Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (20 page)

Tibbett’s Metropolitan career began inauspiciously. His knees shaking during the whole of the audition, as he recounted it, he cracked on the high F-sharp of “Eri tu” from
Un Ballo in maschera
. In the dark, cavernous theater sat the hulking general manager; the baritone was dismissed with a curt “thank you.” Three weeks went by before Gatti, at the insistence of his wife, soprano Frances Alda, agreed to a second hearing. A far less agitated Tibbett sang the “Credo” from
Otello
. This time, Gatti was impressed enough to hire the twenty-seven-year-old Californian who had never sung in opera, not in New York, not anywhere. Tibbett’s elation turned to dismay when Gatti offered a paltry $50 a week. At Alda’s urging, the salary was upped to $60.
That was not all. His boilerplate contract stipulated that whereas the company was responsible for costumes, “gloves, feathers, wigs, tights, boots, shoes, and other similar articles shall be furnished by the Artist himself.” And what is more, Tibbett was expected to master twenty-seven roles, mostly comprimario and secondary parts, two leads (Amonasro and Escamillo), and one role for bass (King Dodon in
Le Coq d’or
). For the next year and a half, he was little noticed by public or press.
³⁰

In fall 1924, Tibbett got his big break. Gatti cabled Alda, on a concert tour with Tibbett, to ask if her protégé was up to Ford, the second baritone role in
Falstaff
. She replied yes, definitely, and did her best to help her young colleague. But rehearsals went poorly for the inexperienced singer, who was challenged by a weak musical memory and a difficult score. The formidable, almost all-Italian cast included Antonio Scotti, as Falstaff, and Gigli; the venerated Serafin was the conductor. To top it all off, the revival had been staged expressly for Scotti’s twenty-fifth anniversary with the company. During rehearsal, annoyed that Tibbett’s on-the-job training was slowing things down, Scotti and Gigli engaged in mocking exchanges over the novice’s histrionic and vocal difficulties. Although he had never set foot in Italy and did not know Italian, Tibbett got the drift. He was furious. Then came the night of the first performance, January 2, 1925. Tibbett sang the bitter aria that concludes the first scene of the second act (“È sogno? o realtà’?”) with an extra dose of passion. During the ovation that followed, the scene’s principals took their bows. Then Scotti came out alone. But the audience kept up the clapping, stamping, whistling, and, finally, to make its will perfectly clear, began shouting, “Tibbett, Tibbett.” For once, the claque was not the instigator of the commotion. Meanwhile, assuming the tribute was for Scotti, Tibbett had repaired to his dressing room two floors above. Serafin did his best to carry on with the performance, but the audience, presuming that Tibbett had somehow been kept from appearing before the curtain alone, would not let up. A member of the orchestra was dispatched to plead that he be allowed to acknowledge the applause. Gatti acceded reluctantly; attention had shifted from the veteran Italian baritone, the honoree of the evening, to the humble newcomer: “An American audience had decided that one of its own nationality should be properly recognized for his talent”
(Times)
. The sixteen-and-a-half-minute demonstration subsided at last and the curtain rose on the interior of Ford’s house. From then on, Tibbett was given increasingly important assignments. He became the cornerstone of Gatti’s American opera initiative, and with his assumption of the title role in the Met’s first
Simon Boccanegra,
he was uncontested as the company’s leading baritone in the Italian and French repertoires. He sang the last of his 603 Met performances on March 24, 1950.

 

FIGURE 18.
Lawrence Tibbett as Ford in
Falstaff
, 1925 (Herman Mishkin; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Kahn’s 1925 rejoinder of “absurd” to charges that the Met had been unfair to Americans was understandable. That very year, there were forty native singers on a roster of ninety-five. The eccentric examples of Ponselle, Talley, and Tibbett offered little guidance for the company’s further Americanization: Talley was an experiment that did not bear repeating, Ponselle and Tibbett phenomena that defied repetition. What was needed was a broadly based and systematic process for the discovery of talent. The answer was the “Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air.” The opening broadcast of the
competition took place on December 22, 1935, the first week of the season. Hosted by Johnson himself and sponsored by Sherwin-Williams, the paint company, the fifteen-week-long series (expanded to twenty-six the next year) featured “the hit tunes of opera brought down to the level of Mr. Average John Q. Public.” However condescending, the copy was intended to reassure diffident audiences that opera was no longer the exclusive domain of the highborn or the highbrow. The “tunes” would be rendered by “finely trained singers who are at the threshold of stardom.” Beyond publishing the company’s brand, and increasing familiarity with already familiar music, the program would help satisfy the Juilliard prescription that the Met provide opportunities to young American singers. As winning soprano Eleanor Steber later pointed out, Americans “had as yet no regional opera companies or, for the most part, conservatory opera schools.” For many, Europe was out of bounds for reasons of budget and, for all starting in 1939, for reasons of security. The Auditions promised Americans a foot in the door of the country’s major opera company.
³¹

The Auditions fielded roughly seventy contestants each year. First place carried with it a prize of $1,000, a plaque, and a contract; runners-up were often asked to join the company as well. The untried aspirants were thrust onto the stage, occasionally for as little as a Sunday night concert, but more often in a role that led to a Met career in the cadre of comprimarios, where the company had particular need of local talent. One of the 1936 finalists was Risë Stevens, who turned down the Met’s offer, opting instead for training in Europe; she came back as a principal artist in 1938–39. Stevens, Steber, Leonard Warren, Patrice Munsel, Regina Resnik, and Richard Tucker all became stars of the 1940s. Merrill Miller failed to place in 1939; in 1945, as Robert Merrill, he won. On the radio, and briefly on television, the Auditions chalked up a twenty-three-year run. The banner year of 1958 produced Martina Arroyo and Grace Bumbry. Since then, although gone from the air, the Auditions have continued to thrive under the auspices of the National Council of the Metropolitan Opera, founded like the Metropolitan Opera Guild by Mrs. August Belmont. In the last many generations it would be the rare American member of the company who missed this rite of passage.
³²

If Gatti’s exit in 1935 accelerated the Americanization of the Met’s roster, his departure also prompted a wave of
italianità
within a swath of the Italian-
American community. Nostalgia for the old management and hostility toward the new served the right wing of the Italian-language press as a rallying point for the chauvinism of its editorial policies and its colony of subscribers. The relentless comparison between Italy and the United States devolved into the affirmation of Italian cultural superiority. Gatti had been gone two years when
La Settimana
(March 14–21, 1937) published a piece titled “Naufragio al Metropolitan” (Shipwreck at the Metropolitan);
La Sentinella
(March 1, 1940) varied the metaphor three years later with “Il Tramonto del ‘Met’” (The Sunset of the Met). Their authors lamented the “golden age” of Gatti-Casazza and decried the present Johnson era, in which the “great Italian musical tradition [has] been suffocated little by little.” Italians who thought themselves “citizens of the Metropolitan” were now again “foreigners” in the “magno teatro,” as they had been in the years of German and French dominance. The strain of ethnic journalism sympathetic to the Italian regime accused the “Juilliard dictatorship” of annihilating Italian opera in New York and, with it, Italian casts.

The injudicious Gigli took aim at the United States and then at the Metropolitan before zeroing in on several of its most prominent American stars. He had left the Met in 1932 only to return under Johnson for a handful of performances in early 1939. If his colleagues had somehow forgotten his refusal of salary cuts in the darkest days of the Depression, they must have found it impossible to forgive the vicious statements he made on his Italian reentry: “There are those who foresee in the not far distance something like civil war” in the United States; the unions “in the hands of Jews” were to blame; as for the Metropolitan, hard times had obliged the company to engage singers who “cost less and substitute notoriety created by publicity for intrinsic value, namely Moore, Tibbett, and Crooks” (
Times,
Feb. 26, 1939). Moore diagnosed Gigli as having “a case of sour grapes.” Tibbett parried, “Gigli is a great tenor. High notes must go to the head.” And Crooks responded, “Mr. Gigli should have learned by now to use his mouth for singing only. It sounds better” (
Times,
Feb. 27, 1939).

For one reason or another—often to loosen purse strings—operatic discourse during the Depression inclined toward the perennial question of the place of opera in the American order. The arguments made in the 1930s found their
way into the March 5, 1941, issue of
Variety,
whose headline, “Urge Not So Grand Opera,” said it all. Those “urging” were Johnson, Gaetano Merola (head of the San Francisco Opera), Walter Damrosch, and Metropolitan singers Melchior, Pons, Moore, Pinza, and Tibbett. Asked to speak to the future of opera in America, their statements coalesced around the fond hope that an American city of any size have “a municipally-owned, subsidy-encouraged, tax-free opera house” dedicated to serving as a training ground for “embryonic” singers. The cities named were Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, Des Moines, St. Paul, Omaha, Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, and Hartford.
Variety
argued that Americans had been “initiated into the idea of government subsidy for cultural undertakings through the Federal Theatre and Music and Radio Projects and more recently the National Youth Administration.” That same spring of 1941, the Texaco Corporation, which had taken on the sponsorship of the radio broadcasts the previous December, wrote to Johnson that it had received “30,000 letters of which 3,884 contained expressions of preference for certain operas.” The astonishing response attested to the Metropolitan’s conquest of a truly national audience. Less surprising were the titles of favored works:
Carmen
was first, then came
Aïda, La Traviata, Faust, Rigoletto, La Bohème, Tristan und Isolde, Madama Butterfly, Lucia di Lammermoor,
and, tied for tenth,
Lohengrin
and
Manon
. Although
Tristan
registered seventh in the rankings, the number of letters fell off by half after the Wagner broadcast. Texaco wondered whether the decline might not be taken “to mean it is a little long and hard going for the radio audience.”
³³

Among the transformative events of spring and summer 1935—the Juilliardization of the Met, the imposition of Witherspoon and his agenda, his death, the naming of Johnson to the post—was the inception of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the brainchild of Eleanor Belmont. With the onset of the Depression, she had chaired the Women’s Division of the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee on whose behalf Eleanor Roosevelt, Otto Kahn, and others solicited contributions from the Met stage. And she became one of the pillars of the “Save the Met” campaign. In 1933, she joined the Association board with the intent to help “to avert unemployment [among Opera House workers], with which I was all too familiar, rather than any lofty idea of preserving art.” Her signal contribution, the founding
of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, was seeded with a $5,000 Association grant. The Guild’s formal mission read, “to develop and cultivate public interest in opera and its allied arts, and to contribute to their support; to further musical education and appreciation; and to sponsor and give assistance to operatic, musical and cultural programs and activities of an educational character.”
³⁴

The Guild’s first annual report, dated April 7, 1936, pointed to impressive achievements: a dress rehearsal of Flagstad’s
Fidelio
open to members; a ticket service, again a member benefit; a fund to provide needy music students discounted tickets; a costume exhibition; and its first publication,
The Metropolitan Opera Guild Primer,
a slim volume of one-sentence plot summaries. A Guild-sponsored poll uncovered that, unlike the wider radio audience that would voice its partialities in 1941, its membership of aficionados appreciated
La Traviata
and
Rigoletto
least and
Lohengrin
and
Tristan und Isolde
most. The organization’s accomplishments of the following year, 1936–37, were a balanced budget, the doubling of its rolls from two thousand to four thousand, and an increase in out-of-town adherence. The introduction of junior memberships via schools was synchronous with the first Met performance offered expressly to students, an
Aïda
with Rethberg and Bruna Castagna underwritten by a $2,000 Guild donation. There were fund-raising luncheons, public lectures,
Operagrams,
pamphlets devoted to single titles, and “Operalogues” (later “The Metropolitan Opera Guild on the Air”), short radio programs designed to prepare listeners for the upcoming Saturday afternoon broadcast. In gratitude for the Guild’s gift of a cyclorama, the company treated members to an evening of arias and skits.
³⁵

Between 1935 and 1940, activities increased further in number while remaining essentially constant in kind. Publications of the late 1930s included
Opera Cavalcade,
a brief history of the Met, and
The Metropolitan Opera Guide,
synopses intended for the radio audience. Student performances thrived for decades. They surrendered to censorship at least once when several schools objected to
Carmen
“on the basis of an immoral libretto”; the less raw, equally licentious
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
took its place. Student performances slackened in the 1980s, and ended altogether in 1996; school groups continue to attend open rehearsals. Boosted by a $3.00 “National” category, membership exceeded twelve thousand by 1940, the year the Guild was rewarded with a room of its own on the Grand Tier level. Membership reached twenty-four thousand in 1945 and upward of one hundred thousand in 2010.
³⁶

The face of the Guild, almost from the start, has been
Opera News
. Its progenitor, the “Bulletin,” was first distributed on December 7, 1936, as a modest broadsheet folded into four pages; it grew into a twelve-page magazine two months later. In 1940, the editors of what was by now
Opera News
settled on a template that would take it through the next quarter of a century: thirty-two pages published twenty-four times annually, with a focus, during the season, on the week’s broadcast. A representative example, the February 5, 1941, issue devoted to
Tristan und Isolde
depicts a smiling Kirsten Flagstad on the cover. In “Names, Dates and Places” we find a plug for Risë Stevens’s new movie,
The Chocolate Soldier,
and the note that the war in Europe has prevented Joel Berglund and Germaine Lubin from joining the company. One feature article, on the
Alceste
dress rehearsal, is the submission of the winner of a letter-writing contest. Another recounts the sometimes conflicting memories of the Misses Wetmore, boxholders since 1883. The new coloratura Josephine Tuminia traces her itinerary from St. Louis to 39th Street. The issue also carries book reviews, squibs on a chorister and on the state of American opera. “Arias on the Air” is a detailed schedule of radio programs, both live and transcribed. The Saturday broadcast is documented by photographs and descriptions of the artists in costume, the text of the “Liebestod” in German and English, a guide to related readings and recordings, a cast list replete with transliterations (“E-soul’-duh,” “Keer’-shten Flag’shtat,” actually the Germanized pronunciation of her name), and an essay by the recently deceased critic Lawrence Gilman on the beauties of the score. The Met schedule for that and the coming week reflects the prominence of Wagner, Flagstad, and Melchior. If, at the time,
Opera News
was a self-congratulatory house organ, it was also, and continues to be, the often literate and informative agent for the initiation and instruction of budding operaphiles.

The first of what would turn out to be just two popularly priced spring seasons had a promising start on May 11, 1936. The house was full. Admission to the family circle set its occupants back only $.25; the parterre and the boxes, pegged at $3.00, had drawn those eager to sit in desirable and, for once, affordable seats. Gilman noted the heterogeneous, “unmistakably democratic” audience: “a lady of African ancestry, wearing a sailor hat was seated a few rows in front of a white-haired grande dame in low neck and pearls. The
parquet was sprinkled with business suits”
(Herald Tribune)
. But for the moment, and for the sake of a smashing opening night, a basic Juilliard tenet was put aside. Castagna, a stunning Carmen, was the beneficiary of flattering comparisons with Rosa Ponselle, who had had her capricious way with the role during the regular season. Castagna was known to New York from popular-priced performances at the Hippodrome and at the yet more capacious Lewisohn Stadium; she had made her tremendously successful Met debut as Amneris just two months earlier. But Castagna was neither American nor a neophyte. In fact, only one of the principals, the Micaela, Natalie Bodanya, could be counted as a young American singer.

With few exceptions, the tyros thrust into leading roles in the big theater for the spring seasons were wanting in voice, in technique, in experience, and in presence. The bargain-basement budget that yielded most principals the munificent sum of $50 per week got the company what it paid for. When it came to the familiar operas, economies plagued the stage direction (nonexistent), the lighting (erratic), and, most conspicuously, the scenery, much of which had been retired early in Gatti’s regime. The “Triumphal Scene” of
Aïda
sported a backdrop “which was so peppered with rents and holes that it looked as if the royal palace had suffered a long siege before the entry of the victorious army of Radamès” (
Times,
May 28, 1936). Only the novelties enjoyed a measure of care.
The Bartered Bride,
in a colloquial translation, was a big hit;
Mârouf
and
Il Matrimonio segreto,
also in English, were not. A modernist
Orfeo ed Euridice,
mimed and danced by George Balanchine’s American Ballet, the resident troupe, relegated the singers to the pit, a conceit reviewers trounced mercilessly. The best that could be said for the single world premiere, Walter Damrosch’s
The Man without a Country,
was that it launched Helen Traubel, a dramatic soprano who would become an indispensable member of the company in the 1940s.

The flaws of the spring seasons emerged in an informal survey. Regular patrons, who declared themselves in favor of the program’s ideals, would not attend, absent “big stars” in “superb performances.” Precious few votes were cast for the novelties. To make matters worse, the recently installed system of air circulation failed to render the auditorium bearable in the often hot and humid days of May. Attendance was sparse. On July 7, 1937, Ziegler wrote to Johnson, “I have whipped Mr. Cravath up to a point of realization that unless the Juilliard assumes some of the loss, that they are not helping us but crucifying us.” The high-minded, ill-conceived, and poorly executed experiment was quietly terminated on January 5, 1938. The one requisite of the Juilliard
Foundation grants that might have expanded opportunities for operagoing and opera training in New York had been a dud.
³⁷

Pushback against opera in English translation kept this requirement out of the Juilliard decree. Otto Kahn, for one, had been a staunch defender of the nexus between the original language and the music. He had argued, half seriously, that the absurdities of many librettos were better left untranslated, and had boasted that the “best informed artistic leaders” of Europe envied the Met’s policy of linguistic authenticity, at least as it applied to works originally in Italian, German, and French. Not only did the United States lack a state-sanctioned official language, but it was a country of immigrants, and these very same immigrants were counted on to fill the top tiers of the opera house. They would cringe at hearing Aïda invoked as “Heavenly” rather than “Celeste” or Lohengrin’s “Lieber” swan addressed as “Beloved.” Russian and Czech operas had long been given in translation, but still not in English. Boris Godunov vented his sorrows in Italian, Jenufa transgressed in German, Zolotoy Pyetushok (The Golden Cockerel) crowed in French. The early 1930s board was divided on the question of English translation: Bliss was in favor and Cravath opposed. Skirting the question, Ziegler foresaw (mistakenly, as it happened) that, in any case, patriotic fervor would soon sound the call for English. He suggested that
Gianni Schicchi,
both short and comic, would be a good fit for an English version. Gatti could not be budged: Giuseppe De Luca was his choice for the title role, and De Luca would sing it only in Italian. Gatti would reconsider if “nationalistic demand” persisted. But with Gatti gone, so was the impediment, and Johnson was free to schedule
Gianni Schicchi
in English for Tibbett in 1935–36 and in 1937–38. Through the end of the decade, the Met mounted only four other translated productions, Gian Carlo Menotti’s
Amelia Goes to the Ball
(
Amelia al ballo
done in English even at its 1937 Philadelphia world premiere),
The Bartered Bride, Mârouf,
and
Il Matrimonio segreto
. Prospects for opera in English would improve in the coming decade.
³⁸

The Met’s fiscal crisis set off in October 1929 was resolved a decade later through the remarkable coalition formed to buy the house and its assets. The
system that favored the original seventy box holders had unraveled bit by bit. By 1932, with the reorganization that gave rise to the Association, its edges were badly worn; by 1935, it was clear that the Real Estate Company was coming apart. The founders had died, their estates were immune to assessments, and descendants could not be made to assume the obligations of deceased shareholders. The Real Estate Company was at risk of defaulting on its taxes and on the mortgage it had incurred for facility upgrades imposed by the building code. By spring 1939, the Real Estate Company board concluded that it was no longer in a position to lease the theater to the Association. The building would have to be sold. On March 29 of that year, Cornelius Bliss, who had taken Paul Cravath’s seat as head of the board in 1938, received a letter from the Real Estate Company advising that “the only recourse of the company is the sale of . . . shares, for which at present, there appears to be no market.” The whole of the truth was that many a new Nob was unwilling to swallow the presence of a nouveau Swell in the neighboring box. And besides, boxes had lost much of their mystique. On May 5, 1939, Bliss drafted a response. He could contemplate only one solution: the purchase of the house and its warehouse on West 40th Street either by the Association “or by a group it would enlist for the sake of the future of opera in New York.” He requested a one-year option. The amount proposed was $1.5 million, subject to $500,000 in cash and the assumption of a first mortgage of $470,000. The balance would be covered by a second mortgage. There was bound to be dissension among the stockholders. A vocal group, indifferent to the public purposes of the institution, pressed for the better return that could be had on the open market. The dissenters sued and lost. In November 1939, the Association approved the deal; two months later, 68 percent of the outstanding shares were voted yes, barely more than the two-thirds majority needed.