Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (3 page)

The Academy of Music at 14th Street between Third Avenue and Irving Place was a sufficient home for opera. Its resident impresario, James H. Mapleson, or better, Colonel Mapleson, as he liked to be called, delivered the stars his patrons considered their due. But as the city’s upper crust grew in size and, more to the point, in financial clout, it became apparent that the Academy was saddled with a fatal flaw: its too few boxes could not accommodate New York’s growing elites. And further, on those rare occasions on which a box became available, it went to a member of the tight Knickerbocker circle and not to one of “the Newcomers.” Approached by George Henry Warren, a Vanderbilt lawyer, for a way out of the impasse, leading Academy stockholders offered to increase the number of boxes from eighteen to forty-four, a supply still substantially short of the demand. Worse, the twenty-six additions would not necessarily be in the coveted proscenium. The occupants would be less advantageously exhibited than they thought befit their station. And so the proposed remodeling was rejected and the campaign for a new opera house was on. Within days, Warren had secured the required capital through sixty-two subscriptions. The central committee of the infant Metropolitan Opera Company met on April 10, 1880, and agreed to move forward with the project, later recapitalized by the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Roosevelts, and others. There were bumps in the road: negotiations for a site on 43rd Street and Madison Avenue fell through; at a later point, the anticipated costs had so escalated that there was pressure to abandon the undertaking altogether. In the end, will and fortune prevailed and, amazingly, in just two and a half years, between the March 1881 acquisition of the 39th Street block and the October 1883 opening, construction was completed, the boxes (ultimately tagged at $15,000 each) were assigned by lot, an impresario was hired, and the inaugural season launched.

As they stepped out of their carriages, some among the box holders may have had buyer’s remorse. The new edifice looked nothing like the stupendous Paris theater dedicated just eight years earlier, an obligatory stop on the grand tour. The Opéra, standing proudly on a pedestal above the pavement, its broad staircase leading to the seven portals of the sumptuously adorned neo-Baroque
façade crowned with gilded statues, was the focal point of the principal thoroughfare that bore its name. The exterior of the Metropolitan, in the moderate Renaissance style, aspired to no such magnificence. J. Cleveland Cady and his colleagues, architects of the still extant Romanesque revival southern wing of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, avoided flights of fancy for this, their first theater commission. Their chief concern was that the most capacious auditorium for opera in the world meet the expectations for display, comfort, and safety of its prosperous patrons. And to these desiderata, they bent whatever largesse the budget allowed. The snide sobriquet of “yellow brick brewery” attributed to Mapleson stuck. Others disagreed, finding the “elegance” of the new building admirable: “Architecturally it is a fine creation, imposing not alone by its size but by its dignity, simplicity, and intelligent adaptation to its ends. And if on the exterior we miss the grandeur and beauty which must belong to a building ere it can be called truly monumental, we have a scholarly, quiet, eminently respectable piece of work.”
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FIGURE 1.
Exterior of Metropolitan Opera House, Broadway and 39th Street, 1883 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

The five-hour-long
Faust
allowed first-nighters a leisurely look at the theater’s interior. They found not the traditional stage frame capped by an arch but
a nearly square opening, likely inspired by Wagner’s dictates for his 1876 opera house in Bayreuth. The decision to forgo proscenium boxes obviated the difficulty that had precipitated the break with the Academy. The stockholders occupied the first and second of the three tiers, grouped as “a republic of oligarchs with no precedence among themselves, nodding on equal terms all round Olympus.” With the parquet orchestra floor and the two upper galleries, the capacity of the Met exceeded three thousand. Critics grumbled that the cramped staircases, corridors, and lobbies were inadequate to assembly, let alone parade, during the long intermissions. Public spaces had been sacrificed to the volume of the hall. The color scheme that provided the “pallid background” for Mr. Vanderbilt’s posturing met with scorn. The
Times,
ever attentive to the interests of ostentation, railed against what it judged an unbecoming contrast to “full dress”; the
Herald
lamented that the diamonds were deprived of “that flashing and blazing of rays that come from a darker setting.” More generally, appreciations of the new Metropolitan ranged from the
Mirror’
s (Oct. 27) quip that “if Oscar Wilde had a nightmare in which an opera house played a conspicuous part we imagine it would appear to him as the
Metropolitan did,” to the encomium of the
Critic
(Oct. 27, 435): “one of the best-arranged places of amusement in the world.” For the more than eight decades of the building’s life, through the devastating fire of 1892 to the major reconstruction that followed, and subsequent modifications to the seating and décor, sight and sound at the Met continued to be hit or miss.
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FIGURE 2.
Interior of Metropolitan Opera House, 1895. This is the oldest extant photograph of the auditorium. (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

The lease of the house to theatrical manager Henry E. Abbey came with the board’s charge that he assemble a company for the Met’s first season. Abbey’s enviable client list included the actors Sarah Bernhardt, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, and Lily Langtree. The “Italian” of his “Grand Italian Opera” meant that French and German works would be sung in Italian. That was no surprise. Years later, in evoking an 1870s
Faust
with Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music, Edith Wharton took a jab at this practice: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.” Abbey chose that same
Faust
and that same Marguerite for his opening fare. He had his conservative patrons in mind. No sooner had Gounod’s original version of the work as an opéra comique, that is, with spoken dialogue, premiered in Paris in 1859 than it was on its way to the top of the operatic charts. At its 1863 landing in New York,
Faust
“leaped . . . into popularity. . . . All the leading
morceaux
were encored” (
Times,
Nov. 30). But unlike the performance retrieved in Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence,
at the lackluster Met premiere, the principals were off their form: “Mme. Nilsson and Signor Campanini sang positively badly.”
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New Yorkers had reason to expect better from stars they knew well. Nilsson and Campanini had been Mapleson singers; both had been seduced by Abbey’s lucrative offers. Nilsson had made her US debut in 1870, soon after her Paris creation of Gounod’s heroine in the grand opera version of
Faust,
through-composed, that is, without spoken dialogue, and with lengthy ballet. The high point of the Met opening was the interruption of the garden scene to mark Nilsson’s proprietary relationship to the role. Presented with a sash of golden leaves in a velvet case, “first holding the box down so that the audience obtained a view of its contents, she placed it upon the chair in front of the casket, and kneeling repeated the [aria]”
(Times)
. But for the reviewer, who took note of the soprano’s wonted acting and musical expressivity, the
“Jewel Song” “was scarcely rendered with the requisite buoyancy and brilliancy.” Campanini, arguably the world’s leading tenor, had been Italy’s first Lohengrin, London’s first Don José, and New York’s first Radamès. As Faust that night, his “old-time sweetness” was intermittent and his “old-time manly ring” suffered “the evidences of labor”
(Tribune)
. In their subsequent appearances that season, separately and together, in
Lucia di Lammermoor, Lohengrin, Mignon, Don Giovanni,
and
Mefistofele,
reservations about Nilsson and Campanini vanished. Their initial reception might have been more sympathetic had the architects gotten their way in situating the orchestra. Borrowing again from Bayreuth, they had sunk the pit below the level of the parquet, though less deeply than the covered “mystic gulf” of the Festspielhaus. But Vianesi and his band objected to the near invisibility to which they had been relegated. The pit was raised, putting maestro and
orchestra in full view, obstructing the stage picture for many seated in the parquet, and, of greater import still, undoing the balance of voices and instruments. The orchestra descended to the intended plane two weeks later, and there, with sporadic minor adjustments, it stayed.
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FIGURE 3.
Christine Nilsson as Marguerite in
Faust
, 1883 (courtesy Photofest)

 

When Gaetano Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor,
as comfortably old-shoe as
Faust,
had its turn two days later, disquiet about the acoustics had subsided. The
Evening Post’
s Henry Finck conjectured that on the previous Monday the sound had been dampened by the mass of the near-capacity audience. The far smaller Wednesday crowd compensated for its poor size by its vociferous response to the twenty-five-year-old Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich in her New York debut. Notices pointed to her perfectly placed tone, to her “refinement of expression,” and to a voice of great compass capable of both bel canto brilliance and “velvety softness”
(Tribune)
. Sembrich had learned from the disappointing
Faust
“to sing her arias as near the footlights as possible”
(Evening Post)
. The scenery was “admirable, the chorus resplendent in voice and real satin”
(Sun),
the “Sextet” and the “Mad Scene” were encored, and Campanini convinced his critics that “the greatest of living tenors retain[ed] his position at the front”
(Times)
. A mile or so south at the Academy, Sembrich’s formidable competitor, Etelka Gerster, was cast as Gilda in
Rigoletto
. For the second time in three days, New Yorkers took up sides for either Mapleson or Abbey. They had had to choose between Gerster’s Amina or Nilsson’s Marguerite. Adelina Patti, the Academy’s headliner, would enter the fray two weeks later. But for the
Times,
Sembrich had “nothing to fear from the few popular rivals she now has.” One reviewer went so far as, “[her Violetta] surpasses [Patti’s] in sympathy.” In the age of Patti, there could be no higher praise. Soon after her debut, the company’s first new diva remarked cheerfully, “I have sung never before such an empty house in my life. . . . Naturally, I am not known yet, or rather I was not known until last Wednesday” (
Times,
Oct. 28).
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Sembrich was the product of the pedagogy of bel canto, itself derived from the technique of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century virtuosi. Briefly put, bel canto is founded on the most rigorous command of the breath, indispensable to the accuracy of intonation and to the emission of equalized, linked tones from the bottom of the range to the top, whether singing piano (softly), singing forte (loudly), or executing the
messa di voce
(the swelling and diminishing
of a note). The perfection of breath control is also essential to the free and even use of
fioritura
(embellishment): melismatic trills, turns,
appoggiature
(grace notes), scales, arpeggios, and other figures of the bel canto rhetoric. Well into the nineteenth century, all students of singing were expected to master the technique and its battery of florid ornaments. Later, the ornaments became the nearly exclusive property of the high soprano.

Following Lucia, Sembrich went on to play the other bel canto heroines of the 1883–84 season: Vincenzo Bellini’s Elvira
(I Puritani)
and Amina
(La Sonnambula),
and Giaochino Rossini’s Rosina
(Il Barbiere di Siviglia). Tribune
critic Henry Krehbiel leveled his sarcasm at the “lugubrious”
I Puritani,
charging it with “a simplicity that is almost amusing”; W.H. Henderson (of the
Times
from 1887 to 1902, then of the
Sun
until 1937) thought the soprano irreproachable and the orchestra and chorus in better form. The
Evening Post
extoled the principals of
La Sonnambula,
Campanini, who, in the space of a few days, sang a lyric Elvino and a heroic Lohengrin, and Sembrich, who lent the sleepwalker the “warm, emotional quality” of her voice, her bravura, her “artistic discrimination and taste.” As for
Il Barbiere di Siviglia,
the
Times
opined that “without a great Rosina” it would be “simply unbearable,” to us a startling appraisal. But then, the Met had a great Rosina. During the inaugural season, Sembrich applied her refined art to many other roles: Violetta, Gilda, Zerlina, Martha, Ophélie, Marguerite de Valois, and Juliette.

Sembrich returned to the company in 1898 after a hiatus of fifteen years. Some time later, thanks to the Met’s librarian, Lionel Mapleson, her voice was captured live from the stage. Between January 1901 and March 1903, Mapleson, the Colonel’s nephew, first placed his recording device, replete with horn, in the prompter’s box, and then in the flies above the stage, an aerie that produced better results. His primitive equipment and makeshift conditions yielded transcriptions rich in the vibrancy of the event. The dim and scratchy sounds emitted by modern transfers of the Mapleson cylinders are the only echoes of “golden age” voices accompanied by full orchestra caught in the ambience of a large auditorium. In the case of two historic artists, Jean de Reszke and Milka Ternina, they are all we have. With Sembrich, we are more fortunate. Her very late commercial “Mad Scene” (1906) and “Sextet” (1908) bear traces of the impression she must have made in 1883. These acoustic records, though superior to Mapleson’s, suffer the shortcomings of attempts to reproduce sound prior to the introduction of electrical processes in 1925. The limited range of frequency cuts the
harmonics, impacting negatively on the body and resonance of the tone. Particularly affected were sopranos. But if the quality of Sembrich’s timbre is compromised by crude technologies, her agility, range, and phrasing survive, and they are prodigious.
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FIGURE 4.
Lionel Mapleson with recording horn and cylinders, c. 1901 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Before making her farewell in 1909, Marcella Sembrich had appeared nearly five hundred times on 39th Street and on tour. Her final Met performance was a splashy exhibition of the range of her artistry: she topped off three acts from her favorite operas by interpolating two show pieces into the “Lesson Scene” of
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
and then accompanying herself at the piano in Chopin’s “A Maiden’s Wish.” At her retirement banquet, Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Antonio Scotti, Louise Homer, and others of the company sang the titles of many of the twenty-seven operas in her New York repertoire to the tune of “The Merry Widow” waltz, beginning, “Ri-go-let-to, Pu-ri-ta-ni, Hu-gue-nots.” Henderson, who at the time of Sembrich’s death in 1935 had heard everyone from Adelina Patti and Christine Nilsson to Rosa Ponselle and Kirsten Flagstad, wrote in memoriam, “this famous soprano was not only one of the greatest singers of her period, but of all lyric history.”
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