Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (9 page)

In the Met’s inaugural year, France provided approximately one-third of the operas and performances given by the Grand Italian Opera. The French repertoire claimed an even higher quotient under Leopold Damrosch the following season, when
Le Prophète
and
La Juive
gave
Tannhäuser
and
Lohengrin
a run for their money. From 1885 to 1891, the six remaining seasons under the leadership and aesthetic bias of Stanton and Seidl, the German
juggernaut drove the French roster to a distant second place at 15 percent of the program. The era of French dominance came under the directorships of Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau, as we have seen, and then of Grau alone. Between 1891 and 1903, the Gallic repertoire accounted for one-third of the total performances; it led the box office in all but three seasons, in four exceeding 50 percent of the gross, and in 1893–94 reaching the top of the parabola with a stupefying 70 percent share. The institutional and performance history of the period exhibits the degree to which French opera shaped the Metropolitan’s
âge d’or
. Through the Conried, Gatti-Casazza, and Johnson years, French works would average around 15 percent of the performances, falling between 10 percent and 13 percent since then.

The inventory of Metropolitan titles from 1883 to 2013 includes sixty-one French works, a number far short of the ninety-eight Italian and slightly greater than the German forty-seven. But by the measure of titles that have tallied more than one hundred performances, only eight are French, while nineteen are German and twenty-nine Italian.
Carmen
and
Faust
have been presented regularly, which is to say, like
Lucia di Lammermoor
and
Il Barbiere di Siviglia,
for example, in half or more of 128 Met seasons. Six other works have persisted through good times and bad:
Manon, Roméo et Juliette, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Samson et Dalila, Pelléas et Mélisande,
and
La Fille du régiment. Werther,
long dormant, has taken on new life in recent decades. Then there are those operas, once popular, that have been absent since the 1940s, some longer:
Mignon, L’Africaine, Les Huguenots, Lakmé, Louise, Guillaume Tell
. Neglected at the Met, they have been exhumed elsewhere, occasionally with considerable success. And finally, there are those such as
Salammbô
and
Messaline
that lapsed into virtual oblivion after their first exposures.

PARSIFAL, SALOME,
AND THE MANHATTAN OPERA COMPANY

THE YEARS 1880 AND 1910
bracket a dazzling chapter in the cultural history of New York City. At one end, the three-decade span is anchored by the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the eastern edge of Central Park and, at the other, by the completion of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The period saw the founding and, in cases such as that of the Museum, the expansion into grand permanent quarters of many of the arts and science institutions that catapulted New York into the orbit of world cultural capitals: the Metropolitan Opera (1883), the New York Music Hall (1891, later Carnegie Hall), the New York Botanical Garden (1891), the New York Zoological Park (1899, later the Bronx Zoo), the Institute of Musical Art of the City of New York (1904, later the Juilliard School of Music), the Jewish Museum (1904), the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (1906, later Rockefeller University), the Pierpont Library (1906, later the Morgan Library and Museum), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1908), and the New-York Historical Society (1908). In 1910, the books from the Astor and Lenox libraries were transferred to the new edifice on 42nd Street. Instrumental in the birth and burgeoning of these institutions were the men who served also on the executive committee of the first Metropolitan Opera board of directors: James A. Roosevelt (an uncle of Theodore Roosevelt), William C. Whitney, George G. Haven, William K. Vanderbilt, and Adrian Iselin.
¹

Whitney, Haven, and Iselin were still on the board in 1903 when its executive committee met to choose a successor to Maurice Grau. On the lists, along with Heinrich Conried, were Walter Damrosch and Andrew Carnegie’s choice, Pittsburgh music manager George W. Wilson. Carnegie’s
backing of Wilson carried with it the support of seventy-six other millionaires and the pledge to raise $150,000 for the company in a matter of weeks. But not unexpectedly, “New York plutocrats had no intention whatsoever of allowing Pittsburgh to encroach on their playground.” Passing over Damrosch by the narrowest margin, seven to six, the executive committee settled on Conried, opting for a theater rather than a music professional, just as they had twenty years earlier in selecting Henry Abbey. With Conried’s ascendency, the Metropolitan name was joined to that of an impresario for the first and last time, and for the first time the impresario was accorded a seat on the board of what was now the Conried Metropolitan Opera Company. Born in Silesia, Conried had emigrated to the United States in 1878, as had the very young Maurice Grau from Moravian Austria in 1854 and Leopold Damrosch from Germany in 1871. Only twenty-three at his arrival, Conried nevertheless had sufficient credits as a stage manager and actor in Austria and Germany to have attracted the interest of the director of the Germania Theatre, at whose invitation he came to New York. He would soon be named artistic manager of the Thalia, then of the Casino Theatre, which specialized in operetta, and, in 1893, of the German Theatre in Irving Place, where he developed an exceptional resident stock company. The artistic and financial success of his promotion of German culture on Irving Place, a model of the ensemble repertory adopted by other theater reformers, won him the Metropolitan plum. He brought with him no experience and precious little knowledge of grand opera. His compensation was guaranteed at $20,000 annually and 50 percent of the presumed profits; his expenses included the purchase of Grau’s assets, among these, contracts with Enrico Caruso and Olive Fremstad.
²

Conried’s five-year term would be neither the shortest nor the longest in the early history of the Metropolitan. Abbey’s first stint lasted just one year, Leopold Damrosch’s, tragically, even less. Edmond Stanton was in charge for six years, Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau for five, and then Grau alone for five more. But of all the regimes to that point, and arguably since, Conried’s was the most flamboyant and, year for year, the most turbulent. His reign began lavishly with the renovation of the auditorium, its décor finally acceding to the traditional deep red and gold it would preserve for the remaining sixty-three years of the theater’s life. The former stagehand insisted on the revamping of the stage and the upgrading of its machinery to the most modern standard. Newly framing the stage was a proscenium arch inscribed with the names of Gluck, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Gounod, and Beethoven. Public rooms
reserved for pampered patrons were fitted with luxurious new appointments. So was the general manager’s extravagant office. Ushers and other employees were dressed in evening clothes, complete with tails, as they had been in 1883. These changes took place in an atmosphere of relative peace. It was the repertoire, though not the repertoire alone, that became the site of conflict.
³

 

FIGURE 9.
Metropolitan stage rebuilt for
Parsifal, Scientific American
, February 6, 1904 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

No sooner had the choice of Conried been made public in February 1903 than the general manager–elect began dropping hints of an exploit he had been plotting for a while: the first staging of
Parsifal
outside of Bayreuth. And so by the time the curtain rose on
Rigoletto,
the 1903–04 season opener and Caruso’s debut, the board found itself caught up in a battle waged against its new lessee from pulpits, courts, and press rooms. In Conried’s second year, a stage bridge collapsed during a performance of
Carmen;
ten choristers were injured in the nine-foot fall. That same year, the unhappy chorus, demanding a raise in pay from $15 to $25 weekly, shorter hours, and sleeping car instead of coach accommodations on overnight travel, walked out for three days in what was to be the first of the several strikes in Metropolitan history. Eames, Caruso, and other principals filled in for the many choruses of
Faust
. Engelbert Humperdinck made his initial visit to New York to supervise the November 1905 unveiling of
Hänsel und Gretel
. Six months later, and throughout the breathless 1906–07 season, one crisis after another, musical and paramusical, made the goings-on at the opera house riveting copy. A less intrepid impresario might have found just one of these happenings more than enough excitement for little more than a single operatic year.
⁴

On April 18, 1906, not long after a performance of
Carmen
(again!) with Caruso and Fremstad, the company on tour in San Francisco felt the first tremors of the historic earthquake. Contralto Louise Homer suffered a miscarriage. The scenery and costumes for thirteen productions were destroyed, a staggering blow for an already compromised budget. In a characteristic gesture of noblesse oblige he could ill afford, the general manager ordered that the $12,000 advance take of the aborted San Francisco engagement be refunded to whoever claimed to have bought a ticket. Musicians, too, took a devastating hit; many of their instruments were lost in the fire. To make matters worse, that fall, Oscar Hammerstein and his Manhattan Opera Company unleashed a competition so ferocious that the opera war with Mapleson and the Academy paled by comparison. In November, as further bad luck would have it, Caruso was arrested for allegedly accosting a woman in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo. His sensational trial (the charge was disturbing the peace, a misdemeanor) ended in a guilty verdict
and a fine of $10. Protestations that it had all been a misunderstanding stemming from the tenor’s awful English, coupled with multiple challenges to the prosecution’s contradictory evidence and to the deeply flawed judicial proceedings, failed to persuade the judge or, indeed, the tribunal that heard the subsequent appeal. Geraldine Farrar, Conried’s other superstar, debuted on opening night. On January 18, 1907, Giacomo Puccini, an international celebrity, made a delayed entrance into the theater (the liner on which he was traveling had met heavy seas and docked later than scheduled) while the Metropolitan premiere of his
Manon Lescaut
was underway. Spotted by the audience at the first act intermission, he was saluted with a fanfare and then an ovation insistent to the point that he was obliged to leave his box so that the performance could continue. Four days later at another premiere (with Puccini present), that of Richard Strauss’s
Salome,
another scandal erupted, and with it the revolt of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company directors, by now at the end of their rope. February 11 brought the company premiere of
Madama Butterfly,
prepared under Puccini’s stern glance. Gustav Mahler made his debut in the pit on January 1, 1908.
⁵

Conried was ready for the firestorm he knew would be ignited by the special prospectus announcing the premiere of
Parsifal
for, of all provocative dates, Christmas Eve 1903. This and all subsequent performances of the great work would be outside the subscription schedule, with the best seats at raised prices. Cries of foul and shame originated from legal and religious quarters on both sides of the Atlantic. As the flippant
Brooklyn Eagle
put it, “The area of low pressure was seen first over the roof of Wahnfried [the home of Cosima, Wagner’s widow], its most natural starting point. Thence it went to Munich and Berlin; thence all over Teutonic Europe, skirting the Latins and the Slavs, and it finally has settled down for real business here in New York” (Nov. 12, 1903). Cosima’s imprecations, befitting her vocation as keeper of the flame, were fueled by the contention that the Metropolitan’s proposed staging was tantamount to piracy committed in violation of copyright law. Following an informal and ultimately futile appeal to the Kaiser, her lawyers went to work, arguing that the Met should be enjoined from producing the opera. Conried’s European colleagues, his fellow
intendants,
whined that
playing Wagner’s
Bühnenfestspiel
(stage-consecrating festival drama) on an ordinary operatic platform was an act of artistic heresy.

From the New York Protestant establishment, through its spokesperson, the Rev. Dr. George L. Shearer, Secretary of the American Tract Society, came the charge that the work itself was sacrilegious. Shearer’s slippery case for censorship took the form of a loaded question: “If Christianity is the law of the land, and is protected by that law, because its morality is the foundation of the government, would not this proposed travesty of the most sacred things of our worship be indictable under the statute which authorizes the suppression of whatever is an offense to public decency?” His “Anti-
Parsifal
Crusade” was launched in defense of the “most sacred things of our worship.” Shearer’s brief held that the flower maidens were nothing other than a “red light legion”; Parsifal he likened somewhat more credibly to Jesus, Gurnemanz to John the Baptist, Kundry to the Magdalen. He railed against the representation of the “Lord’s Supper” as an “amusement . . . for the sake of gain”; the washing of Parsifal’s feet he decried as an impious reference to an episode in the life of Christ (
Tribune,
Nov. 11, 1903). The
Eagle
had its own take on Shearer’s screed: “They [Shearer and a second New York minister] . . . say that if anybody is allowed to produce it
[Parsifal]
he should be a Christian and not a Jew. . . . As for denouncing Mr. Conried because he is a Jew, that is an unworthy business for a Christian clergyman. . . . We can conceive no earthly or celestial difference in the effect to be produced on the spectator by the nationality or belief of the man who hires the singers and pays the rent” (Nov. 11, 1903). The Metropolitan counsel, the same attorney who failed to exonerate Caruso, argued that
Parsifal
had already been presented in concert form in Brooklyn in 1890, with Anton Seidl conducting, and again in concert in Boston; the Wagners, he noted, had voiced no objection on these occasions. The case was ultimately thrown out on a simple finding: the
Parsifal
copyright did not extend to the United States. The city’s mayor, petitioned to uphold Shearer, refused to revoke the license issued to the Met.
⁶

By the time Judge Lacombe rendered his decision, November 24, 1903, preparations for
Parsifal
were well along. Most astounding had been the advance ticket sales, reputedly the greatest ever seen in New York. Weeks before the opening, the
American Journal
reported melodramatically, “Women Faint amid Crush for Seats to
Parsifal
. Many of Them Took Places in Line before Daylight and Were Too Weak to Reach the Window When It Was Opened” (Nov. 11, 1903). Mail orders were delivered so thick and fast that their processing required a room of its own. The paymaster was sequestered
for the three days it took to address the refund envelopes. A special police guard was called to be on hand for the opening performance. The
Evening Telegram
published a special edition, the “Parsifal Extra” (Dec. 24, 1903), that included a front-page story, “Great Crush to See
Parsifal,
” and a series of drawings of scenes from the opera.

The premiere began at the unlikely hour of five o’clock in the afternoon. The doors were shut at the start of the prelude and, again exceptionally, no one arrived late. A hush was reported to envelop the auditorium at the end of the almost two-hour-long act 1, in imitation of Bayreuth’s reverent response to the consecration of the Holy Grail. The audience filed out for the dinner intermission, a concession to the more than five-hour-long score. Many returned in evening clothes (one answer to the question of what to wear to a performance that begins in late afternoon and ends just before midnight) for the second act flower maidens, for Kundry’s attempted seduction of Parsifal, for the spectacle of a deadly spear arrested in midair, and for the collapse of the castle of Klingsor, the reprobate knight. It was here that soprano Milka Ternina disclosed Kundry’s contrasting identities most artfully: “the strange fascination of a Greek maenad . . . a soul racked and torn with an anguish that freezes the blood . . . a figure of wondrous charm” (
Times,
Jan. 1, 1904). Seven minutes of applause and shouts for the cast and production staff were followed by calls for Conried himself, who obliged with an uncharacteristically modest bow before the curtain. At the end of act 3, the impresario came forward again to congratulate “American operagoers” for the discerning enthusiasm they had displayed for “a great, solemn, beautiful work like this”
(Tribune)
. Critics acquainted with the Festspielhaus production pronounced the Met’s superior. Devout Wagnerite Henry Finck consigned much of his notice to the décor—which, as he put it, “at every moment dovetailed with the orchestral score, and [was] an essential part of the total effect, arousing deep emotions, and constituting a succession of real works of art.” He marveled in particular at the transformation from forest to temple as Parsifal and Gurnemanz traversed the stage (
Evening Post,
Dec. 26, 1903). The engagement of leading contralto Louise Homer for an off-stage, six-word phrase was one more sign of the impresario’s profligate showmanship. Against odds of all sorts, Conried had brought off an operatic coup as memorable as any to be found in the annals of the Metropolitan before or since. Barely a month into his first season, he had reached what in retrospect would be thought the high point of his tenure. Met stockholders had eleven
Parsifal
performances to thank for their dividend. The twelfth filled the general manager’s purse.
⁷

Ever ready to stir the pot, Conried announced on his return from his summer 1906 European rounds that the coming Metropolitan season would see the premiere of Richard Strauss’s
Salome,
the first of the composer’s operas to be staged in the United States. Conried had attended a Dresden performance and had been struck by its effect on the audience. Soon after, he began haggling in correspondence with Strauss over royalties for prospective Metropolitan dates and terms that might induce the composer to make a second trip to New York. In winter and spring 1904, Strauss had led several local orchestras at venues as disparate as Carnegie Hall and Wanamaker’s department store. The negotiations concluded with an agreement for ten shows without Strauss, at what Conried protested were unheard-of, “ridiculously high” fees. In October, the general manager advertised the first performance, at double the usual prices, of the one-act opera that had, “for more than a year, been the storm center of the musical world.”
Salome
would be presented as the second half of his annual benefit, the first part a starry concert. Conried expected another personally lucrative succès de scandale. What he got was more than even he bargained for. Based on Oscar Wilde’s notorious 1894 French play,
Salome
had been first performed in Dresden in 1905 to an extraordinary number of curtain calls. While Conried could claim without dissembling, and did, that the opera had been produced in twenty houses throughout Europe, including decorous German court theaters, it was also the case that it had been censored by the Kaiser, if briefly, and banned in Vienna and London. The impresario himself had qualms about the work’s New York reception. He wrote to Strauss, “I . . . don’t know how the American people will take to the subject, and I have simply said that, even at the risk of my audiences not liking the material, I, as Director of the Metropolitan Opera House, would be bound to produce your opera before my audiences—an opera which I, personally, and unendingly, admire.”
⁸

Preparations for the premiere began in fall 1906. To add to the drama, the general manager had been taken ill, seriously so; at his insistence, some rehearsals were conducted at his bedside. On a Sunday morning, two days before the January 22, 1907, premiere and little more than three years after the cheeky Christmas Eve
Parsifal,
Conried scheduled a semipublic dress rehearsal of
Salome,
a repetition of his earlier scheduling gaffe. Many of the one thousand invited guests—Met stockholders, subscribers, friends and relations of the management and cast, journalists, and music critics—had
come to the opera house directly from their devotions. This misstep would haunt discussions of the propriety of staging
Salome
for decades to come. Two days later, on January 22, a capacity audience was treated to the much ballyhooed preopera concert starring, among others, Caruso, Farrar, and Scotti; Sembrich sang two Strauss songs. The last selection was the redemptive climax of
Faust,
“as though to make the maximum contrast with what would follow,” Salome’s erotic encounter with saintliness and death.
⁹

Those who went to the trouble and expense of buying tickets surely knew what they were in for. The Gospel tale of the depraved daughter of Herodias was very much in circulation. There had been persistent press coverage of Strauss’s controversial work; there was also the more immediate buzz surrounding the dress rehearsal. And, to gild the lily, on January 21, the day that separated the rehearsal from the gala, the Sothern-Marlowe Company had opened at the Lyric Theatre up the street with Julia Marlowe as Salome in
John the Baptist
. Many operagoers would have read the review of Hermann Sudermann’s play in the
Tribune:
“This is a repulsive drama . . . in which a wanton woman can perform a lascivious dance, in the presence of a lewd despot, in order to inflame his passions and so entirely to enslave him that he will become a rabid monster of lust and cruelty” (January 22). Two days earlier, the same newspaper had carried a large photo of Fremstad costumed as Salome, holding a silver platter on which sat the papier-mâché head of John the Baptist, the spitting image of Anton van Rooy’s, the baritone of the occasion. All this, and notices of the “Dance of the Seven Veils” as a
danse du ventre
(belly dance) to be executed not by the soprano but by a company ballerina, and of yet many “other sensational features, brought a throng of men and women such as no previous opera [had] drawn to the Metropolitan”
(Times)
. Librettos sold at quadruple the usual price (
Times,
Jan. 28, 1907). And once again, police reinforcements were called in to control the crowd (
Times,
Jan. 23, 1907).

The audience recoiled in revulsion, we are told, when Fremstad “presse[d] her teeth into the gelid flesh” of the severed head with only somewhat less ardor than she had exhibited at the dress rehearsal, although still at the very front of the stage. The Swedish-American dramatic soprano had leapt at the chance to play the Judaean princess once Farrar refused the role. Searing as Isolde and Kundry, she was known to be fiercely dedicated to her art. Her studies for
Salome
had included a much publicized trip to the city morgue to gauge the weight of a human head, far heavier, she learned, than the prop she was to fondle. Moments before Salome demanded “den Kopf des Jochanaan [the head of John],” women en masse had averted their eyes from the other famously
outré scene, the iconic dance. As for the men, “very few . . . seemed comfortable. They twisted in their chairs, and before it was over there were numbers of them who decided to go to the corridors and smoke.” But when Fremstad began to address the Baptist’s head, “the horror of the thing” sent occupants of the front rows and boxes from the auditorium to call for their carriages. The galleries responded with greater equanimity. No one walked out. “Men and women left their seats to stand so that they might look down upon the prima donna as she kissed the dead lips. . . . Then they sank back in their chairs and shuddered”
(Times)
. Still, many accounts conceded, the company had recorded “one of the most remarkable achievements in the way of a lyric production ever accomplished in this country”
(Times)
. Among
Salome
’s partisans was Henderson, now writing for the
Sun
. He held the work up as a “perfect adaptation of the musical expression to the scene” (Jan. 27, 1907). But surprisingly, his reading of audience reaction ran counter to the majority report: “On Tuesday [Fremstad] moderated her transports so that even little girls . . . were not shocked. As for the society women, they viewed the spectacle with perfect calmness.” With the passing days, Henderson changed his tune. On February 3, he called
Salome
a “fester on the body operatic” and, adopting Krehbiel’s language, “a stench [in] the nostrils of society.” The events that followed Conried’s benefit no doubt persuaded Henderson to this awkward reversal.
¹⁰