Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (13 page)

Born in Udine in 1869, two years after Kahn and Toscanini, Gatti belonged to an old and distinguished family. He studied mathematics and naval engineering. At the age of twenty-four, he replaced his father as director of the opera house in Ferrara. Five years later, he was drafted to rescue La Scala from fiscal, physical, and artistic disarray. And with him was appointed music director Arturo Toscanini, born in Parma. While Gatti was studying music as an amateur, Toscanini was embarked on a career as a professional cellist. In 1886, at the age of nineteen, he made his podium debut in Rio de Janeiro in
Aïda
when the scheduled conductor walked out on a jeering crowd and a second was booed out of the pit. It was on that occasion that Toscanini
first cast aside the score, working from what would become a legendary memory. On his return to Italy, he led the world premieres of
Pagliacci
(1892) and
La Bohème
(1896). Toscanini’s path crossed with Gatti’s as they prepared for their first season at La Scala in 1898. Gatti opened the year with Wagner’s
I Maestri Cantori di Norimberga
and was called a “madman” and “disloyal to Italy” for his pains (
Herald Tribune,
Sept. 3, 1940). Nevertheless, he persisted in renewing the repertoire with Wagner’s “Ring,” sung in Italian, of course, and other modern works,
Louise, Salome,
and
Pelléas et Mélisande,
all led by Toscanini. His ten years at La Scala were marked by intelligence, probity, and ultimately widely recognized success. He had taken to heart the caution that the aged Verdi had offered him: “The theatre is intended to be full and not empty. That’s something you must always remember.”
⁷

Toscanini conducted not the inaugural performance of Gatti’s first season, the Brooklyn Academy of Music
Faust,
but the much anticipated second, the 39th Street opening night
Aïda,
in which Emmy Destinn also made her debut, and Caruso, Louise Homer, and Scotti joined her in a spectacular new investiture replete with Radamès’s triumphal entrance on a chariot drawn by two white horses. Here was a thrilling first example of what the
Evening Post
dubbed the grand “Milanese” style (Nov. 17, 1908). One reviewer observed that, mirabile dictu, the singers followed the conductor, and not the conductor the singers, as had been the rule for the Italian repertoire
(Sun)
. A single performance was all it took to convince critics and public that the star in the pit was at least as captivating as those on the stage. Seats at the extreme sides of the theater were suddenly hot; they afforded a full view of the dramatic maestro. As to the orchestra, its members bore stupefied witness early on to Toscanini’s prodigious talent when he rehearsed the six-hour
Götterdämmerung
without a score, singing along at will note for note, word for word. Farrar gives the following account of the effect Toscanini first made on singers and instrumentalists: “The Maestro . . . was a bundle of concentrated quicksilver. Neatly compressed into his black jacket, he wore a broad-brimmed fedora crammed over deep-set burning eyes. Portentous silence was broken by an occasional and solemn raven’s croak. This was the result of long assault upon protesting vocal cords. We were to experience—later and often—the amazing crescendi to screams and expletives that rose to unparalleled
dynamics in rehearsals. However, these tempests became less terrifying by reason of their frequency. We recognized the lightning’s play, sure to be followed by disarming—if unstable—serenity.”
⁸

For one brilliant season, Toscanini and Mahler, formerly of Milan and Vienna, were on the program in ninety-four of the Met’s 224 performances. In the space of five extraordinary days in February 1909, the public heard Toscanini conduct the Verdi Requiem and
Götterdämmerung,
and Mahler
Fidelio
and
The Bartered Bride
. That year, Toscanini led the Met premieres of Puccini’s early
Le Villi
and Alfredo Catalani’s
La Wally,
Mahler those of Eugen d’Albert’s
Tiefland
and Smetana’s comic opera, the only popular novelty of the season. The inevitable clash between the two star conductors was sparked by Toscanini’s move to have
Tristan und Isolde
assigned to him. He had made it clear that he was a committed Wagnerian in the stupendous performance of
Götterdämmerung,
with Fremstad as Brünnhilde for the first time. Mahler prevailed, nonetheless. In his letter to Dippel of fall 1908, he argued, “I have . . . expressly retained
Tristan
for myself. I lavished a great deal of effort on the
Tristan
last season and may reasonably assert that the form in which the work now appears in New York is my intellectual property.” The following season, 1909–10,
Tristan
was Toscanini’s, and Wagnerites got to debate whether Mahler’s version was too pale, Toscanini’s too Italianate. Mahler’s adieu came in spring 1910 when he returned briefly for the US premiere of Tchaikovsky’s
The Queen of Spades,
sung in German, the first staged performance of a Russian opera in New York. Krehbiel thought it a triumph, but the public disagreed, and the opera was absent from the Met until 1965.
⁹

In fall 1909, not content to compete with Oscar Hammerstein, the Metropolitan went into competition with itself at the recently completed New Theatre. The project began in an atmosphere of optimism: sparing no expense, the fabulous edifice would offer all the amenities the performing arts could dream of, along with the educational programs the citizenry had repeatedly been promised. But what New York worthies trumpeted as “the people’s theatre” was soon attacked as “a hobby for millionaires” and “a gilded incubator.” Again, the perceived betrayal of a theater for the common man—and woman—threatened an embryonic cultural institution, as it had the Academy of Music on 14th Street in 1854. The anger of the press and activist theatrical personalities was directed in particular at the thirty founders, who were, to a man, affiliated with the Metropolitan. The early financing was identified with the familiar names of Kahn, Belmont, Vanderbilt, Huntington, and Mackay. In its relationship to the Metropolitan, the New
Theatre was modeled on that of the Opéra-Comique to the Paris Opéra. It opened on November 16, 1909, with
Werther,
starring Farrar and Edmond Clément in his American début, soon followed by the premiere of Alfred Bruneau’s
L’Attaque du moulin
. A mixed repertoire ranged from the intended “light” operas,
Zar und Zimmermann, La Fille de Madame Angot, Fra Diavolo,
to works also regularly presented in the larger house,
Manon, La Bohème,
and
Tosca
. The Met persevered at the New Theatre through only forty performances in the single season, 1909–10. The sight lines were wonderful, the acoustics awful. The elegance and comfort of the 2,318-seat auditorium, sized to opera somewhat less than grand, could not offset the hostility of the left, inept management, and a location considered hopelessly inconvenient, Central Park West at 62nd Street. Sadly, the splendid building was demolished in 1931.
¹⁰

When American composer-critic Reginald De Koven lashed out at the corporate “ambition to make the Metropolitan a central depot for supplying opera in large and small doses to the world at large” (
World,
Nov. 14, 1910), he was thinking not only of the New Theatre but also of the company’s first international tour, scheduled for the following May and June. The Met brought to Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet its best: Caruso’s Canio, Leo Slezak’s Otello, Fremstad’s Santuzza, Destinn’s Aïda, Scotti’s Falstaff, and a new production of
Manon Lescaut,
never before heard in France, in deference to Massenet and his own
Manon
. Adding to the heated coverage of this controversial premiere was the news that the indisposed Lina Cavalieri would be replaced by a young Spanish soprano, Lucrezia Bori, destined to become a pillar of the Met. De Koven’s paper carried glowing news of opening night. It was generally agreed that the heroes of the occasion were Gatti and Toscanini. The first had pulled off the logistical miracle of mounting the opera in two days on a stage inadequate to the grandiosity of the company’s ancient Egypt; Toscanini had conducted incomparably despite only one week of rehearsal with the initially resistant Colonne Orchestra and acoustics inadequate to Verdi’s sonorities (May 28). But that was not the whole story. Rowdies in the gallery had booed Toscanini at the beginning of the second act, ostensibly to protest the absence of even one French principal in the whole of what was tagged the “Italian,” never the “Metropolitan,” visit. When the curtain rose, the cool Louise Homer began to sing over the tumult; her ovation was such that the catcalls were lost in the applause.
Musical America
carried the headline “Our Opera Hissed by Paris Claque, Brilliant Success Achieved Despite Short Violent Anti-Italian Outbreak” (May 28).
The next day, Gatti was pilloried in the literary periodical
Gil Blas
for refusing to reengage a leading French mezzo-soprano, Marie Delna. The writer contended that behind this decision was the powerful Toscanini, Italian to the core, who had pressed his bias against French artists. It was well known too that Edmond Clément had complained bitterly that only those who would sing Italian parts would be retained at the Met, implying what the numbers did not show, that French opera was unfairly slighted in New York (
Times,
March 20, 1910). While Gatti declared, perhaps indelicately, that he had brought the company to France to demonstrate the high standard demanded every day on Broadway,
Gil Blas
alleged that what had actually motivated the impresario and the conductor was the lure of the Légion d’honneur. And while the French, wounded in their national pride, railed against an offending cultural invasion from the south, the far-off American press was busy claiming as its own the altogether Italian triumvirate of Gatti, Toscanini, and Caruso.
¹¹

The defining event of 1909–10, the buyout of Hammerstein at the end of a season of ruinous rivalry, served to cement the power of the Kahn/Gatti directorate. (Kahn himself made up the $500,000 debt incurred in the first two years of the new administration, accruing to himself enormous control over the company in the bargain.) The last straw was Hammerstein’s provocative incursion into Philadelphia, a Met outpost since the year of the company’s founding. On most Tuesdays, the Met held forth at the Academy of Music on South Broad Street; Hammerstein was positioned defiantly at his new opera house on North Broad. Not content with the Philadelphia power play, Hammerstein boasted that he would acquire yet another house, this time in Baltimore, and spoke of extending his empire even further. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan made no secret of its own imperial agenda, starting with Boston and Chicago. Between November 1909 and April 1910, the company put on 135 shows of thirty-eight works on 39th Street, in addition to those mounted at two other New York venues, the New Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and on tour in the United States and abroad, for the unbelievable total of 360 performances of forty-two works.

Debilitated by the four-year contest, at the end of his financial rope, and having ripped out the grand tier boxes of his theater to spite his already alienated society supporters, Hammerstein capitulated. In April 1910, the Metropolitan Opera Company forked over the $1.25 million it took to cover Hammerstein’s obligations and to acquire the sets, the costumes, the Philadelphia opera house—in effect his entire operation, excluding only the
34th Street Manhattan. The Hammerstein deal was contingent on his agreement to desist from operatic activity in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago for the ensuing ten years. The Manhattan Opera Company went out in glory on tour in Boston: Garden sang four of her roles, including Mélisande, Tetrazzini and John McCormack starred in
La Fille du régiment
and
La Traviata
. The indefatigable impresario turned to London, where he went ahead and built himself, yes, another opera house. The British chapter lasted only two years. In 1913, Hammerstein attempted to circumvent the American injunction with a popularly priced season of opera in English at New York’s Century Theatre, the renamed New Theatre. When the Met stopped him from going forward with his plans, he built yet another opera house, the Lexington, home to moving pictures and vaudeville until 1917, when it was leased by the Chicago Opera. Hammerstein lost the Lexington too. He died in 1919, just six months before the end of his exile, but not before he had announced the imminent resumption of his battle with the Met. Hammerstein represents the only serious challenge the Met faced in New York from the days of Mapleson to the bright years of the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center in the 1960s and 1970s.
¹²

Gatti had presided over the fiasco of the world premiere of
Madama Butterfly
at La Scala in 1904. But within a few months, Cio-Cio-San had endeared herself to Europe’s audiences and solidified Puccini’s claim to the title of the most popular of living opera composers. At the front of the verismo wave, he had “staged a coup d’état and seized control of opera’s commanding heights.” It was to Gatti again, now at the Metropolitan, that Puccini entrusted his next work,
La Fanciulla del West
. As early as 1907, in New York to oversee
Butterfly,
he was on the lookout for a wholly American subject. A performance of Belasco’s
The Girl of the Golden West
left him hesitant. Often accused of repeating himself, and most painfully during the catcalls that greeted the La Scala
Butterfly,
Puccini was bent on avoiding the humiliating charge. As the plot would have it, the act 2 struggle between Minnie, the saloon keeper, and Jack Rance, the sheriff, over Dick Johnson, the bandit, bore a marked similarity to the act 2 confrontation between Tosca, the singer, and Scarpia, the police chief, over Mario, the painter. Moreover,
The Girl
was an old-fashioned melodrama, and Puccini, alert to cutting-edge contemporaries such as Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss, was eager to be judged
modern. It was only when an Italian translation of the Belasco play became available that he was convinced he had found his story. He embarked on the project with enthusiasm: “The
Girl
may become a second
Bohème,
but stronger, more daring, with greater scope.” Set in the requisite American locale, the play was alive with action and spectacle animated by a powerful female protagonist. The modernity absent from the plot would be invested in the score. Puccini signed his agreement with Gatti on June 9, 1910, during his visit to Paris for the Metropolitan performances of
Manon Lescaut
.
¹³

 

FIGURE 12.
From left to right, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, David Belasco, Arturo Toscanini, Giacomo Puccini (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)