Next morning I received word from tenor No. 1 that he had changed his mind, was feeling very well, and would sing, but I very haughtily told him that it was too late and that I had already made other arrangements.
So far this story seems a wonderful example of virtue triumphant and vice defeated, but, alas, life’s problems do not always work out that way! During the day my dramatic soprano who was to have sungIsoldebecame hoarse and the opera had to be changed, so that all my carefully reared structure of righteousness and meting out of punishment to the guilty one fell to the ground with a very dull thud.
This is only one of many such instances, some of them childish and others really wicked. But the most unmoral thing about it is that when the culprits were great artists, no matter how much they enraged me by their wickedness, after they had appeared again triumphantlyasSiegfriedorIsoldeI would often become so enthusiastic over their work that their slate would be washed clean and I was ready to forgive them again and to begin anew. Such is the power of art, and a grateful public will always be willing to remember only the artistic uplift which they have received from the artist and forget his personal weaknesses.
Naturally my strictures apply only to certain of the singers. There were many who were always honorable in their relations with me. Among the most devoted of the members of my company I should mention the singers of the chorus. Many of these had been at the Metropolitan in the German opera days. Their salaries were small, but if one of their number fell ill or suffered other misfortune, none so quick as they to help, and they always endured the hardships of travel with great good humor and unfailing courtesy and decency toward me.
Among other reasons that impelled me finally to give up the opera was the realization how comparatively seldom absolute artistic perfection can be obtained at a stage performance. There are so many people concerned in it that it is almost impossible always to obtain a cast which is thoroughly satisfactory, and one “second rater” can spoil an ensemble. Still another problem was the question of stage illusion. I gave this a great deal of attention and study, and spent a great deal of money on scenery and lighting. I examined the best inventions in this direction in the opera-houses of Germany and imported many of them. I was the first to bring over the very clever swimming-machines used in Dresden by the Rhine Maidens in “Rhinegold.” But Wagner’s demands on the stage are so extraordinary that a real illusion is not often possible. His music excites the imagination and is oftenall sufficient. One can see the glorious flames crackling and burning around the sleepingBrunhildewhen one hears an orchestra of a hundred playing the music of the “Fire Charm,” but how seldom does a stage performance enhance this illusion! TheBrunhildemay be too big and too fat, or the light of the flames may too clearly show that the scenery is but painted canvas and pasteboard after all, and our sophisticated eyes know only too well how the plumber’s steam-pipes convey the steam that is intended to simulate the smoke of the flames from the boiler in the cellar. It sometimes seemed to me, after striving in vain to carry out Wagner’s ideal of a union of all the arts in order to produce a new and perfect art form (the “music-drama”), as if this great genius had really committed a gigantic mistake, and as if the very artistic illusion and semblance of verity was destroyed by the scenic paraphernalia.
Of course there were performances over which a happy star seemed to shine and which now and then gave us complete satisfaction and happiness. But the static quality of scenery became to me more and more a hindrance to an imagination ready to soar on the wings of the music.
I carried on my opera company for another year in conjunction with Mr. Charles Ellis, and then definitely resolved to cease all managerial activities and to confine myself absolutely to purely musical work. It took me some time to arrive at this decision, as opera work has also a very fascinating side, and I had made real friends with many of my singers.
I had found Ellis to be a delightful partner. He had had years of experience as manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and his equable temperament and fairmindednesshad made him many friends. I sold to him my share in all our scenery, costumes, and properties as he wished to continue operatic work with Madame Melba as his principal star, and I agreed to conduct a limited number of Wagner performances for him in Philadelphia during the following season.
After the four hectic years I had spent with the Damrosch Opera Company I was glad of such an opportunity to take stock of the past and cogitate on the future.
My wife and I rented the old Butler place in Westchester County, near Hartsdale—a lovely old mansion surrounded by dark pine forests and with the little Bronx River trickling through—and there we spent most of the winter until May. I wrote a violin sonata there and enjoyed the tranquillity of a life freed from operatic worries and excitements.
In 1900 I was once more tempted into the field of opera, but this time it carried with it no managerial or financial responsibility.
Maurice Grau was at that time the lessee of the Metropolitan Opera House. Abbey had died a few years before and the directors, who had gradually realized that it was Grau who had been the real “man behind the gun,” gave him and a small group of financial backers the lease of the Metropolitan Opera House. Grau invited me to return to the Metropolitan as conductor for the Wagner operas. He had at that time a strong group of Wagnerian singers. At the head was the inimitable Jean de Reszke, together with his brother Edouard. Grau had also taken over from my company Madame Ternina, David Bispham, and Madame Gadski. The latter had been a member of the Damrosch Opera Company for the entire four years of its existence. She was only twenty-three when Ifirst engaged her, possessor of a lovely voice, and an indefatigable worker. There were weeks on our Western tours when she would appear on five successive days asElsa,Elizabeth,Sieglinde, andEva. She was a hard student and her voice developed more and more. During her last year with me she added the “Walküre” and “Siegfried”Brunhildesto her repertoire, studying them with me, partly on the trains while travelling, partly in the hotels and theatres of the various cities we visited. When she went into the Grau Company, she added the “Götterdämmerung”BrunhildeandIsolde, thereby completing the entire circle of Wagner soprano parts, exceptKundry.
Jean de Reszke, like Lilli Lehmann, turned to the Wagnerian rôles in the high noon of his operatic career. He had made his fame in the French-Italian operas, but Wagner attracted him irresistibly.
I remember that during one of the seasons of the Damrosch Opera Company we were playing in Boston at the Boston Theatre while the Abbey and Grau Company were performing in the huge Mechanic’s Hall. Jean and Edouard de Reszke attended one of my “Siegfried” performances with Max Alvary in the title-rôle. They applauded their colleague vociferously, and after the performance Jean lamented to me that he was compelled to sing nothing butFaustsandRomeosandWerthers, while it was the ambition of his life to sing Wagner. The memory of his extraordinary impersonations of these rôles later on is too vivid to need comment from me. Illness kept him away from America one year, and when he returned I was again at the Metropolitan as conductor of the Wagner operas. It was a joy to work with this man. Great artist, courteous gentleman, and generous colleague,and (what is most valuable to a conductor) indefatigable at rehearsals. His return was like the triumphant entry of a victorious monarch. He was a marvellous mimic, and used to give us delicious imitations of the various artists of the company coming into his dressing-room to offer their congratulations after his first reappearance.
De Reszke would first depict the French tenor colleague who in polite, reserved, and even patronizing accents would say:
“Vraiment, mon cher, vous-avez chanté très bien ce soir, très bien, je vous assure!”
Then would come the German barytone in a double-breasted frock coat and punctiliously polite manner, saying:
“Erlauben Sie mir, Herr de Reszke, Ihnen meine grosse Hochachtung aus zu drücken für den wirklich ausgezeichneten Genuss den Sie uns heute Abend bereitet haben.”
He was followed by the Italian barytone, who would rush in impulsively and, kissing Jean on both cheeks, would exclaim:
“Caro mio, carissimo!” followed by a flood of Italian words.
Then came the real climax of the scene. Enter the electrician who, thrusting a “horny hand of toil” into that of de Reszke, would exclaim in real “Yankee” accents:
“Jean, you done fine!”
Edouard de Reszke, the huge bass brother with the heart of a child and an imperturbable good nature, was an equally good mimic. But his wonderful stories and impersonations were of a decidedly Rabelaisian character and will not bear repetition here.
With these two well-corseted but un-Corsican brothers, Madame Ternina or Madame Nordica, Madame Schumann-Heink, and David Bispham we gave performances of “Tristan” which came as near perfection as I ever hope to witness.
Madame Nordica had been for years a so-called “utility” singer at the Metropolitan. She had been trained in the French-Italian repertoire, and while her voice was beautiful she had not yet achieved full stardom, perhaps because she was American born and lacked the European cachet, which at that time was more important than it is to-day. She was not by nature musically gifted and was able to learn a rôle only by the hardest and most painful work of endless repetition and rehearsals. But her ambition was boundless—she bided her time and, like Lilli Lehmann, gradually worked herself into the Wagner repertoire. Realizing its advertising value, she offered herself to Madame Cosima Wagner for the “Lohengrin” production at Bayreuth. She meekly accepted every instruction given her there during the months of preparations, no matter how meticulous or artificial some of them seemed to her, and the success which she obtained there launched her successfully on her career as a Wagner singer. I trained her in theBrunhildesas well asIsoldeand was amazed at the way in which she achieved through hard work what nature gives to others overnight.
I remember her coming to Philadelphia to sing “Götterdämmerung” with my company. She arrived the previous day and I found her still very uncertain in the second act, which is rhythmically very difficult. I sat down with her at eight o’clock that evening and we went over that second act again and again until about fouro’clock in the morning. It was ghastly but wonderful. At tenA. M.I gave her an orchestral rehearsal and in the evening she sang the rôle with perfect assurance and with hardly a mistake.
One performance of “Tristan” which we gave with the Grau Company in Baltimore at the Lyric Theatre, which has perhaps the best acoustics of any auditorium in the country, still stays vividly in my memory. At the close we were so elated that all concerned kissed each other ecstatically after the last curtain fell. Those are the rare moments that make one forget the many times perfection in opera seems impossible to attain.
MATHILDE MARCHESI
MATHILDE MARCHESI
NELLIE MELBA
NELLIE MELBA
XI
I have written elsewhere of my first visit to Europe after my father’s death, when the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House made me assistant to the director, Edmund C. Stanton.
I had gone over to engage German singers for the coming season, and Emil Fischer, bass from the Dresden Royal Opera, was one of those whose contract I had ready for Stanton’s signature when he arrived a month later. Emil Fischer had become discontented with his life in Dresden and in signing with us broke his contract with the Royal Opera, and according to an arrangement which all the directors of the various German opera-houses had with each other, this prevented him from ever again appearing on the stage of a German opera-house. He remained in America and became one of the main props of the Metropolitan Opera House Company, and later on of my Damrosch Opera Company.
His voice was a beautifulbasso cantanteof great range and vibrancy. His tone production was perfect, and his powers as an impersonator equalled his singing. He will always remain in my memory as the greatestHans SachsI have ever heard. He imbued the part with a nobility and at the same time with a delightful humor that no otherHans Sachshas quite equalled.
As a man he was a delicious mixture of childishness, vanity, generosity, and kindliness, but I do not think that any emotions of life touched him very deeply.
In dress he was always extremely fastidious, inclining toward a somewhat flamboyant love of extremes. His neckties were rather vivid, his trousers perhaps a shade lighter in gray than the most harmonious taste would demand. He had a highly developed chest, of which he was so inordinately proud that he never buttoned the upper part of his waistcoat, as if to demonstrate that no waistcoat could be cut large enough to encompass his manly proportions.
Of the value of money, as far as saving it was concerned, he had no idea, and his constant effort was directed toward hiding from his wife the fact that he had money in his pocket. She was a buxom lady somewhat older than himself who, in her youth, had been atragediennein one of the smaller German court theatres. She must have played such parts asMedea, and continued the rather exaggerated and gloomy articulation of her words into private life and through all the years that followed her final exit from the stage. Whenever she told me: “My Emil is not well to-day. I have made for him a plate of beef soup into which I have boiled four pounds of beef,” it boomed upon my ears like Shakespearian blank verse or like a Greek tragedy of Sophocles. I think that she annoyed Emil excessively, and that he was happiest when he could get away from her no doubt excellent control and find enjoyment among a circle of boon companions.
I recall that when he was a member of my opera company I paid him two hundred and fifty dollars an appearance, with about twelve appearances a month guaranteed, but he insisted that in the written contract I should make it only two hundred dollars an appearance and give him the other fifty in cash. He used this subtle method in order to have about six hundred dollars a month spendingmoney of which his wife should know nothing. It was I who had to endure the complaints from her, which ran something like this: “I do not know why my Emil is so badly paid while all the others get these enormous salaries. My Emil sings better than any of them and he has to be content with only two hundred dollars an appearance!” And I would sit by feeling very guilty, and yet, from that horrid loyalty which one man has for another, not daring to exculpate myself by condemning him.
At one time in Chicago I accompanied him into a haberdasher’s shop as he wished to buy a necktie. He selected one the price of which was two dollars and a half, and then superbly handed the astonished clerk a five-dollar bill, saying grandiloquently: “You may keep the change!”
He was a great gourmet, and every now and then would give a banquet at his house to his fellow artists, with interminable courses and all manner of wines. Needless to say he did not save anything from his earnings and there came years, as he grew older and his voice left him, when he had to turn to teaching. But he never changed his habits and his appearance was just as carefully gotten up as in former years. Finally came the time when he was really in want, and I assisted Mr. Flagler, who was also an old admirer of his, in getting up a benefit for him at the Metropolitan Opera House. The directors very generously gave the use of the house, many of the stockholders bought their boxes, and the climax of the performance was the appearance of dear old Fischer in his greatest rôle ofHans Sachsin the third act of “Die Meistersinger.” A very good sum was realized with which we bought an annuity for him. He was then, I believe, seventy-four (his wife had died several years before),and a ten-year annuity seemed to us the best way of taking care of him without giving him an opportunity to squander his money. He was delighted, and the first thing he did on the strength of his new wealth was to marry a young lady from the chorus, who, however, I believe took excellent care of him until he died.
During the second year of the Damrosch Opera Company, while we were in St. Louis and just the day before Fischer was to singHans Sachs, a telegram arrived saying that his wife was very ill and was not expected to live more than eight hours. Frau Alvary insisted that I must make him go to New York to see her. He did not want to go. He had not been on particularly pleasant terms with her, he knew he could not arrive in time to see her alive, and besides that he knew also that I had no substitute to singHans Sachsfor him and that the cancellation of the opera would cost me about five thousand dollars. But Frau Alvary, who seemed quite ready to insist on reasons of sentiment when her own purse was not concerned, so bedevilled us both that I finally, being still young and sentimental, decided that he should go. I was therefore compelled to change the programme at the last moment and to substitute single acts from different operas, which, of course, was a very costly change, as the audience in St. Louis had especially looked forward to the first performance of “Die Meistersinger.”
The news of a possible change of programme had travelled fast, and on that morning I received a visit from a young singer, Gerhardt Stehmann, who a year before had come to St. Louis with a little German opera company which had promptly stranded, leaving him without a job. He had, however, continued to live there, acting in occasional German plays and teaching Latin,as he was a man of excellent education. He asked me if I could not give him a place in my company. I found him to be an excellent singer, but above all a man musically so gifted that he could learn an entire rôle in a few hours. He learned the entire third act of “Die Meistersinger” overnight, so that I was able at least to present that to my St. Louis audience. I immediately engaged him as a permanent member of my company, and he remained with me until its dissolution three years later, when he returned to Germany and was grabbed by Mahler for the Imperial opera at Vienna, where he has been ever since. He literally knew and sang every bass and barytone part in the Wagner operas and music dramas. HisBeckmesserin “Die Meistersinger” was a masterpiece of delineation, and no one could depict this nasty, carping, jealous, and vain person in so convincing a fashion as he. But if the exigencies of the moment demanded it, he was just as able to singHans Sachs,Pogner,Kothner, or any other of the good old burghers of that opera. In “Tannhäuser” he was equally at home asLandgraveorBiterolf, but his most remarkable feat of learning a part quickly was performed in New York one spring. The German composer, Xaver Scharwenka, was at that time living in New York as piano virtuoso and teacher. He had, years before, composed an opera which he was anxious to perform, and William Steinway and others asked me if I would let him have my opera company for this purpose, so that he could conduct it himself at an extra performance. I agreed and a good cast was selected. The tenor part was to have been sung by Ernest Krauss, a rather conceited heroic tenor who, not finding the part to his liking, pleaded hoarseness only the day before the performance. There was, of course,no substitute, and it seemed as if the performance would have to be cancelled, which would have been a cruel experience for the composer. To my astonishment Stehmann appeared and said very simply: “Give me the part and I will learn it for to-morrow night.” When I interposed, “But this is a tenor part and you are a bass barytone,” he answered: “Give it to me. I think I can transpose a few of the high notes and can at least save the performance.” Scharwenka, overjoyed, gave him the part and he sang and acted it the following evening without a mistake—a truly remarkable feat.
I grew very fond of him, not only because of his musicianly qualities but also because as a man he was so simple and honorable, and I was glad to hear later on that he had made an excellent position for himself in Vienna.
This summer of 1922, I visited Vienna again after many, many years. I felt that the war should be completely over for us and that we should seek in every way to re-establish cultural relations with our former enemies.
I found Stehmann still at the Vienna opera, now no longer called Kaiserliche but Staats-Oper. It was a joy to see him again, but the war had brought to him also great misfortune! He told me that from his savings, while a member of my opera company and from subsequent savings in Vienna, he had bought a house with several acres of land in the Austrian Tyrols. With tears in his eyes he showed me photographs of this property. The house was charmingly situated in a picturesque valley with the Tyrolean Alps beyond. After the war this territory was taken over by Italy; and that government, wishing to drive out the Austrians and settle the land with Italians, had compelled Stehmann to “sell” his property for a sum fixed by them. He had no choice and theprice which he received amounted to about thirty-seven thousand five hundred kronen, which happened to be the amount I had paid that morning for a pair of shoes—at the present valuation about three dollars and seventy cents! The Poles claim that Bismarck pursued the same policy in Posnia when Prussia endeavored to suppress Polish national aspirations, by forcing them to sell their lands to the Prussian Junkers.
I was sorry on arriving in Vienna not to see once more the venerable old singer, Marianne Brandt, but she had died, aged eighty-four, during the previous winter. In 1884-85 she had been one of the main props of my father’s inaugural German opera season; and her emotional intensity in “Fidelio” and as the mother in “Le Prophète” had made a deep impression on our public. Nature had not endowed her with beauty of face or figure, and she always insisted: “I have been a virtuous woman all my life because I am so ugly that no man would ever look at me.”
Wagner had invited her to Bayreuth to sing the part ofKundryin “Parsifal,” but whether because of her lack of beauty or because, as she thought, of terrible intrigues on the part of Madame Materna, she sang the rôle only once and always remained exceedingly jealous of Madame Materna, whose rather amplitudinous charms, she insisted, had completely hypnotized Wagner.
She simply adored my father and his single-minded idealism, and the spirituality of his character appealed to her to such an extent that she was willing to undergo any amount of work and to sing any rôle which he wanted of her, whether it were a star part or one of the Valkyries in “Walküre.” After his death she was inconsolable, and always went on the anniversary to Woodlawn Cemeteryto deposit a wreath on his grave. She also sought to demonstrate her veneration for his memory by helping me in every way possible, both as superb artist and as one well versed in the practical side of operatic life through years of experience in Vienna and at the Royal Opera in Berlin. She always called me “Mein Sohn,” and her encouragement and faith in my future as a musician during many trying times can never be forgotten by me.
She had a delightful sense of humor, but also a very quick temper, and I remember her telling me one day that she had received a notice from the New York Post-Office Department that a registered letter was awaiting her down in the General Post-Office at City Hall. She went there and inquired at the proper window for her letter.
“Yes,” said the official, “we have it here. Have you got some document to prove that you are Marianne Brandt?—a letter, a bank-book, or a passport?”
“I have none of these things, but I am Marianne Brandt and I want that letter.”
“I am sorry, madame, but the rules are strict, and you will have to bring some one to identify you.”
By this time Brandt was in a state of high indignation. “You will not give me the letter? I will prove to you that I am Marianne Brandt!” And then she proceeded with full voice to sing the great cadenza from her principal aria in “Le Prophète.” Her glorious voice echoed and re-echoed through the vaulted corridors of the post-office. Men came running from all sides to find out what had happened and finally the agitated official handed her the letter, saying: “Here is your letter, but for God’s sake be quiet!”
She finally retired from the stage to her old home inVienna and gave of her art with both hands to a group of devoted pupils. During the war I heard from one of them that, owing to the destitute condition existing in Vienna, she was in real want, but she promptly returned the check we sent her and in a very sweet letter addressed as usual to “Mein Sohn” assured me that she did not need any money, that she did not expect to live much longer, and that she thought she could hold out without receiving any alms from her friends. We did succeed, however, in sending her food which she shared with others.
One of the singers whom I engaged for the Metropolitan Opera House during my first visit to Germany and who afterward achieved great fame was Max Alvary, a young lyric tenor at the Weimar Ducal Opera House. He was the son of the well-known German painter, Andreas Achenbach, of good education, gentlemanly bearing, and a refined artistic taste. He was also exceedingly good looking. As a singer he was very uneven, although he had studied with the Italian master, Lamperti. At first we paid him only a hundred dollars a night, but after he had sung minor rôles for a few months Anton Seidl chose him to create the part ofSiegfried, and in that rôle he made a success so instantaneous as to place him immediately in the front rank of German opera-singers. No one else has givenSiegfriedsuch an atmosphere of boyish innocence and picturesque beauty. The women, bless them, simply worshipped him, from the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl to the matron of mature and more than mature age, and this success repeated itself when he appeared asSiegfriedin Germany, Austria, and England. He made a great deal of money and spent it lavishly. His armor and helmet in “Lohengrin” werespecially made for him out of silver after a design which he had drawn himself. The stuffs for his costumes were often specially woven for him. He reached the climax of his career when he was chosen by Cosima Wagner to singTannhäuserandTristanat Bayreuth. At that time this shrine for the Wagnerite had already become, under the guiding and autocratic hand of the widow of Wagner, a highly artificial product. I saw several of these performances and was frankly amazed at the apparent degeneration since the days of Wagner. Alvary, who had a great sense of humor, gave most entertaining descriptions of the rehearsals, and how, for instance, in slavish imitation of certain rhythms in the orchestra,TannhäuserandWolframhad to execute a kind of minuet opposite each other in order to fill in the instrumental introduction beforeWolframbegins his famous plea toTannhäuser: “Als du im kühnen Sange uns bestrittest.”
In the spring of 1891 Carnegie Hall, which had been built by Andrew Carnegie as a home for the higher musical activities of New York, was inaugurated with a music festival in which the New York Symphony and Oratorio Societies took part. In order to give this festival a special significance, I invited Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky, the great Russian composer, to come to America and to conduct some of his own works. In all my many years of experience I have never met a great composer so gentle, so modest—almost diffident—as he. We all loved him from the first moment—my wife and I, the chorus, the orchestra, the employees of the hotel where he lived, and of course the public. He was not a conductor by profession and in consequence the technic of it, the rehearsals and concerts, fatigued him excessively; but he knew what he wanted and the atmosphere which emanatedfrom him was so sympathetic and love-compelling that all executants strove with double eagerness to divine his intentions and to carry them out. The performance which he conducted of his Third Suite, for instance, was admirable, although it is in parts very difficult; and as he was virtually the first of great living composers to visit America, the public received him with jubilance.
He came often to our house, and, I think, liked to come. He was always gentle in his intercourse with others, but a feeling of sadness seemed never to leave him, although his reception in America was more than enthusiastic and the visit so successful in every way that he made plans to come back the following year. Yet he was often swept by uncontrollable waves of melancholia and despondency.
The following year in May I went to England with my wife, and received an invitation from Charles Villiers Stanford, then professor of music at Cambridge, to visit the old university during the interesting commencement exercises at which honorary degrees of Doctor of Music were to be given to five composers of five different countries—Saint-Saëns of France, Boito of Italy, Grieg of Norway, Bruch of Germany, and Tschaikowsky of Russia.
The proceedings proved highly interesting and enjoyable. As each recipient of the honor stepped forward in his doctor’s robe, the orator addressed him in a discourse of orotund Latin phrases, praising his many virtues and accomplishments, and these phrases were constantly interrupted by the clatter of facetious remarks and requests from the undergraduates in the balcony, all this according to old-established custom. Sometimes the uproar became so great that the presiding officer had to arise and demand “Silentium.”
Among the other recipients of degrees on that occasion was Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, Baron of Kandahar, who, in his scarlet uniform beneath his doctor’s robe, received of course the most uproarious welcome. At that time no one dreamed that twenty-three years later he would go around England uttering solemn warning against the inevitability of war with Germany and bidding England gird on her sword and prepare, only to be laughed at as an alarmist and publicly reprimanded by politicians for seeking to arouse such feeling against a “friendly power.”
In the evening a great banquet was given in the refectory of the college, and by good luck I was placed next to Tschaikowsky. He told me during the dinner that he had just finished a new symphony which was different in form from any he had ever written. I asked him in what the difference consisted and he answered: “The last movement is an adagio and the whole work has a programme.”
“Do tell me the programme,” I demanded eagerly.
“No,” he said, “that I shall never tell. But I shall send you the first orchestral score and parts as soon as Jurgenson, my publisher, has them ready.”
We parted with the expectation of meeting again in America during the following winter, but, alas, in October came the cable announcing his death from cholera, and a few days later arrived a package from Moscow containing the score and parts of his Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique.” It was like a message from the dead. I immediately put the work into rehearsal and gave it its first performance in America on the following Sunday. Its success was immediate and profound. We gave it many repetitions that winter and I have played it sincein concerts all over the United States. Other orchestras have cultivated it with equal assiduity, and in fact for me the time came several years ago when I cried a halt and let the work lie fallow, as it had evidently been overplayed and its high-strung rhythms had excited the nerves of executants and audiences so often that they were in danger of being overstrained.
Ignace Paderewski made his first appearance in America in 1891, and I conducted his first five orchestral concerts. He came under the auspices of Steinway and Sons, and they told me that the gross receipts for the first concert were only five hundred dollars! His playing as well as his personality, however, immediately took our public by storm, and I do not think that since the days of Franz Liszt there has been any other travelling virtuoso in whom the man was as fascinating as the artist. People who have wondered how it was possible for him when the Great War began to throw himself so fully equipped at every point into the struggle to achieve national unity for Poland, do not realize that he was, consciously or unconsciously, preparing himself for just this opportunity all his life. He had always dreamed of a united and independent Poland. He knew the history of his people, their strength, and their weakness. It is said that one day he played before the Czar who, congratulating him, expressed his pleasure that a “Russian” should have achieved such eminence in his art. Paderewski answered: “I am a Pole, your Majesty,” and, needless to say, was never again invited to play in Russia. His mind is one of the most extraordinary I have ever come in contact with. All the world knows what he has achieved in music—his inspired interpretations, his prodigious memory, and the subtle range of colors of his musical palette,but not so many know of his interest in literature, philosophy, and history, and it took the Great War to demonstrate that as orator and statesman he ranks as high as musician. I heard him make a speech on Poland during the Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 before an audience of ten thousand, in which he gave so eloquent a survey of Poland’s history and of her needs and rights, as to rouse the people to a frenzy of enthusiasm, and I am convinced that Poland owes her national existence to-day to his statesmanship and to the sympathy which his personality created among the Allies at the Versailles Conference. I believe that Colonel House pronounced him to be the greatest statesman of the Conference, and it was only the cynical Clemenceau who said to him: “M. Paderewski, you were the greatest pianist in the world and you have chosen to descend to our level. What a pity!”
When he first came to America, his English was very incomplete but even then he demonstrated his grasp of it in unmistakable fashion. One evening he, my wife, and I dined at the house of very dear mutual friends, Mr. and Mrs. John E. Cowdin, in Gramercy Park. Cowdin had all his life been an enthusiastic polo player, and after dinner Paderewski and I admired some handsome silver trophies that he had won and that were placed in the dining-room. I said: “You see the difference between you and Johnny is that he wins his prizes in playing polo while you win yours in playing solo.”
“Zat is not all ze difference!” Paderewski immediately exclaimed in his gentle Polish accents. “I am a poor Pole playing solo, but Johnny is a dear soul playing polo.”
He is highly gifted as a composer, and besides a veryinteresting and spiritual symphony I remember with keen pleasure his opera “Manru,” which Maurice Grau brought out at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1902 and which I conducted. I cannot remember ever having worked harder toward achieving a successful première. The orchestral parts, which had been copied in Germany in a great hurry, arrived so full of mistakes that the first rehearsals were an agony of constant stopping and correcting, and these corrections went on during the entire time of preparation, and I believe that I still found two inaccuracies at the rehearsal just preceding the general rehearsal. Again and again I took some of the worst parts home and worked late into the night going through them meticulously myself, and comparing them with the orchestral score in an endeavor to bring order out of chaos. The opera received a warm welcome, but the libretto was lacking somewhat in dramatic interest; and the music, with all its genuine charm and warmth, was not able to successfully combat this lack.
I think that if Paderewski had been willing to sacrifice his marvellous career as a piano virtuoso (and that would have been a great sacrifice) he would have become one of the greatest composers of our time. It does not seem easy to unite the two careers, as they are essentially at war with each other. Liszt, the only man with whom I can compare Paderewski, recognized this fact, and at forty years of age resolutely turned his back on virtuosodom, with its life in the public glare, its excitements, crowds, and emoluments, in order to devote himself to composition. He settled in the little town of Weimar, living a life of poverty, and never again touched the piano for personal gain. Only now and then he would play in public in order to gather funds for the Beethovenmonument in Bonn or for some great charity. And yet it is universally conceded that even he stopped too late and that, great as is the sum total of his contributions to creative art, he would have been still greater and able to express himself more genuinely if he had never been “the greatest pianist of his generation.”
It is difficult to define the charm with which the artists of Poland seem to be imbued almost beyond any other race. It is more than a social gift. It is not the result of calculation but seems to be a combination of kindliness of heart and good breeding. Madame Marcella Sembrich has it to a supreme degree, also Jean and Edouard de Reszke, also Tim and Joe Adamowski, Paul Kochanski, and my old friend Alexander Lambert, and if the new state of Poland were composed only of such of the Polish elect as I have just mentioned it would soon become the ideal republic of the world. On the other hand, a country composed exclusively of musicians might not make a contented population, as it is well known that we need an audience to listen to us, and musicians, rightly or wrongly, have the reputation of never being willing to listen to each other.
I do not, however, mean to imply that the Poles are the exclusive possessors of personal charm. For instance, I do not know of any man who has it in greater degree than my old friend Charles Martin Loeffler, who was born in Alsace, received his musical education in France, was violinist in the private orchestra of a Russian grand duke in Nice, and, at the age of sixteen, came to America. My father immediately became very fond of him, and on Sunday afternoons, when we always had chamber-music at home in which my father played first violin and Sam Franko second, Martin Loeffler would play theviola. I liked him immensely and our friendship has lasted through the years. Our birthdays are on the same day, and we are almost of an age, as he is only a year older. When Higginson formed the Boston Orchestra under George Henschel, Loeffler migrated to Boston and became first violin and second concert master. At the same time he continued his studies in composition, and has since become one of our foremost American composers. For years he has lived as a gentleman farmer in Medfield, Massachusetts. His compositions are few and far between, but all of them have the same aristocratic conception, refinement, and original orchestration, such as a man can write who has spent a great part of his life in the orchestra and knows its literature and possibilities. His letters, exquisitely penned, rank with those of Eugene Ysaye, and that is high praise, as Ysaye is the very prince of letter-writers. I venture to insert one of Loeffler’s here because it treats of the first performance of my opera, “Cyrano,” and because it is so whole-hearted in its praise and so gentle but discerning in its criticisms of the weak spots in my work.
Medfield, Mass.Sunday, 26 March, 1913.Dear Walter:There was not a more amazed person amongst the audience last Thursday than your old friend here. Having plowed away and wallowed in storm for some time on my own One Act play, I know of the difficulties, the doubts and hazards that one encounters in the business of writing an opera. It is therefore with genuine admiration, that I take off my hat and bow low to him, who could write the Score of Cyrano. It is a masterly accomplishment of a treacherous task. I did not see you on that exciting night; there having been some uncertainty as to my being able to obtain a bed on the 1 o’clock train, I finally had to give up the pleasure of going to your house. I press your dear old hand now in spirit and in sincere admiration.Your orchestration sounded superbly. Your choruses blended wonderfully with the orchestra and I have no doubt that with a slightremaniementandraccourcissement, Cyrano will give great joy to many in the future. I understand that you have already made considerable cuts, still do I advise cutting out more. Four Acts is a long proposition and some of the best things come in the last Act. But the public begins to tire and can no longer thoroughly enjoy the beauties of this Act. A few things have occurred to me besides. In the scene on the balcony, I think it is a mistake to let Cyrano say what Christian shall repeat to Roxane. Is this not what happens in Act III, “How could I love you more,” etc? Would it not be more expressive to let Cyrano prompt his stupid friend in whispering and pantomimic gesture? Curiously enough, this scene which one would have picked out as “made for an opera,” was perhaps the least effective part of the Opera. After the climb to his lady love, everything is again admirable.Then, in the last act, I believe if you were to shorten Cyrano’s delirium and hasten his death somewhat, you would strengthen and heighten the final effect of your work. Cyrano dies hard and one thinks of the nine-live-cat-death of Tristan! All this may only seem long coming at the end of the preceding three intense hours. There are really extraordinary effects in this final Act of yours and one would like to look at such a score as yours. Probably, like all telling things in this world, your effects are obtained through simplest means.The whole work is to me a delight on account of its real musicianship—a work evolved from a highly sensitive, very intelligent brain, that has absorbed and assimilated much, without imitating anybody or anything.These are my first sincere impressions of your work, to which I will add my sentiments. While the musician listened during the hours of the performance, the friend in him was carefully kept apart. When, however, the musician’s heart began beating more and more warmly, the friend and the musician became again at one in their joy.Here also arises the reflection: Where did you or where does anybody acquire mastery? Do the gifted themselves really know what they are doing and is Maeterlinck right when he makes Mélisande say “Je ne sais pas ce que je sais”?A prioriI shall always say: There must be Opera in English—but at present there cannot be, as nobody knows how to sing in it. The performance however was admirable. Amato was superb and so was the orchestra, chorus and old Herty! Hats off to him too!Kindest regards to Mrs. Damrosch in which Elise joins me.Believe me, dear Walter, as ever and more proudly than ever,Your friendCh. M. Loeffler.
Medfield, Mass.Sunday, 26 March, 1913.
Medfield, Mass.Sunday, 26 March, 1913.
Medfield, Mass.
Sunday, 26 March, 1913.
Dear Walter:
There was not a more amazed person amongst the audience last Thursday than your old friend here. Having plowed away and wallowed in storm for some time on my own One Act play, I know of the difficulties, the doubts and hazards that one encounters in the business of writing an opera. It is therefore with genuine admiration, that I take off my hat and bow low to him, who could write the Score of Cyrano. It is a masterly accomplishment of a treacherous task. I did not see you on that exciting night; there having been some uncertainty as to my being able to obtain a bed on the 1 o’clock train, I finally had to give up the pleasure of going to your house. I press your dear old hand now in spirit and in sincere admiration.
Your orchestration sounded superbly. Your choruses blended wonderfully with the orchestra and I have no doubt that with a slightremaniementandraccourcissement, Cyrano will give great joy to many in the future. I understand that you have already made considerable cuts, still do I advise cutting out more. Four Acts is a long proposition and some of the best things come in the last Act. But the public begins to tire and can no longer thoroughly enjoy the beauties of this Act. A few things have occurred to me besides. In the scene on the balcony, I think it is a mistake to let Cyrano say what Christian shall repeat to Roxane. Is this not what happens in Act III, “How could I love you more,” etc? Would it not be more expressive to let Cyrano prompt his stupid friend in whispering and pantomimic gesture? Curiously enough, this scene which one would have picked out as “made for an opera,” was perhaps the least effective part of the Opera. After the climb to his lady love, everything is again admirable.
Then, in the last act, I believe if you were to shorten Cyrano’s delirium and hasten his death somewhat, you would strengthen and heighten the final effect of your work. Cyrano dies hard and one thinks of the nine-live-cat-death of Tristan! All this may only seem long coming at the end of the preceding three intense hours. There are really extraordinary effects in this final Act of yours and one would like to look at such a score as yours. Probably, like all telling things in this world, your effects are obtained through simplest means.
The whole work is to me a delight on account of its real musicianship—a work evolved from a highly sensitive, very intelligent brain, that has absorbed and assimilated much, without imitating anybody or anything.
These are my first sincere impressions of your work, to which I will add my sentiments. While the musician listened during the hours of the performance, the friend in him was carefully kept apart. When, however, the musician’s heart began beating more and more warmly, the friend and the musician became again at one in their joy.
Here also arises the reflection: Where did you or where does anybody acquire mastery? Do the gifted themselves really know what they are doing and is Maeterlinck right when he makes Mélisande say “Je ne sais pas ce que je sais”?
A prioriI shall always say: There must be Opera in English—but at present there cannot be, as nobody knows how to sing in it. The performance however was admirable. Amato was superb and so was the orchestra, chorus and old Herty! Hats off to him too!
Kindest regards to Mrs. Damrosch in which Elise joins me.
Believe me, dear Walter, as ever and more proudly than ever,
Your friend
Ch. M. Loeffler.
In 1891 I was asked to give a concert for the Orthopædic Hospital in which my friend, Mrs. John Hobart Warren, was always much interested, and in casting about for some sensational feature which would draw the public I conceived the idea of having Eugene Ysaye and Fritz Kreisler play the Bach concerto for two violins. Ysaye was then at the very zenith of his career and Kreisler had just come to America as a young violinist of great attainments and charm, and still greater promise for the future. The performance of the Bach concerto proved all that I had hoped, and after the concert Ysaye had supper with me at the old Delmonico’s in Madison Square. Ysaye is not only a remarkable artist but one of the most brilliant conversationalists I have met, and during the supper he proceeded in the most fascinating way to analyze himself and Kreisler. He said: “I have arrived at the top and from now on there will be a steady decrease of my powers. I have lived my life to the full and burned the candle at both ends. For some time I shall make up in subtlety of phrasing and nuance what my technic as a violinist can no longer give, but Kreisler is on the ascendant and in a short time he will be the greater artist.” It is not for me to say whether Ysaye’s prophecy has come true, but no one who has heard him in his prime can forget his truly gigantic conceptionof the Beethoven concerto, for instance, and the mastery with which he poured out the golden flood of his music.
In 1909 I gave a Beethoven cycle at which I performed all the Beethoven symphonies and other smaller works of his in historical sequence. We had engaged Ysaye to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto, but, to my astonishment, he sent word only a week before that he must first play a violin concerto by Vitali, as he had to get his fingers into proper condition before playing the Beethoven. I remonstrated with him and explained to him that in a Beethoven cycle I could not possibly give a concerto by Vitali, even to oblige Ysaye, and suggested that he play the Vitali concerto to himself in the greenroom before the concert, but he refused to accept this amendment and I was ever so reluctantly compelled to cancel his appearance in the cycle. This caused a coolness between us which lasted several years and which I regretted exceedingly. But time is a great peacemaker. We happened to meet again quite casually a few years later, and by tacit consent this little contretemps was completely buried and we are as good friends as of yore.
Perhaps the most important and interesting great musician of France whom I have known was Camille Saint-Saëns, whom I met in 1908 when he came to America on a concert tour. He was at that time seventy years of age. His extraordinary vitality and the fluency of his playing amazed us all, and America outdid itself to honor this venerablegrand maître. I had the great pleasure of conducting all of his concerts in New York at which he played his five piano concertos, an extraordinary feat for a man of his age. We had heard so many stories from French musicians of his “nasty temper” at rehearsals andhis caustic comments on this or that phrasing in his symphonies or concertos that we were all very agreeably disappointed in finding him genial, cheerful, and grateful for what we were able to give him. He even insisted on playing the organ himself at my performance of his Symphony No. 3, which is dedicated to the memory of Liszt. I have always considered this to be his greatest work in that, with all the clarity of form and diction which is a special characteristic of his style, there is also a deep emotion which rises in the last movement to a triumphant and thrilling climax.
I saw him again in Paris during the war in the summer of 1918, and reminded him of a visit which my father had paid to him in 1876.
“That was not the first time I met your father,” he quickly rejoined. “I remember very well meeting him in Weimar in 1857 while I was visiting Liszt.”
In 1920 my second daughter, Gretchen, was to be married to the son of Judge Finletter of Philadelphia. The young people had met at Chaumont, France, where Finletter had been stationed at General Headquarters after the armistice and while Gretchen and her friend, Mary Schieffelin, were there as war workers. My daughter agreed enthusiastically with my suggestion that the wedding should be in Paris after my European tour with the orchestra was finished, and this to them highly important event was carried out with great success on the 17th of July, the ceremony being solemnized at the American church and the reception held at my hotel, the “France et Choiseul,” in the Rue St. Honoré. As I had come to this hotel for so many years, Monsieur Mantel, thedirecteur, and all the employees from the chef down, helped on the affair with an enthusiasm whichcan only be found in a country like France, where all festivals of family life are treated with tremendous importance. All the reception-rooms down-stairs and the greater part of the courtyard, which had been charmingly framed in with laurel-trees and filled with inviting-looking little tables, had been placed at our disposal. All the employees of the house—including Leonie, François, Pierre, Adolph, Theo, Félice, Madeleine, Michel, and Louis, all of whom I had known during the war and even before—wore large white boutonnières and ribbons in honor of the occasion; and at four o’clock about a hundred French and American friends began to arrive from the ceremony at the church. Among these was my old friend Madame Nellie Melba, who had come over from London for the purpose, and “le grand maître” Camille Saint-Saëns, whom all the hotel employees immediately recognized and treated with great and fond deference.
As Saint-Saëns entered the courtyard he turned to me and said, rather testily: “Mon cher ami, pourquoi est-ce que vous n’avez-pas donné une de mes symphonies dans un de vos concerts à Paris ce printemps?” For a moment I was nonplussed what to answer. We had given three concerts in Paris and I had devoted one to the “Eroica” of Beethoven, and the other two to the César Franck D Minor, the Mozart “Jupiter,” and the Dvořák “New World” symphonies, but Albert Spalding, my soloist, had played the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto, so that his name had been represented on our programmes. Suddenly the right answer came to me: “Cher maître, don’t you know that during the war I played your great Symphony No. 3 at a gala concert on the Fête Nationale at the Salle du Conservatoire for the benefit of the Croix Rouge, and here is Monsieur Cortot who played the piano part andhere Mademoiselle Boulanger who played the organ.” (Both of them were luckily standing by my side as Saint-Saëns entered.) He was completely pacified and was carried off in triumph to the buffet by a crowd of adoring French musicians in order to offer him some refreshment.
Henri Casadesus told me afterward that when Saint-Saëns arrived at the buffet he said: “I am thirsty.” “Here is some champagne,” said Casadesus. “No. That is too cold,” “Well, here is chocolate.” “No. That is too hot,” whereupon he took the glass of champagne and poured it into the chocolate and drank it down with evident relish. Pretty good for a man then eighty-two years of age!
Saint-Saëns had always preserved a great adoration for Liszt, who had been one of the first musicians to befriend him in his early days, and his admiration for Liszt’s music had remained much greater than for that of Wagner. In fact, during the war the majority of the French musicians were furious at his chauvinistic attitude toward Wagner.
It is told that when Saint-Saëns was still a very young man he was calling on Liszt and the servant asked him to wait a few minutes as Liszt was engaged in another room. Saint-Saëns, seeing a manuscript orchestral score on the piano, sat down and proceeded with his marvellous musicianship to read and play it at sight, when suddenly the door opened and Liszt and Wagner rushed in, amazed at hearing the intricate harmonies of Wagner’s “Rheingold” so marvellously reproduced. Wagner had just brought the score to Liszt in order to show it to him.
During the winter of 1920-21 I accepted the co-editorship for a series of music readers to be used in our public schools, and as I had agreed to invite a small group ofdistinguished French and English composers to contribute some songs for this publication, I requested Saint-Saëns to honor us with two. He readily complied, and in the summer of 1921 invited me to come to his apartment as he had the songs all ready. When I called, he immediately sat down at the piano and from his very neatly written manuscript played them for me, begging me to observe that he had made the accompaniment exceedingly simple in order that “the American school-teachers should not be too much puzzled by it.” For one of the songs composed in honor of the aviators of the war, he had even written the words himself, and for the other he had taken words by La Fontaine.
He called at my hotel in August of 1921. He seemed to me to have grown more feeble, but seeing on my piano an edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, edited by von Bülow, with which I always like to travel as I find the playing of these sonatas very agreeable and restful between the inevitable irritations of travel, Saint-Saëns suddenly bristled up and became very angry at a certain rather complicated fingering which Bülow had given to a piano passage, as his fingers had not been adapted by nature to rapid playing.
“This is the way it should be played,” said Saint-Saëns, as he sat down at the piano and proceeded to let his fingers, though still clad in gray lisle gloves, run up the keys with incredible swiftness, like little gray mice. This extreme dexterity never left him. I had heard him but a month before at a musical given by Widor in his honor and in which Saint-Saëns played the piano part in his own “Septet with Trumpet.” His fingers literally ran away with him, and every time there was a quick passage, he accelerated the tempo to such an extent that the otherplayers simply had to scramble after him as best they could.
He died last winter at eighty-four years of age, and all Paris, governmental, artistic, and scientific, united in giving him imposing and significant obsequies. The respect which the young men of France have for their old masters is something exceedingly sympathetic to an American observer. Whenever Saint-Saëns appeared among them they would hover around with eager deference, flushing with pride as he would say something to the one or the other. In fact, Widor, who is perhaps ten years younger than Saint-Saëns, always insisted on treating him as if he, Widor, were a young, deferential schoolboy in the presence of his great master. Indeed, they reserve the words “grand maître” only for their very choicest men of the arts and the learned professions.
With Lillian Nordica I made a joint tour through New England, giving Wagner concerts. As she had by that time arrived at true prima donna estate she had a private car in which she lived and in which I also had a room. The poor lady arrived on the first day with an attack of bronchitis so acute that she could hardly speak. Her voice sounded like the croak of a raven. I have never seen any woman in such abject despair, walking up and down the little dining-room of the car like a caged tigress, every now and then touching a note on the upright piano which had been placed therein, and trying her voice. She was clad in a wrapper, and tears and misery had ravaged her comely face so that it was hardly recognizable. I, of course, thought that she would not sing that evening, but at seven she disappeared into her room and an hour later emerged clad in a magnificent toilet, with her diamond tiara on the top of her head and herface wonderfully made up. When she appeared before her audience with whom she was an old favorite, her manner had all the regal but smiling charm of yore. Her voice? Well, that is another story.
During that entire week this tragi-comedy would repeat itself every day. Her bronchitis never left her, and from my room I could hear this poor woman, as she entered the dining-room, touch the piano furtively and try to sing a few notes. It was agony, and I have hated private cars ever since, and am quite content to occupy a drawing-room or a berth in a regular sleeping-car when I travel. It is certainly more cheerful.
When we finally arrived in New York, where we expected to give two Wagner concerts, lo and behold, the clouds suddenly lifted. Nordica was her old self, and while the diamond tiara could not have looked more regal nor the smile have been more ingratiating than at Worcester, Massachusetts, her voice had again regained its old charm and the cry of the Valkyrie andIsolde’sLiebestod brought back to the memory of her audiences the happy days when Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and Jean de Reszke had electrified them at the Metropolitan.
Madame Nordica was, however, not the only American artist with whom I came into frequent professional contact and who had achieved an eminence equal to that of the best of Europe. David Bispham became a member of my opera company in 1896. He came of an old Quaker family in Philadelphia, into whose lives music had never penetrated. How Bispham got his intense musical temperament is one of those mysteries that the laws of neither heredity nor environment can explain.
He was a man of some means, and finding the local atmosphere in which he lived uncongenial to his evidentartistic needs, he went to Europe. He had a vibrant barytone voice, studied singing with Lamperti, and gradually began to make successful appearances on the stage, especially in England. In my company he achieved especial successes asTelramund,Kurvenal, andBeckmesser, also asRoger Chillingworthin my own opera on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.” He adored a part in which he could “act.” In fact, he sometimes overacted. His musical memory, especially in his later years, was not always to be relied on, but the more he forgot the words the more intense his acting became, and asChillingworth, in which rôle he really never quite learned the text, he fairly contorted his body in giving expression to the sinister machinations and revengeful desires of that demon.
As a man he was of a singularly delightful, almost childlike disposition. The things of this life rarely existed for him as they really were. He saw them through the glass of his own exuberant imagination. The mysterious, the extraordinary, always fascinated him, and he therefore often became the prey of designing people who took easy advantage of his trusting nature. He was a most generous colleague and more free from jealousy than most operatic singers. Rehearsals, no matter how long, were to him as the breath to his nostrils, and he would often spend hours before his glass in the dressing-room making up his face for some character part in close imitation of a famous picture he had seen at the Uffizi in Florence or the Royal Gallery in London. He loved to enact a villain, but, on the other hand, his doglike devotion toTristanasKurvenaloften brought tears to our eyes.
My wife and I became very fond of him and, later on, when he and I joined the Metropolitan Opera House Company, again under Maurice Grau, we would oftentake our meals together on the long Western trips to and from California.
He was exceedingly irascible if servants did not carry out his orders properly, and he would berate them in his very resonant voice with a distinctness of utterance worthy of theComédie Française. One morning we were seated at breakfast in the dining-car of our train when the colored waiter brought him his coffee, which was so weak that a drop of the so-called cream turned it a bluish gray. “Take away that coffee!” Bispham thundered. “It is not fit to drink. It is too weak!”
“Oh, no, sah!” expostulated gently the waiter. “Dat coffee am all right. It’s de cream what’s too powerful strong!”
At that time leather suitcases were just making their first appearance and I had bought one and carried it about with me. Bispham noticed it and said, in his extreme Kensington English, which he had carefully acquired over there: “Walter, that is a very nice bag you have there. I think I will buy four of them, each one a little smaller than the other, so that I can put them all inside each other.”
“Why,” I said, “David, aren’t you going to pack anything else inside of those bags?”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed David. “Walter, you are always having your little joke!”
Whenever my opera company came to Boston the supers, when an extra group or crowd of knights or peasants, etc., were necessary, were always taken from Harvard University. This became a source of enormous revenue to the doorkeeper at the stage entrance. Our stage-manager paid him twenty-five cents for each super, but he not only pocketed this money himself but charged thestudents anywhere from fifty cents upward, according to the popularity of the opera, for the privilege of hearing it from the stage. In consequence we often had the most wonderful athletic specimens that the ardent pursuit of sport produces among college men, delighting our eyes as the curtain rose, and the knights and nobles in the second act of “Tannhäuser,” for instance, clad in magnificent robes, would march in and solemnly listen to the contest of song in the castle of the Landgrave of Thuringia.
But they were not all athletes, and I remember one real student among them. The curtain went up on the first act of “Lohengrin” and, to my amazement as I looked up from my conductor’s stand, I saw one of these college boys, dressed in the armor and cloak of one of King Henry’s knights, calmly standing at the foot of the throne, large spectacles on his nose, busily following the action of the opera from a libretto which he held in his hand and close to his eyes.
Another time a much more terrible occurrence took place, but very much “behind the scenes.” I was in Boston with the Grau Opera Company and, at a Saturday matinée, “Carmen” was given with Madame Calvé in the title rôle. I did not conduct that opera, and happened to saunter on the stage after the third act. I found the whole company in a state of only half-suppressed merriment. While Madame A—— was singingMicaela’sair on the stage, in which she imploresDon Joseto leaveCarmenand return to his old mother, one of these young wretches from Harvard had crept into her dressing-room, and in order to have a triumphant souvenir to hang up in his rooms at college he had stolen her— No, not her stockings, but another importantpart of her wearing apparel. Madame A——, on returning to her dressing-room, had discovered the theft. Her maid had told the wardrobe mistress, the wardrobe mistress had told the stage carpenter, he had repeated it to the stage-manager, and so forth and so on, the whole company revelling in it, especially as Madame A—— was herself of New England parentage and was considered an exceptionally proper young person.