Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (7 page)

Meyerbeer’s
Il Profeta
(March 21, 1884),
Der Profet
(Dec. 17, 1884), and
Le Prophète
(Jan. 1, 1892) mark the transitions that define the slice of history we cover in the first two chapters of this book: from the Grand Italian Opera to the German seasons to the international house the Metropolitan became in 1891.
Il Profeta
was on Abbey’s bill for the inaugural season,
Der Profet
on Damrosch’s program for the first German season, and
Le Prophète
on the boards on Abbey’s return. Meyerbeer, who in 1815 traded the Jakob he was given at birth for the Italian Giacomo, was arguably the most cosmopolitan of his peers. He composed operas on Italian and German texts (
Il Crociato in Egitto
and
Ein Feldlager in Schlesien,
for example), and most memorably on French librettos. His works range in style from bel canto to the grand opéra he is credited with founding, in the company of Auber and Rossini.
Le Prophète
shared with his
Les Huguenots,
Bizet’s
Carmen,
and Gounod’s
Faust
the distinction of trilingual hearings in the Met’s Italian, German, and early international years.

The positive reception of the March 21, 1884
Il Profeta
was buried under three distractions. The first was the misguided staging of one of the opera’s
best-known pages; the second, the misbehavior of the box holders; and the third, a suit brought by the impresario against his star contralto. The
Times
reported affably on the “general merriment” provoked by “the evolution of the [roller] skaters, one of whom fell twice” during what the composer and his librettist, Eugène Scribe, intended as a coup de théâtre, a spectacular ice-skating scene. The reviewer took a less genial tone toward the “indifference or servility of the multifarious management” vis-à-vis arrogant box holders who “considered themselves privileged to indulge in conversations which are heard over half the house.” And lastly, the contralto sued by Abbey for damages was Sofia Scalchi; she had refused to replace an ailing colleague. Abbey was forced to cancel. The defense protested that “Mme. Scalchi was and is but human, and had eaten a hearty breakfast. It was impossible for her to appear at so short a notice as Fidès, but she offered to sing in anything else and even two or three acts of
The Prophet
.” Delighted to strike a blow for the Academy, Mapleson testified in favor of Scalchi and, more to the point, against Abbey: “His experience, you know, was only obtained in 1883 and 1884. Before that he knew nothing of operatic management” (
Times,
Dec. 18, 1884).

The New York press seized the opportunity to bask in its pro-German biases by contrasting the December 17, 1884,
Der Profet
to the earlier
Il Profeta
. The
Mail and Express
drew out the parallel: “Last year’s interpretation of it at the same house sinks into insignificance compared with last night’s. Then it seemed merely a show opera. Now it is revealed as a musical and dramatic composition of solid and substantial worth.” The German-language performance had disclosed the opera’s previously obscured qualities. Putting aside his contempt for the composer in the interest of the larger agenda, Krehbiel proclaimed
Der Profet
“an extraordinary work,” a judgment absent from his review of
Il Profeta
. He went on to cite “the great amount of really fine dramatic writing, both vocal and instrumental, with which Meyerbeer has enriched Scribe’s poor libretto” (
Tribune,
Dec. 20). For the
Times,
Marianne Brandt, as Fidès, “acted . . . with a mastery of the methods of expression quite foreign to the exponents of Italian art.” The press corps’s declaration of unconditional German superiority rings hollow: the year before, the same newspaper, and in all likelihood the same reviewer, had lauded the performance of Scalchi in the same role in approximately the same terms. And although one critic asserted that “the
Prophet
was given with a magnificence of ensemble last night at the Metropolitan that made it one of the notable representations of Dr. Damrosch’s already notable season”
(World),
another pointed out that Damrosch conducted from a piano score
and failed to cue musicians, to the detriment of the musical product (
Musical Courier,
Dec. 24, 1884). This much is clear: that during the inaugural and German seasons,
Il Profeta/Der Profet
ran a close second to the thirty-three performances chalked up by
Faust,
the period’s leading title, excepting the Wagner entries, of course.
¹⁴

Meyerbeer’s opera is set in sixteenth-century Holland and Germany during the uprising of the fanatical Anabaptists. The spectacle devised by the composer and his librettist includes not only the skating ballet derided by reviewers in 1884, but a Bacchic orgy, a cataclysmic explosion, and Jean de Leyde’s coronation in the Münster cathedral. Here, the private drama is enacted in the public arena: Fidès, begging alms of the assembled, recognizes her lost son in the newly crowned king; fearing for their lives, Jean denies that Fidès is his mother; and grasping the danger, she denies him in return. Critics extoled this scene and, in particular, Scalchi’s Italian rendition and, some months later, Brandt’s in German. On New Year’s Day 1892
Le Prophète
finally made it to 39th Street in the original French. The cast was led by Polish tenor Jean de Reszke as Jean, the reluctant false prophet, by German soprano Lilli Lehmann, who had often sung the role of Berthe in German at the Met, and by Giulia Ravogli, an Italian contralto, as Fidès, the selfless mother.

On opening night 1891, a fortnight prior to
Le Prophète,
de Reszke, his brother Édouard, and Emma Eames made their New York debuts in Gounod’s
Roméo et Juliette
—and French was heard at the Metropolitan for the first time. But through the end of the season,
Les Huguenots, Faust, Mignon, L’Africaine,
and
Hamlet,
all French, were sung in Italian, the language to which
Lohengrin, Der Fliegende Holländer, Die Meistersinger,
and
Fidelio
reverted in the early international years. The reinstatement of Italian opera in Italian was immediate. But only in 1893–94 were
Faust
and
Carmen
given wholly in French;
Mignon
and
Les Huguenots
continued in Italian. It was not until 1898–99 that the reconversion of Wagner into German was complete. In the intervening years, circumstances called for hybrid solutions, polyglot performances in which one or more of the principals sang in the original language while lesser members of the cast, and more often the chorus, sang in another, or indeed others. But whatever the fits and starts, the Metropolitan was ahead of the world’s great houses by fifty years
and more in the practice of setting scores to the texts to which they had first been wed.

In the initial international season, audiences clamoring for
Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Lucia di Lammermoor, Norma,
and
Rigoletto
were placated by fourteen Italian titles, half the program. German opera fell away to a mere sixteen performances of four works, all given in Italian. Between 1891 and 1903, the company mounted sixteen French premieres, exceeding even the quotient of Italian novelties. For these firsts, the managers engaged a cadre of French specialists: Emma Eames, Nellie Melba, and Jean and Édouard de Reszke, whose reputations were cemented in Paris; Jean Lassalle, Pol Plançon, and Emma Calvé, who had created major roles in works by Massenet; Marie Van Zandt, the first Lakmé; and Sybil Sanderson, the first Thaïs. In all, twenty-five French operas were staged. Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau could count on
Faust, Carmen, Roméo et Juliette,
and
Les Huguenots
—assuming, of course, that they paraded stellar casts.
Werther, Hamlet, L’Africaine,
and others languished even when sung by these same artists. Still, the frequency of performance, the new works, the number and glamour of French and Francophone stars, and the generous receipts of the beloved chestnuts conspired to assure pride of place for French opera in the early international years.

First-night notices were condescending for the most part, if not out and out inimical. But underlying disdain for
Roméo et Juliette
as the vanguard of the Met’s new era and the mixed reception of Eames and Jean de Reszke was the invidious comparison of the international chapter just opened with the German chapter just closed. As usual, the
Musical Courier
reviewer went further than his more judicious colleagues. He let fly with the prognostication that the Gounod performance was the harbinger of what would prove a disastrous regime. His devastating critique of opening night concluded, “Let us hope that the two managers [Abbey and Grau] will not live to rue the day. But we are under the impression that a public which has had seven years of education in a school of opera in which artistic ensemble and dramatic vraisemblance are not sacrificed to the glorification of two or three high salaried stars will not hail the new dispensation with hymns of abiding joy” (Dec. 16, 1891). The
Musical Courier
’s most venomous diatribes were reserved for the
Herald
’s francophilic editor and founder of the Paris edition, James Gordon Bennett, whose paper had spoken for the anti-Wagner forces during the German seasons.
In its rave of
Roméo et Juliette,
distilled as “a general impression of beauty, grace and pleasure; a grateful freedom from the fatigue which has almost invariably accompanied even the best performances at the Metropolitan by German singers,” the
Herald
gave the Wagnerites as good, and with far better humor, as it got: “Dark haired, romantic sons of the South in sky blue hose and doublet, pointed of shoe and plumed of cap, held the stage so lately occupied by stern, blond knights in silver armor; clinging girlhood trembled and thrilled where stalwart demi-goddesses lately strode the boards.” The French repertoire claimed the lion’s share of that season’s New York performances. Nine
Faust
s, with the de Reszkes and Eames, headed the pack. The two French novelties, neither new to the city, were as lightweight as the voice of Van Zandt, for whom they were staged. Meyerbeer’s opéra comique
Dinorah,
with its demented heroine and her pet goat, was “too small and unattractive for so vast a house as the Metropolitan”
(Herald)
. Reviewers indulged Léo Delibes’s
Lakmé
as “exceedingly pleasant”
(Tribune),
an “exquisite little romantic opera, with the charming little American prima donna”
(Herald)
.

Two of the three Italian entries got off to disappointing starts in the winter of 1891. That September, a touring company had presented a rough-and-ready edition of
Cavalleria rusticana
in Philadelphia; Pietro Mascagni was seen as pumping new energy into the spent traditions of Italian opera. At the Met in December, Eames’s patrician Santuzza and the “stridulous” Turiddu of Fernando Valero
(Tribune)
earned only tepid receipts for the Sicilian melodrama. Just two years later, Calvé, “a woman with hot blood in her veins” (
Tribune,
Nov. 30, 1893), set
Cavalleria
on the palmy road it has since enjoyed. As for
Otello,
first performed at the Academy of Music in 1888 by an Italian ensemble assembled for the purpose, it was immediately acknowledged as the crowning work of Verdi’s immense oeuvre. (
Falstaff
was yet to come.) But de Reszke himself, as the Moor, could not rescue
Otello
from the ignominy of the poorest box office of the Met’s 1891–92 season. The opera’s enduring appeal would be realized only many decades later. The third novelty,
Semiramide,
given only in Boston and never to become a fixture, was an ephemeral showcase for Adelina Patti. Later that year, she would bid yet another of her many “farewells” to her devoted New York public. The “Lesson Scene” of
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
was an anthology of old favorites, capped by “The Last Rose of Summer.” That was not all: Patti stood before the final curtain and regaled her fans with “Comin’ through the Rye.”
¹⁵

In August, a catastrophe befell the house. Fire destroyed the stage, the floors below, and those above all the way to the roof, and damaged parts of
the auditorium. The Met’s year-old management had no recourse but to cancel the 1892–93 season. Security measures had been so mindlessly circumvented that it took no more than one vagrant match to ignite the conflagration. The vaunted sprinkler system had been turned off in the cold of winter and remained inactive; in the heat of summer, the asbestos curtain had been raised to better ventilate the stage; iron girders had been replaced by more flexible, and flammable, lumber supports. The estimated cost of rebuilding was far higher than the amount for which the house had been insured; it was precisely the state-of-the-art fireproofing, cavalierly disabled, that had justified the low valuation.

The board seized the opportunity of the crisis to restructure the Metropolitan Opera House Company as the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company. The number of stockholders was reduced from a cumbersome seventy to a more manageable thirty-five, all of whom had exclusive rights to their boxes. A couple of negative ballots would suffice to block the transfer of shares. And the directors of the reorganized company reserved for themselves unprecedented control over artistic decisions: during the Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau years, and later, they cleaved to the prerogative of endorsing six of the principal singers each season, two of whom were to appear in every subscription performance. The new architects replaced the boxes at the parquet level with an orchestra circle and additional standing room. Seating capacity grew from 3,045 to 3,400; with standees, the theater held 4,000. Following Cady’s lead, the firm of Carrere and Hastings slighted theatrical red—not for the original yellow and ivory, but for cream. This time there was no carping. The new electric lights accented the parures sparkling in the thirty-five coveted boxes to such dazzling effect that the “golden” of the 1883 “horseshoe” appreciated to the more precious “diamond.” And as important as the reinvention of the company and the house that the year off allowed was the time for planning afforded to Abbey and Grau by the calamitous event of summer 1892.
¹⁶