Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (10 page)

The Metropolitan board had sidestepped the
Parsifal
controversy, remaining largely silent in the face of accusations of illegality and blasphemy brought against its lessee.
Salome
’s degeneracy was another matter. While Conried had worried about the response of his public, he had failed to reckon with the puritanical sensibilities of his patrons. Not only did the Metropolitan directors weigh in, they intervened quickly and decisively. Three days after the premiere, on January 25, they effectively demanded that Conried cancel the three non-subscription performances he had announced at the conclusion of the benefit. Their resolution read: “The directors of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company consider that the performance of
Salome
is objectionable and detrimental to the best interests of the Metropolitan Opera House. They therefore protest against any repetition of this opera.” It was one thing to take on Cosima Wagner and a handful of New York ministers, however vociferous. It was another to resist the orders of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, called by one commentator the “moving spirit and virtual dictator of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company,” and his powerful cronies. Led by Morgan, whose daughter, Louisa Satterlee, had been deeply offended by
Salome
and prodded her father to take action, the executive committee
was unanimous in its condemnation. One member, D. Ogden Mills, threatened more than termination of contract: “I understand that if Mr. Conried attempts to put the opera on in spite of the objections which have been made the board is quite likely to use force to prevent his doing so” (
Times,
Jan. 28, 1907). Several pastors took advantage of Sunday sermons to vent their outrage. Methodist Episcopal Rev. Dr. Charles Edward Locke, for one, came to the dubious conclusion that “such productions were responsible for such tragedies as the Stanford White case” (
Tribune,
Jan. 28, 1907).
¹¹

 

FIGURE 10.
Olive Fremstad as Salome, 1907 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

The “protest” of the board of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company was, in essence, an interdiction that the board of the Conried Metropolitan Opera Company, principally Otto H. Kahn and Robert Goelet, attempted in vain to have rescinded. In a letter of January 30, 1907, Conried’s board argued that
Salome
was “recognized by the consensus of the
most competent critics of modern music as a monumental work, probably the greatest which musical genius has produced in this generation.” They argued further that in opera, as everyone knew, it was the music that counted, that the text was inconsequential and, in any case, “sung here in a foreign language.” Strauss himself was known to consider the libretto “so subordinate to the orchestral composition that, when told that the orchestra augmented to over 100 men would drown the voices on the stage, he said: ‘I don’t care if it does, never mind the voices or the words, bring out the music of the orchestra regardless of the singers.’” As to the opera’s source, the letter to Morgan and his allies made clear that Conried had no interest in defending Wilde, now several years dead. Strauss was the issue. In the future, Conried promised, the head of John the Baptist would be all but hidden from view. Besides, early sales predicted brisk business. Fremstad threw herself into the debate. She confessed that she too had been appalled when she first encountered the work in Cologne but had come to appreciate the grandeur of the score. In her evocation of the final scene, as Salome “sees his severed head she feels the only love of which she is capable, and her feeling is partly passionate and partly ideal. Strauss tells me this. Wilde tells me nothing” (
Times,
Jan. 27, 1907).

 

FIGURE 11.
Salome banished,
Harper’s Weekly
, February 9, 1907

 

At one point, there was talk that if the opera could not be performed on 39th Street, the contract with the composer would be honored on tour in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston (
Times,
Jan. 28, 1907). That fell through. Conried spoke of moving
Salome
to another house; the New Amsterdam Theatre was mentioned (
Tribune,
Jan. 30, 1907). That too failed to materialize; Conried’s own board was opposed. More than once, the Metropolitan directors offered to share in losses estimated at $30,000 in production costs and $50,000 in missed box-office receipts. Morgan declared himself ready to make Conried whole on his own. The Conried Metropolitan Opera Company would not be co-opted. To the credit of the
Times,
its editorial of January 29, 1907, sided with Conried and Kahn in protesting the censorship: “We tremble to think what the result may be if the newly aroused conscience of the Directors of the Opera House and Realty Company, seeking what it may devour, should be turned in this direction. Not only
Salome,
but a good many other musical masterpieces would be put upon the Index.”
¹²

In 1907, Salome danced but a single night at the Metropolitan. Here are three footnotes to that story. On February 17, the
Sun
kept the polemic going with a page-wide spread, “Salomes of Many Lands,” featuring photographs of singers and actresses who had taken on the role and extensive notes on their costumes and interpretations; the next month, Conried exacted some small
revenge on Morgan and the others by producing the Wilde play in German at his old hunting grounds, the Irving Place Theatre; and soon after, France decorated Fremstad as an Officer of Public Instruction for her service to art in the recent Paris production of Strauss’s
Musikdrama
(
Tribune,
July 19, 1907).

Two years after its Metropolitan premiere,
Salome
returned to New York, this time in an opulent French-language edition at the Manhattan Opera House. News of the run must have been a bitter pill for Conried to swallow. Although much had changed in the intervening seasons, the 1909 reviews of Strauss’s score and libretto varied little from the notices of 1907. Observers described the responses of the overflowing opening night audiences in strikingly similar terms. Prominent clergy dusted off their thundering sermons. Nonetheless, the Manhattan put on ten performances of
Salome
in 1909 and four the next year. In the end it came to this: Hammerstein owned his own theater, answered to no executive committee, was beholden to no investors, and the show went on. There was another important difference, and that was Mary Garden. In the obligatory pairing with Fremstad, critics agreed that Garden came up impossibly short. The “plain truth,” as Henderson condensed it, was “that Miss Garden [could not] sing a phrase of Strauss’ music” (
Sun,
Jan. 10). But her magnetism, her extraordinary acting, and her own unabashed interpretation of the erotic dance carried the day.
¹³

Well before Mary Garden’s
Salome,
Hammerstein offered the composer generous terms for
Elektra,
his still-to-be-produced next opera. On May 29, 1908, Kahn wrote to Strauss acknowledging the Met’s disastrous handling of
Salome,
placing the blame largely on the broad shoulders of J.P. Morgan. He hoped to divert Strauss’s “lust for revenge” by appealing to the composer’s famed cupidity: “Since you aim your wrath at us you affect Mr. Morgan not at all; instead you harm
us
first of all and second, yourself, financially at least . . . your works will be done only by Hammerstein and not in both houses.” Kahn’s entreaties went unheeded; in January 1910, Hammerstein staged the American premiere of
Elektra
.
¹⁴

Fifteen years after the
Salome
debacle, Kahn pleaded with the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company for a reprieve. The opera was a specialty of his new favorite, Maria Jeritza, “an artist of the highest attainments and of dignity and refinement.” His request came with the pious assurance that he would “be unwilling to sanction any performance which could give just offence to the moral or religious sentiments of the community.” Kahn was again rebuffed, and this time there was no question of not being co-opted. On the contrary, the matter was considered settled when Kahn put his name to a
joint communiqué upholding the continued proscription. On January 13, 1934, twenty-seven years after her stand-in had shed the seventh veil, Fremstad was in the audience to witness the famous dance, at last reprised at the Met. Soprano Göta Ljungberg executed the number herself, as have all Salomes since, scandalizing no one, with the exception of Terpsichore; she did little more than drop the scarves she had tucked into her costume moments before. Conductor Artur Bodanzky was “the most refulgent star of the evening.” Strauss’s opera had finally entered the company’s repertoire. But Fremstad aside, it was not until the debut in 1949 of Ljuba Welitsch that Salome was rendered in full, both histrionically and vocally.
Variety
came up with one of its irreverent headlines: “Met’s Sensational New Soprano, Welitsch, Puts 52d St. [New York’s burlesque district] Shimmy to Shame” (Feb. 9). Unlike Fremstad and most of her Met successors, Wagnerians with instruments weighted for the midrange heroic perorations of Isolde and Brünnhilde and often taxed by the high-lying moments of their jubilation or fury, Welitsch was a finely focused
spinto
(a lyric soprano with incisive potential), firm throughout her range, free and incandescent in an upper register that cut through Strauss’s orchestral mass without apparent effort. Here was the youthful sound Strauss had wanted for the spoiled and murderous teenager. The fifteen-minute ovation was followed by the print hosannas of the morning-after reviews. Fritz Reiner’s precise baton shared in the triumph, repeated in the air check of the March 12 broadcast and the commercial recording of the final scene made at that time. For those of us in the audience on January 19, 1952, the force of the conductor-singer collaboration was overwhelming—although, if truth be told, the soprano’s voice was a shade less vivid than her flaming red hair. The Reiner-Welitsch
Salome
is the opera’s touchstone.
¹⁵

The four-year second opera war pitted the by now entrenched Metropolitan against the upstart company lodged in the more recent of the two venues that Oscar Hammerstein named the Manhattan Opera House. His headquarters stood on 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, just a short walk south and west of Conried’s. The campaign would be waged half by the Met’s current intendant and half by his successor, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. On one of many of the period’s extraordinary nights, January 2, 1907, 6,720 persons were reported to have made their way to 34th Street to hear Nellie Melba,
Alessandro Bonci, and Maurice Renaud in
La Traviata
or to 39th Street to hear Emma Eames, Enrico Caruso, and Antonio Scotti in
Tosca
. On occasion, and no doubt on purpose, the two managers scheduled the same work at the same hour, for instance, January 26, 1910, when the operaphile was presented with a wrenching choice: whether to cheer Caruso’s Rodolfo at the Met or John McCormack’s at the Manhattan. For four stunning seasons, New York witnessed hundreds of performances at very high standards as once again two major companies sought to outdo and, above all, to outlast each other. If in this contest and the one with Mapleson the Met was the last house standing, its survival was due not so much to its facilities, its roster, or its repertoire as to the backing it enjoyed from the New York families that called it their own.
¹⁶

The no-holds-barred feud of 1906 was fed by the bad blood between the men in charge. Their rivalry dated back several decades to the first stage assignment of the freshly emigrated Conried, when fate willed that Hammerstein bankroll his show. The dueling impresarios may have had both too little and too much in common. Like Conried, Hammerstein was an immigrant and Jewish. He had landed as a teenager in 1863, fourteen years before Conried’s arrival. German, not Austrian, he had had training in music rather than in drama. Once in the United States, he went to work making cigars and eventually turned his trade into a fortune by inventing machines for their manufacture. In the 1870s, he began to back shows of all sorts. By the late 1880s, he had become obsessed with building theaters. The first of his astounding series was the Harlem Opera House, completed in 1889. It was followed by the Columbus Theatre in 1890, also in Harlem. In 1892 came the original Manhattan Opera House, located on 34th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, home to opera for only two weeks. The most profitable of the several legitimate and vaudeville houses whose construction Hammerstein financed was the 1899 Victoria, at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street. There would be others, in New York and elsewhere, most particularly the second Manhattan Opera House, of course, and the Philadelphia Opera House, a thumb in the Metropolitan’s eye. Hammerstein rushed it to completion in record time in 1908, the midpoint of the four-year contest. The Met had been performing regularly down Broad Street at the Academy of Music, then as now as beautiful a theater as any in the country.
¹⁷

Whether Hammerstein’s first season ended in the black or not, which is a matter of dispute, the Manhattan was judged to have gained the upper hand thanks to the illustrious and colorful troupe the impresario assembled, to the musical leadership of conductor Cleofonte Campanini (brother of Italo, the
Met’s leading tenor in 1883–84), and particularly to the defection of Melba from the Metropolitan. But Hammerstein labored under two crippling disadvantages. The company had been unable to attract the cohort of German singers necessary to Wagner. And, at least as enfeebling, Puccini was strictly off-limits. The composer’s publisher, Casa Ricordi, had ceded exclusive American rights to Puccini’s works to the Metropolitan, and this time legality was not in question, as it had been in Bayreuth’s claims against Conried’s
Parsifal
three years earlier. Hammerstein’s strategy to circumvent the prohibition so as to mount
La Bohème
for Melba was both cumbersome and chancy, cumbersome because the score had to be reconstructed from a mutilated copy (with help from Campanini’s prodigious memory), and chancy because to provoke Ricordi invited a lawsuit, which was indeed filed and ultimately ended in the predictable injunction.
¹⁸

In his second year Hammerstein took a bold turn. With Wagner and Puccini off the table, he opted for recent French works never before performed in the city and engaged artists who could do them justice, Mary Garden in particular, in her first New York appearances. In short order, the Manhattan took on the cachet of a “Parisian” theater. Claude Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande,
refused by Conried “with a contemptuous wave of his hand,” was premiered with nearly the very cast that had introduced the work at the Opéra-Comique in 1902. Garden gave New York not only its first Mélisande, but its first Thaïs and its first Louise. Jacques Offenbach’s
Les Contes d’Hoffmann,
not yet heard at the Met, sold out its eleven Manhattan performances. The public embraced these novelties as firmly as it had resisted Grau’s French premieres not five years earlier. Was it the glamorous and compelling Garden that accounted for the difference? Or was it the quality of the works? By any measure,
La Navarraise, Salammbô,
and
Messaline
paled before
Pelléas et Mélisande, Thaïs,
and
Louise
. In his first year, Hammerstein scheduled French opera for 25 percent of the Manhattan’s performances; in 1907–08, he went to 48 percent, in 1908–09 39 percent, in 1909–10 54 percent. The corresponding percentages at the Met were substantially lower: 16 percent, 9 percent, 9 percent, 12 percent. Hammerstein found yet another way to outmaneuver his antagonist: he stole Luisa Tetrazzini from Conried. Two years earlier, the Met’s general manager had negotiated a contract with the coloratura that he carelessly left unsigned. From the moment of her debut as Violetta, Tetrazzini had New York at her feet as she had had London the year before.
¹⁹

The two
indendants
fought over everything: over repertoire, over casts, and over the always thorny issue of the audience that opera was duty bound
to serve. Hammerstein’s seating plan spoke volumes for his position. He wanted nothing like the Diamond Horseshoe or, for that matter, any horseshoe at all. What he hatched was a comfortable auditorium holding thirty-one hundred, three hundred fewer than the Met, with increased proximity to the well-equipped stage, good sight lines, and acoustics that many preferred to those of the older house. His refusal to bend to the frivolous demands of the gentry proved risky; so was the proposition that the growing immigrant population would fill the void. By 1910, the Manhattan’s last season, the number of Italian-born New Yorkers, roughly 340,000, up dramatically from 145,000 ten years earlier, was approximately equal to the number of German-born New Yorkers at the time of the Met’s German seasons, 1884–1891. Assuming affection for opera by many transplanted Europeans and their first-generation offspring, an enormous pool was theoretically available to Hammerstein for what he fervently believed to be a popular art form. Still, that New York would sustain two such high-rolling competitors as the Manhattan and the Metropolitan remained a long shot.
²⁰