Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (17 page)

Also in March came the game-changing announcement that the Metropolitan Opera Company would be replaced by the Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc. The nascent venture would follow not the old shareholder plan, but a membership model. Everyone was welcome to join by contributing either to the operating fund or to the endowment, or simply by volunteering services. What had been since Gatti’s appointment in 1908 an enterprise unhitched from the profit motive as a matter of policy would become a not-for-profit corporation, “organized for educational purposes” as a matter of law. Tickets would no longer be subject to federal entertainment taxes; their prices could be lowered without strain on an already constrained budget. The purpose of the conversion, it was explained somewhat disingenuously, was to streamline operations. In effect, the new producing entity would be freed from many of the obligations of its predecessor. By June, the Association was official. Each member of the board would have one vote; no longer would power be weighted in favor of those owning the larger block of shares, in the case of Kahn, now 84 percent. And no longer would the Real Estate Company be responsible for shortfalls. The financial crisis and the reluctance of the old families to foot bill after bill had opened the door to the public. The larger middle class, through its support, would take ownership: “It is this new public now forming, and assuming more and more power, which must, and undoubtedly will, determine the future of opera in America. The days of the Maecenases and of gifts of millions to opera companies are flown. . . . The men of finance who ‘could,’ to say nothing of ‘would,’ come to the rescue are growing fewer every day. Our suffering millionaires! They are no longer to be waited upon which on the whole is a good thing.” But for the moment, the elites, “the bankers and the backers,” who conductor Artur Bodanzky disparaged as quitters, had won. Free of liability for production debts, they still sat pretty in their very own boxes in the theater that showed them off to best effect.
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The day after the restructuring was announced, March 25, Gatti outlined the austerity measures anticipated for the 1932–33 season. He called for shared sacrifice so that the Metropolitan might “continue to live.” “In such a critical and decisive moment,” he wrote, “it would be petty and without a
realization of this grave situation, to raise questions of contracts and rights. When a house is on fire one does not send for lawyers or notaries.” If necessary, he himself would serve without pay; others, whether American-born or foreign, would be subject to lowered compensation. By mid-April, as 1932–33 began to take shape, and more than one-tenth of the city’s population was on public or private assistance, it was understood that the season would be shortened from twenty-four to sixteen weeks, and that subscription costs would be halved and individual ticket prices reduced in order to generate more robust sales (
Times,
April 16, 1932). Twenty-eight singers were let go, most for reasons of financial exigency. All those retained, together with their administrative colleagues, accepted the news of a salary cut with resignation. All, that is, except Beniamino Gigli, who had previously rejected the reduction of fall 1931. In spring 1932, he stuck to his guns, to the disgust of many of his colleagues, thirty-two of whom were willing, some said encouraged or even coerced by the management, to sign an open letter of condemnation dated April 12 and published on May 2. Among the signatories were conductors Artur Bodanzky and Tullio Serafin, and singers Lucrezia Bori, Grace Moore, Lily Pons, Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Rethberg, Giovanni Martinelli, Lauritz Melchior, and Ezio Pinza. Aware that the letter was about to be released, on May 1 Gigli took the offensive: “My sincere offers were met with conditions and impositions which would have diminished my dignity as a man and as an artist”
(Times)
. In any case, it had already been announced that he would not return for the 1932–33 season. Nor would Maria Jeritza. The press hinted that she too had refused the salary cut. Correspondence between the soprano, Gatti, and Ziegler leads to a different conclusion: that her departure was their choice, not hers. Their excuse was the reduced length of the season to come and the too great number of guaranteed performances in her contract. In July, Ziegler wrote to Gatti that, moved by the desire to bid farewell to her fans, Jeritza was willing “to sing guest performances for little or no money.” Just the month before, on June 8, the Dow had bottomed out at 41.82; on September 3, 1929, it had stood at 381.17.
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In each of the first three Depression years, Gatti introduced six new productions, divided between premieres and familiar operas. The same quotient had prevailed in the three prosperous seasons prior. The complexion of the repertoire remained similarly constant. The general manager’s policy held steady:
to present Met premieres of works of popular composers and to revive those long neglected, to add Russian and Czech titles, to import the latest European successes, to showcase the specific talents of box-office stars, and to introduce American works. This last was underscored by Kahn in his 1925 “Statement” in defense of Gatti against the charge of Italian bias: “Under the management of the Italian Gatti-Casazza, the Metropolitan Opera has produced thus far nine operas and one ballet by American composers, whilst not a single work composed by an American was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House under any of the preceding managements.” Renewed interest in Verdi brought the long overdue
Luisa Miller
and
Simon Boccanegra. Don Giovanni,
absent since 1908, returned in 1929 to stay.
Der Fliegende Holländer
made port once again after a like hiatus. The new Russian entries produced a short-lived hit, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opulent
Sadko,
and a miss, Mussorgsky’s
The Fair at Sorochintzy
. Weinberger’s
Schwanda the Bagpiper,
despite its success in Prague and elsewhere and good press in New York, ran for only one season. Montemezzi’s
La Notte di Zoraima
and Lattuada’s
Le Preziose ridicole
suffered the same fate. Of only passing interest, two of Franz von Suppé’s operettas,
Boccaccio
and
Donna Juanita,
were there to indulge Jeritza’s comic bent.
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Gatti’s ongoing American wager had paid off with the seventeen performances in three consecutive seasons of
The King’s Henchman
(1927) of Deems Taylor, music critic for the
World
and editor of
Musical America
. The libretto of Edna St. Vincent Millay on a comfortably familiar Tristanesque subject, the leadership of the Met’s preeminent conductor Tullio Serafin, and a cast of principals equipped to project the text intelligibly had impressed reviewers and attracted the public. The world premiere of Taylor’s
Peter Ibbetson
brought
le tout
New York-Hollywood out in force: novelist Edna Ferber, columnist Alexander Woollcott, conductors Walter Damrosch (to whom the score was dedicated) and Leopold Stokowski, Irving Berlin, Ruth Chatterton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harpo Marx. The composer was on hand to acknowledge the applause that elicited thirty-six curtain calls. Enthusiasm for
Peter Ibbetson
persisted through twenty-two performances in four seasons, records for an American premiere that stand to this day. Edward Johnson later boasted, “
Peter Ibbetson
made more money than any other single opera during the past twenty years.” Its subject is the thwarted love of childhood soul mates who meet again as adults, are once more parted by tragic circumstance, and finally achieve perfect understanding in shared dreams and then in the afterlife. Reviewers were taken with Taylor’s expert setting of the text: “a tremendous argument for opera in English, as all the essential parts of the
story could be clearly understood.” At the same time, they found the score “rather negligible,” “oddly featureless.” The plot (“Strong men [were said to have] actually wept”) and the quality of the performances carried the piece to the top of the season’s box office. Through the execrable sonics of the March 17, 1934, broadcast, we hear the original principals. As Peter, the soon-to-retire Johnson is still comfortable on high, still capable of translucent diction. Tibbett luxuriates in Colonel Ibbetson’s act 1 love song, as close as the opera comes to a hummable aria. Bori sings Mary, her English accented but thoroughly intelligible, her voice fresh, her manner unaffected. The transcription is both a precious document of the Spanish soprano’s refined art and a bridge to early Met history. Bori had made her company debut opposite Caruso during the 1910 Paris tour.
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TABLE 8.
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1929–30 to 1931–32

 

 

The previous month, January 1931, had seen the nick-of-time debut of Lily Pons. Galli-Curci had recently retired, her final seasons plagued by a long-standing goiter condition that compromised her intonation and, as serious, the brilliant upper register required by her repertoire. The company was desperate for a star coloratura, a virtuoso singer whose name would sell out the house. Pons filled the bill. Chic, petite, vivacious, she was ubiquitous in concerts, on records, on the radio, in the movies. And she managed her career shrewdly, marketing her persona through a handful of showcase arias. The staccati of her “Bell Song” triggered a long run for Delibes’s
Lakmé;
she sang the Hindu priestess fifty times over a fifteen-year span. She owned Lucia in particular, assuming the character for a role-record ninety-three performances, an astounding fourteen of which were broadcast between 1932 and 1956, the year of her retirement. The French soprano’s stunning high notes, often sweet tone, and glamour held the audience hostage for nearly three decades.

The choice of Franklin Roosevelt as the Democratic nominee for president in summer 1932 deepened the gloom that hung over the company’s management. For one thing, a Roosevelt victory would strengthen the cause of labor, to the benefit of the Metropolitan’s unionized workers; they alone had rejected pay cuts in 1931–32. For another, a Roosevelt win would threaten the interests of the patrons of the opera, the class to which, ironically, the candidate belonged. Together with the Vanderbilts and the Morgans, James A. Roosevelt, Theodore’s uncle and Franklin’s distant Oyster Bay cousin, was a
contributor to the capitalization of the Metropolitan in the early 1880s; at the opening of the house, he was president of the board and owner of a second-tier box. On July 8, Ziegler wrote to Gatti bemoaning the prospect of an FDR White House, and then went on: “Our present form of government has proven a failure at this time and I believe what we need here is what you have in Italy, namely a dictator.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s December 10 appeal on behalf of the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee during the first intermission of
Simon Boccanegra
could only have stoked Ziegler’s fears. It was not the fact of her appeal; others, including a former secretary of state and Kahn himself, had taken a turn at what had become a routine part of the proceedings. It was her tone: “When you come face to face with people in need, you simply have to try to do something about it” (
Times,
Dec. 11, 1932). Most urgent from Ziegler’s point of view was that drastically reduced prices had done little to spur subscriptions.
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It was
Simon Boccanegra
that had inaugurated the 1932–33 season. This time, the feature article on opening night hailed not the brilliance of the occasion or the illustrious history of the institution, but the ways in which the Met had confronted the crisis in order to “carry on”: the sacrifices of so many employees, the legal and fiscal restructuring of the organization, and, above all, the shortening of the season by a third, from twenty-four to sixteen weeks. That winter, the by now tired proposition of a new home for the Met in Rockefeller Center resurfaced. This time, the word that came down from the Real Estate Company was unrelated to the elegance of the neighborhood or the scale of the property. In the present economic circumstance, a move was simply out of the question. The stockholders were clear: they would not be left in the lurch on 39th Street (
Times,
Feb. 1).

The wider Metropolitan community began to mobilize, stepping into the breach left by ever more stingy millionaires. Mrs. August Belmont Jr., the former Eleanor Robson, who had retired from the stage on marrying a son of the banker August Belmont, an early supporter of opera in New York, is credited with the idea for public fund-raising. Belmont was soon to be the first woman director of a Metropolitan board. The radio campaign was launched during an intermission of
Tannhäuser
on February 22, 1933, with an appeal by Lucrezia Bori. Eleanor Roosevelt, apparently listening in, was among the first to send a check. Operagoers found an insert in their librettos addressed “To the Subscribers and Friends of Opera at the Metropolitan.” The flyer announcing a “campaign to save metropolitan opera” was signed by Bori (the chair), Johnson, Tibbett, and two members of the Real
Estate Company board, Cornelius N. Bliss and Robert S. Brewster, identified as a committee to raise a “substantial guaranty fund,” without which the company would be unable to undertake another season: “The closing of the Metropolitan Opera House next year would be nothing short of a national misfortune. Not only would thousands of operagoers and millions of listeners to opera over radio suffer a serious loss in their cultural life, but it would be a catastrophe to throw out of employment at this time of acute depression, the 770 employees of the Opera Company, most of whom, because of their highly specialized training, would be unable to find any other employ-ment.”
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