Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (57 page)

1
. James A. Roosevelt, the first president of the Metropolitan board, was also associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art; William C. Whitney was active in the early years of the New York Zoological Society and the American Museum of Natural History, established in 1877; George G. Haven, later president of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company and managing director of the board, was also identified with the Museum of Natural History; William K. Vanderbilt was president of the short-lived New Theatre; Adrian Iselin was aligned with the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

2
. “New York plutocrats”: Quaintance Eaton,
The Miracle of the Met
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 141–42.

3
. A new gold curtain rose for the first time in 1905.

4
. The credit for bringing Caruso to the Met belongs to both Grau and Conried. Grau’s contract with Caruso was void on Grau’s retirement; Conried re-signed him, but for fewer performances. For the chorus’s demands for a raise in pay, see Martin Mayer,
The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 94.

5
. For Louise Homer’s miscarriage, see Anne Homer,
Louise Homer and the Golden Age of Opera
(New York: William Morrow, 1974), 255–56. A full analysis of
documents relative to the Central Park incident is provided by Ruth Bauerle, “Caruso’s Sin in the Fiendish Park: ‘The Possible Was the Improbable and the Improbable the Inevitable’ (FW 110.11–12),”
James Joyce Quarterly
(Fall 2000–Winter 2001): 157–81. In the concluding section of her essay, Bauerle tracks the many allusions to the Caruso scandal in
Ulysses
and
Finnegan’s Wake
.

6
. For the appeal to the Kaiser, see Irving Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
1883–1966: A Candid History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 161. The European copyright on
Parsifal
was not due to expire until February 1913. Conried ascribed the objections of his German peers to their resentment that Americans would have first crack at Wagner’s last masterpiece. Conried’s response to his opponents is reproduced in full in Montrose Moses,
The Life of Heinrich Conried
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1916), 233–43. His arguments were rejected by many New York critics; Krehbiel called his appropriation of
Parsifal
“the rape of the work.” Henry Edward Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera
(New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 331. For an account of concert presentations of
Parsifal
in New York prior to the opera’s staged premiere in 1903, see Jeffrey S. McMillan, “Grail Crazy,”
Opera News
(March 2013): 16–17.

7
. For a description of Conried’s renovation of the Opera House, the dividends paid by
Parsifal
profits, and the refunded tickets, see Rose Heylbut,
Backstage at the Opera
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1937), 46, 43–44. Jean de Reske offered to come out of retirement for
Parsifal,
a role he had never sung; Conried was unwilling to pay the tenor’s high fee. Mayer,
The Met,
90. For the immediate
Parsifal
spin-offs, see Joseph Horowitz,
Wagner Nights: An American History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 266. Conried’s high-profile success persuaded conductor and impresario Henry Savage to take the opera on the road throughout the United States and Canada with his English Grand Opera Company; well before Berlin and Paris, New Orleans and Montreal could boast a fully staged
Parsifal,
albeit in English translation; Thomas Edison filmed scenes from the opera; a Yiddish translation was performed on the Lower East Side; at the Lee Avenue Theatre in Brooklyn, among other venues, it was given as a play in blank verse with orchestra and chorus.

8
. For correspondence from Conried to Strauss, Moses,
Life of Heinrich Conried,
293–96. “more than a”:
Times,
Jan. 23, 1907. In Germany in 1908 alone,
Salome
registered 217 performances (
Times,
Jan. 29, 1909).

9
. “as though to”: Mayer,
The Met,
92.

10
. “kisse[d] the bloody”: Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera,
352.

11
. “moving spirit and”: Pierre Van Rensselaer Key, “The Only Opera Octopus,”
Cosmopolitan Magazine
(April 1910): 545. Jean Strouse,
Morgan, American Financier
(New York: Random House, 1999), 561, notes that the Morgan papers make no mention of J. P. Morgan’s leadership role in the
Salome
affair. Herbert L. Satterlee, the husband of Morgan’s daughter Louisa, an earlier biographer, makes no reference to
Salome
in
J. Pierpont Morgan, an Intimate Portrait
(New York: Macmillan, 1939). Architect Stanford White was murdered in a crime of passion by Harry Thaw on June 25, 1906, at the Madison Square Roof Garden.

12
. A Feb. 8, 1907, letter from the Conried Opera Company to the board of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company describes the losses Conried incurred over
Salome
.

13
. The remonstrations in New York against the Manhattan Opera Company’s
Salome
in 1909 were mild by comparison with the outcries in Philadelphia and Chicago. The Boston performances were canceled.

14
. “lust for revenge”: cited in John Kobler,
Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 73.

15
. “an artist of”: Jan. 3, 1922, Feb. 14, 1922. “the most refulgent”: W. J. Henderson,
Sun
. Rarely cast in Wagnerian roles (only once on 39th Street), Lily Djanel, the Met’s Salome of the early 1940s, was also its principal Carmen. For Strauss’s wish that Salome be sung by a youthful voice: “Strauss suddenly said that he thought she [Elisabeth Schumann] should sing Salome. When Elisabeth protested that she was a lyric soprano and could not sing such a dramatic role Strauss replied that the youthfulness of her voice, the silvery quality, was exactly what he wanted in the character of Salome.” Strauss offered to alter the orchestration and transpose sections for Schumann; she refused: Gerd Puritz,
Elisabeth Schumann, a Biography,
ed. and trans. Joy Puritz (London: A. Deutsch, 1993), 77.

16
. For audiences at the Metropolitan and the Manhattan on Jan. 2, 1907, see Mayer,
The Met,
93.

17
. For the enmity between Conried and Hammerstein, see ibid., 94. Hammerstein’s theater on 34th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues is now the Manhattan Center.

18
. For the enticements that contributed to Melba’s defection, see Therese Radic,
Melba, the Voice of Australia
(South Melbourne: MMB Music, 1986), 116.

19
. “with a contemptuous”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza,
Memories of the Opera
(New York: Scribner, 1941), 168. For Hammerstein’s stars and their salaries, see Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
179. For the Manhattan’s skyrocketing subscriptions, see John Frederick Cone,
First Rival of the Metropolitan Opera
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 122.

20
. For New York’s population explosion at the turn of the century, see Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
184–85. On losses during the second opera war: “The 1907–1908 season, for example, ended for the Met with a loss of $84,039. . . . [At the conclusion of that same season], Hammerstein commented: ‘My season was successful inasmuch as I lost only $50,000, whereas I expected to lose $75,000.’ ” Kobler,
Otto the Magnificent,
71.

21
. For a discussion of “verismo” as applied to opera, see Alan Mallach,
The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism,
1890–1915
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 42–46.

22
. For Puccini on
Manon Lescaut
and
Madama Butterfly
at the Met, see letters to Tito Ricordi, Feb. 18, Feb. 19, 1907, in
Carteggi pucciniani,
ed. Eugenio Gara (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 339–41.

23
. “most sensational fiasco”: Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera,
320, 324, 325.

24
. Kahn letter to Conried cited in Mayer,
The Met,
95.

25
. “public [that] was opera-mad”: Krehbiel,
Chapters of Opera,
326.

1
. “very important person”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza,
Memories of the Opera
(New York: Scribner, 1941), 142–48.

2
. The
Times
headline ran, “Appointment of Gatti-Casazza and Andreas Dippel to Succeed Conried Confirmed” (Feb. 12, 1908). “Mr. Dippel’s appointment”: Henry Edward Krehbiel,
More Chapters of Opera: Being Historical and Critical Observations and Records Concerning the Lyric Drama in New York from
1908
to
1918
(New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 24.

3
. For a discussion of the letter in support of Dippel, see Martin Mayer,
The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 104–6.

4
. The text of the Kahn announcement following the February 11, 1908, meeting was published in the
Times
of the next day. For Gatti and casting, see Frances Alda,
Men, Women and Tenors
(1937; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 116.

5
. “Perhaps his love:” John Kobler,
Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 51. Kahn was at least as devoted to the company of sopranos as he was to that of “grandees”; he had affairs with Maria Jeritza and Grace Moore (ibid., 166–71).

6
. “Six and three-quarter”: Feb. 21, 1925, 9–10. “I wondered at”: Alda,
Men, Women and Tenors,
73.

7
. “The theatre is”: Gatti-Casazza,
Memories of the Opera,
68–69.

8
. “The Maestro . . . was”: Geraldine Farrar,
Such Sweet Compulsion
(New York: Greystone Press, 1938), 116.

9
. Toscanini became principal conductor at Milan’s La Scala in 1898 at the age of thirty-one; Mahler became artistic director at Vienna’s Hofoper in 1897 at thirty-seven. Mahler’s letter to Dippel, cited in Joseph Horowitz,
Understanding Toscanini, How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 55.

10
. The Met’s activities at the New Theatre were administered by Dippel, another sign that Gatti had taken control of the home base. Widely considered a fatal flaw in 1909, the New Theatre’s uptown address was a stone’s throw from the Met’s present site at Lincoln Center. For a full discussion of the New Theatre, see Mary Jane Matz,
The Many Lives of Otto Kahn
(New York: Pendragon Press, 1963), 68–78.

11
. For a detailed account of the Met’s Paris tour, see Quaintance Eaton,
Opera Caravan: Adventures of the Metropolitan on Tour,
1883–1956
(New York: Metropolitan Opera Guild, 1957), 152–56.

12
. In 1909–10, the Met also presented twenty-five ballet programs. The growing importance of ballet is signaled by the debuts of Anna Pavlova and Mikail Mordkin. When the Met acquired the Philadelphia Opera House, it was renamed the Metropolitan Opera House. The company performed there regularly until 1920. The building, on Broad and Poplar streets, now houses the Holy Ghost Headquarters Revival Center at the Met. The Academy of Music is home to Opera Philadelphia and to the Pennsylvania Ballet. A hefty share of the $1.25 million was contributed by
a Met patron who saw in the payoff a chance to banish Lina Cavalieri, one of Hammerstein’s divas; this extravagance put an end to the involvement of Cavalieri, billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” with the gentleman’s son. Cavalieri had been exiled from the Met in 1908 following her marriage to one of the Astor clan. For Hammerstein’s buyout, see Mayer,
The Met,
112.

13
. “staged a coup”: John Dizikes,
Opera in America: A Cultural History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 316–17. “The
Girl
may”: Puccini to Giulio Ricordi, n.d., in
The Letters of Giacomo Puccini,
ed. Giuseppe Adami, translated from the Italian and edited for the English edition by Ena Makin (New York: Vienna House, 1973), 176.

14
. The
Sun
account of the
Fanciulla del West
rehearsal is cited in Robert Tuggle,
The Golden Age of Opera
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), 65–71.

15
. “the great composers”: John C. Freund, “First Production of Puccini’s Opera,”
Musical America
(Dec. 1910): 1–4.
Königskinder
had been scheduled for the previous season, but the composer had failed to complete the score in time.

16
. For Belasco on Destinn, Caruso, and staging
La Fanciulla del West,
see David Belasco,
The Theatre through Its Stage Door
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919), 103.

17
. For Puccini’s reaction to the
Fanciulla
cast, letter to Carlo Clausetti, Jan. 1, 1911, in
Carteggi pucciniani,
ed. Eugenio Gara (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), 383. Had it not been for the veto of Tito Ricordi, who had again accompanied Puccini to New York, we might have had an aural shard of the first
Fanciulla
cast. Ricordi had made himself a nuisance at rehearsals and, most grievous, had barred all recordings in a greedy effort to protect sales of the published score. Soon after the premiere, Casa Ricordi began marketing
Fanciulla
through, of all things, a piano roll. For Ricordi’s prohibition of
Fanciulla
recordings, see Tuggle,
The Golden Age of Opera,
71.

18
. For the incidents surrounding
Un Ballo in maschera
and
Carmen,
see Johanna Fiedler,
Molto Agitato
(New York: Doubleday, 2001), 20. “General Musik Director”: Mayer,
The Met,
134.

19
. Gatti on ocean travel during World War I: “We docked in New York a day before German submarines sank several ships within the vicinity of the city. All the passengers had been worried. Caruso was with us on the boat. . . . We finished the trip, travelling in a zigzag manner.” Gatti,
Memories of the Opera,
179–83. “lest Germany should”:
Sun,
Sept. 15, 1917, cited in Fiedler,
Molto Agitato,
22. The company’s last German-language performance was the April 28, 1917, Atlanta
Siegfried,
with Gadski as Brünnhilde; the first following the four-year suspension was the US premiere of
Die Tote Stadt
, on November 19, 1921, Maria Jeritza’s debut.

20
. Goritz parody cited in
Musical America
(April 21, 1917): 1–2.

21
. The
Times
(Nov. 3, 1917) reported, “In the last few weeks a new turn of affairs appeared to have taken place.” Melanie Kurt, Hermann Weil, Margarete Ober, and Johannes Sembach were not reengaged. Sembach returned in 1920 to sing
Tristan
in English. German had long been the lingua franca of US symphony orchestras; in 1918, the New York Philharmonic dropped “konzertmeister” in favor of “concertmaster”; see George Martin,
The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 251.

22
. “made no definite”: Ziegler to subscribers, Nov. 13, 1917.

23
. Met singers on the covers of
Time
: Melba (April 18, 1927), Farrar (Dec. 5, 1927), Jeritza (Nov. 12, 1928), Bori (June 30, 1930). Also on the covers of
Time
: Toscanini (Jan. 25, 1926) and Gatti twice (Nov. 5, 1923, and Nov. 1, 1926).

24
. For Caruso’s fees, see Michael Scott,
The Great Caruso
(New York: A. A. Knopf, 1988), 181; and Irving Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
1883–1966: A Candid History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1966), 298.

25
. For the terms of the agreement between the Met and Victor, see C. G. Child, Victor Recording Machine Co., to Ziegler, March 6, 1917.

26
. In 1919, Farrar was briefly the head of her own production company, Diva Pictures, associated with Samuel Goldwyn. For the account of the “rough” Farrar/Caruso
Carmen,
see Alda,
Men, Women and Tenors,
214–15.

27
. For Farrar’s witty barbs directed at colleagues at once tempted and reluctant to engage with the movies, see Henry Finck,
My Adventures in the Golden Age of Music
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1926) 331–32. For Caruso’s movie career, see Scott,
The Great Caruso,
160–61.

28
. “perhaps the most,” cited in Mary Jane Phillips-Matz,
Puccini: A Biography
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 256, 279. “From my seat”: Farrar,
Such Sweet Compulsion,
139.

29
. Jeritza boosted
Die Ägyptische Helena
above the season’s average box office. Between 1929–30 and the end of his regime, 1934–35, Gatti introduced eight more twentieth-century operas: Strauss’s
Elektra,
Felice Lattuada’s
Le Preziose ridicule,
Jaromir Weinberger’s
Schwanda the Bagpiper,
Italo Montemezzi’s
La Notte di Zoraima,
Howard Hanson’s
Merry Mount,
and the world premieres of Deems Taylor’s
Peter Ibbetson,
Louis Gruenberg’s
The Emperor Jones,
and John Laurence Seymour’s
In the Pasha’s Garden
.

30
. The Met sold the
Turandot
production to the Chicago Opera in 1933 for $3,000. It had cost more than $60,000 (Met online archives).

31
. “the afternoon off”: W. J. Henderson,
Sun
, March 11, 1928.