Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (56 page)

Whatever many Met faithful may have felt about the results, Gelb had kept his promise to breathe new life into the repertoire. To the question of whether high-concept productions of core titles were systematically rebuffed by the musical press, the answer is no: its response ranged from high praise for
La Traviata,
to mild enthusiasm for
Faust
and
Manon,
to thumbs down for
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
. The attitude of the public, though probably more generally negative than that of the critics, cannot be assessed without access to box-office figures. To the question of whether reviewers were tougher on directors with only marginal opera experience than on opera professionals, the answer is again, no. They handled veterans Bondy and Audi no more gingerly than Zimmerman, Lepage, and Grandage. Did they find less to like
in productions incubated at the Met than in productions that debuted elsewhere? Here, yes. Of the sixteen Met offspring from 2009–10 through 2012–13 (counting the “Ring” as one), only
The Enchanted Island
and
The Tempest
drew raves, and
Carmen
strongly positive notices. A poor reflection on Gelb? Yes and no. He did, after all, have the decisive say in cosponsoring or importing productions first mounted elsewhere.

 

FIGURE 47
.
West 72nd Street, New York City, September 2013

 

The owners of the original seventy boxes, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the rest, would doubtless have been gratified that fifteen of the twenty operas presented in Henry Abbey’s inaugural 1883 season are still among the
offerings of the early twenty-first century. And only a handful of the titles on the calendar at the approximate midpoint of the Met’s history, the decade of the 1950s, are missing from today’s lists. In fact, all of the slices of the repertoire to which we devote our chapters—bel canto, French opera, Puccini, Wagner, Verdi, American opera, twentieth-century European opera, Baroque and Slavic opera—retain a strong presence. Crucial to the vitality of the institution, contemporary works in growing number have established themselves through the approbation of critics and public. Most astonishing to the Met’s founders would be the company’s sphere of influence. Abbey’s universe was circumscribed by the stops on his tour; Gelb projects his singers larger-than-life on satellite beams around the planet. It is no longer a matter of making an essentially nineteenth-century European art form at home in the New World. It is a question of globalizing what has been, almost from the beginning, an international enterprise, purported to speak a universal language as well as multiple national tongues. Through the intermediary of an American opera company, arguably preeminent in the world, America, or better New York, has become the imperial capital of opera.

1
. “a few ultra”: cited in
Life
(Nov. 1, 1883): 224. We refer the reader to
www.measuringworth.com
for relative dollar values. The $5 balcony ticket for the 1883 opening night was roughly equivalent to $116 in today’s dollars.

2
. In 1883, the location of the Met marked the northern boundary of the theater district. With the development of Long Acre Square (Times Square after 1904 and the completion of the Times Building), it became the southern boundary of the theatre/movie district.

3
. The Opéra in Paris, an exception, did not have separate access to the top gallery.

4
. “loomed up against”: Nov. 1, 224.

5
. “elegance”: “The Metropolitan Opera House,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
(Nov. 1883): 889. “Architecturally it is”: M. G. Van Rensselaer,
American Architect and Building News
(Feb. 23, 1884): 86.

6
. “a republic of”:
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
(Nov. 1883): 883.

7
. “An unalterable and”:
The Age of Innocence
(London: Electric Book Company, 2001), 15. As in the instance of opéra comique, musical terms that may be foreign to the reader are defined in the text following their first use, and in the index. “Mme. Nilsson and”:
Critic,
Oct. 27.

8
. A specialist in French roles, Christine Nilsson also created Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s
Hamlet
at the Opéra in 1868. The composer’s
Mignon
was the vehicle of her New York operatic debut.

9
. For a précis of music journalism during the early decades of Met history, see Robert Tuggle,
The Golden Age of Opera
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 9–12. “[her Violetta] surpasses [Patti’s] in sympathy”:
Critic
(Nov. 10, 1883): 90. Sembrich had at least one detractor: “The prima donna has been accorded no place in the hearts of her listeners, and she will be allowed to go hence, if we are not much mistaken, without profound regret.” The writer found a “want of sympathetic quality in her voice” and a “lack of personal magnetism and distinction as an actress” (
Times,
Jan. 20, 1884).

10
. For the effect of acoustic recording on the reproduction of voices, see J. B. Steane,
The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 7.

11
. “this famous soprano”: W. J. Henderson,
The Art of Singing
(New York: Dial Press, 1938), 460.

12
. For the Erie Canal celebration, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace,
Gotham: A History of New York City to
1898
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 430.

13
. For the Astor Place riot, see Karen Ahlquist,
Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City,
1815–60
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 139–42; John Dizikes,
Opera in America: A Cultural History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 160–63; and Burrows and Wallace,
Gotham,
761–65.

14
. “populists who disdained”: Ahlquist,
Democracy at the Opera,
67.

15
. For descriptions of the Academy of Music, see
Tribune,
Oct. 2, 1854;
Times,
Oct. 3, 1854;
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
(Dec. 1854): 123. For the seating capacity of the Academy of Music in 1883, see
Pictorial Diagrams of New York Theatres,
www.daviscrossfield.com/academy.html
.

16
. “when our air”: Henry James,
A Small Boy and Others
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 240–41.

17
. “But it was”:
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
(Feb. 1882): 468.

18
. Henry Edward Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera
(New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 85–276, offers an extensive account of the establishment of the Met and the rivalry between Abbey and Mapleson. For Patti’s fees and the Gerster-Patti feud, see John Frederick Cone,
Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 11, 54–55. For the Metropolitan budget and box office, see Martin Mayer,
The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 44. The
Times,
Feb. 16, 1884, estimated the Met’s weekly nut at the much higher $35,000.

19
. Callas recorded
Lucia
and
I Puritani
in 1953,
Norma
and
Il Turco in Italia
in 1954, and
La Sonnambula
in 1957. In 1955, the Chicago Lyric put on
I Puritani
for Callas, a rarity at the time. After the December 8, 1956,
Lucia
broadcast, baritone Enzo Sordello was fired, officially for insubordination toward conductor Fausto Cleva, unofficially for having held the last note of the act 2 duet longer than Callas (Edward Downes,
Times,
Dec. 15, 1956).

20
. Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini composed a total of nearly 120 operas, of which twenty-two have been performed at the Met through the 2013–14 season. Rossini’s
Guillaume Tell
and
Le Comte Ory
and Donizetti’s
La Favorite
and
La Fille du régiment
were composed to French librettos,
Guillaume Tell
and
La Favorite
in a style that attenuates the embellishments of bel canto.
Le Comte Ory
and
La Fille du régiment,
examples of French opéra comique, demand the full arsenal of bel canto technique.
Crispino e la comare
(1850), by the Ricci Brothers, Luigi and Federico, had four performances in the 1918–19 season. Saverio Mercadante and Giovanni Pacini have never been heard at the Met.

1
. The New York Symphony Society and the Philharmonic-Symphony Society merged in 1928 to form what is still today the New York Philharmonic. The terms under discussion at the board’s August 8, 1884, meeting differed somewhat from those proposed by Damrosch: the average cost per performance rose to $4,000; Damrosch’s salary would be $1,000 weekly. For ticket prices in the Met’s early seasons, see George Martin,
The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 74; and Joseph Horowitz,
Wagner Nights: An American History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 76.

2
. For German-American demographics, see Martin,
The Damrosch Dynasty,
27, 41, 74; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace,
Gotham: A History of New York City to
1898
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 739, 745, 995. For the history of German-American theatrical troupes, see John Koegel,
Music in German Immigrant Theater
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009).

3
. “were vast, political”: Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho: The Politics of Art, Music and Emotion in German-American Relations, 1870–1920,”
Journal of Social History
36, no. 3 (2003): 586, 606.

4
. Where titles have conventionally acceptable variants, such as
William Tell
or
Guillaume Tell,
we have followed the lead of the Met online archives. Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice
was performed only once, in Boston. Boieldieu’s
La Dame blanche
was given only in Chicago and Boston.

5
. “Something in the”: Louis Auchincloss,
The Vanderbilt Era: Profiles of the Gilded Age
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), 147.

6
. “impulse dominated reflection”: Henry Finck,
Anton Seidl: A Memorial by His Friends
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 136, 168.

7
. “old favorite operas”: “The Opera” (Feb. 1892): 210. “could no more”: ibid., 211. “prohibiting the production”: ibid., 215.

8
. Of the fourteen operas programmed for 1884–85, only three were by Wagner, and two more were German. Box-office records for the German seasons are not known to be extant. The information we provide was published by Krehbiel in the
Tribune
and repeated in Henry Edward Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera
(New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 212.

9
. “continual warfare”: cited in Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera,
211. “many complaints having”: board minutes, Jan. 15, 1891.

10
. “What she did”: Frances Alda,
Men, Women and Tenors
(1937; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 110. Mrs. Astor, née Caroline Webster Schermerhorn, was the wife of William Backhouse Astor Jr., grandson of John Jacob Astor. “The 400” invited to her annual ball defined “le tout New York.” Quaintance Eaton asserts, “Nowhere else in American history is there recorded an instance of equal social power in the hands of one woman.” Eaton,
The Miracle of the Met
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 21. For Mrs. Astor at the Patriarch or Assembly ball, see Lucy Kavaler,
The Astors: A Family Chronicle of Pomp and Power
(Lincoln, NE: An Authors Guild Backinprint.com edition, 2000), 118.

11
. “occasional and curious”:
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
(April 1885): 807. For the salaries of German artists, see
Musical Courier,
Jan. 30, 1889.

12
. “revolt . . . against”: Auchincloss,
The Vanderbilt Era,
149. Nellie Melba did not appear at the Metropolitan until 1893.

13
. Krehbiel’s notice of
Asrael
read in part, “[Franchetti] was a young Italian (or, rather, Italianized Hebrew), a member of one of the branches of the Rothschilds. . . . He was very wealthy, having a purse as large as his artistic ambition, and was not disinclined, when a work of his composition was accepted for performance, to care for its sumptuous production by paying for the stage decorations out of his own pocket. He resembled Meyerbeer in being a Jew”
(Tribune)
.

14
. In a 1904 recording, the sixty-two-year-old Marianne Brandt is still a trenchant Fidès. She was a student of Pauline Viardot, the first Fidès and sister of Maria Malibran.

15
. Patti’s Almaviva was Italo Campanini, who returned briefly to the Met after eight years. Fittingly, the final Met appearance of the company’s first Faust took place two years later in that very role when he replaced the ailing Jean de Reszke.

16
. The board minutes of Oct. 3, 1894, reflect approval for the coming season of the de Reszkes, the Italian tenor Francesco Tamagno, the French baritone Victor Maurel, and the sopranos Nellie Melba and Sibyl Sanderson, one Australian and the other American. See Martin Mayer,
The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 66, for a précis of the refinancing of the organization; for the redistribution of boxes, see Frank Merkling, John W. Freeman, and Gerald Fitzgerald,
The Golden Horseshoe: The Life and Times of the Metropolitan Opera House
(New York: Viking, 1965), 46. The Abbey-Schoeffel-Grau contract served as a template for the next fifty years: “The term was five years. The lessees took the house for an annual rental of $52,000, and pledged themselves to give opera four times a week for thirteen weeks in the winter and spring. The lessors paid back to the lessees the $52,000 for their box privileges.” Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera,
228–30. For the rights that devolved to the board, see ibid., 229.

17
.
Faust
and
Roméo et Juliette
opened the season seven out of eight times between 1891 and 1900.
Tannhäuser
was chosen for 1898–99. Calvé’s 137
Carmen
s, followed by Risë Stevens’s 124, is a company record. “the most sensational”: Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera,
233.

18
. Herman Bemberg wrote the incidental music for Oscar Wilde’s
Salome
. Tamagno performed his signature Otello and several other roles from the Met stage in March and April 1890, in a supplementary Patti-Tamagno season organized by Abbey and Grau. On November 21, 1894, at his company debut in
William Tell
(in Italian), Tamagno was involved in an unforgettable contretemps. Libia Drog, the hapless Mathilde, a role new to her, lost her way in her act 2 aria, and then stopped singing altogether. Glaring at the conductor, she appealed for help but “he seemed to have lost his head as completely as the lady had her memory.” Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera,
242. There followed much walking off the stage and back on in a series of farcical comings and goings.

19
. From 1883 to 1895–96, the company performed on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, and on Saturday afternoons.

20
. During 1897–98, the Damrosch-Ellis Grand Opera presented a short season during which Lillian Nordica sang the three Brünnhildes.

21
. For the neglect of stage sets during the Grau regime, see Rose Heylbut,
Backstage at the Opera
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1899), 24. In 1891–92, Jean’s fee was $20,000 a month for two performances each week. In addition, he was due 25 percent of the gross in excess of $5,000; Edouard was due 10 percent. The de Reszkes are the only singers in Met history whose contracts called for a share of the box office. For de Reszke’s fees, see Clara Leiser,
Jean de Reszke and the Great Days of Opera
(1934; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 114. With regard to the exorbitant fees paid to principal artists during the Grau regime, Mayer notes as follows: “In 1899–1900, for example, after paying $80,500 to Calvé, $61,000 to Sembrich, $49,660 to Edouard de Reszke, $39,000 to Nordica, $39,000 to the Wagnerian tenor Ernest Van Dyck, $37,250 to Eames, and $25,700 to Plançon—Grau had split a profit of $103,510 fifty-fifty with his shareholders. This meant that the Real Estate Company received a $12,050 dividend, a 46 per cent return on investment in a single year. . . . The entire orchestra received only $100,000, the chorus $36,000, the ballet $13,000 for the whole season. Each of the seven highest-priced singers was paid more than the entire conducting staff.” Mayer,
The Met,
75. “No one has”: cited in Irving Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
1883–1966: A Candid History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 157.

22
. For the Melba/Sembrich rivalry, see Stephen Herx, “Marcella Sembrich and Three Great Events at the Metropolitan,”
Opera Quarterly
(Winter 1999): 57.