Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (5 page)

The lesson of the Met’s first season was that Thomas, Bizet, and Meyerbeer, not to mention Wagner, Gounod, Boito, and Ponchielli, had eclipsed “old” Italian opera. Verdi’s
Rigoletto, Il Trovatore,
and
La Traviata
and the bel canto works fell well below the 1883–84 box-office average, trailing far behind
Faust, Lohengrin, Mignon, La Gioconda, Les Huguenots,
and
Don Giovanni
. No one, not even Marcella Sembrich, could stem the tide. In the interest of protecting their investment, the pro–bel canto box holders took a grudging back seat to the ticket-buying public. The influential coterie of Wagnerite critics that had railed often and loudly against the dramatic implausibilities
and musical shallowness of Italian opera, together with the “ultra musical people in the gallery,” had won the day. In a moment of particular hauteur, Krehbiel dismissed Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, throwing in Verdi for good measure, for clinging to “the petty world of feelings,” the “skeleton” for their abiding and exclusive interest in melody (
Tribune,
Nov. 6, 1883). For the next seven years, the war would be waged not between two houses and two companies, but as a latter-day “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.” Lucia, Elvira, and their sisters lived on at the Academy for the remaining season-and-a-half of Mapleson’s tenure. At the Metropolitan from 1884 until 1891, its German years, Donizetti was absent, Rossini was represented only by his French grand opera,
Guillaume Tell,
and Bellini was confined to just three performances of
Norma
. When
Lucia di Lammermoor
was revived for the formidable Nellie Melba in 1893, Henderson, unmoved, pronounced the opera “dead to the world” (
Times,
Dec. 5). And so it went for decades. Caruso himself was unable to shield the 1904 premiere of Donizetti’s
Lucrezia Borgia
from the vituperations of Krehbiel (“a mouldering corpse”) and Henderson (“empty formulas . . . without a trace of dramatic characterization”). In fact, bel canto programming continued to be so spotty that partisan critical attacks were largely moot.

The beginning of the turnabout came with the February 18, 1918, revival of
I Puritani
. Without explanation, the Bellini that Krehbiel had once pilloried was suddenly a model to be emulated: “If only the composers of
Francesca da Rimini
or
Mârouf
could exchange three-quarters of their orchestral mastery for a tithe of the lyric ecstasy which floods the operas of Bellini, the world of modern opera would take on a more hopeful aspect”
(Tribune)
. Krehbiel’s conversion aside,
I Puritani
served the critic’s present purpose: to bludgeon Riccardo Zandonai and Henri Rabaud, whose operas had had recent Met premieres. A week later, Krehbiel devoted an entire column to a summary of
I Puritani
notices, nearly all glowing (
Tribune,
Feb. 24). When Olin Downes became principal music reviewer for the
Times
in 1924, bel canto found a true champion. He took the occasion of the January 18, 1926, production of
Il Barbiere
di Siviglia
to celebrate Rossini. The next year, it was Bellini’s turn.
Norma
retained “a surprising amount of its formal strength, its beauty and eloquence” (Nov. 17, 1927). And he loved
La Sonnambula:
“The music unfolds one faultless melody after another, always appropriate in warmth or pathos or tenderness to the emotion of the text, yet never violating the shape of the formal musical speech” (March 16, 1932). By the mid-1930s, the bel canto operas most frequently revived at the Met,
Lucia di Lammermoor, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, L’Elisir d’amore, Norma,
and
Don Pasquale,
were no longer wanting for rehabilitation by the critical establishment. They had stood the test of time and belonged to the ages.

It took another couple of decades for the neglected operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini to emerge from near oblivion. Their rediscovery turned on the confluence of two phenomena, a soprano, Maria Callas, and a technology, the long-playing record. In January 1949, soon after the start of her career, Callas stunned the Venetian public by following a run of
Walküre
Brünnhildes with her first
Puritani
Elviras. During these performances at La Fenice, a role unquestionably the property of the
soprano leggero
(a light, flexible soprano voice) was triumphantly reinvented by a
soprano drammatico d’agilità
(a soprano voice of both power and agility). Her recording of Bellini’s then unfamiliar opera was released on the heels of the familiar
Lucia
. Callas went on to breathe new musical and dramatic life into other works long in limbo as Italian theaters mounted rarities specifically for her, Rossini’s
Il Turco in Italia
and
Armida,
Donizetti’s
Anna Bolena
and
Poliuto,
and Bellini’s
Il Pirata,
all captured live or in the studio. The conservative Met trod more timorously than did venues abroad. During her all-too-brief string of twenty-three performances with the company, the only bel canto roles Callas sang were Norma, her calling card, and Lucia. The December 8, 1956, broadcast finds her in less than optimal form. Still, the poignancy of Lucia’s predicament explodes at the intersection of bel canto ornamentation and Callas’s incisive accents and diction. She brings the plangency of a “Lacrimosa” to the “Soffriva nel pianto” duet; for the “Mad Scene,” she summons despair and ecstasy at will. Many sopranos, mostly
leggero
like her predecessors, have followed Callas as Lucia at the Met; few have been deaf to her lessons.
¹⁹

Least of all Joan Sutherland. And she had none of Callas’s instability in the upper register, none of the weakness of most
coloratura
s in the lower. Her 1961 Met debut as Lucia was front-page news (
Herald Tribune,
Nov. 27). Twelve minutes of curtain calls saluted the “Mad Scene.” Alas, cameras and microphones were absent. Two months later, television’s Bell Telephone Hour documented her star turn live, preserving not only the voice of “la Stupenda,” but the impact of her interpretation. As her career progressed, Sutherland was often perceived as an indifferent actress. In this telecast, she makes vivid the young woman’s hallucination, the encounter with her beloved by the fountain, her joy at hearing the wedding music, the tender evocation of love, the febrile search for the invisible flute. For the nearly fourteen
minutes of scrutiny by the cameras, the singer’s virtuosity serves the drama. Sutherland’s complete Lucia was captured in a Met telecast on November 13, 1982. At fifty-six, less nimble of foot and, naturally, less fresh of voice, hers remained the standard to be met.

 

FIGURE 5.
Lucia di Lammermoor
“Mad Scene,” Joan Sutherland as Lucia, 1961 (courtesy Photofest)

 

It was the drive to find vehicles for Sutherland that called back works not heard at the Met for at least three decades:
La Sonnambula
(1962–63), Donizetti’s
La Fille du régiment
(1971–72),
I Puritani
(1975–76), and new productions of
Lucia di Lammermoor
(1964–65) and
Norma
(1969–70). She had become one of the company’s most potent and ultimately most durable attractions. Marilyn Horne was the raison d’être for Rossini’s
L’Italiana in Algeri
(1973–74) and
Semiramide
(1990–91), both long absent. The newsworthy debut of Beverly Sills at La Scala in
The Siege of Corinth
propelled the soprano and Rossini’s opera onto the Met stage for the first time (1974–75). Cecilia Bartoli secured a place for Rossini’s
La Cenerentola
(1997–98). For Renée Fleming, keen to add bel canto credentials to her title of Mozart-Strauss specialist, the management scheduled Bellini’s
Il Pirata
(2002–03) and Rossini’s
Armida
(2009–10). Juan Diego Flórez, the sole
tenore di grazia
(a light, flexible tenor voice) in Met history to spearhead a bel canto premiere, was matched by Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau in the pyrotechnics of Rossini’s
Le Comte Ory
(2010–11). Donizetti’s
Anna Bolena
(2011–12) provided another opportunity for Anna Netrebko to extend her lyric voice into
the domain of the
coloratura
. And DiDonato shone in the title role of Donizetti’s
Maria Stuarda
(2012–13). Callas had worked her magic. The appetite for unfamiliar bel canto she reawakened has continued to be satisfied by ensuing generations of artists trained to negotiate the most difficult embellishments with amazing virtuosity. The feast continues.
²⁰

THE GERMAN SEASONS AND FRENCH OPERA

AS THE 1883–84 SEASON CAME TO AN END
, there was no clear decision as to which impresario, Mapleson or Abbey, or which house, the veteran Academy or the rookie Metropolitan, would emerge the victor in what was in retrospect the city’s first opera war. The outcome would have little to do with the tiff between the Nobs and the Swells that had set it off. Nor would the endgame be other than marginally affected by the much publicized face-off between sparring divas. It would, instead, have everything to do with the economics of producing opera on an internationally competitive scale in New York.

When the smoke cleared, Mapleson was left weakened but standing, if only until Christmas 1885. Abbey was gone. His Grand Italian Opera had run up a heavy deficit for which he was personally responsible. Not that he was extravagant; he was actually quite frugal. But by neglecting to factor into his equation that the upper tiers held half the seats of the house, and that they accounted for one-third of the receipts of sold-out performances, he had made a costly miscalculation: at $2–$3 each, tickets were beyond the grasp of the popular, largely immigrant audience. Sales fell sharply as curiosity surrounding the new house dwindled. By the time Abbey adjusted prices downward it was too late. He offered to return for a second season with the proviso that the stockholders shoulder his losses; the directors refused to levy the requisite assessments. The board received bids from two managers based in England, and another from Leopold Damrosch, founder and conductor of the Oratorio Society of New York and of the New York Symphony Society, rival of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society led by Theodore Thomas. German-born like Thomas, Damrosch had been a musical force in the city
since his arrival in 1871. His proposition departed radically from conventional arrangements between owners and leasing impresarios. For an annual salary and a percentage of the profits, Damrosch agreed to put on a season of fourteen operas at ticket prices cut by half and more, and at an anticipated average cost per performance less than half that incurred by Abbey—all the while balancing the books. Risks and rewards would accrue to the stockholders in their new capacity as producers.
¹

Damrosch had in mind a season of opera not in Italian, but in German, its repertoire principally consigned to works composed on German texts, with casts recruited in Germany at fees far lower than Abbey’s stars had commanded. The orchestra would be drawn from the German players of his New York Symphony Society, by all accounts superior to the Italian instrumentalists Abbey had hired. Damrosch would do all the conducting. In making his case, he contended that the German speakers of New York, the population he was confident of luring to the half-empty upper tiers, were interested neither in Italian opera nor in German opera sung in Italian. Ultimately, and despite resistance from influential box holders, the bottom line won out. On and off the stage for the next seven years, German was in every way the lingua franca of the Metropolitan.

Damrosch had come to New York to direct the by then well-established Arion Society, one of the many singing groups active in the United States in the second half of the century. The influx of German intellectuals and cultural workers, musicians in particular, had begun with their flight from Europe following the aborted 1848 revolutions. In 1855, the Philharmonic was 79 percent German; by 1892, 97 percent of its players were of German descent. German music dominated programming; until World War I, 70 percent of the repertory of US orchestras was German or Austrian. The 1880 federal census recorded 360,000 persons of German origin in Manhattan alone, roughly 30 percent of the population. Had their Lower East Side Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) been an independent municipality, it would have been the fourth largest in the United States. New York had become the third German-speaking metropolis in the world, outstripped only by Berlin and Vienna. The immigrant audience that was still too small to support Palmo in 1844 and that, in spite of its greater numbers, had eluded Abbey in 1883 would become Damrosch’s target market. By that time, the
German community had established cultural institutions of all sorts. The Atlantic Garden on the Bowery was a favored destination where “German families sang songs of the fatherland and listened to orchestras perform Strauss, Wagner, and Beethoven.” The Stadt Theater, founded in 1854, and later the Germania, the Thalia, and the Irving Place Theatre brought distinguished German actors to New York for seasons of classical drama: Schiller’s
Don Carlos,
Hauptmann’s
Die Weber,
Shakespeare’s
Hamlet,
Dumas’s
La Dame aux camélias,
Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
. Two, three, and sometimes more professional repertory companies were active in Manhattan from mid-century to 1918 or so, when anti-German sentiment put them out of business. The most prominent and durable of the twenty-eight German-language papers that could be found on New York newsstands in the early 1850s was the
Staats-Zeitung;
it carried extensive reviews of Met performances well into the twentieth century.
²

The trans-Atlantic exportation of its musical culture as a matter of Germany’s national interest began in the last decades of the nineteenth century with maneuvers to draw the United States to its side—and away from England and France. The implications of this policy “were vast, political, and universal, and extended far beyond the development of American musical life.” The calling of German musicians to spread their native canon from coast to coast intersected with the Kaiser’s imperial agenda. Through their engagement with German music, audiences advanced the conflicting intentions of liberal German musicians and nationalist German expansionists. In the end, “while the efforts of Theodore Thomas and Walter Damrosch [Leopold’s conductor-composer son] may not have represented a diplomatic act, they clearly had a diplomatic effect. For the art of the three Bs or Wagner evoked precisely the respect for German greatness,
Heimat
[homeland] and emotionalism that Reich officials wanted to convey, and their legacy lasted much longer than the German
Kaiserreich
[empire].”
³

Leopold Damrosch signaled his intention to promote the cause of Wagner by scheduling
Tannhäuser
for opening night 1884 and lavishing his best effort on the preparation of
Die Walküre
. Although neither was new to New York, never before had either been heard to such advantage. The early, Italianate
Tannhäuser
was a safe choice;
Walküre,
the most accessible component of the “Ring,” represented the more mature Wagner. Henderson
pointed to
Lohengrin,
the season’s third Wagner opera, as proof of his axiom: that the “sincere and realistic” interpretation of German artists was in all ways superior to the Italian practice of privileging “a few tuneful numbers” (
Times,
Dec. 4). It was
Walküre,
reportedly up to the Bayreuth production standard, marvelously cast with Bayreuth regulars Amalie Materna and Marianne Brandt, that made the deepest impression. In the spirit of ensemble that divided Damrosch’s German troupe from Abbey’s assembly of stars, Brandt, who had already sung leading soprano roles in
Fidelio
and
Don Giovanni
and the principal contralto and mezzo-soprano parts in
Le Prophète
and
Lohengrin,
and had done comprimario duty to boot in
Rigoletto
and
William Tell,
impersonated both the powerful goddess Fricka and one of Wotan’s well-nigh anonymous daughters in
Walküre
.

Don Giovanni, Le Prophète, Les Huguenots,
and
Rigoletto
were holdovers from the inaugural season. Apart from the Wagner firsts, there were two other German novelties,
Fidelio
and
Der Freischütz
. The premieres of three French operas, a response to the preference of the public, confirmed that the Met had become home to a serious company, devoted to serious music. Reviewers underscored the historical interest of Auber’s
Masaniello
(usually titled
La Muette de Portici
) and Rossini’s
William Tell
(born
Guillaume Tell
), formative influences on the development of
le grand opéra français,
and Halévy’s
La Juive,
a telling example of the genre’s maturity. Henry Finck went so far as to shower Auber with reflected glory; the composer was credited with leaving his “mark on a much greater master, Richard Wagner, whose enthusiasm for
Masaniello
was unbounded”
(Evening Post)
. The scenic and dramatic effects of French grand opera productions, in particular the eruption of Vesuvius in the Auber and the transformation from moonlit night to Alpine “rosy morn”
(Tribune)
in the Rossini, impressed critics and public. Damrosch had delivered more than he had promised. Not only had he kept to his budget, but he had presented, in opulent settings and compelling stagings, a talented ensemble of singing actors in a challenging repertoire. New York had never before experienced so rich an operatic season.
⁴

On February 15, an exhausted Leopold Damrosch died suddenly of pneumonia. True to his word, he had conducted every performance, fifty-two in three months, including in a last burst of nine days five
Die Walküre
s, a
Le Prophète,
and a
Lohengrin
. Shocked and disconcerted, the board turned to its secretary, Edmund C. Stanton, who had come to opera—and to Wagner—only lately and almost by chance. Stanton was named executive director and general manager. But as novelist Louis Auchincloss, his great-nephew, put it years later,
“Something in the haunting strains of
Tristan und Isolde
. . . or in the stirring motifs of the ‘Ring’ . . . must have penetrated the polished surface of this well-mannered and obliging young man to turn him into the ardent champion of operas detested by the frivolous but powerful society of which he had once been so compliant and affable a member.” Walter Damrosch, twenty-three years old, was made assistant manager and assistant conductor. It was Walter who had led most of the remaining performances of the season, and it was he who was dispatched to Europe to find a successor to his father. For the upcoming season, 1885–86, he conscripted the Hungarian-born Anton Seidl, assistant to Wagner in the years just prior to the composer’s death in February 1883.
⁵

By the time he landed in New York with his wife, soprano Auguste Seidl-Kraus, Seidl, who had been central to the preparation of the first “Ring” cycle in 1876, was an accomplished conductor, poised to fulfill Wagner’s prophecy: that he would become the master’s American apostle. In the German seasons to come, he would be responsible for the momentous US premieres of
Die Meistersinger
(1886),
Tristan und Isolde
(1886),
Siegfried
(1887),
Götterdämmerung
(1888), and
Das Rheingold
(1889). Critics were unfailingly dithyrambic: Seidl’s “impulse dominated reflection, emotion shamed logic. . . . As for the rest, professional and layman, dilettante and ignorant, their souls were his to play with.” The company’s leading soprano, the acknowledged
prima donna assoluta
Lilli Lehmann, incomparable in her exploration of the entire repertoire, was a surpassing Isolde and Brünnhilde. The other Seidl/Stanton novelties, and as often their execution, evoked a mixed response.
Aïda
was admired for its modernity and for its sumptuous décor, but only Brandt, the Amneris, emerged unscathed, and Seidl was chastised for his “dragging” tempos
(Times)
. Another Verdi masterpiece,
Un Ballo in maschera,
headed by the always exceptional Lehmann, was buried in scorn, its “more than familiar music wedded to a plot almost comic in its lack of ideas”
(Herald)
. To add insult to injury, the act 3 festivities were “beefed up” by the interpolation of Massenet dance tunes.
Norma
was dismissed as a relic. The two French premieres—Spontini’s
Fernand Cortez
(“a good deal like an attempt to resuscitate a mummy”
[Tribune]
) and
L’Africaine
(“There are plenty of good musical judges who think it was a pity Meyerbeer lived to complete this opera”
[Herald]
)—provided opportunities to applaud the scenery, if little else. German pieces, Wagner and Weber’s
Euryanthe
aside, were chosen for their spectacle or their
gemütlichkeit,
their amiability. Among the offerings intended to leaven the heavy dose of Wagnerian music-drama,
Die Königin von Saba
was the only hit, its exotic melodies and décors creating
sufficient demand to justify a whopping twenty-five performances in its first season. Reviewers who showed indulgence toward Goldmark’s Biblical extravaganza were merciless toward his Arthurian
Merlin
. The lighter pieces, Ignaz Brüll’s
Das Goldene Kreuz,
Viktor Nessler’s
Der Trompeter von Säkkingen,
and Peter Cornelius’s
Der Barbier von Bagdad,
pleased only the Germanophile press corps.
⁶