precious exotic five years.
The Astor Place Opera House in its external appearance is familiar
enough to the memory of even young New Yorkers, though, unlike its
successor, the Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place,
it did not long permit its tarnished glories to form the surroundings
of the spoken drama after the opera's departure. The Academy of Music
weathered the operatic tempests of almost an entire generation, counting
from its opening night, in 1854, to the last night on which Colonel J.
H. Mapleson was its lessee, in 1886, and omitting the expiring gasps
which the Italian entertainment made under Signor Angelo, in October,
1886, under Italo Campanini, in April, 1888, and the final short spasm
under the doughty Colonel in 1896. The first Italian Opera House (that
was its name) became the National Theater; the second, which was known
as Palmo's Opera House, when turned over to the spoken drama, became
Burton's Theater; the Astor Place Opera House became the Mercantile
Library. The Academy of Music is still known by that name, though it
is given over chiefly to melodrama, and the educational purpose which
existed in the minds of its creators was only a passing dream. The
Metropolitan Opera House has housed twenty-three regular seasons of
opera, though it has been in existence for twenty-five seasons. Once
the sequence of subscription seasons was interrupted by the damage done
to the theater by fire; once by the policy of its lessees, Abbey & Grau,
who thought that the public appetite for opera might be whetted by
enforced abstention. The Manhattan Opera House is too young to enter
into this study of opera houses, their genesis, growth, and decay, and
the houses which Mr. Oscar Hammerstein built before it in Harlem and in
West Thirty-Fourth Street, near Sixth Avenue, lived too brief a time in
operatic service to deserve more than mention.
I am at a loss for data from which to evolve a rule, as I should like to
do, governing the length of an opera house's existence in its original
estate as the home of grand opera.
The conditions which produce the need are too variable and also too
vague to be brought under the operation of any kind of law. At present
the growth of wealth, the increase in population, and with that
increase the rapid multiplication of persons desirous and able to enjoy
the privileges of social display would seem to be determining factors,
with the mounting costliness of the luxury as a deterrent. The last
illustration of the operation of the creative impulse based on the
growth of wealth and social ambition is found in the building of
the Metropolitan Opera House, Mr. Hammerstein's enterprise being
purely individual and speculative. The movement which produced the
Metropolitan Opera House marked the decay of the old Knickerbocker
régime, and its amalgamation with the newer order of society of a
quarter of a century ago. This social decay, if so it can be called
without offense, began--if Abram C. Dayton ("Last Days of Knickerbocker
Life in New York") is correct--about 1840, and culminated with the
Vanderbilt ball, in 1882, to which nearly all the leaders of the old
Knickerbocker aristocracy accepted invitations. "During the third
quarter of the nineteenth century," said The Sun's reviewer of Mr.
Dayton's book, "sagacious and far-sighted Knickerbockers began to
realize that as a caste they no longer possessed sufficient money to
sustain social ascendency, and that it behooved them to effect an
intimate alliance with the nouveaux riches." To this may be added that
when there were but two decades of the century left it was made plain
that the Academy of Music could by no possibility accommodate the two
classes of society, old and new, which had for a number of years been
steadily approaching each other.
There was an insufficiency of desirable boxes, and holders of seats
of fashion were unwilling to surrender them to the newcomers. So the
Metropolitan Opera House was built in 1883, and the vigor of the social
opposition, coupled with popular appreciation of the new spirit, which
came in with the German régime, gave the deathblow to the Academy, whose
loss to fashion was long deplored by the admirers of its fine acoustic
qualities and its effective architectural arrangements for the purposes
of display.
The period is not so remote that we cannot trace the influences of
fashion and society in the rise of the first Italian Opera House, if not
in its fall. The Park Theater was still a fashionable playhouse when
Garcia gave his season of Italian opera in it in 1825-26, but within a
decade thereafter the conditions so graphically described by Mr. White,
combined with new ambitions, which seem to have been inspired to a
large extent by Lorenzo Da Ponte, prompted a wish for a new theater:
one specially adapted to opera. The new entertainment was recognized
as a luxury, and it was no more than fitting that it be luxuriously
and elegantly housed. It will be necessary to account for the potent
influence of Da Ponte, who was only a superannuated poet and teacher of
Italian language and literature, and this I hope to do presently; for
the time being it is sufficient to say that it was he who persuaded the
rich and cultured citizens of New York to build the Italian Opera House,
which stood at the intersection of Church and Leonard streets. The
coming of Garcia had filled Da Ponte, then already seventy-six years
old, with dreams of a recrudescence of such activities as had been his
in connection with Italian Opera in Vienna and London. He made haste to
identify himself in an advisory capacity with the enterprise, persuaded
Garcia to include "Don Giovanni" in his list of operas, although this
necessitated the engagement of a singer not a member of the company, and
had already brought his niece, who was a singer, from Italy, and the
Italian composer Filippo Trajetta, from Philadelphia, when his dream
of a permanent opera, for which he should write librettos, his friend
compose music, and his niece sing, was dispelled by Garcia's departure
for Mexico, and his subsequent return to Europe. For the next five years
Da Ponte seems to have kept the waters of the operatic pool stirred, for
there is general recognition in the records of the fact that to him was
due the conception of the second experiment, although its execution
was left to another, who was neither an American nor an Italian, but a
Frenchman named Montressor. Like Garcia, he was his own tenor, which
fact must have eased him of some of the vexations of management, though
it added to its labors. We are told that Montressor succeeded in making
himself personally popular. He had an agreeable voice, a tolerable
style, and was favorably compared with Garcia, though this goes for
little, inasmuch as Garcia was past his prime when he came here. Among
his singers were Signorina Pedrotti, who created a great stir (though,
I fancy, this was largely because of her beauty and the fact that the
public, remembering the Signorina Garcia, wanted somebody to worship)
and a basso named Fornasari.
Signorina Pedrotti effected her entrance on October 17, in a new opera,
Mercadante's "Elisa e Claudio," which made the hit of the season,
largely because of the infatuation of the public for the new singer.
Mr. White gives us a description of her (from hearsay and the records)
in his article published in The Century Magazine, of March, 1882:
Not much has been said of her, for she had sung only in Lisbon and in
Bologna, and had little reputation. But she took musical New York off
its feet again. She had a fine mezzo-soprano voice, of sympathetic
quality; and although she was far from being a perfectly finished
vocalist, she had an impressive dramatic style and a presence and a
manner that enabled her to take possession of the stage. She was a
handsome woman--tall, nobly formed, with brilliant eyes and a face
full of expression. She carried the town by storm.
Like Malibran, and many another singer since, Fornasari made a fine
reputation here, and was afterward "discovered" in Europe, where he rose
to fame. He seems to have been of the tribe of lady-killers, of whom
every opera company has boasted at least one ever since opera became a
fashion--which is only another way of saying ever since it was invented.
But Fornasari had a noble voice, besides his mere physical attractions.
Mr. White, who saw him long years afterward, when he chanced to be
passing through New York on his way to Europe, describes him: He was
very tall; his head looked like that of a youthful Jove; dark hair in
flaky curls, an open, blazing eye; a nose just heroically curved; lips
strong, yet beautifully bowed; sweet and persuasive (one would think
that White got his description from some woman--what man ever before or
since was praised by a man for having a Cupid's bow mouth?), and withal
a large and easy grace of manner.
Montressor's season opened on October 6, 1832, at the Richmond Hill
Theater, which became respectable for the nonce, and collapsed
after thirty-five representations. The receipts for the season were
$25,603--let us say about half as much as a week's receipts at the
Metropolitan Opera House to-day. The operas given were Rossini's
"Cenerentola," "L'Italiana in Algeri"; Bellini's "Il Pirata," and
Mercadante's "Elisa e Claudio," the last winning the largest measure of
popularity. The chief good accomplished was the bringing to New York
from Europe of several excellent orchestral players, who, after the
failure of the enterprise, settled here, to the good of instrumental
music and the next undertaking.
Why men embark in operatic management, or, rather, why they continue in
it after they have failed, has always been an enigma. Once, pointing my
argument with excerpts from the story of all the managers in London,
from Handel's day down to the present, I tried to prove that the desire
to manage an opera company was a form of disease, finding admirable
support for my contention in the confession and conduct of that English
manager who got himself into Fleet Prison, and thence philosophically
urged not only that it served him right (since no man insane enough to
want to be an operatic impresario ought to be allowed at large), but
also that a jail was the only proper headquarters for a manager, since
there, at least, he was secure from the importunities of singers
and dancers. Lorenzo Da Ponte was, obviously, of the stuff of which
impresarios are made. Montressor's failure, for which he was in a degree
responsible (and which he discussed in two pamphlets which I found
twenty years ago in the library of the New York Historical Society),
persuaded him that the city's greatest need was an Italian opera house.
His powers of persuasion must have been great, for he succeeded in
bringing a body of citizens together who set the example which has been
followed several times since, and built the Italian Opera House at
Church and Leonard streets, on very much the same social and economic
lines as prevail at the Metropolitan Opera House to-day. European models
and European taste prevailed in the structure and its adornments. It was
the first theater in the United States which boasted a tier composed
exclusively of boxes. This was the second balcony. The parterre was
entered from the first balcony, a circumstance which redeemed it from
its old plebeian association as "the pit," in which it would have been
indecorous for ladies to sit. The seats in the parterre were mahogany
chairs upholstered in blue damask. The seats in the first balcony were
mahogany sofas similarly upholstered. The box fronts had a white ground,
with emblematic medallions, and octagonal panels of crimson, blue, and
gold. Blue silk curtains were caught up with gilt cord and tassels.
There was a chandelier of great splendor, which threw its light into a
dome enriched with pictures of the Muses, painted, like all the rest of
the interior, as well as the scenery, by artists specially brought over
for the purpose from Europe. The floors were carpeted. The price of
the boxes was $6,000 each, and subscribers might own them for a single
performance (evidently by arrangement with the owners) or the season.
Apropos of this, Mr. White tells a characteristic story:
It was told of a man who had suddenly risen to what was then great
wealth, that, having taken a lady to the opera, he was met by the
disappointing assurance that there were no seats to be had.
"What, nowhere?"
"Nowhere, sir; every seat in the house is taken, except, indeed, one of
the private boxes that was not subscribed for."
"I'll have that."
"Impossible, sir. The boxes can only be occupied by subscribers and
owners."
"What is the price of your box?"
"Six thousand dollars, sir."
"I'll take it."
And drawing out his pocketbook he filled up a check for six thousand
dollars and escorted his lady to her seat to the surprise and, indeed,
to the consternation of the elegant circle, which saw itself completed
in this unexpected manner.
The new house, which, with the ground, had cost $150,000, was opened
on November 18, 1833, under the joint management of the Chevalier
Rivafinoli and Da Ponte, with Rossini's "La Gazza ladra," but two months
before that date there was a drawing for boxes, concerning which and
some of the details of the opening performance an extract from the diary
of Mr. Philip Hone, once mayor of the city, presents a much livelier
picture than I could draw:
(From the diary of Philip Hone, Esq.)
September 15, 1833. The drawing for boxes at the Italian Opera
House took place this morning. My associates, Mr. Schermerhorn and
General Jones, are out of town, and I attended and drew No. 8, with
which I am well satisfied. The other boxes will be occupied by the
following gentlemen: Gerard H. Coster, G. C. Howland, Rufus Prime,
Mr. Panon, Robert Ray, J. F. Moulton, James J. Jones, D. Lynch, E.
Townsend, John C. Cruger, O. Mauran, Charles H. Hall, J. G. Pierson
and S. B. Ruggles.
November 18, 1833. The long expected opening of the opera house took
place this evening with the opera "La Gazza ladra"; all new performers
except Signor Marozzi, who belonged to the old company. The prima donna
soprano is Signorina Fanti. The opera, they say, went off well for a
first performance; but to me it was tiresome, and the audience was
not excited to any degree of applause. The performance occupied four
hours--much too long, according to my notion, to listen to a language
which one does not understand; but the house is superb, and the
decorations of the proprietors' boxes (which occupy the whole of the
second tier) are in a style of magnificence which even the extravagance
of Europe has not yet equaled. I have one-third of box No. 8; Peter
Schermerhorn one-third; James J. Jones one-sixth; William Moore
one-sixth. Our box is fitted up with great taste with light blue
hangings, gilded panels and cornice, armchairs, and a sofa. Some of
the others have rich silk ornaments, some are painted in fresco, and
each proprietor seems to have tried to outdo the rest in comfort and
magnificence. The scenery is beautiful. The dome and the fronts of the
boxes are painted in the most superb classical designs, and the sofa
seats are exceedingly commodious. Will this splendid and refined
amusement be supported in New York? I am doubtful.
The outcome justified Mr. Hone in his doubts. The season was advertised,
to last forty nights. When they were at an end a supplementary season of
twenty-eight nights was added, which extended the time to July 21, 1834.
Besides "La Gazza ladra," the operas given were "Il Barbiere di
Siviglia," "La Donna del Lago," "Il Turco in Italia," "Cenerentola," and
"Matilda di Shabran"--all by Rossini; Pacini's "Gli Arabi nelli Gallie,"
Cimarosa's "II Matrimonio segreto," and "La Casa do Pendere," by the
conductor, one Salvioni. The season had been socially and artistically
brilliant, but the financial showing at the end was one of disaster. The
prices of admission were from $2 down to fifty cents, and when the house
was completely sold out the receipts were not more than $1,400. The
managers took their patrons into their confidence, Rivafinoli publishing
the fact that the receipts for the entire season--including fifteen
nights in Philadelphia, for that city's dependence on New York for
Italian opera began thus early--were but $51,780.89, which were exceeded
by the expenses $29,275.09. For the next season the house was leased by
the owners to Signor Sacchi, who had been the treasurer of Rivafinoli
and Da Ponte, and Signor Porto, one of the singers. These managers had
an experience similar to that which Maretzek declaimed against twenty
years later when troubles gathered about the new Academy of Music.
Notwithstanding that there had been a startling deficit, though the
audiences had been as large as could be accommodated, these underlings
of Rivafinoli and Da Ponte, who were at least men of experience in
operatic management, took the house, giving the stockholders the free
use of their boxes and 116 free admissions every night besides. The
second season started brilliantly, but just as financial disaster was
preparing to engulf it the performances were abruptly brought to an
end by the prima donna, Signora, or Signorina, Fanti, who took French
leave--an incident which remains unique in New York's operatic annals,
at least in its consequences, I think.
It is evident to a close student of the times that the reasons given
were not the only ones to contribute to the downfall of the enterprise.
Italian opera had found a vigorous rival in English, or rather in
opera in the vernacular, for the old ballad operas were disappearing
and German, French, and Italian opera sung in the vernacular, not by
actresses who had tolerable voices, but by trained vocalists, was taking
its place. The people of New York were not quite so sophisticated as
they are to-day, and possibly were dowered with a larger degree of
sincerity. Many of them were willing to admit the incongruity of
behavior at which Addison made merry when he predicted that the time
would come when the descendants of the English people of his day would
be curious to know "why their forefathers used to sit together like an
audience of foreigners in their own country and to hear whole plays
acted before them in a tongue which they did not understand." We know
that Addison was a poor prophet, for the people of Great Britain and
America are still sitting in the same attitude as their ancestors so far
as opera is concerned; but it is plain that arguments like his did reach
the consciences of even the stockholders of the Italian Opera House, or
at least the one of them who has taken posterity into his confidence.
The season under Sacchi and Porto had scarcely begun when Mr. Hone
wrote in his diary:
I went to the opera, where I saw the second act of "La Straniera," by
Bellini. The house is as pretty as ever, and the same faces were seen in
the boxes as formerly; but it is not a popular entertainment, and will
not be in our day, I fear. The opera did not please me. There was too
much reiteration, and I shall never discipline my taste to like common
colloquial expressions of life: "How do you do, madame?" or "Pretty
well, I thank you, sir," the better for being given with orchestral
accompaniment.
I shrewdly suspect that Mr. Hone had been reading his Spectator.
There were three years of opera in London, in Addison's day, when the
English and Italian languages were mixed in the operas as German and
Italian were in Hamburg when Handel started out on his career. "The king
or hero of the play generally spoke in Italian and his slaves answered
him in English; the lover frequently made his court and gained the heart
of his princess in a language which she did not understand." At length,
says Addison, the audience got tired of understanding half the opera,
"and to ease themselves entirely of the fatigue of thinking, so ordered
it that the whole opera was performed in an unknown tongue." Now listen
to our diarist:
The Italian language is among us very little understood, and the genius
of it certainly never entered into with spirit. To entertain an audience
without reducing it to the necessity of thinking is doubtless a
first-rate merit, and it is easier to produce music without sense than
with it; but the real charm of the opera is this--it is an exclusive and
extravagant recreation, and, above all, it is the fashion.
Italian music's sweet because 'tis dear,
Their vanity is tickled, not their ear;
Their taste would lessen if the prices fell,
And Shakespeare's wretched stuff do quite as well.
The recitative is an affront to common sense, and if there be any
spectacle more than another opposed to the genius of the English
character and unsuited to its taste it is the ballet of the opera house.
Its eternal dumbshow, with its fantastic appeals to sense and to sense
only, may be Italian perfection, but here it is in English a tame
absurdity. What but fashion could tempt reasonable creatures to sit and
applaud--what was really perpetrated--Deshayes dancing "The Death of
Nelson"?
After the season of Sacchi and Porto Italian opera went into exile for
ten years. Da Ponte pleaded for "the most splendid ornament" of the city
in vain. English opera conquered, aided, no doubt, by the fact that the
section of the city in which the Italian Opera House was situated was
fatally unfashionable, and after standing vacant for a year the house
was leased to James W. Wallack, father of John Lester Wallack, who
turned it into a home for the spoken drama. In another year it went
up in flames.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST ITALIAN COMPANY
The beginnings of Italian opera in America are intimately associated
with two men who form an interesting link connecting the music of the
Old World with that of the New. These men were Manuel del Popolo Vicente
Garcia and Lorenzo Da Ponte. The opera performed in the Park Theater on
November 29, 1825, when the precious exotic first unfolded its petals
in the United States, was Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia." In this
opera Garcia, then in his prime, had created, as the French say, the
rôle of Almaviva in Rome a little less than ten years before. The
performance was one of the most monumental fiascos in Rossini's career,
and the story goes that Garcia, hoping to redeem it, introduced a
Spanish song to which he himself supplied a guitar accompaniment. The
fiasco of the first performance was largely, if not wholly, due to the
jealous ill will of the friends of Paisiello, who had written music for
an opera on the same story, which was much admired all over Europe, and
which in an adapted form had reached America, as had Rossini's, before
Garcia came with the original version. But Rossini's music was too
fascinating to be kept under a bushel, and in it Garcia won some of his
finest triumphs in London and Paris. In the first New York season it
was performed twenty-three times. Garcia was also a composer, and had
made his mark in this field before he became famous as a singer, having
produced at least seventeen Spanish operas, nineteen Italian, and Seven
French, most, if not all of them, before he came to America.
Exactly what it was that persuaded Garcia to embark on the career of
impresario in a new land does not appear in the story of his enterprise.
There are intimations that he had long had the New York project in mind;
also it used to be thought that Da Ponte had inspired him with the idea;
the more general story is that Dominick Lynch, a New York importer of
French wines, was at the bottom of the enterprise, but whether on his
own account or as a sort of agent for the manager of the Park Theater,
I have not been able to learn. Garcia's singing days were coming to an
end, though his popularity was not yet on the wane if there is evidence
in the circumstances that from 1823 to 1825 his salary in London had
increased from 260 pounds to 1,250 pounds. But it was as a teacher and
composer that he now commanded the greater respect. He had founded
a school of singing of which it may truthfully be said that it was
continued without loss of glory until the end of the nineteenth
century by his son Manuel, who died in 1906, a few months after he had
celebrated the hundredth anniversary of his birth. But, though we may
not know all the reasons which prevailed with him to seek fortune as a
manager after he had himself passed the half-century mark, it is easy
to fancy that the fact that he had half the artists necessary for the
undertaking in his own family had much to do with it. His daughter,
Maria Felicita, had studied singing with him from childhood and at
sixteen years of age had sung with him in Italy. His wife was an
opera singer and his son Manuel had made a beginning in the career which
he speedily abandoned in favor of that which gave him far greater fame
than the stage promised. The future Malibran was singing in the chorus
in London only a year before she disclosed her peerless talents in New
York. In June, 1825, Pasta, who was Mr. Ebers's prima donna at the
King's Theater, took ill. Garcia was a member of the company and came
forward with an offer of his daughter as substitute. The offer was
accepted, the girl effected her début as Rosina in "The Barber," and
made so complete a hit that she was engaged for the remaining six weeks
of the season at a salary of 500 pounds. This is the story as told by
Fétis, which does not differ essentially from that told by Ebers in
his account of his seven years of tenancy of the King's Theater, or
by Lord Mount-Edgecumbe in his "Musical Reminiscences," except that
these make no direct reference to Pasta's illness as the cause which
gave Maria her opportunity. Lord Mount-Edgecumbe's account says that
Ebers found it necessary, about the time of the arrival of Pasta, "to
engage a young singer, the daughter of the tenor Garcia, who had sung
here for several seasons. She was as yet a mere girl, and had never
appeared on any public stage; but from the first moment of her
appearance she showed evident talents for it, both as singer and
actress. Her extreme youth, her prettiness, her pleasing voice and
sprightly, easy action as Rosina in 'Il Barbiere di Siviglia,' in which
part she made her début, gained her general favor; but she was too
highly extolled and injudiciously put forward as a prima donna when she
was only a promising débutante, who in time, by study and practice,
would, in all probability, under the tuition of her father, a good
musician, but (to my ears at least) a most disagreeable singer, rise
to eminence in her profession."
I am not more than half persuaded that this view of the future
Malibran's talents and prospects did not tally with that of her father,
though her tremendous success in New York ought to have persuaded him
that a future of the most dazzling description lay before his daughter.
There is something of a puzzle in the fact that in the midst of her
first triumph the girl should have married M. Malibran, who was only
apparently wealthy, and was surely forty-three years her senior, and of
a nature which was bound to develop lack of sympathy and congeniality
between the pair. The popular version of the story of her marriage is
that she was forced into it by her father, and it is more than intimated
that he was induced to act as he did by the promise of 100,000 francs
made by Malibran as a compensation for the loss of his daughter's
services. Did Garcia oppose his daughter's marriage, and did she
wilfully have her own way in a matter in which she was scarcely a proper
judge? Or was the marriage repugnant to her, and was she sacrificed to
her father's selfishness? I cannot tell, but it has been hinted that
there was danger of her marrying a member of the orchestra in London
before she came to New York, and it is as like as not that the affair
Malibran was of her wishing. Who can know the ways of a maid fourscore
years after? The marriage was as unfortunate as could be. In a few
months Malibran was a bankrupt, his youthful wife's father was gone to
distant Mexico, there to make money, only to be robbed of it at Vera
Cruz on his home journey to England, and Maria Felicita, instead of
living in affluence as the wife of a wealthy New York merchant, was
supporting an unworthy husband, as well as herself, by singing in
English at the theater in the Bowery and in Grace Church on Sundays. The
legal claims bound the ill-assorted pair for ten years, but did not gall
the artist after she returned to Europe in 1827, little more than a year
later. In Paris the marriage was annulled in 1836, and the singer, now
the greatest prima donna on the stage, married Charles de Bériot, the
violinist, with whom she had been living happily for six years, and by
whom she had a son, born in February, 1833. The world's Book of Opera
must supply the other chapters which tell of the great Malibran, her
marvelous triumphs and her early death; but it is a matter of pride for
every American to reflect that this adorable artist began her career
with the admiring applause of our people.
Manuel Garcia, the son, the senior of his sister by three years,
survived her the whole span of life allotted to man by the Psalmist.
Malibran died in 1836; Garcia in 1906. He achieved nothing on the stage,
which he abandoned in 1829. Thereafter his history belongs to that of
pedagogy. Till 1848 his field of operations was Paris; afterward, till
his death, London. Jenny Lind was one of his pupils; Mme. Marchesi
another.
The story that Da Ponte had anything to do with inspiring Garcia's New
York enterprise is practically disposed of by the fact that Da Ponte,
though intimately associated with the opera in London during his sojourn
in that city, had already been a resident of New York three years when
Garcia made his début as a singer and never returned thither. Personally
Garcia was a stranger to him and he to Garcia when the latter came to
New York in the fall of 1825. This gives color of verity to a familiar
story of their meeting. As might easily be imagined, the man who had
written the librettos of "Le Nozze di Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Cosi
Fan Tutte" for Mozart, was not long in visiting Garcia after his arrival
here. He introduced himself as the author of "Don Giovanni," and Garcia,
clipping the old man in his arm, danced around the room like a child in
glee, singing "Fin ch'han dal vino" the while. After that the inclusion
of Mozart's masterpiece in Garcia's repertory was a matter of course,
with only this embarrassment that there was no singer in the company
capable of singing the music of Don Ottavio. This was overcome by Da
Ponte going to his pupils for money enough to pay an extra singer for
the part. Many a tenor, before and since, who has been cast for that
divinely musical milksop has looked longingly at the rôle of Don
Giovanni which Mozart gave to a barytone, and some have appropriated it.
Garcia was one of these (he had been a tenor de forza in his day),
and it fell to him to introduce the character in New York. Outside of
himself, his daughter, and the basso Angrisani, the company was a poor
affair, the orchestra not much better than that employed at the ordinary
theater then (and now, for that matter), and the chorus composed of
mechanics drilled to sing words they did not understand. It is scarcely
to be wondered at, therefore, that at one of the performances of
Mozart's opera, of which there were ten, singers and players got at
sixes and sevens in the superb finale of the first act, whereupon
Garcia, losing his temper, rushed to the footlights sword in hand,
stopped the orchestra, and commanded a new beginning.
It has already been told how that Da Ponte was active in the promotion
of the first Italian opera enterprise, that he inspired Montressor's
experiment at the Richmond Hill Theater and was the moving spirit in the
ambitious, beautiful but unhappy Italian Opera House undertaking. To do
all these things it was necessary that he should be a man of influence
among the cultured and wealthy classes of the community. As a matter of
fact he was this, and that in spite of the fact that his career had been
checkered in Europe and was not wholly free from financial scandal, at
least in New York. The fact is that the poet's artistic temperament was
paired with an insatiable commercial instinct. This instinct, at least,
may be set down as a racial inheritance. Until seven or eight years
ago nobody seems to have taken the trouble to look into the family
antecedents of him whom the world will always know as Lorenzo Da Ponte.
That was not his name originally. Of this fact something only a little
better than a suspicion had been in the minds of those who knew him and
wrote about him during his lifetime and shortly after his death. Michael
Kelly, the Irish tenor, who knew him in Vienna, speaks of him as "my
friend, the abbé," and tells of his dandyish style of dressing, his
character as a "consummate coxcomb," his strong lisp and broad Venetian
dialect; if he knew that he was a converted Jew, he never mentioned the
fact. Later writers hinted at the fact that he had been born a Jew, but
had been educated by the Bishop of Ceneda and had adopted his name.
When I investigated his American history, a matter of twenty years ago,
my statement in The Tribune newspaper that he was the son of a Hebrew
leather dealer provoked an almost intemperate denial by a German
musical historian, who quoted from his memoirs a story of his religious
observances to confound me. My statement, however, was based, not only
on an old rumor, but also on the evidence of a pamphlet published in
Lisbon in the course of what seems to have been a peculiarly acrimonious
controversy between Da Ponte and a theatrical person unnamed, but
probably one Francesco. In this pamphlet, which is not only indecorous
but indecent, he is referred to as "the celebrated Lorenzo Daponte, who
after having been Jew, Christian, priest, and poet in Italy and Germany
found himself to be a layman, husband, and ass in London." It remained
for Professor Marchesan, his successor in the chair of rhetoric in the
University of Treviso, to give the world the facts concerning his origin
and early family history. From Marchesan's book ("Della Vita e delle
Opere di Lorenzo da Ponte") published in Treviso in 1900 we learn that
the poet's father was in truth a Hebrew leather dealer, and also that
the father's name was Jeremiah Conegliano, his mother's Rachel
Pincherle, and his own Emanuele Conegliano. He was fourteen years old
when not he alone, but the whole family, embraced Christianity. They
were baptized in the cathedral of Ceneda on August 20, 1763, and the
bishop gave the lad, whose talents he seems to have observed, his own
name. The rest of his story up to his departure for America may be
outlined in the words of the sketch in Grove's "Dictionary of Music
and Musicians" (second edition, Vol. III, p. 789).
After five years of study in the seminary at Ceneda (probably with the
priesthood as an object) he went to Venice, where he indulged in amorous
escapades which compelled his departure from that city. He went to
Treviso and taught rhetoric in the university, incidentally took part in
political movements, lampooned an opponent in a sonnet, and was ordered
out of the republic. In Dresden, whither he turned his steps, he found
no occupation for his talents, and journeyed on to Vienna. There,
helped by Salieri, he received from Joseph II the appointment of poet
to the imperial theater and Latin secretary. Good fortune brought
him in contact with Mozart, who asked him to make an opera book of
Beaumarchais's "Mariage de Figaro." The great success of Mozart's opera
on this theme led to further co-operation, and it was on Da Ponte's
suggestion that "Don Giovanni" was undertaken, the promptings coming
largely from the favor enjoyed at the time by Gazzaniga's opera on the
same subject, from which Da Ponte made generous drafts--as a comparison
of the libretti will show. Having incurred the ill will of Leopold, Da
Ponte was compelled to leave Vienna on the death of Joseph II. He went
to Trieste, where Leopold was sojourning, in the hope of effecting a
reconciliation, but failed; but there he met and married an Englishwoman
who was thenceforth fated to share his checkered fortunes. He obtained a
letter recommending him to the interest of Marie Antoinette, but while
journeying toward Paris learned of the imprisonment of the Queen, and
went to London instead. A year was spent in the British metropolis in
idleness, and some time in Holland in a futile effort to establish an
Italian theater there. Again he turned his face toward London, and this
time secured employment as poet to the Italian opera and assistant to
the manager, Taylor. He took a part of Domenico Corri's shop to sell
Italian books, but soon ended in difficulties, and to escape his
creditors fled to America, arriving in New York on June 4, 1805.
Da Ponte lives in the respect and admiration of Dante scholars as the
first of American teachers and commentators on "The Divine Comedy." He
gave himself the title, and in this case adhered to the truth, which
cannot be said of all of his statements about himself. For instance, in
a letter to the public to be set forth presently, he calls himself "poet
of the Emperor Joseph II." He was in the habit of thus designating
himself and it was small wonder that his biographers almost unanimously
interpreted these words to mean that he was poet laureate, or Caesarian
poet. After the mischief, small enough, except perhaps in an ethical
sense, had been done, he tried to correct it in a foot note on one of
the pages of his "Memorie," in which he says that he was not "Poeta
Cesario," but "poet to the Imperial theaters." In his capacity as a
teacher his record seems to have been above reproach; and it was in
this capacity that he first presented himself favorably to New Yorkers.
Within two years after his arrival he gave a pamphlet to the public
entitled "Compendium of the Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, written by
Himself, to which is added the first Literary Conversatione held at his
home in New York on the 10th day of March, 1807, consisting of several
Italian compositions in verse and prose translated into English by his
scholars." That this little brochure was designed as an advertisement
is obvious enough; it was issued on his fifty-eighth birthday and its
contents, besides the sketch of his life, which, so it began, he
had promised to give his pupils, were specimens of their literary
handicraft. In the biographical recital are echoes of the contentions in
which he had been engaged in London a few years before. Although only
two years had elapsed since his arrival in America, what may be called
the first of his commercial periods was already over. He had sent his
wife to New York ahead of him with some of the money which his English
creditors were looking for. With this he promptly embarked in business,
trafficking in tobacco, liquors, drugs, etc.--goods which promised
large profits. In three months fear of yellow fever drove him to
Elizabethtown, N. J., where he remained a year, by which time he was
ruined. He came back to New York and began to teach the Italian
language and literature, and the little "Compendium" recorded his first
successes. He taught till 1811, by which time he had laid aside $4,000,
with which he again went into business, this time as a distiller in
Sunbury, Pa. After several years of commercial life he returned again to
New York and resumed the profession which brought him into contact with
people of refinement and social standing, who seem to have remained his
friends, despite his complaints and importunities, till his death in
1838. Among those who were sincerely attached to him were Clement Clark
Moore, Hebrew lexicographer, trustee of Columbia College, and (best of
all) author of "'Twas the Night before Christmas." Through Moore he
secured the privilege of calling himself Professor of Italian Literature
at Columbia, though without salary, managed to sell the college a large
number of Italian books, and was engaged to make a catalogue of the
college library. Another friend was Henry James Anderson, who became
Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy in the college in 1825, the year
in which Garcia came to New York with his operatic enterprise. Professor
Anderson married his daughter and became the father of Edward Henry and
Elbert Ellery Anderson. Other friends were Giulian C. Verplanck, Dr.
Macneven, Maroncelli, the Italian patriot, (whose wife was one of the
members of the opera company which Da Ponte organized with Rivafinoli),
Samuel Ward, Dr. John W. Francis, the Cottenet family, and H. T.
Tuckerman, who wrote a sketch of him after his death in Putnam's
Magazine. At the time of his operatic venture, 1833-34, he lived at No.
342 Broadway, and kept a bookstore at No. 336, which may then have been
an adjoining house. The site is near the present Catherine Lane. Before
then he had lived in dozens of different houses, moving, apparently,
nearly every year. He died at No. 91 Spring Street, on August 17, 1838,
and was buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Eleventh Street,
between First Avenue and Avenue A. When the centenary of the first
performance of "Don Giovanni" was celebrated in many European cities, in
1887, I conceived the idea of sending a choir of trombones to the grave
of the poet who had written the text to pay a musical tribute to his
memory, and thus made the discovery that the place of his burial was
as completely lost as the last resting place of the mortal remains of
Mozart. Weeks of research were necessary to determine the fact that it
was the old cemetery that had received his body, and that the location
of the grave was no longer to be determined by the records. It was never
marked.
Da Ponte's ambition to see Italian opera permanently established in New
York seems to have received a crushing blow with the failure of the
pretentious Italian Opera House enterprise. His dream I have referred
to; he was again to be a "poet to the opera," to write works for season
after season which his countryman Trajetta was to set to music. His
niece was to be a prima donna. He did write one libretto; it was for an
opera entitled, "L'Ape Musicale," for the musical setting of which he
despoiled Rossini. His niece, Giulia Da Ponte, did sing, but her talents
were not of the kind to win distinction. He persuaded Montressor to give
his season, and, rushing into print, as was his custom--the period of
the pamphleteer was to his liking--he discussed the failure of that
undertaking in two booklets. After the successive failures of himself
with Rivafinoli and his underlings, who attempted to succeed where he
had come to grief, he appended a letter to his old supporters (who had
plainly fallen away from him) to a pamphlet devoted to setting forth the
miseries of his existence after the great things which, in his opinion,
he had done for the people of New York. The letter has never seen the
light of day from the time when it was printed in 1835 till now; but it
deserves preservation. I found it twenty years ago in the library of the
Historical Society of New York in a bound volume of miscellaneous
pamphlets. It is as follows:
TO THOSE AMERICANS who love the fine arts I address myself. Hitherto I
have vainly spoken and written. Never was more really verified the Latin
proverb: Abyssus abyssum invocat.
Let the verses that I now present you rouse you from your lethargy; yet
should they not, I will not cease to cry aloud. I cannot now remain in
silence while my fellow countrymen are sacrificed, the citizens of two
noble cities deceived, and an enterprise for which I have so long and
ardently labored, so calculated to shed luster on the nation, and so
honorable in its commencement, ruined by those who have no means, nor
knowledge, nor experience. Answer at least these questions: Did you not
request from me an Italian company? It will be readily understood with
whom I speak. Why did you ask this of me? I was offered a handsome
premium if I would introduce a troupe of select Italian artists in
America. Did not I, and I alone procure them? Were they not excellent?
Have I been compensated for my labor, reimbursed my actual expenses,
or even honored by those most benefited by my losses and labors?
Had not I a right to expect thus much, or at least justice? And if you
thought me competent to do what I have done, why should you not be
guided by my counsels? Did I not tell you and reiterate in my writing
and verbally that Rivafinoli was not to be trusted? That he was a
daring, but imprudently daring, adventurer, whose failures in London,
and in Mecico and Carolina were the sure forerunners of his failure in
New York? And when deceived by him, whom did you take in place of him?
PORTO! SACCHI! With what means? What talents? What judgment? What
experience? What chances of a happy issue? Would you know why they
wished it? I will tell you, with Juvenal--'Greculus esuriens si in
coelum jusseris ibit.' But ignorant pretenders mostly have more
influence than modest truth. You, gentlemen of the committee, gave the
theater to them because, not having anything to lose, they could yield
to everything, even to the promising of what they knew themselves
unable to perform.
One of them it is said still has some hopes from you. Before another
disgrace occurs I beg you to look at the effects. Nemo dat quod non
habet. I brought a company from Italy by the mere force of my word. And
why was this? Because they knew me for an honorable man, who would not
promise what he could not perform, who had been eleven years the poet of
the Emperor Joseph 2d, who for another equal space of time had been the
poet to the theater in London, who had written thirty-six operas for
Salieri, for Martini, for Storace and Mozzart (sic).
That these dramas still survive, you yourself have seen and thought its
author not worthy of your esteem. For God's sake let the past become a
beacon light to save you from the perils of the future. Do not destroy
the most splendid ornament of your city. Rocco is obliged to visit
Italy. Lease to him the theater, he will have for his advisers the
talented and estimable Bagioli and myself. For me I wish for nothing,
but it pains me to see spoiled by ignorance and imposture, and vanity
that which cost me so much, or to speak more correctly, which cost me
everything, and you so much, and it will cost you more in fame as well
as in money.
What will they say, the Trollops and the Halls and Hamiltons who
nodum in scripto quoerunt with the microscope of national aversion?
Rocco and he only can redeem the fortunes of your disorganized,
betrayed, dishonored establishment by giving you a new and meritorious
company. Listen then to him and assist him--you will lose nothing by
it; I pledge you the word of an old man whose lips have never uttered
an untruth. Your servant and fellow citizen,
Lorenzo Da Ponte
The theater was not leased to Rocco. It never echoed to
opera after the second season.
CHAPTER IV
HOUSES BUILT FOR OPERA
"His wit was not so sharp as his chin, and so his career was not so long
as his nose," says Richard Grant White of the impresario who, ten years
after the failure of the Italian Opera House, made the third effort to
establish Italian opera in New York of which there is a record. The man
with a sharp chin and long nose was Ferdinand Palmo. He was the owner of
a popular restaurant which went by the rather tropical name "Café des
Milles Colonnes," and was situated in Broadway, just above Duane Street.
Palmo knew how to cook and how to cater, and his restaurant made him
fairly rich. What he did not know about managing an opera house he was
made conscious of soon after the ambition to be an impresario took hold
of him. His was an individual enterprise, like Mr. Hammerstein's, with
no clogs or entangling alliances in the shape of stockholders, or
managing directors, or amusement committees. He seems to have been
strongly impressed with the idea that after the public had been total
abstainers for ten years they would love opera for its own sake, and
that it would not be necessary to give hostages to fortune in the shape
of a beautiful house, with a large portion set apart for the exclusive
use of wealth and fashion. Except in name, says Mr. White, there were no
boxes. Palmo did not even build a new theater. He found one that could
be modeled to his purposes in Stoppani's Arcade Baths, in Chambers
Street, between Broadway and Center Street. The site is now occupied
by the building of the American News Company. The acoustics of the new
opera house are said to have been good, but the inconvenience of the
location and unenviable character of the neighborhood are indicated
quite as much as Signor Palmo's enterprising and considerate nature
by his announcement that after the performances a large car would be
run uptown as far as Forty-Second Street for the accommodation of
his patrons; and also that the patrons aforesaid should have police
protection. The house seated about eight hundred persons, the seats
being hard benches, with slats across the back shoulder high. Opera
lovers given to luxury were permitted to upholster their benches. The
orchestra numbered "thirty-two professors," but their devotion to the
art which they professed was not so great as to make them willing to
starve for its sake or to refuse to resort to the methods of the more
modern workingmen's unions to compel payment for their services, as
we shall see presently. The first performance under Signor Palmo took
place on February 3, 1844, the opera being the same one with which
Mr. Hammerstein began his latest venture sixty-two years later--"I
Puritani." The prima donna soprano was Borghese, who was attractive in
appearance, though not beautiful; who dressed well, sang with passionate
intensity, and won a popularity that found vent in praise which may
have been extravagant. One critic, "balancing her beauties against her
defects," pronounced her the best operatic singer that the writer had
yet heard on this side of the Atlantic. This remark leads Mr. White
to surmise that the critic had not been five years in America, for,
says he, Signora Borghese was not worthy to tie the shoes of Malibran,
Pedrotti, Fanti, Garadori, or Mrs. Wood, the last two of whom had sung
in English opera. Her chief defect seems to have been the tremolo--that
vice toward which the American critics of to-day are more intolerant
than those of any other people, as they are toward the sister vice of
a faulty intonation. Mr. White talks sensibly on the subject in his
estimate of Borghese.
She had a fine voice, although not a great one; her vocalization,
regarded from a merely musical point of view, was of the corresponding
grade, but as stage vocalization it had great power and deserved
higher commendation. Her musical declamation was always effective and
musico-rhetorically in good taste. She had a fine person, an expressive
face, and much grace of manner. One might be content never to hear a
better prima donna if one were secured against never hearing a worse.
In her was first remarked here, among vocalists of distinction, that
trembling of the voice when it is pressed in a crescendo, which has
since become so common as greatly to mar our enjoyment of vocal music.
This great fault, unknown before the appearance of Verdi, is attributed
by some musical critics to the influence of his vociferous and strident
style. It may be so; but that which follows is not always a consequence
of that after which it comes. Certain it is, however, that from this
time forward very few of the principal singers who have been heard in
New York--only the very greatest and those whose style was formed
before Verdi domineered the Italian lyric stage--were without this
tremble. Grisi, Mario, Sontag, Jenny Lind, Alboni, and Salvi were
entirely without it; their voices came from the chest pure, free and
firm.
I can scarcely believe that the distressful vocal wabble either came in
with Verdi's music or was greatly promoted by it. In the lofty quality
of style Mme. Sembrich is the most perfect exemplar whom it is the
privilege of New Yorkers to hear to-day; and she is the best singer
we have of Verdi's music. Did anyone ever hear a tone come out of her
throat that was not pure, free, and firm? Frequently the tremolo is
an affectation like the excessive vibrato of a sentimental fiddler;
sometimes it is the product of weakness due to abuse of the vocal organ.
In all cases it is the sign of bad taste or vicious training, or both,
and is an abomination. On the opera stage to-day Italian prima donnas
are most afflicted with it. In turn Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Wagner
have been accused of having caused it, but anyone who has listened
intelligently to the opera singers of the last forty years will testify
with me that the truly great singers of their music have been as free
from the vicious habit as have been those whose artistic horizons have
been confined by the music of Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti.
The tenor of the Palmo company was Antognini, who effected his entrance
on the American stage five weeks after the opening of the season. In the
opinion of Mr. White, he was the greatest tenor ever heard here, not
excepting Mario and Salvi, and Mr. White's opinion is so judiciously
expressed that one is fain to give it credence. Whether or not it can be
extended over the period which he has covered, which is that reaching
from the last days of the Academy of Music, when Campanini was still in
his vocal prime but had not developed the dramatic powers which he put
into play with the decay of his voice, I shall not undertake to say;
taste in tenor voices has changed within the last generation in favor
of the robust quality so magnificently exemplified in Signor Caruso. To
judge from Mr. White's description Antognini, as a singer merely, was
a Bonci of a manlier mould. His fame seems to have died with those who
heard him, and perhaps this is a good reason for reprinting what Mr.
White said about him in full:
He (Antognini) was an artist of the first class, both by natural gifts
and by culture. His voice, although not of notable compass, was an
absolute tenor of a delicious quality and great power. His vocalization
was unexceptionably pure, and his style was manly and noble. As a
dramatic singer I never heard his equal except Ronconi; as an actor,
I never saw his equal, except Ronconi, Rachel, and Salvini. He had in
perfection that power which Hamlet speaks of in his soliloquy, after
he dismisses the players, when the speech about Pyrrhus is ended:
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit!
I have seen the blood fade not only from Antognini's cheeks, but from
his very lips, as he strode slowly forward to interrupt the nuptials
in "Lucia di Lammermoor," and then flame back again as he broke into
defiance of his foes. The inflections of his voice in passages of
tenderness were ravishing, and his utterance of anger and despair was
terrible. Nor was any tenor that has been heard here, not even Mario
in his prime, his superior in that great test of fine vocalization, a
sustained cantabile passage. He was one of those blond Italians who
are found on the northern border of the peninsula. Being all this he
nevertheless soon disappeared, and was forgotten except by a few of the
most exacting and cultivated among his hearers; the reason of which was
that his voice could not be depended upon for two nights together--not,
indeed, for one alone. On Monday he would thrill the house; on Wednesday
he would go about the stage depressed, almost silent, huskily making
mouths at his fellow actors and the audience. His voice would even
desert him in the middle of an evening, thus producing an impression
that he was trifling with his audience. No judgment could have been
more unjust, for he was a conscientious artist, but the effect of this
defect, as Polonius might say, was therefore no less disastrous, and
he soon gave place to artists less admirable but more to be relied
upon.
In this season there appeared a prima donna of the French school in
the person of Laura Cinthe Montalant, known in the annals of opera
as Cinti-Damoreau, who had come to America to sing in concerts with
Artôt, the violinist. In the eyes of Fétis she was one of the greatest
singers the world had known. Damoreau was the name of her husband, an
unsuccessful French actor. When she came to America she had made her
career in Paris and London, a great triumph coming to her in the French
capital, where Rossini composed the principal female rôles in "Le Siège
de Corinth" and "Moïse," and Auber those in "Domino Noir,"
"L'Ambassadrice," and "Zanetta."
[Repertory of the first season at Palmo's Opera House: "I Puritani"
(Bellini), "Belisario" (Donizetti), "Beatrice di Tenda" (Bellini), "Il
Barbiere di Siviglia" (Rossini), "La Sonnambula" (Bellini), "L'Elisir
d'Amore" (Donizetti), "L'Italiana in Algeri" (Rossini). Repertory of
the second season, 1844-1845: "Lucia di Lammermoor" (Donizetti), "II
Pirata" (Bellini), "Chiara de Rosemberg" (Luigi Ricci), "Lucrezia
Borgia" (Donizetti), "Belisario" (Donizetti), "La Cenerentola"
(Rossini), "Semiramide" (Rossini).]
It is not surprising that ill fortune became the companion of Palmo at
the outset of his enterprise and dragged him down to the lowest depths
before the end of his second season (according to the calendar).
The first season ran its course and a second one began in November,
1844. Amidst the usual vicissitudes it continued until January 25,
1845. On this momentous date Borghese was before the footlights and
about to open her mouth in song when suddenly the orchestra ceased
playing. Not a soft complaining note from the flute, not a whimper from
the fiddles. Borghese raved and Palmo came upon the stage to learn the
cause of the direful silence. A colloquy with the musicians, if not
exactly in these words, was to this effect:
"What's the meaning of this? Is it a strike? Why?"
"No pay."
"I'll pay you to-morrow."
"To-night's the time"--the musicians packing up their instruments.
Palmo rushed to the box office to get the night's receipts. Alas! they
were already in the hands of the deputy sheriff. Another opera manager
had gone down into the vortex which had swallowed up Ebers, and Taylor,
and Delafield, and others of their tribe in London, and Montressor and
Rivafinoli in New York. Palmo, it is said, had literally to return to
his pots and kettles; after serving as cook and barkeeper in the hotels
of others the once enterprising manager of the Café of a Thousand
Columns became a dependent upon the charity of his friends. There was
another season of opera at Palmo's, among the managers of which were
Sanquirico, a buffo singer, Salvatore Patti, and an Italian named
Pogliagno. In the company were Catarina Barili and her two children,
Clotilde and Antonio. Patti was a tenor singer. He was the husband
of the prima donna, Catarina Barili, who was looked upon as a fine
representative of the old school of singing, and from the pair sprang
Carlotta and Adelina, who gave a luster to the name of Patti which the
father would never have given it by his exertions as singer and manager.
Both were born before their parents came to New York; Carlotta in
Florence, in 1840, and Adelina in Madrid, in 1843. The childhood and
youth of both were spent in New York, and here both received their
musical training. Their artistic history belongs to the world, and since
I am, with difficulty, trying just now to talk more about opera houses
and those who built them to their own ruin, than about those who sang in
them, I will not pursue it. The summer of 1847 saw Palmo's little opera
house deserted. In 1848 it became Burton's Theater, where, as Mr. White
observes, that most humorous of comedians made for himself in a few
years a handsome fortune.
Who shall deny that Signor Palmo, though his fortunes went down in
disaster, made a valuable contribution to that movement--which must
still be looked upon as in an experimental stage--which has for its aim
the permanent establishment of opera in the United States? Experimental
in its nature the movement must remain until the vernacular becomes the
language of the performances and native talent provides both works and
interpreters. The day is still far distant, but it will come. The opera
of Germany was still Italian more than a century and a half after the
invention of the art form, though in the meanwhile the country had
produced a Bach and a Handel. The Palmo venture (at the bottom of which
there seems to have been a desire to popularize or democratize a form of
entertainment which has ever been the possession of wealth and fashion)
revived the social sentiment upon which Da Ponte had built his hopes.
In the opinion of the upper classes's it was not Italian opera that
had succumbed, but only the building which housed it. This certainly
presented an aspect of incongruity. Fine talent came from England for
the English companies, whose career continued without interruption,
and the moment which saw the downfall of Palmo's enterprise saw also
the influx of a company of Italian artists under the management of Don
Francesco Marty y Torrens, of Havana, who deserves to be kept in the
minds of opera lovers which go back to the days of the Academy of
Music, if for no other reason than that he brought Signor Arditi to
New York--the hawk-billed conductor whose shining pate used to
glisten like a stage lamp from the conductor's seat in the fine old
house at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place.
And so, in order that Italian opera might not perish from the earth, but
live on, surrounded by the architectural splendor appropriate to it, one
hundred and fifty men of social prominence got together and guaranteed
to support it for five years, and Messrs. Foster, Morgan, and Colles
built the Astor Place Opera House. Instead of the eight hundred seatings
of Palmo's institution, this held 1,800. The theater had "a fine open
front and an excellent ventilation." That it was an elegant playhouse
and admirably adapted to the purpose for which it had been designed
there are many people still alive in New York to testify. Mr. White says
enthusiastically that it was "one of the most attractive theaters ever
erected." Even Max Maretzek, who began his American career there, first
as conductor, afterward as impresario, while throwing ridicule upon its
management (his own administration excepted, of course) and its artistic
forces, praises the architectural arrangement of the house. "Most
agreeably surprised was I," he writes in his "Crotchets and Quavers,"
published in 1855, "on entering this small but comfortably arranged
bonbonnière. It contained somewhere about 1,100 excellent seats in
parquet (the Parisian parterre), dress circle and first tier, with some
seven hundred in the gallery. Its principal feature was that everybody
could see, and, what is of infinitely greater consequence, could be
seen. Never, perhaps, was any theater built that afforded a better
opportunity for a display of dress. Believe me" (he is indulging in the
literary fiction of a letter to a journalistic friend in Paris), "that
were the Funambules built as ably for this grand desideratum, despite
the locality and the grade of performance at this theater, my conviction
is that it would be the principal and most fashionable one in Paris."
Maretzek is, of course, here aiming chiefly to cast discredit upon one
of the vanities and affectations of society--the love of display; but if
Mr. White is to be believed, the patrons of the Astor Place Opera House,
on its opening (which means the fashionable element of New York society)
were temperate and tasteful in the matter of dress. Speaking of the
first performance at the new house, he says: "Rarely has there been
an assembly, at any time or in any country, so elegant, with such a
generally suffused air of good breeding; and yet it could not be called
splendid in any one of its circles. At the Astor Place Opera House that
form of opera toilet for ladies which is now peculiar to New York and
a few other American cities came into vogue--a demi-toilet of marked
elegance and richness, and yet without that display either of apparel
and trimmings or of the wearer's personal charms which is implied by
full evening dress in fashionable parlance. This toilet is very pleasing
in itself, and it is happily adapted to the social conditions of a
country in which any public exhibition of superior wealth in places set
apart for common enjoyment of refined pleasure is not in good taste."
Mr. White wrote in 1881; would he have been able to be so complimentary
to the opera audiences of 1908? What relation does the present
extravagance of dress, the vulgar ostentation which Mr. White would
have us believe was foreign to the taste of New York's cultured society
in 1847, bear toward the support which opera has received since the
Metropolitan Opera House was opened? The factors which are to determine
the question seem to be marshaling themselves since Mr. Hammerstein
opened the Manhattan Opera House, but they are not yet fairly opposed
to each other. There are features in which the new opera house recalls
memories of the old Academy which met its downfall when the amalgamation
between the old Knickerbockers and the newer New Yorkers was effected;
but there are also other features which make a repetition of that
occurrence under present circumstances very improbable, and the chiefest
of these is that inculcated by the failure of the Palmo enterprise;
opera must have an elegant environment if it is to succeed. But it had
this in the Astor Place Opera House; why, then, did it live its little
span only?
The question is easily answered--the Astor Place Opera House was killed
by competition; not the competition of English opera with Italian, which
had been in existence for twenty-five years, but of Italian opera with
Italian opera. The first lessees of the new institution were Messrs.
Sanquirico and Patti, who had first tried their luck in Palmo's Opera
House. They endured a season. [At the Astor Place Opera House in its
first season Sanquirico and Patti produced Verdi's "Ernani," Bellini's
"Beatrice di Tenda," Donizetti's "Lucrezia Borgia," Mencadante's "Il
Giuramento," and Verdi's "Nabucco." Mr. Fry's season in 1848 when Mr.
Maretzek was the conductor, brought forward Donizetti's "Linda di
Chamouni," "Lucrezia Borgia," "L'Elisir d'Amore," "Roberto Devereux,"
and "Lucia di Lammermoor" and Verdi's "Ernani."] Then the first American
manager appeared on the field--I mean the first American manager whose
thoughts were directed to opera exclusively as distinguished from the
managers of theaters who took hold of opera at intervals, as they did
any other sort of entertainment which offered employment for their
houses. The manager in question was Mr. E. R. Fry, who came from the
counting house to a position of which he can have known nothing more
than what he could acquire from attendance upon opera, of which he was
fond, and association with his brother, W. H. Fry, who was a journalist
by profession (long the musical critic of The Tribune) and an amateur
composer of more than respectable attainments. Mr. Maretzek, in his
"Crotchets and Quavers"--a book generally marked by characteristic good
humor, but not free from malevolence--tries to make it appear that Mr.
Edward Fry went into operatic management for the express purpose of
performing his brother's operas; but while the animus of the statement
is enough to cause it to be looked upon with suspicion, the fact
that none of William Henry Fry's operas was performed at the Astor
Place Opera House during the incumbency of Edward Fry is a complete
refutation. "Leonora," the only grand opera by a professional critic
ever performed in New York, so far as I know, was brought forward at
the Academy of Music a good nine years later. Apropos of this admirable
and respected predecessor of mine, a good story was disclosed by Charles
A. Dana some fifteen or twenty years ago in his reminiscences of Horace
Greeley. Mr. Dana published a large number of letters sent to him at
various times while he was managing editor of The Tribune and Mr.
Greeley editor-in-chief. It was in the days just before the War of
the Rebellion. A political question of large importance had arisen
in Congress, and Mr. Greeley was so concerned in it that he went to
Washington to look after it in person and act as a special correspondent
of his own newspaper. Thence one day he sent two letters to The Tribune
on the subject, but in the issue of the day in which he expected them to
appear in The Tribune he sought in vain for his communication. Thereupon
he indited an epistle to Mr. Dana in these wingèd words:
Friend Dana: What would it cost to burn the Opera House? If the price
is reasonable have it done and send me the bill. . . . I wrote my two
letters under the presumption (there being no paper on Wednesday) that
the solid work of exposing their (Pierce and Gushing) perversion of
history had of course been done by Hildreth. I should have dwelt with it
even more gravely but for that. And now I see (the Saturday paper only
got through last night) that you crowded out what little I did say to
make room for Fry's eleven columns of arguments as to the feasibility of
sustaining the opera in N. Y. if they would only play his compositions.
I don't believe three hundred people who take the Tribune care one chew
of Tobacco for the matter.
The "eleven columns" was an amiable exaggeration quite in consonance
with the remainder of the letter; but I can testify from a consultation
of the files of the newspaper which I have served as one of Mr. Fry's
successors for more than a quarter of a century that on the date in
question The Tribune's critic did occupy three and a half columns
with a discussion of the Lagrange season just ended at the Academy
of Music and a most strenuous plea for the permanent substitution of
English for Italian opera! Also, that most of what Mr. Fry said would
sound just as apposite to-day as it did then, and be backed by just as
much reason. But a taste for the elegant exotic and reason do not seem
to go hand in hand, and managers are still strangely averse to placing
themselves for guidance into the hands of The Tribune's critics. How
different might not musical history in New York have shaped itself had
William Henry Fry, George William Curtis, John R. G. Hassard, and H. E.
K. had their way during the last sixty years! The thought is quite
overpowering.
The opposition which the Astor Place Opera House met was indeed
formidable. It came from the company organized by Don Francesco Marty y
Torrens for performances in Havana. This enterprising gentleman did not
come to New York to make money, but mischief--as Messrs. Sanquirico,
Patti, Fry, and Maretzek must have thought--and incidentally to keep
his singers employed during the hot and unhealthy season in Havana. His
aiders and abettors were James H. Hackett and William Niblo. The former,
in his day an actor, was particularly famous for his impersonation of
Falstaff. His interest in opera may have been excited more or less by
the fact that his wife had been Catherine Leesugg, an English opera
singer, who had sung the part of Rosina in an English version of
Rossini's "Barber of Seville" as early as 1819. At Niblo's history
I have already taken a glance. In the present chapter he is chiefly
interesting, according to a story which has long had currency, as
the manager who succeeded in putting an end to the Astor Place Opera
House by a trick which took the bloom of caste off that aristocratic
institution. I shall let Maretzek tell the story presently, pausing now
to interject an anecdote which fell under my notice some years ago while
I was turning over the records of the Grand Ducal Theater at Weimar.
This always comes to my mind when the downfall of the Astor Place Opera
House is mentioned, and also when, as has frequently been the case
within the last sixteen years, I met a grandson of one of the principal
actors in the incident in the streets of New York.
In April, 1817, there came to Weimar from Vienna a gifted dog, who
assisted his master in the presentation of a play of the melodramatic
order, entitled "The Dog of Aubri de Mont-Didier." The director of the
Grand Ducal Theater at the time was one Wolfgang von Goethe. To him the
dog's manager applied for the privilege of producing his edifying piece.
Goethe refused permission, and there was danger that the patrons of the
playhouse which had echoed to the first sounds of the plays of Schiller
and Goethe were to be deprived of the inestimable privilege of seeing
a dog dash out of the door of a tavern in which a murder had been
committed, pull a bell rope to alarm the village, carry a lantern into
the forest, discover the murderer just at the psychological moment,
pursue him from rock to rock, capture him at the last, and thus bring
about the triumph of justice. But the dog's manager was not thus to be
put down. He went with a petition to Fräulein Jagemann (whose portrait
in the character of Sappho my readers may still find hanging on a wall
of the library at Weimar), and solicited her intervention with the Grand
Duke, whose reign Schiller and Goethe made glorious. Fräulein Jagemann
was a prima donna and the Grand Duke's mistress. ("The companion of
my leisure moments," he called her with quite a pretty euphemism.) In
the former capacity she had given Goethe, the director, a great deal
of trouble, and in the latter her influence had caused him many an
annoyance. It was the dog that broke the camel's back of his patience.
Fräulein Jagemann saw an opportunity to get in a blow against her
artistic tyrant, and she wheedled Charles Augustus into commanding the
production of "The Dog of Aubri de Mont-Didier." The play was given
twice, on April 12 and 14, 1817, with uproarious success, of course,
and on April 17th Goethe resigned the artistic direction of the Weimar
Court Theater. As for Fräulein Jagemann, she eventually got a title
and estates as Frau von Heygendorf.
And now for the story of "The Dogs of Donetti: or, the Downfall of the
Astor Place Opera House," by Max Maretzek; it must be prefaced by the
statement that after Edward Fry had made a lamentable failure of his
opera season at which he had the services of Maretzek as conductor,
Maretzek became lessee of the house and thus remained for the years
1849 and 1850.
Bled to the last drop in my veins (I, of course, allude to my purse and
my pocket), the doors of the Astor Place Opera House were closed upon
the public. It was my determination to woo the fickle goddess Fortune
elsewhere. Possibly her blinded eyes might not recognize her old adorer,
and she might even yet bestow upon me a few of her faithless smiles.
Again, however, after my departure, was the opera house leased. But to
whom do you imagine it was now abandoned by the exemplary wisdom of its
proprietors?
To the identical William Niblo who had fostered and encouraged the
opposition--the same William Niblo who had a theater (or let me give
it his name, and call it--a garden) within the length of some three
stone-throws from their own house. It must be granted they did not
foresee that which was about to happen. But this will scarcely palliate
the folly of taking the head of a rival establishment for their tenant.
This gentleman engaged the troupe of dogs and monkeys, then in this
country, under the charge of a certain Signor Donetti.
Their dramatic performances were offered to the refined and intelligent
proprietors and patrons of this classic and exclusive place of
amusement. Naturally they protested. It was in vain. Then they sued out
an injunction against this exhibition on the ground that in Niblo's
lease of the premises only respectable performances were permitted to
be given in the opera house. On the "hearing to show cause" for this
injunction Mr. Niblo called up Donetti or some of his friends, who
testified that his aforesaid dogs and monkeys had, in their younger
days, appeared before princes and princesses and kings and queens.
Moreover, witnesses were called who declared under oath that the
previously mentioned dogs and monkeys behaved behind the scenes more
quietly and respectably than many Italian singers. This fact I feel that
I am not called on to dispute. . . . As might be supposed the injunction
was dissolved.
As a matter of course, the house lost all its prestige in the eyes of
the community. Shortly afterward its contents were sold, and the shell
of the opera was turned into a library. Its deathblow had been given it
as a place for theatrical amusement by the astute Mr. William
Niblo.
Furthermore, Mr. Maretzek would have us believe that some year or
two later, the Academy of Music having been projected meanwhile, he
met Niblo and asked him what he thought of the prospects of the new
enterprise.
"Why," answered the manager, in his nasal voice, "I suppose I shall
have again to engage Donetti's dogs and monkeys."
CHAPTER V
MARETZEK, HIS RIVALS AND SINGERS
Of the operatic managers of fifty years ago Max Maretzek was the only
one with whom I was personally acquainted, and it was not until near the
close of his career that he swam into the circle of my activities or I
into his. He died on September 17, 1897. His last years were spent in a
home on Staten Island, and the public heard nothing about him after the
memorable concert given for his benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House
on February 12, 1889, the occasion being set down as the fiftieth
anniversary of the beginning of his career as a conductor in America.
All the notable conductors then living in New York took part in the
concert--Theodore Thomas, Anton Seidl, Frank van der Stucken, Walter
Damrosch, and Adolf Neuendorff. Maretzek was seventy-six years of age
at the time of his death, and he had grown old, if not gracefully, at
least good-naturedly. He did not quarrel with his fate, but even when
he spoke of its buffetings it was in a tone of pleasant banter and with
a twinkle in his eyes. His manner of accepting what the world brought
him was illustrated at a meeting which I had with him in the season of
1883-84--the first of the Metropolitan Opera House. It was on a Saturday
afternoon that I found him standing in front of the new establishment
after the first act of the opera was over. Not having seen him in the
house, I asked him if he was attending the performance. He said he was,
but that, the house being sold out, he had no seat. Thereupon I offered
him mine, saying that it might be a pleasure to occupy it since several
of his professional acquaintances were seated in the neighborhood who
would be glad to greet him. "Annie Louise Cary is right back of me," I
said, "and Clara Louise Kellogg near by." But he did not care to accept
my offer, and I fancied I saw a rather more serious and contemplative
look come over his grizzled face. Naturally, I asked him what he thought
of the new house and the new enterprise, adding that I regretted that he
was not the manager. He began with apparent solemnity:
"Well, when I heard the house was to be built, I did think--I did think
that some of the stockholders would remember what I had done for opera.
Some of the old-timers, who used to go to the Academy of Music and Astor
Place Opera House when I was manager there, I thought, would recollect
what companies I gave them--Parodi, and Steffanone, and Marini, and
Lorini, and Bettini, and Bertucca"--(how often I had heard him chant the
list, counting off the singers on his chubby fingers!)--"and Truffi,
and Benedetti, and Salvi. I thought somebody might remember this and the
old man, and come to me and say, 'Max, you did a good deal for us once,
let us do something for you now.' I didn't expect them to come and offer
me the house, but I thought they might say this and add, 'Come, we'll
make you head usher,' or, 'You may have the bar.' But nobody came, and
I'm out of it completely."
Maretzek's managerial career continued at least until 1874; after that
he conducted operas for others and did something toward the last in the
way of teaching. It was seldom that one could get into a conversation
with him but he could grow reminiscent, and, reverting to the olden
time, begin tolling off the members of the companies which he had led
to artistic victories and who had helped plunge him into financial
defeat--"Parodi, and Steffanone, and Marini, and Bettini, and Lorini,
and Bertucca," and so on. Poor Bertucca! Few of those who in later
years saw Mme. Maretzek, portly and sedate, enter the orchestra at the
Academy of Music and Metropolitan Opera House, and tune her harp while
the audience was gathering in the gilded horseshoes above, recalled
that she had been the sprightly and bewitching Bertucca of thirty
years before.
I cannot recall that Maretzek ever grew bitter in discoursing on what
once was and what might have been. He could be satirical and cutting,
but his words were generally accompanied with a smile. His dominant mood
and something of his style of expression are illustrated in his book,
"Crotchets and Quavers, or Revelations of an Opera Manager in America,"
which he published in 1855, most obviously with the help of some
literary hack who, I imagine, got the thoughts from Maretzek, but
supplied the literary dress for them. A good many old scores are paid
off in the book, and a good many grudges fed fat; but there are not many
instances of bad humor. There is a sugar coating even to his malice.
Shortly before I left Cincinnati, the College of Music of that city,
having suffered a serious loss of prestige because of the resignation
of Theodore Thomas, made a pretentious announcement of an operatic
department, a practical school for opera, which was to be conducted by
Maretzek. I think it was in the fall of 1880. At any rate, it was on the
very eve of my departure from Cincinnati for New York. Maretzek came to
the city somewhat late in the evening, and though I called upon him at
the Burnet House as soon as I heard of his coming, he was already in
bed when my card reached him. Nevertheless, I was asked up to his room.
A tea tray still stood upon the table by the side of the bed when I
entered. He held out his hand cordially and apologized for receiving
me in bed. I told him that my newspaper, The Gazette, wanted to know,
for the information of its readers, what he purposed doing at the
college. The squabble between Mr. Thomas and the college authorities had
kept the town in a ferment for months, all of which Maretzek seemed to
know. It was no concern of his, but he could not help having artistic
sympathies or predispositions, and these were obviously on the side of
the musician Thomas, who had split with the business management of the
college because of charlatanry in its methods. There was a merry twinkle
in Maretzek's eyes as in reply to my question he answered: "I don't
know what I am going to do, or what I'm here for. They made me an offer,
and I came. I'm told that I am to run an opera school." Again he held
out his hand at parting, and his last words were:
"Don't give me away!"
Not many months had passed before he, too, had followed Theodore Thomas
back to New York, I met him in the lobby of the Academy of Music between
the acts of the opera. It was in the consulship of Mapleson. "Hello!"
I greeted him. "Back to New York so soon? What's the matter in
Cincinnati?"
The quizzical smile with which he had greeted me grew wider as he
replied sententiously:
"I'm not a hog. I know when I've got enough!"
Maretzek was a Hebrew, born in Brünn, Moravia, and educated in Vienna,
where first he studied medicine, but, according to his own story,
becoming disgusted with the sights of the dissecting room, he changed
his purposes and devoted himself to music. He wrote an opera entitled
"Hamlet" when he was twenty-two years old, and a year later, in 1844,
found himself in London, employed under Balfe at Her Majesty's Theater.
Thence he was brought to New York to conduct the opera for Mr. E. P.
Fry, as has already been mentioned, in 1848. After one season as
conductor he started in on his career as manager, which lasted
twenty-five years, the first five of which are amusingly described
in his book "Crotchets and Quavers." More than twenty years later he
attempted to continue the story in a musical journal, and gathering the
disconnected chapters together, issued them in an unattractive form
under the title "Flats and Sharps." The first book is, to some extent,
a contribution to musical history, though its strong personal equation
and its effort to be entertaining mar its value and influence. The
impression to which I have given utterance, that he was helped in its
preparations by some penny-a-liner, is based upon the difference between
its pages and the personal letters which I received from Maretzek in
his later years, especially a brief autobiographical sketch which he
prepared for me. To judge by the evidence of book and sketch, the
latter in his own handwriting and delivered in person, one was forced
to the conclusion either that he knew more about the English language
six years after his first coming to New York than he did twenty years
later or that he had hired somebody fluent but malignant of pen to put
his thoughts into shape. It had long been the fashion for theatrical
managers and opera impresarios to give the history of their
administrations to the world, and Maretzek was but following it, though
why he should have done so before he had finally and definitely retired
from the field it is not easy to see.
It was an unwise, even a dangerous, thing to do, for it involved the
necessity of criticizing the acts of professional people and music
patrons with whom a manager was more or less likely to come into contact
if he expected to continue his enterprises. The style adopted in the
book was the epistolary, the chapters being in the form of letters to
European friends: Hector Berlioz (with whom Maretzek had been brought
into connection in London), Fiorentino (an Italian, who had been musical
critic of the Corsaire, of Paris), Luigi Lablache (the famous basso),
Professor Joseph Fischof (of Vienna), Michael W. Balfe (of London,
composer of "The Bohemian Girl" and other English operas), Frederick Gye
(manager of the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, London), and Carl
Eckert (conductor of the Court Opera, Vienna). A final chapter is
addressed to the public and is devoted to a recital of the troubles
through which the Academy of Music passed in the earliest stages of its
career. Eckert had been in America as conductor of the company headed by
Henrietta Sontag, and the chapter over which his name is written tells
of the career of that artist in the United States and her death in
Mexico. Incidentally, also, Maretzek pays off a score owing to Bernard
Ullmann, a manager with whom Maretzek was much in conflict and against
whom he tried to turn the public by calling the attention of Americans
to the sneers in which the delectable gentleman had indulged at their
expense while he was trying to win the good graces of the Havanese.
Nevertheless, within four years he was Ullmann's partner, for together
they opened the season of 1859 at the Academy of Music. The quarrels of
opera managers are very like those of lawyers inside the courtroom.
But when Maretzek was holding up the heinousness of Ullmann in the
chapter entitled "Los Americanos y su gusto por la Musica," Ullmann was
only an agent for Maurice Strakosch, who had entered the managerial
field. It was different with Don Francesco Marty y Torrens, the
impresario who invaded Maretzek's territory from Havana; and he remained
Maretzek's pet aversion to the end of the chapter. In his memoirs
Arditi, who came to New York as conductor of one of Marty's companies,
says that Don Francesco was among impresarios the most generous of
men, Maretzek the cleverest (though he sets down Maurice Grau as the
"cleverest of entrepreneurs"), and Colonel Mapleson the most astute.
It is not unlikely that Arditi's amiable opinion of the Cuban was
influenced not a little by the circumstance that Marty, not caring to
make money in New York, treated his artists with unusual liberality.
That, naturally, would not tend to increase the admiration of a rival
manager for him. He may have been the most generous of men in the eyes
of Arditi, but in those of Maretzek he was worse than Barbaja, the
Neapolitan manager, who owned the gambling monopoly in the kingdom
of Naples, and who, after animating his acquaintances with music and
singing, and diverting their eyes with the silk fleshings and short
muslin jupons of his dancers, fleeced them at his gambling houses and
became richer than the King of Naples himself. Maretzek intimates that
in his youth Don Francesco had been the mate of a pirate vessel which
preyed on the commerce of the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent waters; that
he betrayed his captain to death, and was rewarded with a monopoly of
the fish trade in Cuba; that he became possessed mysteriously of enough
money to fit out a feet of fishing boats to supply the market which he
controlled; that from that source alone his annual income rose to about
$160,000; that then he embarked in the slave trade, bringing negroes
from Africa and Indians from Yucatan, which he bribed the Spanish
officials to permit him to land; was knighted by the Spanish Crown out
of gratitude for pecuniary help extended in a crisis; and built an opera
house in Havana in order to acquire a social position among the proud
people who, despite his badge of nobility, refused to "swallow the fish
and digest the negro," as Maretzek puts it. This was the manager who, in
the summer of 1850, brought to New York what Maretzek characterizes as
"the greatest troupe which had been ever heard in America," and which,
"in point of the integral talent, number, and excellence of the artists
composing it," had "seldom been excelled in any part of the Old World."
"This party consisted of three prime donne. These were the Signore
Steffanone, Bosio, and Tedesco. Its only contralto was the Signora
Vietti. There were three tenors--Salvi, Bettini, and Lorini. Badiali and
Corradi Setti were the two barytones, while the two bassi were Marini
and Coletti. At the head of this extraordinary company was the great
contrabassist Bottesini, assisted by Arditi. It would be useless, my old
friend, to attempt to indicate to you the excellence of this company.
You have long since known their names, or been aware of their standing
as artists in the world of music. The greater portion of them enjoy a
wide and well-deserved European reputation, and their reunion anywhere
would form an almost incomparable operatic troupe."
Some of these names are those of singers whom, in his later days, I have
said Maretzek was in the habit of chanting while telling them off on his
fingers. His was not the credit of having brought them to the country,
but he did, a year after they had made their first appearance in the
Havana company, succeed in enticing them away from their generous
manager and enlisting them under his banner at the Astor Place Opera
House. All but Tedesco.
Of these singers Maretzek has more or less to say in his book, but
the point of view is that of the manager perpetually harassed by the
jealousies, importunities, and recalcitrancy of his singers. Steffanone
was a conscientious artist, but had an infirmity of body and mind which
was exceedingly troublesome to her manager; Bosio was talented and
industrious, but had a husband whose devotion to her interests was an
affliction to her manager; Tedesco was husbandless, but had a father who
was so concerned about her honorarium that he came to the opera house on
payday with a small pair of scales in his pocket, with which he verified
every coin that came out of the exchequer of the unfortunate manager,
"subjecting each separate piece of gold to a peculiarly Jewish
examination touching their Christian perfection;" Salvi was a mountain
of conceit, who believed himself to be the Louis Quatorze of the lyric
drama, and compelled his manager to imagine him exclaiming "L'opéra
c'est moi!" Toward his manager Salvi was a despot, who rewarded favors
bestowed upon himself by compelling the manager to engage persons who
had served the tenor. Maretzek cites a ukase touching a singer named
Sidonia:
Caro Max: Fa di tutto per iscriturare la Sidonia, altrimenti io non
canto ne "Don Giovanni," ne "Norma," ne altri.
A 250 $ il mese, e che la scrittura porti 350 $. Amen, cosi sia.
Il tuo, Salvi.
19. 4. 53.
(In English: "Dear Max: Do everything to engage the Sidonia, otherwise
I shall not sing in 'Don Giovanni,' 'Norma' or other operas. At $250 per
month, but let the writing bear $350. Amen, and so be it.")
"At $250 per month, but let the scrittura bear $350." I wonder how many
of my readers think of this cheap device of singers and managers when
they read about the honoraria received by opera singers to-day!
Bettini drank to excess and spent whole nights in the gambling room,
rendering him unfit for duty ever and anon; Badiali was singularly
conscientious as an artist, and became a favorite with the public, but
not with his colleagues, because of his extraordinary meanness and
avarice and a jealous disposition; Marini was the greatest living
Italian basso, save Lablache, but his voice was occasionally unreliable,
and he frequently ill-humored, capricious, splenetic, and peevish.
In private life Angiolina Bosio was Mme. Panayotis di Xindavelonis, the
wife of a Greek gentleman, whom she had married in 1851. She was in her
prime when she came to New York, though she had not reached the meridian
of her reputation. Her features were irregular, and she was not comely.
Richard Grant White claims credit for having given her the punning
sobriquet "Beaux Yeux," by which she was widely known on account of her
luminous and expressive eyes. "Her voice," says White:
was a pure, silvery soprano, remarkable alike for its penetrating
quality and for its charm so fine and delicate that it seemed almost
intellectual. But she was not a remarkably dramatic singer, even in
light comedy parts, which best suited her; and her style was not at all
declamatory. She _sang_; and in her vocalization she showed the results
of intelligent study in the old Italian school. Her phrasing was
incomparably fine, and the delicacy of her articulation has been
surpassed by no modern prima donna, not even by Alboni. Thus much of
her as a vocal artist; but her charm was greatly personal. Although
her acting was always appropriate and in good taste, and at times--as,
for example, in the saucy widow of "Don Pasquale"--very captivating,
she never seemed to throw herself wholly into her part. She was always
Angiolina Bosio, and appeared on the stage like a lady performing
admirably in private theatricals. Her bearing was a delight to her
audience, and seemed to be a performance, whereas it was only herself.
She sang the music of all the great operatic composers to the admiration
of the public and the critics of the most exacting disposition; but she
was greatest in Rossini's operas, and in Bellini's and Donizetti's. Yet
her exquisitely charming and finished performance of Zerlina should not
be passed over unmentioned.
Tedesco, who came to New York with the first Havana company in April,
1847, presented herself to the always susceptible mind of Mr. White as a
great, handsome, ox-eyed creature, the picture of lazy loveliness until
she was excited by music; then she poured out floods, or rather gusts,
of rich, clear sound. "She was not a great artist, but her voice was
so copious and so musical that she could not be heard without pleasure,
although it was not of the highest kind." Bettini left nothing here that
remained in the memory of New Yorkers except the half of a name which he
gave to his wife, the contralto Trebelli-Bettini, who was a member of
Mr. Abbey's company on the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in
1883. Salvi came over with the Havana company in the spring of 1848, and
was one of the fish which Maretzek took from Marty's weirs. If we are
to believe the testimony of contemporaneous critics he was the greatest
tenor of his time, with the exception of Mario. That was the opinion of
White, who wrote of him as follows in The Century Magazine for May,
1882:
Although Salvi was past his youth when he first sang in New York, his
voice was yet in perfect preservation. It lacked nothing that is to be
expected in a tenor voice of the first class; and it had that mingling
of manliness and tenderness, of human sympathy and seraphic loftiness
which, for lack of any other or better word, we call divine. As a
vocalist he was not in the first rank, but he stood foremost in the
second. His presence was manly and dignified, and he was a good actor.
But it was as a vocalist, pure and simple, that he captivated and moved
his audiences. He was heard in America at brief intervals during a few
years, and his influence upon the taste of the general music-loving
public was very considerable and wholly good. Singing at Niblo's or
Castle Garden and other like places at which the price of admission was
never more than $1, and was generally 50 cents, he gave to multitudes
who would otherwise have had no such opportunity that education in art
which is to be had only from the performances of a great artist. In
purity of style he was unexceptionable. He lacked only a little higher
finish, a little more brilliancy of voice and impressiveness of manner
to take a position among tenors of the very first rank. Of these,
however, there are never two in the world at the same time, scarcely two
in the same generation; and so Salvi prepared the public for the coming
Mario. His forte was the cantabile and his finest effects were those in
mezza voce, expressive of intense suppressed feeling. More than once
when he sang "Spirto gentil," as he rose to the crescendo of the second
phrase, and then let his cry pass suddenly away in a dying fall, I have
heard a whole house draw suspended breath, as if in pain, so nearly
alike in their outward manifestation and fine, keen pleasure.
Such were some of the singers whose names are associated in the musical
annals of New York with that of Max Maretzek.
CHAPTER VI
THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MUSIC
Fifty-one years ago the center of operatic activity had shifted to the
Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, and there it
remained until the Metropolitan Opera House was built. From the opening
of the Academy in 1854 to the opening of the Metropolitan in 1883 the
former had no rival as an establishment, though the rivalry between
managers and singers was the liveliest that New York has ever seen
during the first decade of the time. For twenty years Burton's Theater
revived its early traditions, and housed an opera troupe at intervals,
and Niblo's Theater and Castle Garden were open to every manager who
wished to experiment with the costly enterprise. English companies
came and went, and a new competitive element, which soon became more
dangerous than that which several times crushed the Italian exotic,
entered in the shape of German opera, which, though it first sought a
modest home in the lesser theaters of the Bowery and lower Broadway,
soon achieved recognition at the fashionable Academy. The eagerness of
the rivalry in the Italian field alone is indicated by the fact that the
Academy had five different managers in the first three seasons of its
history, and that thereafter, until the coming of James H. Mapleson in
1878, it was almost a rule that there should be a change of management
every season. Maretzek was alternately manager and competitor over
and over again, and the bitterest rivals of one season would be found
associated with each other the next. Already in the first season the
stockholders had to step in and assume some of the risks of management
to save the enterprise from shipwreck, and, despite the attractiveness
of the house, the excellence of the performances, the presence of such
phenomenal artists as Mme. Grisi and Signor Mario, and generous public
patronage, the first season cost the different managers between $50,000
and $60,000--three times as much as Maretzek had lost in the previous
six years, if that gentleman's word is to be taken. The figures look
modest now, but twenty years later their duplication at the Metropolitan
Opera House sufficed to effect a revolution in methods, and eventually
tastes, which had a profound influence upon musical life in New York.
The Academy of Music had its birth in the expiring throes of the Astor
Place Opera House. The spirit of which it was the material expression
seems to have been admirable. To this the name of the establishment
bears witness. It was not alone the official title of the French
institution, popularly spoken of as the Grand Opéra, which was in the
minds of the promoters of the New York enterprise--the new opera house
was to be a veritable academy of music, an educational institution.
Not only was fashionable society to have a place in which to display
and disport itself, but popular taste and popular knowledge were to
be cultivated. To this end the auditorium was to be three times as
commodious as that of the Astor Place Opera House, and the low prices
which had been prevalent only at Niblo's, Burton's, and Castle Garden
were to be the rule at the new establishment. In the charter granted
by the State, dated April 10, 1852, the purposes of the Academy were
set down as the cultivation of taste by entertainments accessible at
moderate charges, by furnishing facilities for instruction and by
rewards. These purposes were overlooked at the beginning, but before the
first season had come to its end Ole Bull, for a few weeks a manager,
proclaimed his intention to pursue them by promising to open a
conservatory in the fall of 1855, and at once (January, 1855) offering
a prize of $1,000 for the "best original grand opera by an American
composer, and upon a strictly American subject." The competition ended
with Ole Bull's announcement, for his active season endured only two
weeks.
It is doubtful if the competition would have produced anything more
than a curiosity had it been carried to a conclusion. On the spur of
the moment I can think of only two American musicians whose capacity
was adequate to such a task--Mr. W. H. Fry, who was then musical critic
and an editorial writer for The Tribune, and Mr. George F. Bristow,
both of whom had composed operas found worthy of performance. Mr. Fry's
"Leonora" was performed at the Academy on March 29, 1858, with Mme.
Lagrange in the principal rôle, but the score was already a dozen years
old, and it is not likely that the composer's state of health would
have permitted him to undertake the writing of a new opera even if
he had been so disposed. Mr. Bristow's "Rip Van Winkle," which had a
production in New York in the year of Ole Bull's announcement, may, for
all that I know to the contrary, have been written for the prize. The
scheme of uniting a training school for singers with an opera house was
not heard of again, so far as I can recall, until Mr. Conried became
director of the Metropolitan Opera House. It has much to commend it, and
might be made a power for artistic good with an operatic establishment
on a really public-spirited, artistic, and unselfish basis; as it is,
its influence is apt to be pernicious morally, as well as artistically.
How seriously Mr. Fry took the proposed educational feature of the
institution is indicated by an article on the new opera house, which he
published in The Tribune, in the course of which he said:
The expense of maintaining an opera house so nurtured at home will be
at most not more than one-fourth what it would be if the artists were
brought from Europe. American vocalists would be content with some few
thousand dollars a year, and, if they were sought for and educated,
boarded and lodged gratuitously the meanwhile, their services could be
procured for several years in payment of the expenses of apprenticeship.
In that way alone can the exorbitant demands of foreign artists be
diminished; and the folly and extravagance of paying them from one to
ten thousand dollars a night, as has been done in this city, will be
forever avoided. In connection with this it may be mentioned that there
are some Americans now studying for the operatic stage in Italy, and
one lady of Boston has appeared in Naples with success. It may yet come
to pass that art, in all its ramifications, may be as much esteemed as
politics, commerce or the military profession. The dignity of American
artists lies in their hands.
Mr. Fry's hopes, so far as the Academy of Music is concerned, were
never realized, and after half a century his words are echoing wherever
writers indulge in discussion of ways and means for promoting American
music. Yet, without schools connected with opera houses American singers
have made their mark, not only at home, but in the lyric theaters of
Italy, France, Germany, and England. Names like Clara Louise Kellogg,
Annie Louise Cary, Minnie Hauk, Alwina Valleria, Emma Nevada, Lillian
Nordica, Adelaide Phillips, Emma Albani, and Josephine Yorke are
connected more or less intimately with the history of the Academy of
Music, but they do not exhaust the list. To them must be added those
of Charles Adams, Suzanne Adams, David Bispham, Robert Blass, William
Candidus, Emma Eames, Signor Foli, Geraldine Farrar, Julia Gaylord,
Helen Hastreiter, Eliza Hensler (the daughter of a Boston tailor who
became the morganatic wife of Dom Fernando of Portugal), Louise Homer,
Emma Juch, Pauline l'Allemande, Marie Litta, Isabella McCullough,
Frederick C. Packard, Jules Perkins, Signor Perugini, Mathilde Phillips,
Susan Strong, Minnie Tracey, Jennie Van Zandt, Emma Abbott, Bessie
Abott, Julia Wheatley, Virginia Whiting (Signora Lorini), Edyth Walker,
Marion Weed, Zélie de Lussan, Clarence Whitehill, Allen Hinckley, Joseph
F. Sheehan, and half a dozen or more singers now attracting attention in
London and Germany.
Max Maretzek was the first lessee of the Academy of Music, but the
company that opened it on October 2, 1854, was that engaged by J. H.
Hackett to support Grisi and Mario, which had appeared at Castle Garden
two months before. Maretzek sublet to Hackett, who thought that the
brilliancy of his stars, and the new house, justified him in advancing
the price of seats to $2. He had a rude awakening, for the audience on
the first night was neither large nor brilliant. It numbered not more
than 1,500, and on the second night the prices came down to the popular
scale, with $1.50 as the standard. By the middle of December, though
the stockholders had been obliged to come to the rescue of Hackett,
the collapse of the opening enterprise was announced, and Hackett took
Grisi and Mario to Boston for a brief season, and then came back for
three or four performances at the Metropolitan Theater.
The last performance took place on February 20, 1855. Though many
excellent singers had been heard in New York between the coming of
Malibran and that of Grisi and Mario, the three months of their sojourn
in America have ever since remained memorable. For a generation
afterward all tenors were measured by Mario's standard. Grisi created
a less enduring impression, because the audiences that heard her were
within the space of a few years permitted also to hear such singers as
Jenny Lind, Henrietta Sontag, and Marietta Alboni, three names that are
still resplendent in operatic annals. There does not seem to be any
reason for questioning the belief that Mario was the greatest tenor
singer that ever gladdened the ears of American music lovers. Richard
Grant White, who was then writing the musical reviews for The Courier
and Enquirer newspaper, had chosen Benedetti as his ideal of a dramatic
singer, and he found Mario lacking in passion, while confessing that
he had the sweetest tenor voice in all the world. He retired from the
stage in 1867, but came to America in 1872, under Strakosch, and sang
in concert with Carlotta Patti, Annie Louise Gary, Teresa Carreño, and
Sauret. He had always been a somewhat unreliable singer, frequently
disappointing his audiences by not singing at all, or singing listlessly
until he reached the air in which he could produce a sensational effect,
and when he returned to America he had only a superb presence and
bearing, and a magnificent reputation with which to arouse interest. He
was sixty-two years old, and had accepted an engagement for the reason
that frequently brings worn-out artists to the scenes of their earlier
triumphs; he needed money. Eight years later his financial condition so
distressed his old friends and admirers in London that they got up a
benefit concert for him. He was living in Rome when he died in 1883.
Such satisfaction as can come to one from seeing a renowned artist was
mine in 1872; but I can scarcely say that I _heard_ Mario. With Annie
Louise Gary he sang first in a graceful little duet, "Per valli, per
boschi," by Blangini ("Dear old Mario had to warm up in a duet before
he would trust himself in solo," said the admired contralto, many years
afterward), and later attempted Beethoven's "Adelaide." Romances were
Mario's specialty, and Beethoven's divine song ought to have been an
ideal selection for him, but it was quite beyond his powers and I do not
now know whether to be glad or sorry that I heard him attempt it. It
is always unfortunate when great singers who have gone into decay are
tempted again to sing. To the generation who knew them in their prime
they bring a double measure of disappointment--grief for the passing
away of the art which once gave pleasure, and regret that the younger
generation should carry down to posterity a false impression of the
singer's voice and style. Who shall measure the heartburnings left by
Madame Patti's last visit to America when she sold herself to a trumpery
balladist, and, affecting the appearance and manner which had been hers
a quarter of a century before, tried to make a new generation believe
that it was listening to the vocalist whom veterans maintained was the
last one entitled to be called "la Diva." How much lovelier and more
fragrant the memory of Annie Louise Cary, whose American career began
during the Strakosch régime at the Academy of Music, and ended with her
marriage to Charles Mon son Raymond, when she was still in the very
plenitude of her powers. Many a time within the first few years after
her retirement have I seen her surrounded by young women and old, as she
was leaving the Academy of Music or the Metropolitan Opera House, and
heard their pleading voices: "Oh, Miss Cary! aren't you ever going to
sing for us again?" and "Please, Miss Cary, won't you let me kiss you?"
Ole Bull's management of the Academy of Music was but a fleeting
incident, memorable only for the protestations with which it was begun
and for its brevity. For the famous Norwegian violinist it was a
Utopian dream with a speedy and rude awakening. After he had retired
the Lagrange troupe came from downtown and completed the season with
the help of the stockholders, and Maretzek, the erstwhile impresario
and lessee, became the conductor. For four years, 1855, 1856, 1857,
and 1858, the Academy saw Maretzek, Strakosch, and Ullmann alternately
installed as impresarios, and then for a year there was no opera at the
house, the three men at the head of as many different companies seeking
their fortunes outside of the metropolis. With Ullmann Thalberg was
associated for a space, the great pianist having come to America to
make money under the management of Ullmann, and probably having been
persuaded to risk some of his gains by his manager. It was but a brief
interlude, however. Ullmann, whose activities in America extended over
a quarter of century, lived to manage some of the artists who are
still before the public. The beginning of his career, like that of
Maretzek, fell in the period when Barnumism was at its zenith, and
Ullmann was utterly unconscionable in the methods to which he resorted
for the purpose of exploiting his artists. It was under his operatic
consulship that the winsome Piccolomini came to New York--an artist of
insignificant caliber, lovely to look upon and fascinating as an actress
in soubrette parts. "A Columbine," said Chorley about her when she
effected her début in London, "born to 'make eyes' over an apron with
pockets, to trick the Pantaloon of the piece, to outrun the Harlequin,
and to enjoy her own saucy confidence on the occasion of her success--with
those before the footlights and the orchestra." But this was not
all. "Never did any young lady, whose private claims to modest respect
were so great as hers are known to be," said the same critic, "with such
self-denial fling off their protection in her resolution to lay hold of
the public at all risks. Her performances at times approached offense
against maidenly reticence and delicacy. When she played Zerlina,
in 'Don Giovanni,' such virtue as there was between the two seemed
absolutely on the side of the libertine hero--so much invitation was
thrown into the peasant girl's rusticity." Here was a capital subject
for the methods dear to the heart of Ullmann. In London the Piccolomini
had been proclaimed to be of a noble Roman family, the niece of a
cardinal, who had quarreled with her relations because of her theatrical
propensities. There may have been some truth in the statements, but
Ullmann adorned her history still more, and proclaimed from every New
York housetop that the lady was a lineal descendant of Charlemagne, and
the great-grand-daughter of Schiller's tragic hero Max Piccolomini.
It was under the co-consulship of Maretzek and Ullmann that Adelina
Patti made her operatic début at the Academy of Music. The date was
November 24, 1859, the opera "Lucia di Lammermoor." Twenty-five years
later Patti was again the prima donna of the Academy, though Mapleson
was now the manager. It was the second year of the rivalry between the
Academy and the Metropolitan Opera House, and Colonel Mapleson conceived
the idea of profiting by the anniversary. At first it was planned that
"Lucia" should be given, with Brignoli as Edgardo, the part he had sung
in the opera at Patti's début, but two months before the time the tenor
died. Instead, "Martha" was performed, in a manner wholly commonplace
in all respects except as to the titular rôle, in which Mme. Patti
appeared, as a matter of course. There was only a little perfunctory
applause, but Colonel Mapleson had resolved that the scene should be
enacted, of which we have often read, in which the devotees of the prima
donna unhitch the horses from her carriage, and themselves drag it, with
wild rejoicings, through the streets. To make sure of such a spontaneous
ovation in staid New York was a question which Mapleson solved by
hiring fifty or more Italians (choristers, probably) from the familiar
haunts in Third Avenue, and providing them with torches, to follow the
carriage, which was prosaically dragged along to its destination at the
Windsor Hotel. As a demonstration it was the most pitiful affair that I
have ever witnessed. In fact, it seemed to me such a humiliation of the
great artist that on the next opera night I suggested to my colleague
of The Times newspaper that something adequate and appropriate to so
interesting an anniversary be arranged. He agreed and within a fortnight
or so a banquet was given in Mme. Patti's honor at the Hotel Brunswick,
under the auspices of a committee consisting of a number of well-known
gentlemen, including Judge Daly, William Steinway, and Nahum Stetson.
The committee of arrangements, having visited Mme. Patti and gained her
consent, went to work right merrily, but before the invitations were
issued an obstacle was met which threatened shipwreck to the amiable
enterprise; the wives of several gentlemen who had been invited
privately refused pointblank to break bread with the prima donna on
account of the scandal caused by her separation from the Marquis de Caux
and marriage to Nicolini, the tenor. Somewhat perplexed, the two critics
visited her a second time, and put the matter to her as delicately as
possible. Would she, under the circumstances, be the guest of a number
of gentlemen, representative of the legal, artistic, and literary
professions? Again she accepted, and without a moment's hesitation. So,
instead of the gathering that had been planned, there was a stag party
of about seventy gentlemen in the ballroom of the Brunswick, handsomely
decorated and discreetly lighted with wax candles.
The preliminary reception was held in one of the rooms adjoining the
banquet hall, and there a scene was enacted which brought into relief
a trait of character which was extremely useful to the Colonel in the
difficult task of managing his wilful and capricious prima donna. Mme.
Patti received her hosts seated upon a divan. She looked radiant, and
was wholly at ease after having taken a peep into the hall to see that
the light would not be prejudicial to her complexion. One after another
of the seventy gentlemen advanced to her, took the hand which she
extended with a gracious smile, muttered the pretty compliment which he
had rehearsed, and fell back to make room for the next comer. The room
was pretty nearly full, when the Colonel appeared in the glory of that
flawless, speckless dress suit, with the inevitable rose in the lapel
of his coat. Not a glance did he give to right or left, but with the
grace of a practised courtier, he sailed across the room, sank on his
knees before the diva, and raised her hand to his lips. Such a smile as
rewarded him! A score of breasts bulged out with envy and a score of
brains framed the thought: "Confound it! Why didn't I think of doing
that?"
The dinner passed off without a hitch, Mme. Patti managing by a hundred
pretty coquetries to convince nearly every one of her three-score and
ten hosts that he had received at least one smile that was more gracious
than that bestowed upon his fellows. Speeches were made by Judge Daly,
William Steinway, Dr. Leopold Damrosch, William Winter and others, but,
as Colonel Mapleson had carried off the palm by his courtliness at the
reception, Max Maretzek made himself the most envied of men at the
dinner. Quite informally he was asked to say something after the set
programme had been disposed of. Where the other speakers had brought
forward their elegantly turned oratorical tributes the grizzled old
manager told stories about the child life and early career of the guest.
Amongst other things he illustrated how early the divine Adelina had
fallen into the ways of a prima donna by refusing to sing at a concert
in Tripler Hall unless he, who was managing the concert, would first
go out and buy her a pound of candy. He agreed to get the sweetmeats
provided she would give him a kiss in return. In possession of her box
she kept both of the provisions of her contract. When the toastmaster
declared the meeting adjourned Patti bore straight down on her old
manager and said:
"Max, if I gave you a kiss for a box of candy then, I'll give you one
for nothing now!"
And she did.
CHAPTER VII
MAPLESON AND OTHER IMPRESARIOS
Memories are crowding upon me, and I find there is much still to be said
about the Academy of Music, and the operatic folk whom it housed between
1854 and 1886. Just now the incidents which have been narrated about
the banquet given in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Adelina
Patti's début recall other characteristic anecdotes of Colonel Mapleson,
who managed the Academy of Music from 1878 to the end of the disastrous
season of 1885-'86. When Mapleson and Abbey were drawing up their forces
for the battle royal between the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan
Opera House in 1883, one of the New York newspapers reported Mme. Patti
as saying: "Colonel Mapleson comes here when he wants me to sing, and
he calls me 'My dear child,' and he goes down on both knees and kisses
my hands, and he has, you know, quite a supplicating face, and it is not
easy to be firm with a man of such suavity of manners." I have often
thought of this in connection with the outcome of the disastrous rivalry
between the two houses and their managers. When Colonel Mapleson let
himself down so gracefully upon his knee and pressed the prima donna's
hand to his lips, the act was not all unselfish adoration. It used to
be said that there was no manager alive who had succeeded in becoming
debtor to Adelina Patti. It was golden grain alone that persuaded this
bird to sing. The story is old of how her personal agent once hovered
between her dressing room and the manager's office, carrying the message
one way: "Madame Patti will not put on her slippers until she is paid,"
returning the other way with a thousand dollars; coming again to the
manager with: "Madame has one slipper on, but will not put on the other
till she has her fee"--and so on. Doubtless apocryphal and yet only a
bit fanciful and exaggerated. Yet it was known in the inner operatic
circles in 1885 that Colonel Mapleson had succeeded in getting himself
pretty deeply into her debt. How he did it the anecdotes of the
reception and Mme. Patti's interview serve to indicate. In sooth, the
persuasive powers of the doughty colonel were distinctly remarkable, and
it was not only the prima donna who lived in an atmosphere of adulation
who fell a victim to them. I have a story to illustrate which came to
me straight from the lips of the confiding creditor. He was a theatrical
costumer, moreover, and one of the tribe of whom it is said that only to
a Connecticut Yankee will they lower the flag in a horse trade.
My friend was a theatrical costumer with a shop conveniently situated
in Union Square. When the clouds began to lower upon the Academy around
the corner he became curious to know whether or not he was likely to
get a balance of some $1,500 owing him for costumes furnished to the
establishment. He sent his bill many times, and, being on amicable terms
with Colonel Mapleson, called on him at intervals to talk over the
situation. When he left the impresario's office he always carried away
profuse promises of speedy payment, but nothing more. Finally, he put
the bill into the hands of his lawyer, who at once took steps to attach
the property of the foreign debtor, and, to bring about pressure in a
manner that seemed likely to be effective, he instructed the deputy
sheriff, who was to serve the legal papers, to present himself at the
office of Colonel Mapleson an hour or so before the beginning of the
opera. The arrangements perfected, he informed his client of what had
been done. But there remained a kindly spot in the costumer's soul, and
of his own volition he called on the manager in the afternoon of the day
set apart for the coup in order to give him one more opportunity to save
himself from the impending catastrophe.
"I found the Colonel in his office," said he, in relating the incident,
"cutting the corners off of tickets and sending them out to fill his
house for the next performance. While he clipped he talked away at me
in his cheerfullest and blandest style, told me how sorry he was that he
could not pay me out of hand, and deplored the action which I had taken,
but with such absence of all resentment that I began to feel ashamed of
myself for having threatened to shut him up. After half an hour I agreed
to send a messenger post-haste to my lawyer and call off the sheriff.
This done he borrowed $75 cash from me, and I went away happy. I tell
you I know lots of managers, but there's only one Colonel Mapleson in
this world."
Whether or not my friend ever collected his bill I do not know; but this
I do know, that when the colonel ended the campaign of 1884-'85 Mme.
Patti's name was on his list of creditors for a considerable sum--$5,000
or $6,000, I believe. The next time I met him he was sauntering about in
what passes for a foyer in Covent Garden Theater, London. The rose in
his buttonhole was not more radiant than he.
"What are you up to now, Colonel?" I asked him.
"In what respect?"
"In a business way, of course."
"Well," with a twinkling smile, "just now I am persuading Adelina to
sing at my benefit."
"Will she do it?"
"I think she will" And she did.
Mapleson was one of the last of the race of managers who had practical
training in the art in which he dealt commercially. He was a graduate
of the Royal Academy of Music in the violin class, and had played in
the orchestra at the opera. He had also studied singing, and in his
youth tried his luck as an operatic tenor. In this he was like Maurice
Strakosch, who played the pianoforte prodigiously as a child, studied
singing three years with no less an artist than the great Pasta, and
after singing for a space at Agram turned his attention again to the
pianoforte. He came to New York in 1848, and his first engagement was
with Maretzek, at the Astor Place Opera House. Afterward he was a member
of a traveling concert company, in which he was associated with Amalia
Patti, whom he married, and it was thus that he became the teacher,
and, eventually, the manager of his sister-in-law, Adelina Patti. When
Ronconi first appeared in America at Burton's Theater (which had
been Palmo's Opera House), in the spring of 1858, Strakosch was the
conductor. The last of the old opera managers whom I recall at this
moment who were practical musicians as well, was Dr. Leopold Damrosch,
who directed the destinies of the Metropolitan Opera House after one
year of warfare with the Academy of Music had put Henry E. Abbey hors
du combat for a while. Abbey came out of the ranks of theatrical
managers, like Heinrich Conried, his only practical experience in music
being as a cornet player in a brass band in Akron, Ohio, whence he came.
Strakosch's associates, however, were not musical practitioners. Ullmann
may have had some knowledge of music, but he was all showman. Thalberg,
the pianist, was Ullmann's partner when Strakosch and Ullmann joined
their forces in January, 1857, to manage the Academy of Music, but the
new coalition was the sign of Thalberg's withdrawal from the managerial
field.
Like Maretzek, in his Cincinnati experience, the virtuoso knew when he
had enough. Strakosch's later associates were his brothers, Ferdinand
and Max. The former was the European agent for the firm, and the latter
what might be termed the acting house man in the United States,
especially during the later years of the Strakosch régime.
In Europe Maurice Strakosch was also associated with Pollini, who
afterward became a large factor in the field of German opera, as manager
of the opera in Hamburg. Pollini had been Strakosch's office boy. His
real name was Pohl, and he hailed from Cologne; but he, too, was a
musician. Strakosch died in Paris in October, 1887. One night in July,
1886, I met him in the theater at Altona, whither I had gone to hear a
performance of "Der Trompeter von Säkkingen," then the rage throughout
Germany. He asked me to drive back to his hotel in Hamburg with him, for
his physician had told him that day that he might drink a glass of beer,
the first in six months, and he wanted a friend to share the pleasure
with him. I brought him the latest news from the opera houses of New
York, and, also, the intelligence that Pollini had just engaged Mme.
Sembrich for a season at some 5,000 francs a night.
"We quit partnership," said he, "back in the 70's because Pollini
thought that money was no longer to be made in Italian opera, and wanted
to take up German opera exclusively. I didn't agree with him, and went
on with Nilsson and the rest. He got rich and I got poor, and now he's
going back into the Italian field. He'll rue it."
Call the roll of some of the best of the singers whose American careers
are chiefly bound up with the history of the Academy of Music: Grisi,
Mario, Vestvali (a much admired contralto), Badiali, Amodio (barytone),
Steffanone, Brignoli, Lagrange, Mirate, D'Angri, Piccolomini, Adelina
Patti, Kellogg, Nilsson, Campanini, Lucca, Cary, Parepa, Albani, Hauk,
Gerster, Nevada. There are others whom fond recollection will call back,
some belonging indubitably to the first rank, like Maurel, some who
will live on because they gladdened the hearts of the young people of a
generation ago, who were more impressionable than critical. Some men of
middle age (as they think) now will not want to forget Mlle. Ambre or
Mlle. Marimon, and will continue to forgive the homely features of Mme.
Scalchi for the sake of her perfect physical poise and movement as the
page in "Les Huguenots," as others forgave the many registers of her
voice because of her joyous volubility of utterance. Doubtless, too,
there are matrons of to-day who will remember the singing of Ravelli
with as much pleasure as I recall it, and the shapely legs of the young
tenor that walked off with the heart (we also had a story of a diamond
ring) of a young singer from California, who afterward made a name for
herself in Paris, with more enthusiasm than I could possibly feel.
Some of these singers became intimately associated with New York life in
a social way. Annie Louise Cary, after her marriage to Charles Monson
Raymond, lived for years in a cheery apartment at No. 20 Fifth Avenue,
sang occasionally with the choir in the West Presbyterian Church, in
Forty-second Street, and shed sunshine over a circle of friends who
loved her as enthusiastically as a woman as they had admired her as an
artist. Now her home is in Norwalk, Conn. Her first operatic engagement
was at Copenhagen, and she spent two seasons in the opera houses of
the Scandinavian peninsula, and one at Brussels before the Strakosch
brothers brought her to the United States, in 1870. The first season she
sang in concert with Nilsson, the second (1871-72) in opera, the third
with Carlotta Patti and Mario in concert; and thereafter till her
retirement in 1882 in both concert and opera, winning and holding an
almost unparalleled popularity. In the Strakosch company of 1873-74 she
was one of a galaxy of artists that the opera-goers of that period, who
are still living, will never cease to think of without a swelling of the
heart--Nilsson, Cary, Campanini, Capoul, Maurel, Del Puente, and others.
Campanini remained the tenor of tenors for New Yorkers for a decade
longer. Abbey took him away from Mapleson for the first season of the
Metropolitan Opera House, and, after the introduction of German opera
there, his local career was practically at an end. He died in 1896
in Italy, whither he had returned on retirement. His dramatic style
improved as his voice decayed. When he first came he was chiefly a
lyrical singer; his Elvino was delicious beyond description. In his last
years he had taken on robust stature, and his passionate utterances in
"Carmen" and "Aïda" will live till the end in the memory of those who
heard them. He was proud of his skill as a singer pure and simple,
though he was more or less of a "naturalist," as the Germans call a
singer who owes more to nature than to artistic training. How greatly
he admired the perfection of his "attack" is illustrated in an incident
which twice grieved the soul of Theodore Thomas and some other sticklers
for the verities in classical music.
At the Cincinnati Music Festival, in May, 1880, Mr. Thomas brought
forward Beethoven's Mass in D, the great "Missa Solemnis." In the first
movement, "Kyrie," of this work Beethoven has created an effect of
surpassing beauty in the successive introduction of the solo voices. At
the outset there is a crashing chord from all the forces, including the
full organ. The thundering sound ceases abruptly, leaving the solo tenor
voice sustaining a tone seemingly in midair. Another loud crash projects
the solo contralto voice, and so on. The effect is transporting; but
the obvious intention of the composer and the loveliness of his device
weighed nothing in Campanini's mind against the fact that it interfered
with popular appreciation of the "attack," of which he was proud. So
he calmly waited until the colossal D major chord was silenced, then
intoned his D softly, and made a beautiful crescendo upon it. After
a rehearsal I ventured to call his attention to the beautiful
effectiveness of Beethoven's device, but he answered: "It is music for
the head, not for the heart. If I sing it so the audience will not hear
my beautiful attack."
And at the concert he perverted the text to gratify his vanity. I
reminded Mr. Thomas of the incident two years later, when he gave the
mass at the festival held in the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York.
Campanini was to sing in it again. Mr. Thomas said he would set him
right, but at the performance we were again cheated of Beethoven's
effect in order that the tenor might make his. When Campanini died
Philip Hale set down his estimate of him in these words:
No tenor who has blazed here above the opera horizon has fully equaled
in brilliancy Campanini at his zenith. De Reszke, in point of personal
refinement, is a greater artist, but his voice is inferior, and his
dramatic action lacks the elementary force shown by Campanini when
aroused. De Lucia is a greater actor of melodramatic parts, but his
voice is too shrill. Tamagno in "Otello" is beyond comparison, but that
is his one opera. . . . Of all tenors who have visited us since 1873
the greatest, viewed from all points, was Campanini.
The popular idol before Campanini was Brignoli, who held his own from
the first days of the Academy until within less than a decade of its
collapse. For some years before the Mapleson era, however, he had
dropped out of the Italian operatic ranks and sung in English companies,
and in concerts. It was in such organizations that I first heard
him some twelve or fifteen years after he had become the popular
"silver-voiced tenor" of New York. He came to New York in 1855, and his
career was American, though it was in Paris that Strakosch heard him
and turned his face toward America. He lived in New York, singing and
occasionally managing companies in which he sang, till October, 1884,
when he died. He was twice married, the first time to Kate Duckworth, an
English contralto, known on the platform as Mlle. Morensi, and, after
her death, to Isabella McCullough, an American soprano. Richard Grant
White's mind was still obsessed by memories of Salvi, Benedetti, and
Mario when Brignoli was basking in the sunshine of popular favor, and
his estimate of the tenor in The Century Magazine for June, 1882, is
scarcely flattering either to the singer or the public that liked him.
It was Mr. White's observation that Brignoli came into the swim at the
time that the young woman of New York became the arbiter of art and
elegance. Says Mr. White:
Her admiration of Brignoli was not greatly to the credit of her taste.
He had one of those tenor voices that seem like the bleating of a sheep
made musical. His method was perfectly good; but be sang in a very
commonplace style, and was as awkward as the man that a child makes
by sticking two skewers into a long potato; and he walked the stage,
hitching forward first one side and then the other, much as the child
would make his creature walk. But he was a very "nice" young man, was
always ready to sing, and faute de mieux it became the fashion with
the very young to like him. But there never was a tenor of any note in
New York whose singing was so utterly without character or significance
and who was so deficient in histrionic ability. His high and long
continued favor is one of those puzzling popular freaks not uncommon
in dramatic annals.
Let us hope, in a spirit of Christian charity and something more
selfish, that Brignoli never read these severely critical words.
His vanity was that of a child, and they would have grieved him
inordinately. There was truly something of the bleat in his voice, and
his walk on the stage, whether in concert or opera, was provocative
of the risibles, but even his mannerisms were fascinating. Shall we,
because a critic did not like him, be ashamed for having thrilled a
little when we heard his "Coot boy, sweetheart, c-o-o-o-t boy!" thirty
years ago? I trust not. And if he were here again, and his manager were
to come with the old request, "Do me a favor, won't you, and if you
chance to meet dear old Brig say something pretty to him and help me
keep him in a good humor against the concert to-night--admire his teeth
and compliment him on his youthful appearance"--we should do it for
old sake's sake, and with a heart full of gratitude. No one could know
Brignoli and remain in ignorance of his frailties and foibles. He
probably ate as no tenor ate before or since--ravenously as a Prussian
dragoon after a fast. No contracts did he sign on a Friday or on a
thirteenth day, and he lived in perpetual dread of the evil eye. Part of
his traveling outfit was a pair of horns, which he relied upon to shield
him in case the possessor of the jettatura should get into his room
and he not have his fingers properly posed. I had been four years in the
turmoil of New York's musical life when Brignoli died; I cannot recall
an unkind word that was ever spoken of him.
CHAPTER VIII
THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE
Not the chronicler of musical doings but the historian of society
should discuss the genesis of the Metropolitan Opera House, which came
twenty-five years ago to displace the Academy of Music as the home of
grand opera in New York. In the second of these "Chapters of Opera"
I cited the Metropolitan Opera House as the last illustration of the
creative impulse which springs from the growth of wealth and social
ambition, and stated that it marked the decay of the old Knickerbocker
régime, and its amalgamation with the newer order of society. Before
this latter occurrence, however, it had become plain that the Academy of
Music could not accommodate all the representatives of the two elements
in fashionable society, who, for one reason or another, wished to own
or occupy the boxes which were the visible sign of wealth and social
position. There was no manifest dissatisfaction, either, with the
Academy of Music or with the performances under the direction of Colonel
Mapleson, though these were conventional enough and the dress of the
operas looked particularly shabby in contrast with the new scenery and
costumes at the new theater when once the rivalry had begun. The house
being satisfactory, popular taste contented with the representations,
and there being no evidences of insufficient room in any part of the
audience room except the private boxes, it seems obvious to the merest
observer from without that social and not artistic impulses led to the
enterprise which produced the new establishment.
The Metropolitan Opera House was built in the summer of 1883. The
corporation which built it was called the Metropolitan Opera House
Company (Limited), and its leading spirits were James A. Roosevelt, the
first president of the board of directors; George Henry Warren, Luther
Kountze, George Griswold Haven, who remained the active head of the
amusement committee from the beginning till he died last spring; William
K. Vanderbilt, William H. Tillinghast, Adrian Iselin, Robert Goelet,
Joseph W. Drexel, Edward Cooper, Henry G. Marquand, George N. Curtis,
and Levi P. Morton. The building is bounded by Broadway, Seventh Avenue,
Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. About one-quarter of the space
is devoted to the audience room, another quarter to the stage and
accessories, and the rest to administrative offices, apartments, etc.
Its cost, including the real estate, was $1,732,978.71, and so actively
was the work of construction pushed that the portion of the building
devoted to the opera was completed when the first performance took place
on October 22, 1883. J. Cleaveland Cady, the architect, had had no
previous experience in building theaters, to which fact must be ascribed
a few impracticable features of the house, most of which have since been
eradicated, but he had made a careful study of the plans of the most
celebrated opera houses of Europe, and the patrons of the house still
have cause to be grateful to him for the care with which he looked after
their safety and comfort. Since then the appearance of the interior has
been changed very considerably. The two tiers of boxes were where they
are now, but their fronts were perpendicular, and there was no bulging
curve at the proscenium. Besides the two tiers of boxes, as they exist
at present, there were twelve baignoirs, six on a side at the stage ends
of the parquet circle, so-called. These were found to be unprofitable,
and were abolished when the house was remodeled about ten years after
the opening. The decoration of the interior was intrusted to E. P.
Tredwill, an architect of Boston, who followed Mr. Cady's wishes in
avoiding all garish display and tawdry effect. The deepest color in the
audience room was the dark, rich red of the carpet on the floor. The
silk linings of the boxes and the curtains between them and the small
salons in the rear were of fabrics specially made for the purpose. They
had an old gold ground and large, raised figures of conventional design
in a darker shade, with dark red threads. The tier fronts, ceiling,
and proscenium were of a light color, the aim having been to obtain a
prevailing tint of ivory. Amid the filigree designs of the pilasters,
which carried the work above the curtain opening, were pictures of
singing and playing cherubs, and back of the bold consoles, which
projected from the side walls, were figures called "The Chorus" and
"The Ballet," painted by Francis Maynard, while above the middle of
the opening, in a segmentary arch, was an allegory, with Apollo as the
central figure, by Francis Lathrop. Statues of the Muses filled niches
on both sides of the consoles. Over the ceiling, amidst the entwinings
of ornamental figures, on a buff ground, were spread a large number
of medallions of oxidized metal, which, in the illumination from the
lights, shone with a copper luster. The house was lighted by gas, though
preparations had been made for the installation of electrical appliances
when that form of illumination should be found justified by economy. As
originally built, the orchestra was sunk sufficiently below the level
of the floor to conceal the performers from all but the occupants of
the upper tiers. In the hope of attaining improved acoustic effects
the floor of the orchestra was laid upon an egg-shaped sound-chamber
of masonry. The innovation did not meet with the approval of Signor
Vianesi, the first musical director at the opera house, and, after an
experimental rehearsal, the floor was raised so that the old conditions
obtained when the performances began. So the orchestra remained, the
players spoiling the picture on the stage, until "Lohengrin" came
to a performance. Then Signor Vianesi was prevailed upon to try the
arrangement from which Mr. Cady had expected fine artistic results.
The effect was good, and the device was adhered to for a space, and in
more or less modified form ever since, though there has been continual
experimentation with the disposition of the instrumentalists.
Operatic performances began at the new house on October 22, 1883, and
after sixty-one representations, at which nineteen operas were produced,
the first season came to an end. I shall tell the story of the season in
greater detail in the next chapter, contenting myself for the present
with an account of the results of the merry war which ensued between
the rival establishments. Colonel Mapleson was intrenched in the Academy
of Music, which opened its doors for its regular season on the same
evening. The advantage lay with Mr. Henry E. Abbey, who had a new house,
the fruit of an old longing, and the realization of long cherished
social aspirations. With the Academy of Music there rested the charm of
ancient tradition, more potent then than it has ever been since, and the
strength of conservatism. There were stars of rare refulgence in both
constellations, which met the Biblical description in differing one
from another in their glory. With Colonel Mapleson was Mme. Adelina
Patti, who, in so far as she was an exponent of the art of beautiful
vocalization, was without a peer the whole world over. She served then
to keep alive the old traditions of Italian song as Mme. Sembrich does
now. At her side stood Mme. Etelka Gerster, with a voice youthful,
fresh, limpid, and wondrously flexible, and a style that was ripening
in a manner that promised soon to compass all the requirements of the
Italian stage from the sentimental characters in which she won her first
successes to the deeper tragic parts which had begun to make appeal to
her ambition. With Mr. Abbey was Mme. Christine Nilsson. Mme. Patti,
though she had grown to womanhood and effected her entrance on the
operatic as well as concert stage in New York, was not so familiar a
figure as Mme. Nilsson. Patti had begun her operatic career at the
Academy of Music in 1859, and had gone to Europe, where she remained
without revisiting her old home until the fall or winter of 1881, when
she came on a concert trip. The trip was more or less a failure, the
public not yet being prepared to pay ten dollars for a reserved seat
to hear anybody sing. After singing at a concert for the benefit of
the sufferers from forest fires in Michigan, she announced a reduction
of prices to two dollars for general admission, and five dollars for
reserved seats. Under these conditions business improved somewhat, but
in February, 1882, she found it necessary to organize an opera company
in order to awaken interest fairly commensurate with her great merit
and fame. It was a sorry company, and the performances, only a few,
took place in the Germania Theater, on Broadway, at Thirteenth Street,
formerly Wallack's; but they were received with much enthusiasm. So far
as London was concerned, she was under engagement at the time to Mr.
Gye, Colonel Mapleson's rival at Covent Garden. Mr. Abbey claimed that
he had an option on any American engagement for opera, but she appeared
next season at the Academy, and the doughty English manager held her as
his trump card in the battle royal which ensued on the opening of the
Metropolitan.
In the twenty years of Mme. Patti's absence from New York, Mme. Nilsson,
who had come to the metropolis in the heyday of her European fame in
1870, had won her way deep into the hearts of the people. In 1883 she
was no longer in her prime, neither her voice nor her art having stood
the wear of time as well as those of Mme. Patti, who was six months her
senior in age, and five years in stage experience, but she was more
than a formidable rival in the admiration of the public. She was no less
happy in the companionship of Mme. Sembrich as a junior partner than
Patti was with Mme. Gerster. Both of the younger singers were fresh from
their first great European successes. Three years later Mme. Gerster
went back to Mme. Marchesi, her teacher, with her voice irreparably
damaged. "The penalty of motherhood," said her friends; "the result of
worry over the failure to hold her place in the face of opposition,"
said more impartial observers. Mme. Sembrich went back to Europe to
continue her triumphs after disaster had overtaken her first American
manager, and in a decade returned, to remain an ornament of the
Metropolitan ever since.
In Mr. Abbey's ranks were also Mme. Fursch-Madi, Mme. Scalchi, Mme.
Trebelli, Mme. Lablache (who gave way to her daughter till a quarrel
over her between the impresarios was determined), and Mme. Valleria,
who had come to the Academy some time before from London, though she
was a Baltimorean by birth--a sterling artist who is remembered by
all connoisseurs with gratitude and admiration. Chief among Colonel
Mapleson's masculine forces was Signor Galassi, a somewhat rude but
otherwise excellent barytone. At the head of the tenors was Signor
Nicolini, the husband of Mme. Patti, who sang only when she did, but not
always. The circumstance that Mme. Patti insisted upon his engagement,
also, whenever she signed a contract gave rise to a malicious story
to the effect that she had two prices, one of, let us say merely for
illustration, 6,000 francs for herself alone, one of 4,000 francs for
herself and Nicolini. The rest of the male contingent was composed
mostly of small fry--Vicini, Perugini, and Falletti, tenors, Cherubini
and Lombardini, basses, and Caracciolo, buffo. Mr. Abbey had carried off
three admired men singers from the Academy--Campanini, Del Puente, and
Novara--and brought an excellent barytone, Kaschmann, from Europe, and
a redoubtable tenor, Stagno.
There was little to interest a public supposedly weary of the
barrel-organ list in the promises made in the rival announcements.
Colonel Mapleson held forth the prospect of Patti in Gounod's "Roméo
et Juliette," and "Mireille" (in Italian, of course), as well as in
Rossini's "La Gazza ladra," a forgotten opera then and again forgotten
now; other old works which were to be revived for her and Mme. Gerster
were "Crispino e la Comare," and "L'Elisir d'Amore." Mme. Pappenheim's
presence as the dramatic soprano of the company (a less necessary
personage in the companies of that day than now) led to the promise of
"Norma" and "Oberon." Only the Italian work was given. Mr. Abbey's book
of good intentions embraced twenty-four operas, all of them familiar
except "La Gioconda," which had been the novelty of the preceding
London season.
The outcome of the battle between the opera houses was defeat for both.
The Academy of Music survived for two more campaigns, out of which the
new house came triumphant, while the old went down forever. It was
different with the men. Mr. Abbey retired after one season, forswearing
opera, as he said, for all time; Colonel Mapleson, though defeated,
was a smaller loser, and he was not only brave enough to prepare for a
second encounter, but also adroit enough to persuade Mme. Patti to place
herself under his guidance again. Mr. Abbey's losses have been a matter
of speculation ever since. It was known at the time that he had lost
all the profits of three or four other managerial enterprises, and some
years ago I feared that I might be exaggerating when I set down the
deficit of the Metropolitan Opera House in its first season at $300,000.
As I write now, however, I have before me a letter from Mr. John B.
Schoeffel, who was associated with Mr. Abbey as partner, in which he
says that the losses of the season were "nearly $600,000."
[The operas performed at the Academy of Music in the season 1883-1884
were: "La Sonnambula," "Rigoletto," "Norma," "Faust," "Linda di
Chamouni," "La Gazza ladra," "Marta," "La Traviata," "Aïda," "L'Elisir
d'Amore," "Crispino e la Comare," and "Les Huguenots" (in Italian).]
CHAPTER IX
FIRST SEASON AT THE METROPOLITAN
Twenty-five years ago there was no opera in the current repertory
comparable in popularity with "Faust." If I am told that neither is
there to-day I shall neither gainsay my informant nor permit the fact
to give me heartburnings in spite of my attitude toward the modern
lyric drama. To that popularity Mme. Nilsson contributed a factor of
tremendous puissance. No singer who is still a living memory was so
intimately associated in the local mind with Gounod's masterpiece as
she, whose good fortune it had been to recreate the character of
Marguerite, when, on March 3, 1869, the opera in a remodeled form was
transferred from the Théâtre Lyrique to the Grand Opéra in Paris. Coming
to New York soon afterward, it was she who set the standard by which,
for a long time, all subsequent representatives of the character were
judged. With her, Mme. Scalchi (who never had more than one rival in the
part of Siebel so far as New Yorkers are concerned, viz., Annie Louise
Cary), and Signor Campanini (the most popular Faust who has ever sung
in New York) in the company, it was no wonder that the opera was chosen
for performance on the opening night at the Metropolitan Opera House on
October 22, 1883. The opera was sung in Italian, no manager's fancy
having yet attained such a conception, as that all operas ought to be
sung in the language in which they were composed--and might be; for this
reason the names in the cast, though given in their familiar French
forms may be transliterated into Italian if so they will better please
the reader. The cast then was as follows: Marguerite, Mme. Nilsson;
Siebel, Mme. Scalchi; Martha, Mlle. Lablache (whose mother had
been expected to appear in the part, but was prevented by judicial
injunction); Faust, Signor Campanini; Valentine, Signor Del Puente;
Mephistopheles, Signor Novara.
The performance did not differ materially from many which had taken
place in the Academy of Music when the same artists took part. All the
principal artists, indeed, had been heard in the opera many times when
their powers were greater. Mme. Nilsson had been thirteen years before
the American public, and though in this period her art had grown in
dignity and nobility, her voice had lost the fresh bloom of its youth,
and her figure had begun to take on matronly contours. Still, she was a
great favorite, and hers was an extraordinary triumph, the outburst of
popular approbation coming, as was to have been expected, in the garden
scene of the opera. Referring to my review of the performance which
appeared in The Tribune of the next day, I note that till that moment
there had been little enthusiasm. After she had sung the scintillant
waltz, however, "the last film of ice that had held the public in
decorous check was melted," and an avalanche of plaudits overwhelmed the
fair singer. Bouquets rained from the boxes, and baskets of flowers were
piled over the footlights till it seemed as if there was to be no end.
In the midst of the floral gifts there was also handed up a magnificent
velvet casket inclosing a wreath of gold bay leaves and berries,
ingeniously contrived to be extended into a girdle to be worn in the
classic style, and two gold brooch medallions, bearing the profiles
of Tragedy and Comedy, with which the girdle was to be fastened. The
donor was not mentioned, but an inscription told that the gift was in
"commemoration of the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House." Signor
Campanini had spent the year before the opening in retirement, hoping
to repair the ravages made in his voice by the previous seasons at the
Academy of Music, and, I regret to say, possibly his careless mode of
life. His faults had been conspicuous for several seasons, and the
hoped-for amendment did not discover itself. "Occasionally the old-time
sweetness, and again occasionally the old-time manly ring was apparent
in his notes, but they were always weighted down by the evidences of
labor, and the brilliancy of the upper tones with which he used to fire
an audience into uncontrollable enthusiasm was gone."
The regular subscription nights at the Metropolitan in the first season,
and for all the seasons that followed down to that of 1907-08, were
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with afternoon performances on
Saturdays. On the second night of the season, October 24, 1883, Mr.
Abbey brought forward two of his new singers. The opera was "Lucia di
Lammermoor," the first performance of which in the new house was made
memorable by the introduction of Mme. Marcella Sembrich. She had been
engaged by Mr. Abbey on the strength of the success achieved by her
in the London season of 1883. She was almost at the beginning of her
career, being little known outside of Athens, where she made her début,
Dresden, where she had sung in German, and London. She had dazzled the
British metropolis by her vocalization, especially in "Lucia," and it
was for this reason that it was selected for her introduction to New
York. Before the season came to an end she sang in "I Puritani," "Don
Giovanni," "La Traviata," and "Hamlet." All the good qualities which
have since then been extolled hundreds of times by the critics of the
New York newspapers were noticeable in her first representation. I
turn back to the files of The Tribune to see what I wrote while under
the spell of her witching art, and find the following:
Mme. Sembrich is a lovely singer,--lovely of person, of address, of
voice; and her artistic acquirements, in the limited field in which
Donizetti's opera called them into activity, at least, are of the
highest rank. Her style is exquisite, and plainly the outgrowth of a
thoroughly musical nature. It unites some of the highest elements of
art. Such reposefulness of manner, such smoothness and facility in
execution, such perfect balance of tone and refinement of expression
can be found only in one richly endowed with deep musical feeling and
ripe artistic intelligence. She carries her voice wondrously well
throughout a w
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