Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (16 page)

Farrar sang
Tosca
only twice more after that. She had turned forty, the age at which she had pledged to leave the company. Despite her explicit preference and the vociferations of her most ardent fans, the Gerryflappers, Gatti refused to allow
Tosca
for her farewell, some said in retribution for her zeal in the insurrection that had met his appointment fourteen years earlier. He scheduled Leoncavallo’s
Zazà
instead. Nonetheless, Farrar’s April 22, 1922, adieu remains among the most emotional in the history of the company, the
house festooned with banners, its stage covered with flowers, the star, queen of the event, wearing a tiara and bearing a scepter, her car surrounded by noisy admirers, traffic halted as it carried her away. We are left to wonder what a Caruso farewell would have been.

During World War I and after, Gatti held fast to the policy of repertoire expansion set at the beginning of his regime. Each season, he introduced two or three operas, more often four or five, once seven, and in 1918–19 as many as ten, including five one-acters. From 1918–19 to 1928–29, Gatti presented forty-eight novelties, proportionally as many as in his prewar period. New York’s music critics were generally happy with older scores new to the Met, such as Verdi’s
La Forza del destino
(“a vital opera still” [
Times,
Nov. 16, 1918]) and Mozart’s
Così fan tutte
(“some of the most delightful music ever written” [
Tribune,
March 25, 1922]). As always, they were hard on contemporary European compositions and inclined to condescend to the American pieces. Gatti’s repertoire continued to show commitment both to opera’s past and to its vitality as a contemporary art form.

Of the seven world premieres listed in table 6, the three that made up
Il Trittico
aroused far and away the most excitement. For one thing, they were creations of Maestro Puccini. For another, his triptych was the first world premiere to be staged in New York, or indeed anywhere, after the armistice.
Il Tabarro,
Puccini’s slice of squalid proletarian life, his sole excursion into the heart of verismo, was attacked for its naked realism, for the perceived paucity of lyric passages, and for the ostensible monotony of the river motif that threads through the narrative. No one liked
Suor Angelica
(“over an hour of almost unrelieved female chatter”
[Tribune]
) despite Farrar’s moving portrayal of the hapless nun, deprived of her illegitimate child and ultimately driven to madness and suicide.
Gianni Schicchi,
a hilarious demonstration of the composer’s farcical vein, mustered all the acclaim. Florence Easton’s “O mio babbino caro,” “the most exquisite bit of melody and singing of the evening”
(Tribune),
was encored. Puccini’s first and, as it turned out, only comic opera had entered the repertoire to stay. The negative view of the other panels endured for half a century, shattering the conception as a whole until the trio was reunited in 1975. By then,
Il Trittico
was seen as yet another successful turn in the composer’s inspired journey. Leaving aside
the non-subscription premiere in 1918 at raised prices, the initial two-season run missed even the box-office mean. Leoncavallo’s
Zazà,
which soon disappeared, did better.

TABLE 6.
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1918–19 to 1921–22

 

 

TABLE 6.
(continued)

 

 

Gatti would produce twenty-four new works between 1922–23 and 1928–29, all but two (Gaspare Spontini’s
La Vestale,
Massenet’s
Le Roi de Lahore
) born in the twentieth century. The 1928–29 season alone registered four modernist novelties, fresh from their European réclame. Ottorino Respighi’s fantasy
La Campana sommersa,
Ildebrando Pizzetti’s declamatory
Fra Gherardo,
and Ernst Krenek’s jazz-inflected
Jonny spielt auf
disappointed the critics and the public. So did
Die Ägyptische Helena,
further evidence, insisted the reviewers, of Richard Strauss’s waning invention. Igor Stravinsky’s
Le Rossignol
would return after a protracted absence; it has yet to prove its staying power. Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande
found its way into the repertoire without delay. Leoš Janáček’s
Jenufa
was made to wait even longer than the thirty years it took Puccini’s
Turandot
to break through.
²⁹

The posthumous
Turandot
(unfinished at the composer’s death in November 1924, with the final scene completed by Franco Alfano) was an event of national moment at its La Scala world premiere in April 1926. Prior to reaching the Met in November of that year, it had been the subject of copious attention. Gatti filled the stage with stars, comprimarios, choristers, dancers, and supers reported to number between six hundred and seven hundred. Joseph Urban’s spectacular orientalist design, a pinnacle of art direction under Gatti, was just one of his fifty or so Met commissions, an oeuvre never to be equaled. Jeritza had the heroic upper register, the charisma, and the fabled beauty of the eponymous Chinese princess. The reviews marveled at her imperious manner and prodigal tone. For Olin Downes, Lauri-Volpi had the “leather lungs” and “good stage presence”
(Times)
demanded by Calaf. Conductor Tullio Serafin marshaled the multitudes with his wonted authority. Fifteen curtain calls spoke eloquently of the public’s approbation. But most critics disagreed, some vehemently. Downes, for one, embarked on the mission of striking the opera from the boards. He fulminated whenever it was revived: “a whole resplendent operatic edifice, destined sooner or later to collapse like a house of cards, has been made of virtually nothing” (
Times,
Nov. 21, 1926); “Puccini had stopped creating when he wrote it, but had mastered the art of saying nothing exceedingly well” (
Times,
Nov. 1, 1927); and in a final insult, “there is only one work by a great composer of modern times that we think as bad, and that is the
Egyptian Helen
by Richard Strauss” (
Times,
Nov. 17, 1928).
Turandot
led the box office in 1926–27 and rang up
receipts far above average the following season. After a run of twenty-seven performances between 1926 and 1930, it was dropped, no doubt the victim of high production costs, hefty royalties, and the departure of Jeritza in 1932. In 1961, the clarion voices of Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli would secure
Turandot
’s place in the Met’s canon.
³⁰

TABLE 7.
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1922–23 to 1928–29

 

 

TABLE 7.
(continued)

 

 

Gatti presented one last Puccini premiere. Commissioned as an operetta for Vienna in 1913, reconceived as an opera first heard in Monte Carlo in 1917,
La Rondine
came to New York only in 1928. Critics were generally well disposed to Urban’s sets and the stellar cast. Lucrezia Bori had, they avowed, imbued Magda with exceptional charm and pellucid diction, qualities we discern in a 1934 broadcast of a live Chicago performance and in a recording of the aria “Ore dolci e divine” made a year after her retirement in 1936. Gigli compensated for his unprepossessing appearance and rudimentary stagecraft with honeyed timbre. Although reviewers granted the work its due in terms of craft and melody, and some even admitted to liking it, almost to a man they dismissed the composition as “the afternoon off of a genius.”
La Rondine
failed to take flight in its initial Met run and in its 1935–36 revival. Box-office receipts came up short. But then, in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, even
La Bohème
and
Madama Butterfly
languished. That would, of course, change.
³¹

WAGNER

THE LAST SIX YEARS
of Gatti’s regime saw difficulty depreciate into misery. In 1929–30, the company coasted on the momentum of the cushy 1920s and on fortuitous new revenue streams. For the next two seasons, it survived on the $1 million the tightfisted administration had squirreled away. The final three years were, in the words of the famously unflappable general manager, his “Calvary.”
¹

The season opened with Puccini’s
Manon Lescaut,
Lucrezia Bori as the flighty Manon and Beniamino Gigli as the besotted Chevalier Des Grieux. Bori and Gigli, on-stage lovers in so many of the 129 performances they sang together, were soon to find themselves on opposite sides of an internecine divide. Opening night was October 28, 1929, a Monday, as had been and continues to be the almost unbroken tradition. “Black Monday,” a day in which the Dow Jones lost almost 13 percent, followed on the “Black Thursday” of the week before. The next day, the front-page headline in the
Times
ran, “stock prices slump 14 billion dollars in nation-wide stampede.” The customary opening-night feature article, oblivious to the crisis that shook the wealthy regions of the auditorium, devoted its considerable length to the glamour of the occasion. The following day was “Black Tuesday,” October 29; the market fell another 12 percent, and the Great Depression was on. The only reference to the likelihood of less glittering future openings was linked not to the financial bust, but to a prospective new house at Rockefeller Center: “These events need
the half antiquated setting, the absurd plush and gold manner which they have at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street, and cannot have when that locality has given place to something a little less pompous and splendid, and a little more comfortable, practical and contemporaneous, uptown” (
Times,
Oct. 29, 1929). In his balancing act, Olin Downes betrays the ambivalence that had plagued plans for a new house in the preceding decades and would prove to be an insurmountable hurdle for decades to come.
²

The most persistent and passionate advocate for a state-of-the-art home was Otto Kahn. He had made it his personal crusade beginning in 1903 with his appointment to the board, had promised Gatti new quarters in 1908, and from 1925 to 1927 had played his last and strongest hand. He put together a nearly $2.7 million deal for a plot bounded by 56th and 57th Streets and Eighth and Ninth Avenues. What he lacked was the backing of the “fogeys,” the directors of the Real Estate Company. In an effort to stare them down, Kahn embarked on a campaign to draw the city’s music constituencies to his side. His “Statement” of October 5, 1925, titled
The Metropolitan Opera,
could only have irritated his socially prominent opposition: “It is a solemn obligation of a semi-public institution, such as the Metropolitan Opera, to provide amply and generously for music lovers of small or modest means. I have had frequent occasion to observe how much music means to such devotees of the art. Indeed, I venture the assertion that it means a good deal more to the denizens of, say, Third Avenue than to those of Fifth Avenue.” In a letter of early 1926 in which he rehearsed the deficits of the present house—too many seats with poor visibility, a hopelessly outmoded stage, minimal storage, inadequate rehearsal space—Kahn informed the Real Estate Company of his acquisition. He went on to rub the noses of the directors in their classism: “A considerable number of the lower priced seats are so bad that it is really an act of unfairness to take money for them—especially from people of small means.” On January 25, 1927, he detailed his plan: increased seating to at least four thousand, improved sight lines, and, most distasteful to the old guard, the reduction of the number of boxes to thirty, which would be leased, not owned. However the matter was decided, the company would not produce opera on 39th Street beyond the next five years. Expenses had proved too great, the facilities too decrepit. On February 2, its back to the wall, the Real Estate Company board recommended Kahn’s proposal to the stockholders. On April 12, the stockholders, led by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and Robert Goelet, turned their board down. They objected to the 57th Street location: as the directors put it, the site was simply not “monumental
enough.” Monumentality was not what Kahn was after: “Our conception is that [the theater] should be plain and dignified, on good but simple lines, seeking its distinction in being perfectly adapted to its purpose, both on the stage and in the accommodation to the public, rather than in outward impressiveness.” But Kahn knew he had lost. He put the property up for sale. In the months and years that followed, he kept his counsel in debates on the Rockefeller Center solution that was assumed imminent by Downes on opening night 1929.
³

Despite the crash and ensuing crisis, 1929–30 recorded the highest revenues in company history. Attendance was off, although not dramatically. For the most part, subscriptions had been nailed down before the start of the season. By great, if temporary, good fortune, non-box-office income had risen to a dazzling $350,000 from rights to engage Metropolitan artists for recordings and broadcasts, rights to publish Met programs and to advertise in their pages, rentals to outside producing agents, commercial endorsements, and food and drink concessions. Gatti’s stash remained untouched. The general manager’s contract was renewed through 1934–35.
⁴

The ever so delicate balance that obtained through 1929–30 was undone by the more than 10 percent decline in 1930–31 subscriptions. Income dropped by $308,000; another $100,000 was lost with the cancellation of tours to Atlanta and Richmond when local operators balked at the required guar-antees.

Opening night belonged once again to
Aïda
. Mediocre reviews kicked off what was sure to be a troubled season. The companion feature article in the
Times
was peculiarly upbeat. The message? All was well at the Metropolitan—and beyond: “Regarded always as the acme of luxury by the man in the street, the opening of the opera was watched with especial interest this year. It was felt to be an index to prosperity. And Broadway hailed with satisfaction its solidly maintained subscriptions, backed by leaders in world finance, as an indication of better times to come in the theatres and trade of the metropolis.” The front page of the
Telegram
carried the headline “The Opera Opening Is Still the Opera Opening, Depression or No Depression, and Kahn or No Kahn.” That may have been the case for this particular night. But otherwise, the conversation was all about a break with the past, about a new and modern theater within the perimeter of the projected “Rockefeller City” between
Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 48th and 51st Streets. John D. Rockefeller Jr. brought his voice to bear in acquiring the site from Columbia University in early 1929. His intention was to have as the centerpiece of this ambitious development a “Place de l’Opéra for New York City.” The clinching argument for the “uptown” location was its contiguity to Radio City, a proximity that would further Rockefeller’s grand communications design while freeing the Met from its physical confines, allowing it to reach millions across the nation, indeed across the world. The prospect was dizzying: “It [radio] has captured the opera stars and brought them to the microphone so that the people of the land might hear their wondrous voices. . . . The broadcasters look forward to the day when the Metropolitan will cast away from the Victorian environs at Fortieth Street and Broadway and smile on the microphone.” The future for opera was not only rosy, it was transcendent. But by December 6, 1929, little more than a month after the stock market crash, prospects for an alliance between the Metropolitan and Rockefeller were dead. Ironically, no sooner had Kahn sold his 57th Street plot in September 1930 than the Real Estate Company came around to the view that a new house was artistically and fiscally imperative.
⁵

Broadcasting would not wait. It took on a life of its own, impervious to the sparring over the pros and cons of a new house. In spring 1931, NBC agreed to transmit twenty-four complete or partial performances from the 39th Street stage each season for the two upcoming, at the substantial fee of $120,000 per year. It was Kahn who closed the deal. Up to that point, Gatti had vetoed broadcasts, blaming poor sound quality, and no doubt harboring the fear that attendance would suffer. NBC paid $30,000 annually for the exclusive right to negotiate with Met stars for other programing.
⁶

As summer and early fall wore on, omens for the coming season grew darker. Subscriptions would shrink by another 10 percent, and despite swelling non-box-office income, revenues would drop by another $506,000. With expenses projected to outpace receipts by nearly 23 percent, the last dregs of the $1 million reserve would be gone by the end of the season. On October 26, Kahn resigned as president and chairman, keeping his seat on the opera board. The weight of the Depression, a widely publicized suit brought by a Swedish soprano with whom he had had an affair, and surely bitterness at the quashing of his ambitions for a house on 57th Street had contributed to his
decision. He was also painfully aware that the leadership of a Jew (he had joined the Fifth Avenue Episcopal parish church of St. Thomas in the vain hope that greater acceptance would follow) had been tolerated only as long as the company was profitable. He bequeathed the presidency and chairmanship to his lawyer, Paul D. Cravath. Son of a minister, the Ohio-born Cravath was an early architect of corporate structures retained as attorney and consultant by Westinghouse, RCA, and Kahn’s own firm. His long record of public and international service had begun with the Armistice. At the time of the transition, he was seventy years old. Knowing little of opera, he “charmingly . . . undertook music appreciation lessons.” He quickly made organizational and policy changes aimed, he said, at preserving ‘our last Victorian tradition’” (
Times,
Nov. 3, 1931).

The
Times
gave its usual airbrushed account of opening night, November 2. The headline, echoing that of the previous year, proclaimed in fanciful denial that there was “No Sign of Depression in Brilliant Opening,” and suggested that subscriptions had held up. It was at this point precisely, as Gatti wrote in his memoirs, that “the deluge” was upon the house. “The gossip that broke loose did not help us,” he continued. “Rumor and tales concerning the Metropolitan were rife on every hand. . . . There were tales of rivalry and dissension in the company. There was talk of Radio City, Roxy, bankruptcy, and I don’t know what other far-fetched ideas.” In fact, not so far-fetched. Minutes of a November 18, 1931, meeting read, “It was . . . proposed that Mr. Gatti-Casazza . . . be authorized to accept the cooperation of all artists, musicians and other employees of the Company who might volunteer to accept reductions in their respective salaries, and to enter into such arrangements . . . as he might think expedient to assure completion of the season.” Only days later, the general manager “voluntarily” reduced his own salary by 10 percent “and the administrative and executive staff, together with the principal singers and conductors, ‘spontaneously followed his example’” (
Times,
Nov. 22, 1931). Not all the principal singers, it soon turned out.
⁷

There was one bright note: the Christmas Day broadcast of
Hänsel und Gretel,
the first nationwide transmission of the Metropolitan Opera. It was carried by more than one hundred stations on both the Red and Blue (later ABC) networks of NBC and by shortwave around the world. The announcer of the occasion, and for the next forty years, was Milton Cross. Deems Taylor narrated the action over the score, to the distress of many listeners. All but one of the twenty-three subsequent broadcasts that season were limited to one hour. The only available recordings of the first two broadcast years are
extracts of
Manon
with Grace Moore and Gigli and of
Tristan und Isolde
with Frida Leider and Lauritz Melchior.
⁸

 

FIGURE 16.
Backstage after the first matinee broadcast,
Hänsel und Gretel
, Deems Taylor, the announcer, second from left, and Giulio Gatti-Casazza, far right, December 25, 1931 (Carlo Edwards; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

In the frenetic spring of 1932, events followed furiously one after the other. In March, the Rockefeller alternative was back on the table, revived by the astonishing success of the radio programs. But again there was a snag, an apparent deal breaker: Rockefeller insisted that every component of his development be self-sustaining. The market rate he would exact would far exceed the meager rent charged by the Real Estate Company. For a time, arguments in favor of the move seemed to prevail: that broadcast fees would take up the slack, and that “as soon as opera [became] a common radio experience, especially with television, the native American composers and their librettists [would] begin to use it as their medium of expression and truly modern opera [would] result” (
Times,
March 16, 1932), a variation on the perennial, deluded refrain. The outcome of years of negotiation, of rising and falling hopes, was again in the hands of the old moneyed crowd, keenly aware
that it would be left holding the bag, the white elephant of an opera house on Broadway, should the company relocate (
Times,
March 25, 1932). By April 18, Cravath was said to be ready to vote “yes”; he was not, however, in a position to speak for the stockholders of the Real Estate Company. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller were seen more frequently in their box at the Met.