Chapters of Opera Part 1

Chapters of Opera.

by Henry Edward Krehbiel.

PREFACE

The making of this book was prompted by the fact that with the season 1907-08 the Metropolitan Opera House in New York completed an existence of twenty-five years. Through all this period at public representations I have occupied stall D-15 on the ground floor as reviewer of musical affairs for The New York Tribune newspaper. I have, therefore, been a witness of the vicissitudes through which the inst.i.tution has pa.s.sed in a quarter-century, and a chronicler of all significant musical things which were done within its walls. I have seen the failure of the artistic policy to promote which the magnificent theater was built; the revolution accomplished by the stockholders under the leadership of Leopold Damrosch; the progress of a German regime, which did much to develop tastes and create ideals which, till its coming, were little-known quant.i.ties in American art and life; the overthrow of that regime in obedience to the command of fashion; the subsequent dawn and development of the liberal and comprehensive policy which marked the climax of the career of Maurice Grau as an operatic director, I have witnessed since then, many of the fruits of wise endeavor and astute management frittered away by managerial incapacity and greed, and fad and fashion come to rule again, where for a brief, but eventful period, serious artistic interest and endeavor had been dominant.

The inst.i.tution will enter upon a new regime with the season 1908-09.

The time, therefore, seemed fitting for a review of the twenty-five years that are past. The incidents of this period are fixed; they may be variously viewed, but they cannot be changed. They belong to history, and to a presentation of that history I have devoted most of the pages which follow. I have been actuated in my work by deep seriousness of purpose, and have tried to avoid everything which could not make for intellectual profit, or, at least, amiable and illuminative entertainment.

The chapters which precede the more or less detailed history of the Metropolitan Opera House (I-VII) were written for the sake of the light which they shed on existing inst.i.tutions and conditions, and to ill.u.s.trate the development of existing taste, appreciation, and interest touching the lyrical drama. To the same end much consideration has been paid to significant doings outside the Metropolitan Opera House since it has been the chief domicile of grand opera in New York. Especial attention has been given for obvious reasons to the two seasons of opera at Mr. Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House.

H. E. KREHBIEL.

Blue Hill, Maine, the Summer of 1908.

AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THIRD EDITION

For the purposes of a new and popular edition of this book, the publishers asked the author to continue his historical narrative, his record of performances, and his critical survey of the operas produced at the two chief operatic inst.i.tutions of New York, from the beginning of the season 1908-1909 down to the close of the season 1910-1911. This invitation the author felt compelled to decline for several reasons, one of which (quite sufficient in itself), was that he had already undertaken a work of great magnitude which would occupy all his working hours during the period between the close of the last season and the publication of this edition.

Thereupon the publishers, who seemed to place a high valuation on the historical element in the book, suggested that the record of performances at least be brought up to date even if the criticism of new operas and the discussion of the other incidents of the season--such as the dissensions between the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House, the rivalry between them and the director of the Manhattan, the quarrels with artists, the successes achieved by some operas and the failure suffered by others--be postponed for the present at least for want of time on the part of the author to carry on the work on the scale of the original edition.

It was finally agreed that the author should supply the record for the period intervening between the appearance of the first edition of "Chapters of Opera" and the present publication by revised excerpts from the annual summaries of the activities of the seasons in question published by him in the New York Tribune, of which newspaper he has had the honor of being the musical critic for thirty years past. For the privilege of using this material the author is deeply beholden to the Tribune a.s.sociation and the editor, Hart Lyman, Esq. The record may be found in the Appendices after the last chapter.

H. E. KREHBIEL.

Blue Hill, Maine, Summer of 1911.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION OF OPERA IN NEW YORK

Considering the present state of Italian opera in New York City (I am writing in the year of our Lord 1908), it seems more than a little strange that its entire history should come within the memories of persons still living. It was only two years ago that an ancient factotum at the Metropolitan Opera House died who, for a score of years before he began service at that establishment, had been in various posts at the Academy of Music. Of Mr. Arment a kindly necrologist said that he had seen the Crowd gather in front of the Park Theater in 1825, when the new form of entertainment effected an entrance in the New World. I knew the little old gentleman for a quarter of a century or more, but though he was familiar with my interest in matters historical touching the opera in New York, he never volunteered information of things further back than the consulship of Mapleson at the Academy. Moreover, I was unable to reconcile the story of his recollection of the episode of 1825 with the circ.u.mstances of his early life. Yet the tale may have been true, or the opera company that had attracted his boyish attention been one that came within the first decade after Italian opera had its introduction.

Concerning another's recollections, I have not the slightest doubt.

Within the last year Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, entertaining some of her relatives and friends with an account of social doings in New York in her childhood, recalled the fact that she had been taken as a tiny miss to hear some of the performances of the Garcia Troupe, and, if I mistake not, had had Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" pointed out to her by her brother. This brother was Samuel Ward, who enjoyed the friendship of the old poet, and published recollections of him not long after his death, in The New York Mirror. For a score of years I have enjoyed the gentle companionship at the opera of two sisters whose mother was an Italian pupil of Da Ponte's, and when, a few years ago, Professor Marchesan, of the University of Treviso, Italy, appealed to me for material to be used in the biography of Da Ponte, which he was writing, I was able, through my gracious and gentle operatic neighbors, to provide him with a number of occasional poems written, in the manner of a century ago, to their mother, in whom Da Ponte had awakened a love for the Italian language and literature. This, together with some of my own labors in uncovering the American history of Mozart's collaborator, has made me feel sometimes as if I, too, had dwelt for a brief s.p.a.ce in that Arcadia of which I purpose to gossip in this chapter, and a few others which are to follow it.

There may be other memories going back as far as Mrs. Howe's, but I very much doubt if there is another as lively as hers on any question connected with social life in New York fourscore years ago. Italian opera was quite as aristocratic when it made its American bow as it is now, and decidedly more exclusive. It is natural that memories of it should linger in Mrs. Howe's mind for the reason that the family to which she belonged moved in the circles to which the new form of entertainment made appeal. A memory of the incident which must have been even livelier than that of Mrs. Howe's, however, perished in 1906, when Manuel Garcia died in London, in his one hundred and first year, for he could say of the first American season of Italian opera what aeneas said of the siege of Troy, "All of which I saw, and some of which I was."

Manuel Garcia was a son of the Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia, who brought the inst.i.tution to our sh.o.r.es; he was a brother of our first prima donna, she who then was only the Signorina Garcia, but within a l.u.s.trum afterward was the great Malibran; and he sang in the first performance, on November 29, 1825, and probably in all the performances given between that date and August of the next year, when the elder Garcia departed, leaving the Signorina, as Mme. Malibran, aged but eighteen, to develop her powers in local theaters and as a chorister in Grace Church. Of this and other related things presently.

In the sometimes faulty and incomplete records of the American stage to which writers on musical history have hitherto been forced to repair, 1750 is set down as the natal year for English ballad opera in America.

It is thought that it was in that year that "The Beggar's Opera" found its way to New York, after having, in all probability, been given by the same company of comedians in Philadelphia in the middle of the year preceding. But it is as little likely that these were the first performances of ballad operas on this side of the Atlantic as that the people of New York were oblivious of the nature of operatic music of the Italian type until Garcia's troupe came with Rossini's "Barber of Seville," in 1825. There are traces of ballad operas in America in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and there can exist no doubt at all that French and Italian operas were given in some form, perhaps, as a rule, in the adapted form which prevailed in the London theaters until far into the nineteenth century, before the year 1800, in the towns and cities of the Eastern seaboard, which were in most active communication with Great Britain, I quote from an article on the history of opera in the United States, written by me for the second edition of "Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians":

Among French works Rousseau's "Pygmalion" and "Devin du Village,"

Dalayrac's "Nina" and "L'Amant Statue," Monsigny's "Deserteur," Gretry's "Zemire et Azor," "Fausse Magie" and "Richard Coeur de Lion" and others, were known in Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York in the last decade of the eighteenth century. There were traces, too, of Pergolese's "Serva padrona," and it seems more than likely that an "opera in three acts," the text adapted by Colman, ent.i.tled "The Spanish Barber; or, The Futile Precaution," played in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, in 1794, was Paisiello's "Barbiere di Siviglia." From 1820 to about 1845 more than a score of the Italian, French, and German operas, which made up the staple of foreign repertories, were frequently performed by English singers. The earliest of these singers were members of the dramatic companies who introduced theatrical plays in the colonies. They went from London to Philadelphia, New York, Williamsburg (Va.), and Charleston (S. C.), but eventually established their strongest and most enduring foothold in New York.

Accepting the 1750 date as the earliest of unmistakable records for a performance of "The Beggar's Opera" in New York, the original home of opera here was the Na.s.sau Street Theater--the first of two known by that name. It was a two-storied house, with high gables. Six wax lights were in front of the stage, and from the ceiling dangled a "barrel hoop,"

pierced by half a dozen nails on which were spiked as many candles. It is not necessary to take the descriptions of these early playhouses as baldly literal, nor as indicative of something like barbarism.

The "barrel hoop" chandelier of the old theater in Na.s.sau street was doubtless only a primitive form of the chandeliers which kept their vogue for nearly a century after the first comedians sang and acted at the Na.s.sau Street Theater. Illuminating gas did not reach New York till 1823, and "a thousand candles" was put forth as an attractive feature at a concert in the American metropolis as late as 1845. "The Beggar's Opera" was only twenty years old when the comedians sent to the colonies by William Hallam, under the management of his brother, Lewis, produced it, yet the historic Covent Garden Theater, in which it first saw the stage lights (candles they were, too), would scarcely stand comparison with the most modest of the metropolitan theaters nowadays. Its audience-room was only fifty-four or fifty-five feet deep; there were no footlights, the stage being illuminated by four hoops of candles, over which a crown hung from the borders. The orchestra held only fifteen or twenty musicians, though it was in this house that Handel produced his operas and oratorios; the boxes "were flat in front and had twisted double branches for candles fastened to the plaster. There were pedestals on each side of the boards, with elaborately-painted figures of Tragedy and Comedy thereon." Hallam's actors went first to Williamsburg, Va., but were persuaded to change their home to New York in the summer of 1753, among other things by the promise that they would find a "very fine 'Playhouse Building'" here. Nevertheless, when Lewis Hallam came he found the fine playhouse unsatisfactory, and may be said to have inaugurated the habit or custom, or whatever it may be called, followed by so many managers since, of beginning his enterprise by erecting a new theater. The old one in Na.s.sau Street was torn down, and a new one built on its site. It was promised that it should be "very fine, large, and commodious," and it was built between June and September, 1753; how fine, large, and commodious it was may, therefore, be imagined. A year later, the German Calvinists, wanting a place of worship, bought the theater, and New York was without a playhouse until a new one on Cruger's Wharf was built by David Dougla.s.s, who had married Lewis Hallam's widow, Hallam having died in Jamaica, in 1755. This was abandoned in turn, and Mr. Dougla.s.s built a second theater, this time in Chapel Street. It cost $1,625, and can scarcely have been either very roomy or very ornate. Such as it was, however, it was the home of the drama in all its forms, save possibly the ballad opera, until about 1765, and was the center around which a storm raged which culminated in a riot that wrecked it.

The successor of this unhappy inst.i.tution was the John Street Theater, which was opened toward the close of the year 1767. There seems to have been a period of about fifteen years during which the musical drama was absent from the amus.e.m.e.nt lists, but this house echoed, like its earliest predecessors, to the strains of the ballad opera which "made Gay rich and Rich gay." "The Beggar's Opera" was preceded, however, by "Love in a Village," for which Dr. Arne wrote and compiled the music; and Bickerstaff's "Maid of the Mill" was also in the repertory. In 1774 it was officially recommended that all places of amus.e.m.e.nt be closed.

Then followed the troublous times of the Revolution, and it was not until twelve years afterward--that is, till 1786--that English Opera resumed its sway. "Love in a Village" was revived, and it was followed by "Inkle and Yarico," an arrangement of Shakespeare's "Tempest," with Purcell's music, "No Song, No Supper," "Macbeth," with Locke's music, McNally's comic opera "Robin Hood," and other works of the same character; in fact, it may safely be said that few, if any, English operas, either with original music or music adapted from the ballad tunes of England, were heard in London without being speedily brought to New York and performed here. In the John Street Theater, too, they were listened to by George Washington, and the leader of the orchestra, a German named Pfeil, whose name was variously spelled Fyle, File, Files, and so on, produced that "President's March," the tune of which was destined to become a.s.sociated with "Hail Columbia," to the words of which it was adapted by Joseph Hopkinson, of Philadelphia. On January 29, 1798, a new playhouse was opened. This was the Park Theater. A musical piece ent.i.tled "The Purse, or American Tar," was on the program of the opening performance, and for more than a score of years the Park Theater played an important role in local operatic history. For a long term English operas of both types held the stage, along with the drama in all its forms, but in 1819 an English adaptation of Rossini's "Barber of Seville"--the opera which opened the Italian regime six years later--was heard on its stage, and two years after that Henry Rowley Bishop's arrangement of Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro." At the close of the season of 1820 the Park Theater was destroyed by fire, to the great loss of its owners, one of whom was John Jacob Astor. On its site was erected the new Park Theater, which was the original home of Italian opera, performed in its original tongue, and in the Italian manner, though only a small minority of the performers were Italians by birth.

Garcia was a Spaniard, born in Seville. Richard Grant White, writing in The Century Magazine for March, 1882, calls him a "Spanish Hebrew," on what authority I am unable to guess. Not only was Manuel Garcia, the elder, a chorister in the Cathedral of Seville at the age of six, but it seems as likely as not that he came of a family of Spanish church musicians who had made their mark for more than fifty years before the father of Malibran was born. But it is a habit with some writers to find Hebrew blood in nearly all persons of genius.

The new Park Theater was looked upon as a magnificent playhouse in its day, and it is a pity that Mr. White, writing about it when it was a quarter of a century old, should have helped to spread the erroneous notion that it was quite unworthy of so elegant a form of entertainment as Garcia brought into it. It remained a fashionable house through all its career or at least for a long time after it gave refuge to the Italian muse, though it may not have been able to hold one of its candles to the first house built especially to house that muse eight years later. The barrel hoop of the first New York theater gave way to "three chandeliers and patent oil lamps, the chandeliers having thirty-five lights each." Mr. White's description of this house after it had seen about a quarter of a century's service is certainly uninviting.

Its boxes were like pens for beasts. "Across them were stretched benches consisting of a mere board covered with faded red moreen, a narrower board, shoulder high, being stretched behind to serve for a back. But one seat on each of the three or four benches was without even this luxury, in order that the seat itself might be raised upon its hinges for people to pa.s.s in. These sybaritic inclosures were kept under lock and key by a fee-expecting creature, who was always half drunk, except when he was wholly drunk. The pit, which has in our modern theater become the parterre (or, as it is often strangely called, the parquet), the most desirable part of the house, was in the Park Theater hardly superior to that in which the Jacquerie of old stood upon the bare ground (par terre), and thus gave the place its French name. The floor was dirty and broken into holes; the seats were bare, backless benches.

Women were never seen in the pit, and, although the excellence of the position (the best in the house) and the cheapness of admission (half a dollar) took gentlemen there, few went there who could afford to study comfort and luxury in their amus.e.m.e.nts. The place was pervaded with evil smells; and, not uncommonly, in the midst of a performance, rats ran out of the holes in the floor and across into the orchestra. This delectable place was approached by a long, underground pa.s.sage, with bare, whitewashed walls, dimly lighted, except at a sort of booth, at which vile fluids and viler solids were sold. As to the house itself, it was the dingy abode of dreariness. The gallery was occupied by howling roughs, who might have taken lessons in behavior from the negroes who occupied a part of this tier, which was railed off for their particular use."

This was the first home of Italian opera, strictly speaking. It had long housed opera in the vernacular, and remained to serve as the fortress of the English forces when the first battles were fought between the champions of the foreign exotic and the entertainment which had been so long established as to call itself native. Its career came to an end in 1848, when, like its predecessor and successor, it went up in flames and smoke.

Presently I shall tell about the houses which have been built in New York especially for operatic uses, but before then some attention ought to be given to several other old theaters which had connection with opera in one or another of its phases. One of these was the New York Theater, afterward called the Bowery, and known by that name till a comparatively recent date. The walls of this theater echoed first to the voice of Malibran, when put forth in the vernacular of the country of which fate seemed, for a time, to have decreed that she should remain a resident. This was immediately after the first season of Italian opera at the Park Theater. The New York Theater was then new, having been built in 1826. Malibran had begun the study of English in London before coming to New York with her father; and she continued her studies with a new energy and a new purpose after the departure of her father to Mexico had left her apparently stranded in New York with a bankrupt and good-for-nothing husband to support. She made her first essay in English opera with "The Devil's Bridge," and followed it up with "Love in a Village." English operas, whether of the ballad order or with original music, were constructed in principle on the lines of the German Singspiel and French opera comique, all the dialogue being spoken; and Malibran's experience at the theater and Grace Church, coupled with her great social popularity, must have made a pretty good Englishwoman of her. "It is rather startling," says Mr. White, in the article already alluded to, "to think of the greatest prima donna, not only of her day, but of modern times--the most fascinating woman upon the stage in the first half of the nineteenth century--as singing the soprano parts of psalm tunes and chants in a small town then less known to the people of London and Paris and Vienna than Jeddo is now. Grace Church may well be pardoned for pride in a musical service upon the early years of which fell such a crown of glory, and which has since then been guided by taste not always unworthy of such a beginning." Malibran's performances at the New York Theater were successful and a source of profit, both to the manager and M. Malibran, to whom, it is said, a portion of the receipts were sent every night.

Three other theaters which were identified with opera more or less came into the field later, and by their names, at least, testified to the continued popularity which a famous English inst.i.tution had won a century before, and which endured until that name could be applied to the places that bore it only on the "lucus a non lucendo" principle.

These were the theaters of Richmond Hill, Niblo's, and Castle Garden.

The Ranelagh Gardens, which John Jones opened in New York, in June, 1765, and the Vauxhall Gardens, opened by Mr. Samuel Francis, in June, 1769, were planned more or less after their English prototypes.

Out-of-doors concerts were their chief musical features, fireworks their spectacular, while the serving of refreshments was relied on as the princ.i.p.al source of profit. Richmond Hill had in its palmy days been the villa home of Aaron Burr, and its fortunes followed the descending scale like those of its once ill.u.s.trious master. Its site was the neighborhood of what is now the intersection of Varick and Charlton streets. After pa.s.sing out of Burr's hands, but before his death, the park had become Richmond Hill Gardens, and the mansion the Richmond Hill Theater, both of somewhat shady reputation, which was temporarily rehabilitated by the response which the fashionable elements of the city's population made to an appeal made by a season of Italian opera, given in 1832. The relics of Niblo's Garden have disappeared as completely as those of Richmond Hill, but its site is still fresh in the memory of those whose theatrical experiences go back a quarter of a century. They must be old, however, who can recall enough verdure in the vicinity of Broadway and Prince Street to justify the name maintained by the theater to which for many years entrance was gained through a corridor of the Metropolitan Hotel. Three-quarters of a century ago Niblo's Garden was a reality.

William Niblo, who built it and managed it with consummate cleverness, had been a successful coffee-house keeper downtown. Its theater opened refreshingly on one side into the garden (as the Terrace Garden Theater, at Third Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street does to-day), where one could eat a dish of ice cream or sip a sherry cobbler in luxurious shade, if such were his prompting, while play or pantomime went merrily on within.

Writing of it in 1855 Max Maretzek, who, as manager of the Astor Place Opera House, had suffered from the rivalry of Niblo and his theater, said:

The Metropolitan Hotel, Niblo's Theater, stores and other buildings occupy the locality. Of the former garden nothing remains save the ice cream and drinking saloons attached to the theater. These take up literally as much room in the building as its stage does, and prove that its proprietor has not altogether overlooked the earlier vocation which laid the foundation of his fortune. The name by which he calls it has never changed. It was Niblo's Garden when loving couples ate their creams or drank their cobblers under the shadow of the trees. It is Niblo's Garden now, when it is turned into a simple theater and hedged in with houses. Nay, in the very bills which are circulated in the interior of the building during the performances you may find, or might shortly since have found, such an announcement as the following, appearing in large letters:

"Between the second and third acts"--or, possibly, it may run thus when opera is not in the ascendant--"after the conclusion of the first piece an intermission of twenty minutes takes place, for a promenade in the garden."

You will, I feel certain, admit that this is a marvelously delicate way of intimating to a gentleman who may feel "dry" (it is the right word, is it not?) that he will find the time to slake his thirst.

When he returns and his lady inquires where he has been he may reply, if he wills it:

"Promenading in the garden."

It is not plain from Mr. White's account whether or not his memory reached back to the veritable garden of Mr. Niblo, but his recollections of the theater were not jaundiced like those of Mr. Maretzek, but altogether amiable. Speaking of the performances of the Shireff, Seguin, and Wilson company of English opera singers, who came to New York in 1838, he says:

Miss Shireff afterward appeared at Niblo's Garden, which was on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, where the Metropolitan Hotel now stands. Here she performed in Auber's "Masked Ball" and other light operas (all, of course, in English), singing in a theater that was open on one side to the air; for Niblo's was a great place of summer entertainment. It was a great New York "inst.i.tution" in its day--perhaps the greatest and most beneficent one of its sort that New York has ever known. It may be safely said that most of the elder generation of New Yorkers now living [this was written in 1881] have had at Niblo's Garden the greatest pleasure they have ever enjoyed in public. There were careless fun and easy jollity; there whole families would go at a moment's warning to hear this or that singer, but most of all, year after year, to see the Ravels--a family of pantomimists and dancers upon earth and air, who have given innocent, thoughtless, side-shaking, brain-clearing pleasure to more Americans than ever relaxed their sad, silent faces for any other performers. The price of admission here was fifty cents, no seats reserved; "first come, first served."

Last of all there was Castle Garden. Children of to-day can remember when it was still the immigrants' depot, which it had been for half a century. Tradition says that it was built to protect New York City from foreign invasion, not to harbor it; but as a fortress it must have suffered disarmament quite early in the nineteenth century. It is now an aquarium, and as such has returned to its secondary use, which was that of a place of entertainment. In 1830 and about that day it was a restaurant, but for the sale only of ice cream, lemonade, and cakes.

You paid a shilling to go in--this to restrict the patronage to people of the right sort--and your ticket was redeemable on the inside in the innocent fluids and harmless solids aforementioned. A wooden bridge, flanked by floating bathhouses, connected the castle with the garden--i.e., Battery Park. North and east, in lower Broadway and Greenwich Street, were fashionable residences, whose occupants enjoyed the promenade under the trees, which was the proper enjoyment of the day, as much as their more numerous, but less fortunate fellow citizens.