Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (8 page)

Faust
opened the rebuilt theater in 1893 as it had the Met a decade earlier. For the first five of the Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau years, it, together with
Roméo et Juliette,
held a monopoly on opening night, a sign of the preeminence of French opera under the new administration.
Faust,
in particular, was performed with such numbing frequency that Henderson famously dubbed the
Metropolitan the “Faustspielhaus.” On February 14, 1896, de Reszke and Melba so incited the audience that a piano had to be rolled onto the stage so that Jean might accompany Nellie in her melodious urging that the crowd wend its way “Home, Sweet Home.”
Carmen,
at last in French, came into its own when the management brought together a cast—Calvé, de Reszke, Eames, and Lassalle—that the
Times
(Dec. 21, 1893) described as “near to justifying the epithet ‘ideal.’” In 1893–94, Calvé appeared in all but one of the thirty performances of Bizet’s opera, half in New York, half on tour; she set what still stands as the single-season record for a singer in a major role. Abandoning all restraint, Krehbiel called hers “the most sensational triumph
ever achieved by any opera or singer.” If, in the course of the hundreds of Carmens she sang all over the world during her long career, Calvé became capricious, even ridiculous, in 1896 Henderson thought her perfect: “Her performance last night was that of a genius” (
Times,
Dec. 12). Iterations of the 1894–95
Les Huguenots
with Melba, the two de Reszkes, Lillian Nordica, Plançon, Scalchi, and Victor Maurel were promoted as “The Night of the Seven Stars.” The price for orchestra seats was raised from $5 to $7 and hyped at $1 a luminary.
¹⁷

 

FIGURE 7.
Emma Calvé as Carmen (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Throughout this period, as before and since, critics petitioned loudly for new music that they then found wanting for one reason or another. It was the rare house premiere that won over the press, or indeed the audience. The nine French novelties introduced between 1893 and 1897 were all box-office failures. To Gounod’s sweetened versions of Goethe and Shakespeare, the company added the composer’s
Philémon et Baucis,
based on Ovid by way of La Fontaine; it found a tenuous place in the repertoire through the end of the Grau regime. Far more surprising was that Massenet’s sorrowful
Werther,
with de Reszke and Eames, eked out but one solitary performance on 39th Street. The francophilic
Herald,
no longer obliged to defend the underdog as it had during the Stanton years, reckoned
Werther
“a trifle tiresome for all classes of operagoers.” Herman Bemberg’s
Elaine,
dedicated to Melba and de Reszke, its original interpreters in London, soon disappeared, despite favorable reviews and good box office.
Manon
(Jan. 16, 1895) was a vehicle for Sibyl Sanderson, a California-born soprano, the darling of Paris and, more particularly, of the opera’s composer, Massenet, incidentally one of Bemberg’s teachers. “A much-advertised woman”
(Tribune),
with a small voice and “thin and strident” high notes
(Times),
Sanderson was cited for her charm and beauty, and her costumes, to which the
Herald
consecrated four detailed paragraphs. De Reszke’s Chevalier des Grieux made off with the few honors there were. The work itself was found ill suited to the cavernous Met. Camille Saint-Saëns’s
Samson et Dalila
was even more poorly received, attacked as an oratorio passing as an opera. The
Herald
would have preferred “a little more love in the libretto and not so much Hebrew lamentation!” And during what ought to have been the spectacular finale, “in the midst of wild hilarity” malfunctioning stage machinery hoisted a column that the Samson, Francesco Tamagno, had valorously toppled. Donizetti’s
La Favorite,
sung in its more familiar Italian translation, was dismissed as beneath contempt by Krehbiel and Henderson. Calvé appeared as Anita, a role written for her, in
La Navarraise
. The
Herald
wondered at the good London press for the
one-acter: “To be perfectly blunt, Massenet’s opera is no opera at all. . . . Imagine a series of living pictures, with speech and music thrown in.” An abbreviated
Les Pêcheurs de perles,
also with Calvé, made its debut the same evening as
La Navarraise
. Bizet’s exotic piece bred rare discord between the
Times
(“it abounds in lyric beauties”) and the
Tribune
(“the opera is insufferably stupid”).
Le Cid
was an occasion for de Reszke to reprise the role he had originated in Paris in 1885; the brickbats for Massenet’s music, his fourth Met flop in successive years, and poor receipts for the second performance foretold the opera’s early demise.
¹⁸

Only one of the four new Italian works did any better than the French novelties.
Pagliacci
was initially programmed with the neoclassical
Orfeo,
a coupling as odd as that of the Gluck opera with
Cavalleria rusticana
two years earlier. Ruggero Leoncavallo’s trenchant depiction of a crime of passion within an itinerant commedia dell’arte troupe rang up average receipts until it found its niche that very season as half of
Cav/Pag,
the most indissoluble of all operatic double bills. The ever prodigal Grau again presented his two top sopranos for the price of one, Calvé, who as Santuzza “fairly outdid herself” (
Herald,
Dec. 23, 1893), and an indisposed Melba as Nedda. The response of the
Times,
“the effect of bringing the two operas together in one night was good,” is surely among operatic criticism’s rare understatements.
Falstaff,
starring Maurel, Verdi’s first “Fat John,” fell far below the season’s average. The modest take of
Le Nozze di Figaro
was a faulty predictor of its brilliant future. Even the magnetic Fernando de Lucia and Emma Calvé, in the roles they had created in Rome in 1891, were unable to generate enthusiasm for
L’Amico Fritz
. Mascagni’s romantic comedy had but one complete hearing. Its second act was drafted as a curtain-raiser for, what else, his own inevitable
Cavalleria rusticana,
Calvé as the sweet-tempered Suzel in the former and the impassioned Santuzza in the latter.

How to explain the management’s persistence in mounting new works, given the dismal grades racked up by one premiere after another? If pressure came from the might of reviewers, it also came from within. Like all major companies, the Met guarded its prestige jealously and its standing depended, in significant part, on the propagation of opera as a living art. Equally compelling, perhaps more, was the imperative to keep its stars happy by obliging them with the novel and flattering roles they craved. And after all, if Calvé failed to put over
La Navarraise
or
L’Amico Fritz,
there was always
Carmen;
de Reszke could rely on the trusty
Faust
and
Les Huguenots
to offset
Werther
and
Le Cid
. Then there was the Wagner he demanded to sing in German,
seconded by two thousand starved Wagnerites who had lobbied the management for German performances. Abbey and Grau made their case to the board, and a lucrative fifth slot, Thursday evening, was added to accommodate the German repertoire, with Seidl conducting. Of the many resplendent moments of this period, none is remembered as more electrifying than November 27, 1895, when de Reszke sang Tristan in the original for the first time, brother Édouard King Marke, Nordica Isolde. Before the season ended, the tenor had added Lohengrin in the original. The following year, de Reszke continued to grow his Wagnerian laurels with the young hero of
Siegfried
(for which he shaved his famous moustache), seemingly unperturbed by the drama that surrounded the production. When Melba was announced for Brünnhilde, Nordica, having reason to presume the role to be hers, took understandable umbrage. She held the tenor responsible for the offense and
canceled her season. But Melba came to grief in this, her first and only attempt to rise to the warrior maiden (Dec. 30, 1896). She too dropped out of 1896–97, or what was left of it. In the end, it was de Reszke who counted: his assumption of the heroic roles of the “Ring” guaranteed Wagner stage time comparable, if not to the French wing, certainly to the Italian. That he sang only eight performances of Italian opera out of his more than three hundred in seven years with the company attests not only to the primacy of French and German opera at the end of the century, but to the low estate to which the bel canto composers and Verdi had fallen.
¹⁹

 

FIGURE 8.
Jean de Reszke as Siegfried in
Götterdämmerung
(courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Well before Henry Abbey’s death on October 17, 1896, it was evident that the managing triumvirate was close to bankruptcy. The opera company had held its own, and more; Abbey’s other theatrical ventures were to blame. The board designated William Steinway, principal of the piano firm, to restructure the enterprise as Abbey, Schoeffel, and Grau Ltd., and to rebalance the books. The situation continued to deteriorate nonetheless. Following Abbey’s death and Schoeffel’s withdrawal, Grau found himself alone in charge. He refused to lease the house for 1897–98, when the de Reszkes, Calvé, and Melba chose to sing elsewhere, and repaired instead to Covent Garden, where he was also managing director. For the second time in six years, the Met had no resident company. Those who argued for the primacy of music in the German manner over that of the star system endemic to French and Italian practice were, in some perverse way, vindicated by Grau’s desertion of New York for an entire operatic year.
²⁰

On Grau’s return in 1898, the star system ruled as aggressively as ever. The five-year tenancy of the Maurice Grau Opera Company is often cited as the apogee of the Met’s “golden age.” And as if to silence the opposing camp, for the first time in seventy-three years of intrepid entrepreneurship, it was Grau who proved opera fiscally viable in New York. The company showed a profit in each of his years. His winning strategy was this: to engage the most celebrated artists of the time for the entire season, and to pay them extravagantly, to the despair of competing houses and on the backs of supporting singers, of the orchestra, and of the chorus; to assemble so large a roster of international singers that he could field casts capable of performing in all styles and operatic languages then current; and to make frequent cast changes so as to oblige reviewers to attend again and again. The public, he knew, would put up with
scenery hung interchangeably for Verdi, Wagner, and Meyerbeer as long as it framed the Melbas, the Calvés, and the de Reszkes. As to conductors, he quipped that “no one has ever paid a nickel to see a man’s back.”
²¹

In 1898–99, audiences at last heard an uncut “Ring” cycle, under Franz Schalk, with de Reszke, Lehmann, and Nordica reconciled with the company and her tenor. Sembrich made an emotional return after fifteen years. Melba was absent in 1899–1900 but resurfaced the next year, when, for the first time, the board exercised its right to choose the lead singers, by voting her a contract. She, in turn, cast a ballot of her own: the veto of Sembrich. The following year, with Melba’s defection, Sembrich was again on the roster. Most eagerly awaited was Jean de Reszke as Lohengrin on New Year’s Eve 1900, after a season’s hiatus. Admiration for de Reszke, his style, his acting, his musicality, and his sincerity bordered on delirium. The story of the Met’s golden age is largely his story. It was he who defined the Met primarily as home to the French repertoire and who soon thereafter rehabilitated Wagner. The turn of the first year of the new century would coincide with de Reszke’s adieu. The Gay Nineties were over. So was an extraordinary operatic era. At the April 29, 1901, gala, during which a reported sixteen women were revived by the ammonia providentially dispensed by ushers posted at every door, an astonishing two thousand standees were jammed behind the orchestra seats. The program featured de Reszke, Melba, and Nordica, of course. Ovations for the Polish tenor oscillated from “frantic” to “frenzied”
(Times)
. The gala also blandished two French guests, the actors Sarah Bernhardt and Coquelin, in a one-act comedy.
²²

La Bohème
and
Tosca
were new to the Met in the 1900–01 season. Henderson and Krehbiel had snubbed Puccini’s bohemians when an Italian troupe of no particular distinction introduced them to New York at Wallach’s Theatre in 1898. And when Melba, in search of suitable new roles, and Albert Saléza sang the doomed seamstress and the impoverished poet on 39th Street, the fractious critics saw no reason to change their minds.
Tosca
had by far the stronger cast, particularly in the Roman diva of Milka Ternina and the lecherous police chief of Antonio Scotti, who would go on to sing more than two hundred Scarpias with the company. The
Tribune
decried the opera’s “repulsive” subject; Krehbiel was particularly hard on Puccini’s score, “much of it like shreds and patches of many things with which the operatic stage has long been familiar.” Audience response through the end of the Grau years was unexceptional. It was not until Heinrich Conried took over from Grau in 1903 and Enrico Caruso assumed the tenor leads that these Puccini masterworks would take their undying place in the public’s affections.

TABLE 3.
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1891–92 to 1902–03

 

 

TABLE 3.
(continued)

 

 

TABLE 3.
(continued)

 

 

Reviewers heaped abuse on Ernest Reyer’s
Salammbô
and Isidore De Lara’s
Messaline,
the first served up on a scale that vied with the grandiosity of Flaubert’s orientalist novel, the second a personal triumph for Calvé as the Roman empress, a “foul-minded, utterly carnal, and debased woman”
(Times)
. Two German-language works,
Manru,
Ignacy Paderewski’s sole opera, and Ethel Smyth’s
Der Wald,
were fresh from their European premieres. Critics faulted the libretto of
Manru,
“awkward in construction, and at times amazingly silly in language”
(Tribune);
Paderewski’s score was coddled as “an amazing first opera”
(Tribune),
“the conception of a genuine composer”
(Times)
. The beloved pianist was called to take repeated bows as early as the second-act curtain. And Sembrich was indebted to her Polish compatriot for a congenial vehicle.
Manru
failed to survive its initial season. Grau’s final premiere was also attended by the composer, in this case the composer-librettist, a British feminist largely trained in Leipzig.
Der Wald
was the first and remains the only opera by a woman to be staged at the Met. The one-act piece was given two performances. The
Telegraph
couched its favorable notice in blatantly sexist terms: “In fact, this little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to be the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in
Der Wald,
nor an unstable sentiment.” The
World
bridled at “an hour of ultra-modern music, strident, formless.” The
Times
regretted that “Mr. Grau’s long and distinguished career as an impresario should be marked by a production of so little importance.” By then, in declining health, Grau had announced his retirement for the end of the 1902–03 season. The board named Conried to replace him. Five years later, the exasperated directors bought Conried out. High on the list of complaints was that he had strayed from the French path Grau had charted so profitably.