He (Antognini) was an artist of the first class, both by natural gifts and by culture. His voice, although not of notable compass, was an absolute tenor of a delicious quality and great power. His vocalization was unexceptionably pure, and his style was manly and noble. As a dramatic singer I never heard his equal except Ronconi; as an actor, I never saw his equal, except Ronconi, Rachel, and Salvini. He had in perfection that power which Hamlet speaks of in his soliloquy, after he dismisses the players, when the speech about Pyrrhus is ended:

Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd; Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit!

I have seen the blood fade not only from Antognini's cheeks, but from his very lips, as he strode slowly forward to interrupt the nuptials in "Lucia di Lammermoor," and then flame back again as he broke into defiance of his foes. The inflections of his voice in passages of tenderness were ravishing, and his utterance of anger and despair was terrible. Nor was any tenor that has been heard here, not even Mario in his prime, his superior in that great test of fine vocalization, a sustained cantabile passage. He was one of those blond Italians who are found on the northern border of the peninsula. Being all this he nevertheless soon disappeared, and was forgotten except by a few of the most exacting and cultivated among his hearers; the reason of which was that his voice could not be depended upon for two nights together—not, indeed, for one alone. On Monday he would thrill the house; on Wednesday he would go about the stage depressed, almost silent, huskily making mouths at his fellow actors and the audience. His voice would even desert him in the middle of an evening, thus producing an impression that he was trifling with his audience. No judgment could have been more unjust, for he was a conscientious artist, but the effect of this defect, as Polonius might say, was therefore no less disastrous, and he soon gave place to artists less admirable but more to be relied upon.

In this season there appeared a prima donna of the French school in the person of Laura Cinthe Montalant, known in the annals of opera as Cinti-Damoreau, who had come to America to sing in concerts with Artt, the violinist. In the eyes of Ftis she was one of the greatest singers the world had known. Damoreau was the name of her husband, an unsuccessful French actor. When she came to America she had made her career in Paris and London, a great triumph coming to her in the French capital, where Rossini composed the principal female rles in "Le Sige de Corinth" and "Mose," and Auber those in "Domino Noir," "L'Ambassadrice," and "Zanetta."

[Repertory of the first season at Palmo's Opera House: "I Puritani" (Bellini), "Belisario" (Donizetti), "Beatrice di Tenda" (Bellini), "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" (Rossini), "La Sonnambula" (Bellini), "L'Elisir d'Amore" (Donizetti), "L'Italiana in Algeri" (Rossini). Repertory of the second season, 1844-1845: "Lucia di Lammermoor" (Donizetti), "II Pirata" (Bellini), "Chiara de Rosemberg" (Luigi Ricci), "Lucrezia Borgia" (Donizetti), "Belisario" (Donizetti), "La Cenerentola" (Rossini), "Semiramide" (Rossini).]

It is not surprising that ill fortune became the companion of Palmo at the outset of his enterprise and dragged him down to the lowest depths before the end of his second season (according to the calendar).

The first season ran its course and a second one began in November, 1844. Amidst the usual vicissitudes it continued until January 25, 1845. On this momentous date Borghese was before the footlights and about to open her mouth in song when suddenly the orchestra ceased playing. Not a soft complaining note from the flute, not a whimper from the fiddles. Borghese raved and Palmo came upon the stage to learn the cause of the direful silence. A colloquy with the musicians, if not exactly in these words, was to this effect:

"What's the meaning of this? Is it a strike? Why?"

"No pay."

"I'll pay you to-morrow."

"To-night's the time"—the musicians packing up their instruments.

Palmo rushed to the box office to get the night's receipts. Alas! they were already in the hands of the deputy sheriff. Another opera manager had gone down into the vortex which had swallowed up Ebers, and Taylor, and Delafield, and others of their tribe in London, and Montressor and Rivafinoli in New York. Palmo, it is said, had literally to return to his pots and kettles; after serving as cook and barkeeper in the hotels of others the once enterprising manager of the Caf of a Thousand Columns became a dependent upon the charity of his friends. There was another season of opera at Palmo's, among the managers of which were Sanquirico, a buffo singer, Salvatore Patti, and an Italian named Pogliagno. In the company were Catarina Barili and her two children, Clotilde and Antonio. Patti was a tenor singer. He was the husband of the prima donna, Catarina Barili, who was looked upon as a fine representative of the old school of singing, and from the pair sprang Carlotta and Adelina, who gave a luster to the name of Patti which the father would never have given it by his exertions as singer and manager. Both were born before their parents came to New York; Carlotta in Florence, in 1840, and Adelina in Madrid, in 1843. The childhood and youth of both were spent in New York, and here both received their musical training. Their artistic history belongs to the world, and since I am, with difficulty, trying just now to talk more about opera houses and those who built them to their own ruin, than about those who sang in them, I will not pursue it. The summer of 1847 saw Palmo's little opera house deserted. In 1848 it became Burton's Theater, where, as Mr. White observes, that most humorous of comedians made for himself in a few years a handsome fortune.

Who shall deny that Signor Palmo, though his fortunes went down in disaster, made a valuable contribution to that movement—which must still be looked upon as in an experimental stage—which has for its aim the permanent establishment of opera in the United States? Experimental in its nature the movement must remain until the vernacular becomes the language of the performances and native talent provides both works and interpreters. The day is still far distant, but it will come. The opera of Germany was still Italian more than a century and a half after the invention of the art form, though in the meanwhile the country had produced a Bach and a Handel. The Palmo venture (at the bottom of which there seems to have been a desire to popularize or democratize a form of entertainment which has ever been the possession of wealth and fashion) revived the social sentiment upon which Da Ponte had built his hopes. In the opinion of the upper classes's it was not Italian opera that had succumbed, but only the building which housed it. This certainly presented an aspect of incongruity. Fine talent came from England for the English companies, whose career continued without interruption, and the moment which saw the downfall of Palmo's enterprise saw also the influx of a company of Italian artists under the management of Don Francesco Marty y Torrens, of Havana, who deserves to be kept in the minds of opera lovers which go back to the days of the Academy of Music, if for no other reason than that he brought Signor Arditi to New York—the hawk-billed conductor whose shining pate used to glisten like a stage lamp from the conductor's seat in the fine old house at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place.

And so, in order that Italian opera might not perish from the earth, but live on, surrounded by the architectural splendor appropriate to it, one hundred and fifty men of social prominence got together and guaranteed to support it for five years, and Messrs. Foster, Morgan, and Colles built the Astor Place Opera House. Instead of the eight hundred seatings of Palmo's institution, this held 1,800. The theater had "a fine open front and an excellent ventilation." That it was an elegant playhouse and admirably adapted to the purpose for which it had been designed there are many people still alive in New York to testify. Mr. White says enthusiastically that it was "one of the most attractive theaters ever erected." Even Max Maretzek, who began his American career there, first as conductor, afterward as impresario, while throwing ridicule upon its management (his own administration excepted, of course) and its artistic forces, praises the architectural arrangement of the house. "Most agreeably surprised was I," he writes in his "Crotchets and Quavers," published in 1855, "on entering this small but comfortably arranged bonbonnire. It contained somewhere about 1,100 excellent seats in parquet (the Parisian parterre), dress circle and first tier, with some seven hundred in the gallery. Its principal feature was that everybody could see, and, what is of infinitely greater consequence, could be seen. Never, perhaps, was any theater built that afforded a better opportunity for a display of dress. Believe me" (he is indulging in the literary fiction of a letter to a journalistic friend in Paris), "that were the Funambules built as ably for this grand desideratum, despite the locality and the grade of performance at this theater, my conviction is that it would be the principal and most fashionable one in Paris." Maretzek is, of course, here aiming chiefly to cast discredit upon one of the vanities and affectations of society—the love of display; but if Mr. White is to be believed, the patrons of the Astor Place Opera House, on its opening (which means the fashionable element of New York society) were temperate and tasteful in the matter of dress. Speaking of the first performance at the new house, he says: "Rarely has there been an assembly, at any time or in any country, so elegant, with such a generally suffused air of good breeding; and yet it could not be called splendid in any one of its circles. At the Astor Place Opera House that form of opera toilet for ladies which is now peculiar to New York and a few other American cities came into vogue—a demi-toilet of marked elegance and richness, and yet without that display either of apparel and trimmings or of the wearer's personal charms which is implied by full evening dress in fashionable parlance. This toilet is very pleasing in itself, and it is happily adapted to the social conditions of a country in which any public exhibition of superior wealth in places set apart for common enjoyment of refined pleasure is not in good taste." Mr. White wrote in 1881; would he have been able to be so complimentary to the opera audiences of 1908? What relation does the present extravagance of dress, the vulgar ostentation which Mr. White would have us believe was foreign to the taste of New York's cultured society in 1847, bear toward the support which opera has received since the Metropolitan Opera House was opened? The factors which are to determine the question seem to be marshaling themselves since Mr. Hammerstein opened the Manhattan Opera House, but they are not yet fairly opposed to each other. There are features in which the new opera house recalls memories of the old Academy which met its downfall when the amalgamation between the old Knickerbockers and the newer New Yorkers was effected; but there are also other features which make a repetition of that occurrence under present circumstances very improbable, and the chiefest of these is that inculcated by the failure of the Palmo enterprise; opera must have an elegant environment if it is to succeed. But it had this in the Astor Place Opera House; why, then, did it live its little span only?

The question is easily answered—the Astor Place Opera House was killed by competition; not the competition of English opera with Italian, which had been in existence for twenty-five years, but of Italian opera with Italian opera. The first lessees of the new institution were Messrs. Sanquirico and Patti, who had first tried their luck in Palmo's Opera House. They endured a season. [At the Astor Place Opera House in its first season Sanquirico and Patti produced Verdi's "Ernani," Bellini's "Beatrice di Tenda," Donizetti's "Lucrezia Borgia," Mencadante's "Il Giuramento," and Verdi's "Nabucco." Mr. Fry's season in 1848 when Mr. Maretzek was the conductor, brought forward Donizetti's "Linda di Chamouni," "Lucrezia Borgia," "L'Elisir d'Amore," "Roberto Devereux," and "Lucia di Lammermoor" and Verdi's "Ernani."] Then the first American manager appeared on the field—I mean the first American manager whose thoughts were directed to opera exclusively as distinguished from the managers of theaters who took hold of opera at intervals, as they did any other sort of entertainment which offered employment for their houses. The manager in question was Mr. E. R. Fry, who came from the counting house to a position of which he can have known nothing more than what he could acquire from attendance upon opera, of which he was fond, and association with his brother, W. H. Fry, who was a journalist by profession (long the musical critic of The Tribune) and an amateur composer of more than respectable attainments. Mr. Maretzek, in his "Crotchets and Quavers"—a book generally marked by characteristic good humor, but not free from malevolence—tries to make it appear that Mr. Edward Fry went into operatic management for the express purpose of performing his brother's operas; but while the animus of the statement is enough to cause it to be looked upon with suspicion, the fact that none of William Henry Fry's operas was performed at the Astor Place Opera House during the incumbency of Edward Fry is a complete refutation. "Leonora," the only grand opera by a professional critic ever performed in New York, so far as I know, was brought forward at the Academy of Music a good nine years later. Apropos of this admirable and respected predecessor of mine, a good story was disclosed by Charles A. Dana some fifteen or twenty years ago in his reminiscences of Horace Greeley. Mr. Dana published a large number of letters sent to him at various times while he was managing editor of The Tribune and Mr. Greeley editor-in-chief. It was in the days just before the War of the Rebellion. A political question of large importance had arisen in Congress, and Mr. Greeley was so concerned in it that he went to Washington to look after it in person and act as a special correspondent of his own newspaper. Thence one day he sent two letters to The Tribune on the subject, but in the issue of the day in which he expected them to appear in The Tribune he sought in vain for his communication. Thereupon he indited an epistle to Mr. Dana in these wingd words:

Friend Dana: What would it cost to burn the Opera House? If the price is reasonable have it done and send me the bill. . . . I wrote my two letters under the presumption (there being no paper on Wednesday) that the solid work of exposing their (Pierce and Gushing) perversion of history had of course been done by Hildreth. I should have dwelt with it even more gravely but for that. And now I see (the Saturday paper only got through last night) that you crowded out what little I did say to make room for Fry's eleven columns of arguments as to the feasibility of sustaining the opera in N. Y. if they would only play his compositions. I don't believe three hundred people who take the Tribune care one chew of Tobacco for the matter.

The "eleven columns" was an amiable exaggeration quite in consonance with the remainder of the letter; but I can testify from a consultation of the files of the newspaper which I have served as one of Mr. Fry's successors for more than a quarter of a century that on the date in question The Tribune's critic did occupy three and a half columns with a discussion of the Lagrange season just ended at the Academy of Music and a most strenuous plea for the permanent substitution of English for Italian opera! Also, that most of what Mr. Fry said would sound just as apposite to-day as it did then, and be backed by just as much reason. But a taste for the elegant exotic and reason do not seem to go hand in hand, and managers are still strangely averse to placing themselves for guidance into the hands of The Tribune's critics. How different might not musical history in New York have shaped itself had William Henry Fry, George William Curtis, John R. G. Hassard, and H. E. K. had their way during the last sixty years! The thought is quite overpowering.

The opposition which the Astor Place Opera House met was indeed formidable. It came from the company organized by Don Francesco Marty y Torrens for performances in Havana. This enterprising gentleman did not come to New York to make money, but mischief—as Messrs. Sanquirico, Patti, Fry, and Maretzek must have thought—and incidentally to keep his singers employed during the hot and unhealthy season in Havana. His aiders and abettors were James H. Hackett and William Niblo. The former, in his day an actor, was particularly famous for his impersonation of Falstaff. His interest in opera may have been excited more or less by the fact that his wife had been Catherine Leesugg, an English opera singer, who had sung the part of Rosina in an English version of Rossini's "Barber of Seville" as early as 1819. At Niblo's history I have already taken a glance. In the present chapter he is chiefly interesting, according to a story which has long had currency, as the manager who succeeded in putting an end to the Astor Place Opera House by a trick which took the bloom of caste off that aristocratic institution. I shall let Maretzek tell the story presently, pausing now to interject an anecdote which fell under my notice some years ago while I was turning over the records of the Grand Ducal Theater at Weimar. This always comes to my mind when the downfall of the Astor Place Opera House is mentioned, and also when, as has frequently been the case within the last sixteen years, I met a grandson of one of the principal actors in the incident in the streets of New York.

In April, 1817, there came to Weimar from Vienna a gifted dog, who assisted his master in the presentation of a play of the melodramatic order, entitled "The Dog of Aubri de Mont-Didier." The director of the Grand Ducal Theater at the time was one Wolfgang von Goethe. To him the dog's manager applied for the privilege of producing his edifying piece. Goethe refused permission, and there was danger that the patrons of the playhouse which had echoed to the first sounds of the plays of Schiller and Goethe were to be deprived of the inestimable privilege of seeing a dog dash out of the door of a tavern in which a murder had been committed, pull a bell rope to alarm the village, carry a lantern into the forest, discover the murderer just at the psychological moment, pursue him from rock to rock, capture him at the last, and thus bring about the triumph of justice. But the dog's manager was not thus to be put down. He went with a petition to Frulein Jagemann (whose portrait in the character of Sappho my readers may still find hanging on a wall of the library at Weimar), and solicited her intervention with the Grand Duke, whose reign Schiller and Goethe made glorious. Frulein Jagemann was a prima donna and the Grand Duke's mistress. ("The companion of my leisure moments," he called her with quite a pretty euphemism.) In the former capacity she had given Goethe, the director, a great deal of trouble, and in the latter her influence had caused him many an annoyance. It was the dog that broke the camel's back of his patience. Frulein Jagemann saw an opportunity to get in a blow against her artistic tyrant, and she wheedled Charles Augustus into commanding the production of "The Dog of Aubri de Mont-Didier." The play was given twice, on April 12 and 14, 1817, with uproarious success, of course, and on April 17th Goethe resigned the artistic direction of the Weimar Court Theater. As for Frulein Jagemann, she eventually got a title and estates as Frau von Heygendorf.

And now for the story of "The Dogs of Donetti: or, the Downfall of the Astor Place Opera House," by Max Maretzek; it must be prefaced by the statement that after Edward Fry had made a lamentable failure of his opera season at which he had the services of Maretzek as conductor, Maretzek became lessee of the house and thus remained for the years 1849 and 1850.

Bled to the last drop in my veins (I, of course, allude to my purse and my pocket), the doors of the Astor Place Opera House were closed upon the public. It was my determination to woo the fickle goddess Fortune elsewhere. Possibly her blinded eyes might not recognize her old adorer, and she might even yet bestow upon me a few of her faithless smiles.

Again, however, after my departure, was the opera house leased. But to whom do you imagine it was now abandoned by the exemplary wisdom of its proprietors?

To the identical William Niblo who had fostered and encouraged the opposition—the same William Niblo who had a theater (or let me give it his name, and call it—a garden) within the length of some three stone-throws from their own house. It must be granted they did not foresee that which was about to happen. But this will scarcely palliate the folly of taking the head of a rival establishment for their tenant.

This gentleman engaged the troupe of dogs and monkeys, then in this country, under the charge of a certain Signor Donetti.

Their dramatic performances were offered to the refined and intelligent proprietors and patrons of this classic and exclusive place of amusement. Naturally they protested. It was in vain. Then they sued out an injunction against this exhibition on the ground that in Niblo's lease of the premises only respectable performances were permitted to be given in the opera house. On the "hearing to show cause" for this injunction Mr. Niblo called up Donetti or some of his friends, who testified that his aforesaid dogs and monkeys had, in their younger days, appeared before princes and princesses and kings and queens. Moreover, witnesses were called who declared under oath that the previously mentioned dogs and monkeys behaved behind the scenes more quietly and respectably than many Italian singers. This fact I feel that I am not called on to dispute. . . . As might be supposed the injunction was dissolved.

As a matter of course, the house lost all its prestige in the eyes of the community. Shortly afterward its contents were sold, and the shell of the opera was turned into a library. Its deathblow had been given it as a place for theatrical amusement by the astute Mr. William Niblo.

Furthermore, Mr. Maretzek would have us believe that some year or two later, the Academy of Music having been projected meanwhile, he met Niblo and asked him what he thought of the prospects of the new enterprise.

"Why," answered the manager, in his nasal voice, "I suppose I shall have again to engage Donetti's dogs and monkeys."



CHAPTER V

MARETZEK, HIS RIVALS AND SINGERS

Of the operatic managers of fifty years ago Max Maretzek was the only one with whom I was personally acquainted, and it was not until near the close of his career that he swam into the circle of my activities or I into his. He died on September 17, 1897. His last years were spent in a home on Staten Island, and the public heard nothing about him after the memorable concert given for his benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House on February 12, 1889, the occasion being set down as the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of his career as a conductor in America. All the notable conductors then living in New York took part in the concert—Theodore Thomas, Anton Seidl, Frank van der Stucken, Walter Damrosch, and Adolf Neuendorff. Maretzek was seventy-six years of age at the time of his death, and he had grown old, if not gracefully, at least good-naturedly. He did not quarrel with his fate, but even when he spoke of its buffetings it was in a tone of pleasant banter and with a twinkle in his eyes. His manner of accepting what the world brought him was illustrated at a meeting which I had with him in the season of 1883-84—the first of the Metropolitan Opera House. It was on a Saturday afternoon that I found him standing in front of the new establishment after the first act of the opera was over. Not having seen him in the house, I asked him if he was attending the performance. He said he was, but that, the house being sold out, he had no seat. Thereupon I offered him mine, saying that it might be a pleasure to occupy it since several of his professional acquaintances were seated in the neighborhood who would be glad to greet him. "Annie Louise Cary is right back of me," I said, "and Clara Louise Kellogg near by." But he did not care to accept my offer, and I fancied I saw a rather more serious and contemplative look come over his grizzled face. Naturally, I asked him what he thought of the new house and the new enterprise, adding that I regretted that he was not the manager. He began with apparent solemnity:

"Well, when I heard the house was to be built, I did think—I did think that some of the stockholders would remember what I had done for opera. Some of the old-timers, who used to go to the Academy of Music and Astor Place Opera House when I was manager there, I thought, would recollect what companies I gave them—Parodi, and Steffanone, and Marini, and Lorini, and Bettini, and Bertucca"—(how often I had heard him chant the list, counting off the singers on his chubby fingers!)—"and Truffi, and Benedetti, and Salvi. I thought somebody might remember this and the old man, and come to me and say, 'Max, you did a good deal for us once, let us do something for you now.' I didn't expect them to come and offer me the house, but I thought they might say this and add, 'Come, we'll make you head usher,' or, 'You may have the bar.' But nobody came, and I'm out of it completely."

Maretzek's managerial career continued at least until 1874; after that he conducted operas for others and did something toward the last in the way of teaching. It was seldom that one could get into a conversation with him but he could grow reminiscent, and, reverting to the olden time, begin tolling off the members of the companies which he had led to artistic victories and who had helped plunge him into financial defeat—"Parodi, and Steffanone, and Marini, and Bettini, and Lorini, and Bertucca," and so on. Poor Bertucca! Few of those who in later years saw Mme. Maretzek, portly and sedate, enter the orchestra at the Academy of Music and Metropolitan Opera House, and tune her harp while the audience was gathering in the gilded horseshoes above, recalled that she had been the sprightly and bewitching Bertucca of thirty years before.

I cannot recall that Maretzek ever grew bitter in discoursing on what once was and what might have been. He could be satirical and cutting, but his words were generally accompanied with a smile. His dominant mood and something of his style of expression are illustrated in his book, "Crotchets and Quavers, or Revelations of an Opera Manager in America," which he published in 1855, most obviously with the help of some literary hack who, I imagine, got the thoughts from Maretzek, but supplied the literary dress for them. A good many old scores are paid off in the book, and a good many grudges fed fat; but there are not many instances of bad humor. There is a sugar coating even to his malice. Shortly before I left Cincinnati, the College of Music of that city, having suffered a serious loss of prestige because of the resignation of Theodore Thomas, made a pretentious announcement of an operatic department, a practical school for opera, which was to be conducted by Maretzek. I think it was in the fall of 1880. At any rate, it was on the very eve of my departure from Cincinnati for New York. Maretzek came to the city somewhat late in the evening, and though I called upon him at the Burnet House as soon as I heard of his coming, he was already in bed when my card reached him. Nevertheless, I was asked up to his room. A tea tray still stood upon the table by the side of the bed when I entered. He held out his hand cordially and apologized for receiving me in bed. I told him that my newspaper, The Gazette, wanted to know, for the information of its readers, what he purposed doing at the college. The squabble between Mr. Thomas and the college authorities had kept the town in a ferment for months, all of which Maretzek seemed to know. It was no concern of his, but he could not help having artistic sympathies or predispositions, and these were obviously on the side of the musician Thomas, who had split with the business management of the college because of charlatanry in its methods. There was a merry twinkle in Maretzek's eyes as in reply to my question he answered: "I don't know what I am going to do, or what I'm here for. They made me an offer, and I came. I'm told that I am to run an opera school." Again he held out his hand at parting, and his last words were:

"Don't give me away!"

Not many months had passed before he, too, had followed Theodore Thomas back to New York, I met him in the lobby of the Academy of Music between the acts of the opera. It was in the consulship of Mapleson. "Hello!" I greeted him. "Back to New York so soon? What's the matter in Cincinnati?"

The quizzical smile with which he had greeted me grew wider as he replied sententiously:

"I'm not a hog. I know when I've got enough!"

Maretzek was a Hebrew, born in Brnn, Moravia, and educated in Vienna, where first he studied medicine, but, according to his own story, becoming disgusted with the sights of the dissecting room, he changed his purposes and devoted himself to music. He wrote an opera entitled "Hamlet" when he was twenty-two years old, and a year later, in 1844, found himself in London, employed under Balfe at Her Majesty's Theater. Thence he was brought to New York to conduct the opera for Mr. E. P. Fry, as has already been mentioned, in 1848. After one season as conductor he started in on his career as manager, which lasted twenty-five years, the first five of which are amusingly described in his book "Crotchets and Quavers." More than twenty years later he attempted to continue the story in a musical journal, and gathering the disconnected chapters together, issued them in an unattractive form under the title "Flats and Sharps." The first book is, to some extent, a contribution to musical history, though its strong personal equation and its effort to be entertaining mar its value and influence. The impression to which I have given utterance, that he was helped in its preparations by some penny-a-liner, is based upon the difference between its pages and the personal letters which I received from Maretzek in his later years, especially a brief autobiographical sketch which he prepared for me. To judge by the evidence of book and sketch, the latter in his own handwriting and delivered in person, one was forced to the conclusion either that he knew more about the English language six years after his first coming to New York than he did twenty years later or that he had hired somebody fluent but malignant of pen to put his thoughts into shape. It had long been the fashion for theatrical managers and opera impresarios to give the history of their administrations to the world, and Maretzek was but following it, though why he should have done so before he had finally and definitely retired from the field it is not easy to see.

It was an unwise, even a dangerous, thing to do, for it involved the necessity of criticizing the acts of professional people and music patrons with whom a manager was more or less likely to come into contact if he expected to continue his enterprises. The style adopted in the book was the epistolary, the chapters being in the form of letters to European friends: Hector Berlioz (with whom Maretzek had been brought into connection in London), Fiorentino (an Italian, who had been musical critic of the Corsaire, of Paris), Luigi Lablache (the famous basso), Professor Joseph Fischof (of Vienna), Michael W. Balfe (of London, composer of "The Bohemian Girl" and other English operas), Frederick Gye (manager of the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, London), and Carl Eckert (conductor of the Court Opera, Vienna). A final chapter is addressed to the public and is devoted to a recital of the troubles through which the Academy of Music passed in the earliest stages of its career. Eckert had been in America as conductor of the company headed by Henrietta Sontag, and the chapter over which his name is written tells of the career of that artist in the United States and her death in Mexico. Incidentally, also, Maretzek pays off a score owing to Bernard Ullmann, a manager with whom Maretzek was much in conflict and against whom he tried to turn the public by calling the attention of Americans to the sneers in which the delectable gentleman had indulged at their expense while he was trying to win the good graces of the Havanese. Nevertheless, within four years he was Ullmann's partner, for together they opened the season of 1859 at the Academy of Music. The quarrels of opera managers are very like those of lawyers inside the courtroom.

But when Maretzek was holding up the heinousness of Ullmann in the chapter entitled "Los Americanos y su gusto por la Musica," Ullmann was only an agent for Maurice Strakosch, who had entered the managerial field. It was different with Don Francesco Marty y Torrens, the impresario who invaded Maretzek's territory from Havana; and he remained Maretzek's pet aversion to the end of the chapter. In his memoirs Arditi, who came to New York as conductor of one of Marty's companies, says that Don Francesco was among impresarios the most generous of men, Maretzek the cleverest (though he sets down Maurice Grau as the "cleverest of entrepreneurs"), and Colonel Mapleson the most astute. It is not unlikely that Arditi's amiable opinion of the Cuban was influenced not a little by the circumstance that Marty, not caring to make money in New York, treated his artists with unusual liberality. That, naturally, would not tend to increase the admiration of a rival manager for him. He may have been the most generous of men in the eyes of Arditi, but in those of Maretzek he was worse than Barbaja, the Neapolitan manager, who owned the gambling monopoly in the kingdom of Naples, and who, after animating his acquaintances with music and singing, and diverting their eyes with the silk fleshings and short muslin jupons of his dancers, fleeced them at his gambling houses and became richer than the King of Naples himself. Maretzek intimates that in his youth Don Francesco had been the mate of a pirate vessel which preyed on the commerce of the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent waters; that he betrayed his captain to death, and was rewarded with a monopoly of the fish trade in Cuba; that he became possessed mysteriously of enough money to fit out a feet of fishing boats to supply the market which he controlled; that from that source alone his annual income rose to about $160,000; that then he embarked in the slave trade, bringing negroes from Africa and Indians from Yucatan, which he bribed the Spanish officials to permit him to land; was knighted by the Spanish Crown out of gratitude for pecuniary help extended in a crisis; and built an opera house in Havana in order to acquire a social position among the proud people who, despite his badge of nobility, refused to "swallow the fish and digest the negro," as Maretzek puts it. This was the manager who, in the summer of 1850, brought to New York what Maretzek characterizes as "the greatest troupe which had been ever heard in America," and which, "in point of the integral talent, number, and excellence of the artists composing it," had "seldom been excelled in any part of the Old World."

"This party consisted of three prime donne. These were the Signore Steffanone, Bosio, and Tedesco. Its only contralto was the Signora Vietti. There were three tenors—Salvi, Bettini, and Lorini. Badiali and Corradi Setti were the two barytones, while the two bassi were Marini and Coletti. At the head of this extraordinary company was the great contrabassist Bottesini, assisted by Arditi. It would be useless, my old friend, to attempt to indicate to you the excellence of this company. You have long since known their names, or been aware of their standing as artists in the world of music. The greater portion of them enjoy a wide and well-deserved European reputation, and their reunion anywhere would form an almost incomparable operatic troupe."

Some of these names are those of singers whom, in his later days, I have said Maretzek was in the habit of chanting while telling them off on his fingers. His was not the credit of having brought them to the country, but he did, a year after they had made their first appearance in the Havana company, succeed in enticing them away from their generous manager and enlisting them under his banner at the Astor Place Opera House. All but Tedesco.

Of these singers Maretzek has more or less to say in his book, but the point of view is that of the manager perpetually harassed by the jealousies, importunities, and recalcitrancy of his singers. Steffanone was a conscientious artist, but had an infirmity of body and mind which was exceedingly troublesome to her manager; Bosio was talented and industrious, but had a husband whose devotion to her interests was an affliction to her manager; Tedesco was husbandless, but had a father who was so concerned about her honorarium that he came to the opera house on payday with a small pair of scales in his pocket, with which he verified every coin that came out of the exchequer of the unfortunate manager, "subjecting each separate piece of gold to a peculiarly Jewish examination touching their Christian perfection;" Salvi was a mountain of conceit, who believed himself to be the Louis Quatorze of the lyric drama, and compelled his manager to imagine him exclaiming "L'opra c'est moi!" Toward his manager Salvi was a despot, who rewarded favors bestowed upon himself by compelling the manager to engage persons who had served the tenor. Maretzek cites a ukase touching a singer named Sidonia:

Caro Max: Fa di tutto per iscriturare la Sidonia, altrimenti io non canto ne "Don Giovanni," ne "Norma," ne altri.

A 250 $ il mese, e che la scrittura porti 350 $. Amen, cosi sia. Il tuo, Salvi.

19. 4. 53.

(In English: "Dear Max: Do everything to engage the Sidonia, otherwise I shall not sing in 'Don Giovanni,' 'Norma' or other operas. At $250 per month, but let the writing bear $350. Amen, and so be it.")

"At $250 per month, but let the scrittura bear $350." I wonder how many of my readers think of this cheap device of singers and managers when they read about the honoraria received by opera singers to-day!

Bettini drank to excess and spent whole nights in the gambling room, rendering him unfit for duty ever and anon; Badiali was singularly conscientious as an artist, and became a favorite with the public, but not with his colleagues, because of his extraordinary meanness and avarice and a jealous disposition; Marini was the greatest living Italian basso, save Lablache, but his voice was occasionally unreliable, and he frequently ill-humored, capricious, splenetic, and peevish.

In private life Angiolina Bosio was Mme. Panayotis di Xindavelonis, the wife of a Greek gentleman, whom she had married in 1851. She was in her prime when she came to New York, though she had not reached the meridian of her reputation. Her features were irregular, and she was not comely. Richard Grant White claims credit for having given her the punning sobriquet "Beaux Yeux," by which she was widely known on account of her luminous and expressive eyes. "Her voice," says White:

was a pure, silvery soprano, remarkable alike for its penetrating quality and for its charm so fine and delicate that it seemed almost intellectual. But she was not a remarkably dramatic singer, even in light comedy parts, which best suited her; and her style was not at all declamatory. She sang; and in her vocalization she showed the results of intelligent study in the old Italian school. Her phrasing was incomparably fine, and the delicacy of her articulation has been surpassed by no modern prima donna, not even by Alboni. Thus much of her as a vocal artist; but her charm was greatly personal. Although her acting was always appropriate and in good taste, and at times—as, for example, in the saucy widow of "Don Pasquale"—very captivating, she never seemed to throw herself wholly into her part. She was always Angiolina Bosio, and appeared on the stage like a lady performing admirably in private theatricals. Her bearing was a delight to her audience, and seemed to be a performance, whereas it was only herself. She sang the music of all the great operatic composers to the admiration of the public and the critics of the most exacting disposition; but she was greatest in Rossini's operas, and in Bellini's and Donizetti's. Yet her exquisitely charming and finished performance of Zerlina should not be passed over unmentioned.

Tedesco, who came to New York with the first Havana company in April, 1847, presented herself to the always susceptible mind of Mr. White as a great, handsome, ox-eyed creature, the picture of lazy loveliness until she was excited by music; then she poured out floods, or rather gusts, of rich, clear sound. "She was not a great artist, but her voice was so copious and so musical that she could not be heard without pleasure, although it was not of the highest kind." Bettini left nothing here that remained in the memory of New Yorkers except the half of a name which he gave to his wife, the contralto Trebelli-Bettini, who was a member of Mr. Abbey's company on the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883. Salvi came over with the Havana company in the spring of 1848, and was one of the fish which Maretzek took from Marty's weirs. If we are to believe the testimony of contemporaneous critics he was the greatest tenor of his time, with the exception of Mario. That was the opinion of White, who wrote of him as follows in The Century Magazine for May, 1882:

Although Salvi was past his youth when he first sang in New York, his voice was yet in perfect preservation. It lacked nothing that is to be expected in a tenor voice of the first class; and it had that mingling of manliness and tenderness, of human sympathy and seraphic loftiness which, for lack of any other or better word, we call divine. As a vocalist he was not in the first rank, but he stood foremost in the second. His presence was manly and dignified, and he was a good actor. But it was as a vocalist, pure and simple, that he captivated and moved his audiences. He was heard in America at brief intervals during a few years, and his influence upon the taste of the general music-loving public was very considerable and wholly good. Singing at Niblo's or Castle Garden and other like places at which the price of admission was never more than $1, and was generally 50 cents, he gave to multitudes who would otherwise have had no such opportunity that education in art which is to be had only from the performances of a great artist. In purity of style he was unexceptionable. He lacked only a little higher finish, a little more brilliancy of voice and impressiveness of manner to take a position among tenors of the very first rank. Of these, however, there are never two in the world at the same time, scarcely two in the same generation; and so Salvi prepared the public for the coming Mario. His forte was the cantabile and his finest effects were those in mezza voce, expressive of intense suppressed feeling. More than once when he sang "Spirto gentil," as he rose to the crescendo of the second phrase, and then let his cry pass suddenly away in a dying fall, I have heard a whole house draw suspended breath, as if in pain, so nearly alike in their outward manifestation and fine, keen pleasure.

Such were some of the singers whose names are associated in the musical annals of New York with that of Max Maretzek.



CHAPTER VI

THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Fifty-one years ago the center of operatic activity had shifted to the Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, and there it remained until the Metropolitan Opera House was built. From the opening of the Academy in 1854 to the opening of the Metropolitan in 1883 the former had no rival as an establishment, though the rivalry between managers and singers was the liveliest that New York has ever seen during the first decade of the time. For twenty years Burton's Theater revived its early traditions, and housed an opera troupe at intervals, and Niblo's Theater and Castle Garden were open to every manager who wished to experiment with the costly enterprise. English companies came and went, and a new competitive element, which soon became more dangerous than that which several times crushed the Italian exotic, entered in the shape of German opera, which, though it first sought a modest home in the lesser theaters of the Bowery and lower Broadway, soon achieved recognition at the fashionable Academy. The eagerness of the rivalry in the Italian field alone is indicated by the fact that the Academy had five different managers in the first three seasons of its history, and that thereafter, until the coming of James H. Mapleson in 1878, it was almost a rule that there should be a change of management every season. Maretzek was alternately manager and competitor over and over again, and the bitterest rivals of one season would be found associated with each other the next. Already in the first season the stockholders had to step in and assume some of the risks of management to save the enterprise from shipwreck, and, despite the attractiveness of the house, the excellence of the performances, the presence of such phenomenal artists as Mme. Grisi and Signor Mario, and generous public patronage, the first season cost the different managers between $50,000 and $60,000—three times as much as Maretzek had lost in the previous six years, if that gentleman's word is to be taken. The figures look modest now, but twenty years later their duplication at the Metropolitan Opera House sufficed to effect a revolution in methods, and eventually tastes, which had a profound influence upon musical life in New York.

The Academy of Music had its birth in the expiring throes of the Astor Place Opera House. The spirit of which it was the material expression seems to have been admirable. To this the name of the establishment bears witness. It was not alone the official title of the French institution, popularly spoken of as the Grand Opra, which was in the minds of the promoters of the New York enterprise—the new opera house was to be a veritable academy of music, an educational institution. Not only was fashionable society to have a place in which to display and disport itself, but popular taste and popular knowledge were to be cultivated. To this end the auditorium was to be three times as commodious as that of the Astor Place Opera House, and the low prices which had been prevalent only at Niblo's, Burton's, and Castle Garden were to be the rule at the new establishment. In the charter granted by the State, dated April 10, 1852, the purposes of the Academy were set down as the cultivation of taste by entertainments accessible at moderate charges, by furnishing facilities for instruction and by rewards. These purposes were overlooked at the beginning, but before the first season had come to its end Ole Bull, for a few weeks a manager, proclaimed his intention to pursue them by promising to open a conservatory in the fall of 1855, and at once (January, 1855) offering a prize of $1,000 for the "best original grand opera by an American composer, and upon a strictly American subject." The competition ended with Ole Bull's announcement, for his active season endured only two weeks.

It is doubtful if the competition would have produced anything more than a curiosity had it been carried to a conclusion. On the spur of the moment I can think of only two American musicians whose capacity was adequate to such a task—Mr. W. H. Fry, who was then musical critic and an editorial writer for The Tribune, and Mr. George F. Bristow, both of whom had composed operas found worthy of performance. Mr. Fry's "Leonora" was performed at the Academy on March 29, 1858, with Mme. Lagrange in the principal rle, but the score was already a dozen years old, and it is not likely that the composer's state of health would have permitted him to undertake the writing of a new opera even if he had been so disposed. Mr. Bristow's "Rip Van Winkle," which had a production in New York in the year of Ole Bull's announcement, may, for all that I know to the contrary, have been written for the prize. The scheme of uniting a training school for singers with an opera house was not heard of again, so far as I can recall, until Mr. Conried became director of the Metropolitan Opera House. It has much to commend it, and might be made a power for artistic good with an operatic establishment on a really public-spirited, artistic, and unselfish basis; as it is, its influence is apt to be pernicious morally, as well as artistically. How seriously Mr. Fry took the proposed educational feature of the institution is indicated by an article on the new opera house, which he published in The Tribune, in the course of which he said:

The expense of maintaining an opera house so nurtured at home will be at most not more than one-fourth what it would be if the artists were brought from Europe. American vocalists would be content with some few thousand dollars a year, and, if they were sought for and educated, boarded and lodged gratuitously the meanwhile, their services could be procured for several years in payment of the expenses of apprenticeship. In that way alone can the exorbitant demands of foreign artists be diminished; and the folly and extravagance of paying them from one to ten thousand dollars a night, as has been done in this city, will be forever avoided. In connection with this it may be mentioned that there are some Americans now studying for the operatic stage in Italy, and one lady of Boston has appeared in Naples with success. It may yet come to pass that art, in all its ramifications, may be as much esteemed as politics, commerce or the military profession. The dignity of American artists lies in their hands.

Mr. Fry's hopes, so far as the Academy of Music is concerned, were never realized, and after half a century his words are echoing wherever writers indulge in discussion of ways and means for promoting American music. Yet, without schools connected with opera houses American singers have made their mark, not only at home, but in the lyric theaters of Italy, France, Germany, and England. Names like Clara Louise Kellogg, Annie Louise Cary, Minnie Hauk, Alwina Valleria, Emma Nevada, Lillian Nordica, Adelaide Phillips, Emma Albani, and Josephine Yorke are connected more or less intimately with the history of the Academy of Music, but they do not exhaust the list. To them must be added those of Charles Adams, Suzanne Adams, David Bispham, Robert Blass, William Candidus, Emma Eames, Signor Foli, Geraldine Farrar, Julia Gaylord, Helen Hastreiter, Eliza Hensler (the daughter of a Boston tailor who became the morganatic wife of Dom Fernando of Portugal), Louise Homer, Emma Juch, Pauline l'Allemande, Marie Litta, Isabella McCullough, Frederick C. Packard, Jules Perkins, Signor Perugini, Mathilde Phillips, Susan Strong, Minnie Tracey, Jennie Van Zandt, Emma Abbott, Bessie Abott, Julia Wheatley, Virginia Whiting (Signora Lorini), Edyth Walker, Marion Weed, Zlie de Lussan, Clarence Whitehill, Allen Hinckley, Joseph F. Sheehan, and half a dozen or more singers now attracting attention in London and Germany.

Max Maretzek was the first lessee of the Academy of Music, but the company that opened it on October 2, 1854, was that engaged by J. H. Hackett to support Grisi and Mario, which had appeared at Castle Garden two months before. Maretzek sublet to Hackett, who thought that the brilliancy of his stars, and the new house, justified him in advancing the price of seats to $2. He had a rude awakening, for the audience on the first night was neither large nor brilliant. It numbered not more than 1,500, and on the second night the prices came down to the popular scale, with $1.50 as the standard. By the middle of December, though the stockholders had been obliged to come to the rescue of Hackett, the collapse of the opening enterprise was announced, and Hackett took Grisi and Mario to Boston for a brief season, and then came back for three or four performances at the Metropolitan Theater.

The last performance took place on February 20, 1855. Though many excellent singers had been heard in New York between the coming of Malibran and that of Grisi and Mario, the three months of their sojourn in America have ever since remained memorable. For a generation afterward all tenors were measured by Mario's standard. Grisi created a less enduring impression, because the audiences that heard her were within the space of a few years permitted also to hear such singers as Jenny Lind, Henrietta Sontag, and Marietta Alboni, three names that are still resplendent in operatic annals. There does not seem to be any reason for questioning the belief that Mario was the greatest tenor singer that ever gladdened the ears of American music lovers. Richard Grant White, who was then writing the musical reviews for The Courier and Enquirer newspaper, had chosen Benedetti as his ideal of a dramatic singer, and he found Mario lacking in passion, while confessing that he had the sweetest tenor voice in all the world. He retired from the stage in 1867, but came to America in 1872, under Strakosch, and sang in concert with Carlotta Patti, Annie Louise Gary, Teresa Carreo, and Sauret. He had always been a somewhat unreliable singer, frequently disappointing his audiences by not singing at all, or singing listlessly until he reached the air in which he could produce a sensational effect, and when he returned to America he had only a superb presence and bearing, and a magnificent reputation with which to arouse interest. He was sixty-two years old, and had accepted an engagement for the reason that frequently brings worn-out artists to the scenes of their earlier triumphs; he needed money. Eight years later his financial condition so distressed his old friends and admirers in London that they got up a benefit concert for him. He was living in Rome when he died in 1883.

Such satisfaction as can come to one from seeing a renowned artist was mine in 1872; but I can scarcely say that I heard Mario. With Annie Louise Gary he sang first in a graceful little duet, "Per valli, per boschi," by Blangini ("Dear old Mario had to warm up in a duet before he would trust himself in solo," said the admired contralto, many years afterward), and later attempted Beethoven's "Adelaide." Romances were Mario's specialty, and Beethoven's divine song ought to have been an ideal selection for him, but it was quite beyond his powers and I do not now know whether to be glad or sorry that I heard him attempt it. It is always unfortunate when great singers who have gone into decay are tempted again to sing. To the generation who knew them in their prime they bring a double measure of disappointment—grief for the passing away of the art which once gave pleasure, and regret that the younger generation should carry down to posterity a false impression of the singer's voice and style. Who shall measure the heartburnings left by Madame Patti's last visit to America when she sold herself to a trumpery balladist, and, affecting the appearance and manner which had been hers a quarter of a century before, tried to make a new generation believe that it was listening to the vocalist whom veterans maintained was the last one entitled to be called "la Diva." How much lovelier and more fragrant the memory of Annie Louise Cary, whose American career began during the Strakosch rgime at the Academy of Music, and ended with her marriage to Charles Mon son Raymond, when she was still in the very plenitude of her powers. Many a time within the first few years after her retirement have I seen her surrounded by young women and old, as she was leaving the Academy of Music or the Metropolitan Opera House, and heard their pleading voices: "Oh, Miss Cary! aren't you ever going to sing for us again?" and "Please, Miss Cary, won't you let me kiss you?"

Ole Bull's management of the Academy of Music was but a fleeting incident, memorable only for the protestations with which it was begun and for its brevity. For the famous Norwegian violinist it was a Utopian dream with a speedy and rude awakening. After he had retired the Lagrange troupe came from downtown and completed the season with the help of the stockholders, and Maretzek, the erstwhile impresario and lessee, became the conductor. For four years, 1855, 1856, 1857, and 1858, the Academy saw Maretzek, Strakosch, and Ullmann alternately installed as impresarios, and then for a year there was no opera at the house, the three men at the head of as many different companies seeking their fortunes outside of the metropolis. With Ullmann Thalberg was associated for a space, the great pianist having come to America to make money under the management of Ullmann, and probably having been persuaded to risk some of his gains by his manager. It was but a brief interlude, however. Ullmann, whose activities in America extended over a quarter of century, lived to manage some of the artists who are still before the public. The beginning of his career, like that of Maretzek, fell in the period when Barnumism was at its zenith, and Ullmann was utterly unconscionable in the methods to which he resorted for the purpose of exploiting his artists. It was under his operatic consulship that the winsome Piccolomini came to New York—an artist of insignificant caliber, lovely to look upon and fascinating as an actress in soubrette parts. "A Columbine," said Chorley about her when she effected her dbut in London, "born to 'make eyes' over an apron with pockets, to trick the Pantaloon of the piece, to outrun the Harlequin, and to enjoy her own saucy confidence on the occasion of her success—with those before the footlights and the orchestra." But this was not all. "Never did any young lady, whose private claims to modest respect were so great as hers are known to be," said the same critic, "with such self-denial fling off their protection in her resolution to lay hold of the public at all risks. Her performances at times approached offense against maidenly reticence and delicacy. When she played Zerlina, in 'Don Giovanni,' such virtue as there was between the two seemed absolutely on the side of the libertine hero—so much invitation was thrown into the peasant girl's rusticity." Here was a capital subject for the methods dear to the heart of Ullmann. In London the Piccolomini had been proclaimed to be of a noble Roman family, the niece of a cardinal, who had quarreled with her relations because of her theatrical propensities. There may have been some truth in the statements, but Ullmann adorned her history still more, and proclaimed from every New York housetop that the lady was a lineal descendant of Charlemagne, and the great-grand-daughter of Schiller's tragic hero Max Piccolomini.

It was under the co-consulship of Maretzek and Ullmann that Adelina Patti made her operatic dbut at the Academy of Music. The date was November 24, 1859, the opera "Lucia di Lammermoor." Twenty-five years later Patti was again the prima donna of the Academy, though Mapleson was now the manager. It was the second year of the rivalry between the Academy and the Metropolitan Opera House, and Colonel Mapleson conceived the idea of profiting by the anniversary. At first it was planned that "Lucia" should be given, with Brignoli as Edgardo, the part he had sung in the opera at Patti's dbut, but two months before the time the tenor died. Instead, "Martha" was performed, in a manner wholly commonplace in all respects except as to the titular rle, in which Mme. Patti appeared, as a matter of course. There was only a little perfunctory applause, but Colonel Mapleson had resolved that the scene should be enacted, of which we have often read, in which the devotees of the prima donna unhitch the horses from her carriage, and themselves drag it, with wild rejoicings, through the streets. To make sure of such a spontaneous ovation in staid New York was a question which Mapleson solved by hiring fifty or more Italians (choristers, probably) from the familiar haunts in Third Avenue, and providing them with torches, to follow the carriage, which was prosaically dragged along to its destination at the Windsor Hotel. As a demonstration it was the most pitiful affair that I have ever witnessed. In fact, it seemed to me such a humiliation of the great artist that on the next opera night I suggested to my colleague of The Times newspaper that something adequate and appropriate to so interesting an anniversary be arranged. He agreed and within a fortnight or so a banquet was given in Mme. Patti's honor at the Hotel Brunswick, under the auspices of a committee consisting of a number of well-known gentlemen, including Judge Daly, William Steinway, and Nahum Stetson. The committee of arrangements, having visited Mme. Patti and gained her consent, went to work right merrily, but before the invitations were issued an obstacle was met which threatened shipwreck to the amiable enterprise; the wives of several gentlemen who had been invited privately refused pointblank to break bread with the prima donna on account of the scandal caused by her separation from the Marquis de Caux and marriage to Nicolini, the tenor. Somewhat perplexed, the two critics visited her a second time, and put the matter to her as delicately as possible. Would she, under the circumstances, be the guest of a number of gentlemen, representative of the legal, artistic, and literary professions? Again she accepted, and without a moment's hesitation. So, instead of the gathering that had been planned, there was a stag party of about seventy gentlemen in the ballroom of the Brunswick, handsomely decorated and discreetly lighted with wax candles.

The preliminary reception was held in one of the rooms adjoining the banquet hall, and there a scene was enacted which brought into relief a trait of character which was extremely useful to the Colonel in the difficult task of managing his wilful and capricious prima donna. Mme. Patti received her hosts seated upon a divan. She looked radiant, and was wholly at ease after having taken a peep into the hall to see that the light would not be prejudicial to her complexion. One after another of the seventy gentlemen advanced to her, took the hand which she extended with a gracious smile, muttered the pretty compliment which he had rehearsed, and fell back to make room for the next comer. The room was pretty nearly full, when the Colonel appeared in the glory of that flawless, speckless dress suit, with the inevitable rose in the lapel of his coat. Not a glance did he give to right or left, but with the grace of a practised courtier, he sailed across the room, sank on his knees before the diva, and raised her hand to his lips. Such a smile as rewarded him! A score of breasts bulged out with envy and a score of brains framed the thought: "Confound it! Why didn't I think of doing that?"

The dinner passed off without a hitch, Mme. Patti managing by a hundred pretty coquetries to convince nearly every one of her three-score and ten hosts that he had received at least one smile that was more gracious than that bestowed upon his fellows. Speeches were made by Judge Daly, William Steinway, Dr. Leopold Damrosch, William Winter and others, but, as Colonel Mapleson had carried off the palm by his courtliness at the reception, Max Maretzek made himself the most envied of men at the dinner. Quite informally he was asked to say something after the set programme had been disposed of. Where the other speakers had brought forward their elegantly turned oratorical tributes the grizzled old manager told stories about the child life and early career of the guest. Amongst other things he illustrated how early the divine Adelina had fallen into the ways of a prima donna by refusing to sing at a concert in Tripler Hall unless he, who was managing the concert, would first go out and buy her a pound of candy. He agreed to get the sweetmeats provided she would give him a kiss in return. In possession of her box she kept both of the provisions of her contract. When the toastmaster declared the meeting adjourned Patti bore straight down on her old manager and said:

"Max, if I gave you a kiss for a box of candy then, I'll give you one for nothing now!"

And she did.



CHAPTER VII

MAPLESON AND OTHER IMPRESARIOS

Memories are crowding upon me, and I find there is much still to be said about the Academy of Music, and the operatic folk whom it housed between 1854 and 1886. Just now the incidents which have been narrated about the banquet given in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Adelina Patti's dbut recall other characteristic anecdotes of Colonel Mapleson, who managed the Academy of Music from 1878 to the end of the disastrous season of 1885-'86. When Mapleson and Abbey were drawing up their forces for the battle royal between the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883, one of the New York newspapers reported Mme. Patti as saying: "Colonel Mapleson comes here when he wants me to sing, and he calls me 'My dear child,' and he goes down on both knees and kisses my hands, and he has, you know, quite a supplicating face, and it is not easy to be firm with a man of such suavity of manners." I have often thought of this in connection with the outcome of the disastrous rivalry between the two houses and their managers. When Colonel Mapleson let himself down so gracefully upon his knee and pressed the prima donna's hand to his lips, the act was not all unselfish adoration. It used to be said that there was no manager alive who had succeeded in becoming debtor to Adelina Patti. It was golden grain alone that persuaded this bird to sing. The story is old of how her personal agent once hovered between her dressing room and the manager's office, carrying the message one way: "Madame Patti will not put on her slippers until she is paid," returning the other way with a thousand dollars; coming again to the manager with: "Madame has one slipper on, but will not put on the other till she has her fee"—and so on. Doubtless apocryphal and yet only a bit fanciful and exaggerated. Yet it was known in the inner operatic circles in 1885 that Colonel Mapleson had succeeded in getting himself pretty deeply into her debt. How he did it the anecdotes of the reception and Mme. Patti's interview serve to indicate. In sooth, the persuasive powers of the doughty colonel were distinctly remarkable, and it was not only the prima donna who lived in an atmosphere of adulation who fell a victim to them. I have a story to illustrate which came to me straight from the lips of the confiding creditor. He was a theatrical costumer, moreover, and one of the tribe of whom it is said that only to a Connecticut Yankee will they lower the flag in a horse trade.

My friend was a theatrical costumer with a shop conveniently situated in Union Square. When the clouds began to lower upon the Academy around the corner he became curious to know whether or not he was likely to get a balance of some $1,500 owing him for costumes furnished to the establishment. He sent his bill many times, and, being on amicable terms with Colonel Mapleson, called on him at intervals to talk over the situation. When he left the impresario's office he always carried away profuse promises of speedy payment, but nothing more. Finally, he put the bill into the hands of his lawyer, who at once took steps to attach the property of the foreign debtor, and, to bring about pressure in a manner that seemed likely to be effective, he instructed the deputy sheriff, who was to serve the legal papers, to present himself at the office of Colonel Mapleson an hour or so before the beginning of the opera. The arrangements perfected, he informed his client of what had been done. But there remained a kindly spot in the costumer's soul, and of his own volition he called on the manager in the afternoon of the day set apart for the coup in order to give him one more opportunity to save himself from the impending catastrophe.

"I found the Colonel in his office," said he, in relating the incident, "cutting the corners off of tickets and sending them out to fill his house for the next performance. While he clipped he talked away at me in his cheerfullest and blandest style, told me how sorry he was that he could not pay me out of hand, and deplored the action which I had taken, but with such absence of all resentment that I began to feel ashamed of myself for having threatened to shut him up. After half an hour I agreed to send a messenger post-haste to my lawyer and call off the sheriff. This done he borrowed $75 cash from me, and I went away happy. I tell you I know lots of managers, but there's only one Colonel Mapleson in this world."

Whether or not my friend ever collected his bill I do not know; but this I do know, that when the colonel ended the campaign of 1884-'85 Mme. Patti's name was on his list of creditors for a considerable sum—$5,000 or $6,000, I believe. The next time I met him he was sauntering about in what passes for a foyer in Covent Garden Theater, London. The rose in his buttonhole was not more radiant than he.

"What are you up to now, Colonel?" I asked him.

"In what respect?"

"In a business way, of course."

"Well," with a twinkling smile, "just now I am persuading Adelina to sing at my benefit."

"Will she do it?"

"I think she will" And she did.

Mapleson was one of the last of the race of managers who had practical training in the art in which he dealt commercially. He was a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in the violin class, and had played in the orchestra at the opera. He had also studied singing, and in his youth tried his luck as an operatic tenor. In this he was like Maurice Strakosch, who played the pianoforte prodigiously as a child, studied singing three years with no less an artist than the great Pasta, and after singing for a space at Agram turned his attention again to the pianoforte. He came to New York in 1848, and his first engagement was with Maretzek, at the Astor Place Opera House. Afterward he was a member of a traveling concert company, in which he was associated with Amalia Patti, whom he married, and it was thus that he became the teacher, and, eventually, the manager of his sister-in-law, Adelina Patti. When Ronconi first appeared in America at Burton's Theater (which had been Palmo's Opera House), in the spring of 1858, Strakosch was the conductor. The last of the old opera managers whom I recall at this moment who were practical musicians as well, was Dr. Leopold Damrosch, who directed the destinies of the Metropolitan Opera House after one year of warfare with the Academy of Music had put Henry E. Abbey hors du combat for a while. Abbey came out of the ranks of theatrical managers, like Heinrich Conried, his only practical experience in music being as a cornet player in a brass band in Akron, Ohio, whence he came.

Strakosch's associates, however, were not musical practitioners. Ullmann may have had some knowledge of music, but he was all showman. Thalberg, the pianist, was Ullmann's partner when Strakosch and Ullmann joined their forces in January, 1857, to manage the Academy of Music, but the new coalition was the sign of Thalberg's withdrawal from the managerial field.

Like Maretzek, in his Cincinnati experience, the virtuoso knew when he had enough. Strakosch's later associates were his brothers, Ferdinand and Max. The former was the European agent for the firm, and the latter what might be termed the acting house man in the United States, especially during the later years of the Strakosch rgime.

In Europe Maurice Strakosch was also associated with Pollini, who afterward became a large factor in the field of German opera, as manager of the opera in Hamburg. Pollini had been Strakosch's office boy. His real name was Pohl, and he hailed from Cologne; but he, too, was a musician. Strakosch died in Paris in October, 1887. One night in July, 1886, I met him in the theater at Altona, whither I had gone to hear a performance of "Der Trompeter von Skkingen," then the rage throughout Germany. He asked me to drive back to his hotel in Hamburg with him, for his physician had told him that day that he might drink a glass of beer, the first in six months, and he wanted a friend to share the pleasure with him. I brought him the latest news from the opera houses of New York, and, also, the intelligence that Pollini had just engaged Mme. Sembrich for a season at some 5,000 francs a night.

"We quit partnership," said he, "back in the 70's because Pollini thought that money was no longer to be made in Italian opera, and wanted to take up German opera exclusively. I didn't agree with him, and went on with Nilsson and the rest. He got rich and I got poor, and now he's going back into the Italian field. He'll rue it."

Call the roll of some of the best of the singers whose American careers are chiefly bound up with the history of the Academy of Music: Grisi, Mario, Vestvali (a much admired contralto), Badiali, Amodio (barytone), Steffanone, Brignoli, Lagrange, Mirate, D'Angri, Piccolomini, Adelina Patti, Kellogg, Nilsson, Campanini, Lucca, Cary, Parepa, Albani, Hauk, Gerster, Nevada. There are others whom fond recollection will call back, some belonging indubitably to the first rank, like Maurel, some who will live on because they gladdened the hearts of the young people of a generation ago, who were more impressionable than critical. Some men of middle age (as they think) now will not want to forget Mlle. Ambre or Mlle. Marimon, and will continue to forgive the homely features of Mme. Scalchi for the sake of her perfect physical poise and movement as the page in "Les Huguenots," as others forgave the many registers of her voice because of her joyous volubility of utterance. Doubtless, too, there are matrons of to-day who will remember the singing of Ravelli with as much pleasure as I recall it, and the shapely legs of the young tenor that walked off with the heart (we also had a story of a diamond ring) of a young singer from California, who afterward made a name for herself in Paris, with more enthusiasm than I could possibly feel.

Some of these singers became intimately associated with New York life in a social way. Annie Louise Cary, after her marriage to Charles Monson Raymond, lived for years in a cheery apartment at No. 20 Fifth Avenue, sang occasionally with the choir in the West Presbyterian Church, in Forty-second Street, and shed sunshine over a circle of friends who loved her as enthusiastically as a woman as they had admired her as an artist. Now her home is in Norwalk, Conn. Her first operatic engagement was at Copenhagen, and she spent two seasons in the opera houses of the Scandinavian peninsula, and one at Brussels before the Strakosch brothers brought her to the United States, in 1870. The first season she sang in concert with Nilsson, the second (1871-72) in opera, the third with Carlotta Patti and Mario in concert; and thereafter till her retirement in 1882 in both concert and opera, winning and holding an almost unparalleled popularity. In the Strakosch company of 1873-74 she was one of a galaxy of artists that the opera-goers of that period, who are still living, will never cease to think of without a swelling of the heart—Nilsson, Cary, Campanini, Capoul, Maurel, Del Puente, and others.

Campanini remained the tenor of tenors for New Yorkers for a decade longer. Abbey took him away from Mapleson for the first season of the Metropolitan Opera House, and, after the introduction of German opera there, his local career was practically at an end. He died in 1896 in Italy, whither he had returned on retirement. His dramatic style improved as his voice decayed. When he first came he was chiefly a lyrical singer; his Elvino was delicious beyond description. In his last years he had taken on robust stature, and his passionate utterances in "Carmen" and "Ada" will live till the end in the memory of those who heard them. He was proud of his skill as a singer pure and simple, though he was more or less of a "naturalist," as the Germans call a singer who owes more to nature than to artistic training. How greatly he admired the perfection of his "attack" is illustrated in an incident which twice grieved the soul of Theodore Thomas and some other sticklers for the verities in classical music.

At the Cincinnati Music Festival, in May, 1880, Mr. Thomas brought forward Beethoven's Mass in D, the great "Missa Solemnis." In the first movement, "Kyrie," of this work Beethoven has created an effect of surpassing beauty in the successive introduction of the solo voices. At the outset there is a crashing chord from all the forces, including the full organ. The thundering sound ceases abruptly, leaving the solo tenor voice sustaining a tone seemingly in midair. Another loud crash projects the solo contralto voice, and so on. The effect is transporting; but the obvious intention of the composer and the loveliness of his device weighed nothing in Campanini's mind against the fact that it interfered with popular appreciation of the "attack," of which he was proud. So he calmly waited until the colossal D major chord was silenced, then intoned his D softly, and made a beautiful crescendo upon it. After a rehearsal I ventured to call his attention to the beautiful effectiveness of Beethoven's device, but he answered: "It is music for the head, not for the heart. If I sing it so the audience will not hear my beautiful attack."

And at the concert he perverted the text to gratify his vanity. I reminded Mr. Thomas of the incident two years later, when he gave the mass at the festival held in the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York. Campanini was to sing in it again. Mr. Thomas said he would set him right, but at the performance we were again cheated of Beethoven's effect in order that the tenor might make his. When Campanini died Philip Hale set down his estimate of him in these words:

No tenor who has blazed here above the opera horizon has fully equaled in brilliancy Campanini at his zenith. De Reszke, in point of personal refinement, is a greater artist, but his voice is inferior, and his dramatic action lacks the elementary force shown by Campanini when aroused. De Lucia is a greater actor of melodramatic parts, but his voice is too shrill. Tamagno in "Otello" is beyond comparison, but that is his one opera. . . . Of all tenors who have visited us since 1873 the greatest, viewed from all points, was Campanini.

The popular idol before Campanini was Brignoli, who held his own from the first days of the Academy until within less than a decade of its collapse. For some years before the Mapleson era, however, he had dropped out of the Italian operatic ranks and sung in English companies, and in concerts. It was in such organizations that I first heard him some twelve or fifteen years after he had become the popular "silver-voiced tenor" of New York. He came to New York in 1855, and his career was American, though it was in Paris that Strakosch heard him and turned his face toward America. He lived in New York, singing and occasionally managing companies in which he sang, till October, 1884, when he died. He was twice married, the first time to Kate Duckworth, an English contralto, known on the platform as Mlle. Morensi, and, after her death, to Isabella McCullough, an American soprano. Richard Grant White's mind was still obsessed by memories of Salvi, Benedetti, and Mario when Brignoli was basking in the sunshine of popular favor, and his estimate of the tenor in The Century Magazine for June, 1882, is scarcely flattering either to the singer or the public that liked him. It was Mr. White's observation that Brignoli came into the swim at the time that the young woman of New York became the arbiter of art and elegance. Says Mr. White:

Her admiration of Brignoli was not greatly to the credit of her taste. He had one of those tenor voices that seem like the bleating of a sheep made musical. His method was perfectly good; but be sang in a very commonplace style, and was as awkward as the man that a child makes by sticking two skewers into a long potato; and he walked the stage, hitching forward first one side and then the other, much as the child would make his creature walk. But he was a very "nice" young man, was always ready to sing, and faute de mieux it became the fashion with the very young to like him. But there never was a tenor of any note in New York whose singing was so utterly without character or significance and who was so deficient in histrionic ability. His high and long continued favor is one of those puzzling popular freaks not uncommon in dramatic annals.

Let us hope, in a spirit of Christian charity and something more selfish, that Brignoli never read these severely critical words. His vanity was that of a child, and they would have grieved him inordinately. There was truly something of the bleat in his voice, and his walk on the stage, whether in concert or opera, was provocative of the risibles, but even his mannerisms were fascinating. Shall we, because a critic did not like him, be ashamed for having thrilled a little when we heard his "Coot boy, sweetheart, c-o-o-o-t boy!" thirty years ago? I trust not. And if he were here again, and his manager were to come with the old request, "Do me a favor, won't you, and if you chance to meet dear old Brig say something pretty to him and help me keep him in a good humor against the concert to-night—admire his teeth and compliment him on his youthful appearance"—we should do it for old sake's sake, and with a heart full of gratitude. No one could know Brignoli and remain in ignorance of his frailties and foibles. He probably ate as no tenor ate before or since—ravenously as a Prussian dragoon after a fast. No contracts did he sign on a Friday or on a thirteenth day, and he lived in perpetual dread of the evil eye. Part of his traveling outfit was a pair of horns, which he relied upon to shield him in case the possessor of the jettatura should get into his room and he not have his fingers properly posed. I had been four years in the turmoil of New York's musical life when Brignoli died; I cannot recall an unkind word that was ever spoken of him.



CHAPTER VIII

THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE

Not the chronicler of musical doings but the historian of society should discuss the genesis of the Metropolitan Opera House, which came twenty-five years ago to displace the Academy of Music as the home of grand opera in New York. In the second of these "Chapters of Opera" I cited the Metropolitan Opera House as the last illustration of the creative impulse which springs from the growth of wealth and social ambition, and stated that it marked the decay of the old Knickerbocker rgime, and its amalgamation with the newer order of society. Before this latter occurrence, however, it had become plain that the Academy of Music could not accommodate all the representatives of the two elements in fashionable society, who, for one reason or another, wished to own or occupy the boxes which were the visible sign of wealth and social position. There was no manifest dissatisfaction, either, with the Academy of Music or with the performances under the direction of Colonel Mapleson, though these were conventional enough and the dress of the operas looked particularly shabby in contrast with the new scenery and costumes at the new theater when once the rivalry had begun. The house being satisfactory, popular taste contented with the representations, and there being no evidences of insufficient room in any part of the audience room except the private boxes, it seems obvious to the merest observer from without that social and not artistic impulses led to the enterprise which produced the new establishment.

The Metropolitan Opera House was built in the summer of 1883. The corporation which built it was called the Metropolitan Opera House Company (Limited), and its leading spirits were James A. Roosevelt, the first president of the board of directors; George Henry Warren, Luther Kountze, George Griswold Haven, who remained the active head of the amusement committee from the beginning till he died last spring; William K. Vanderbilt, William H. Tillinghast, Adrian Iselin, Robert Goelet, Joseph W. Drexel, Edward Cooper, Henry G. Marquand, George N. Curtis, and Levi P. Morton. The building is bounded by Broadway, Seventh Avenue, Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. About one-quarter of the space is devoted to the audience room, another quarter to the stage and accessories, and the rest to administrative offices, apartments, etc. Its cost, including the real estate, was $1,732,978.71, and so actively was the work of construction pushed that the portion of the building devoted to the opera was completed when the first performance took place on October 22, 1883. J. Cleaveland Cady, the architect, had had no previous experience in building theaters, to which fact must be ascribed a few impracticable features of the house, most of which have since been eradicated, but he had made a careful study of the plans of the most celebrated opera houses of Europe, and the patrons of the house still have cause to be grateful to him for the care with which he looked after their safety and comfort. Since then the appearance of the interior has been changed very considerably. The two tiers of boxes were where they are now, but their fronts were perpendicular, and there was no bulging curve at the proscenium. Besides the two tiers of boxes, as they exist at present, there were twelve baignoirs, six on a side at the stage ends of the parquet circle, so-called. These were found to be unprofitable, and were abolished when the house was remodeled about ten years after the opening. The decoration of the interior was intrusted to E. P. Tredwill, an architect of Boston, who followed Mr. Cady's wishes in avoiding all garish display and tawdry effect. The deepest color in the audience room was the dark, rich red of the carpet on the floor. The silk linings of the boxes and the curtains between them and the small salons in the rear were of fabrics specially made for the purpose. They had an old gold ground and large, raised figures of conventional design in a darker shade, with dark red threads. The tier fronts, ceiling, and proscenium were of a light color, the aim having been to obtain a prevailing tint of ivory. Amid the filigree designs of the pilasters, which carried the work above the curtain opening, were pictures of singing and playing cherubs, and back of the bold consoles, which projected from the side walls, were figures called "The Chorus" and "The Ballet," painted by Francis Maynard, while above the middle of the opening, in a segmentary arch, was an allegory, with Apollo as the central figure, by Francis Lathrop. Statues of the Muses filled niches on both sides of the consoles. Over the ceiling, amidst the entwinings of ornamental figures, on a buff ground, were spread a large number of medallions of oxidized metal, which, in the illumination from the lights, shone with a copper luster. The house was lighted by gas, though preparations had been made for the installation of electrical appliances when that form of illumination should be found justified by economy. As originally built, the orchestra was sunk sufficiently below the level of the floor to conceal the performers from all but the occupants of the upper tiers. In the hope of attaining improved acoustic effects the floor of the orchestra was laid upon an egg-shaped sound-chamber of masonry. The innovation did not meet with the approval of Signor Vianesi, the first musical director at the opera house, and, after an experimental rehearsal, the floor was raised so that the old conditions obtained when the performances began. So the orchestra remained, the players spoiling the picture on the stage, until "Lohengrin" came to a performance. Then Signor Vianesi was prevailed upon to try the arrangement from which Mr. Cady had expected fine artistic results. The effect was good, and the device was adhered to for a space, and in more or less modified form ever since, though there has been continual experimentation with the disposition of the instrumentalists.

Operatic performances began at the new house on October 22, 1883, and after sixty-one representations, at which nineteen operas were produced, the first season came to an end. I shall tell the story of the season in greater detail in the next chapter, contenting myself for the present with an account of the results of the merry war which ensued between the rival establishments. Colonel Mapleson was intrenched in the Academy of Music, which opened its doors for its regular season on the same evening. The advantage lay with Mr. Henry E. Abbey, who had a new house, the fruit of an old longing, and the realization of long cherished social aspirations. With the Academy of Music there rested the charm of ancient tradition, more potent then than it has ever been since, and the strength of conservatism. There were stars of rare refulgence in both constellations, which met the Biblical description in differing one from another in their glory. With Colonel Mapleson was Mme. Adelina Patti, who, in so far as she was an exponent of the art of beautiful vocalization, was without a peer the whole world over. She served then to keep alive the old traditions of Italian song as Mme. Sembrich does now. At her side stood Mme. Etelka Gerster, with a voice youthful, fresh, limpid, and wondrously flexible, and a style that was ripening in a manner that promised soon to compass all the requirements of the Italian stage from the sentimental characters in which she won her first successes to the deeper tragic parts which had begun to make appeal to her ambition. With Mr. Abbey was Mme. Christine Nilsson. Mme. Patti, though she had grown to womanhood and effected her entrance on the operatic as well as concert stage in New York, was not so familiar a figure as Mme. Nilsson. Patti had begun her operatic career at the Academy of Music in 1859, and had gone to Europe, where she remained without revisiting her old home until the fall or winter of 1881, when she came on a concert trip. The trip was more or less a failure, the public not yet being prepared to pay ten dollars for a reserved seat to hear anybody sing. After singing at a concert for the benefit of the sufferers from forest fires in Michigan, she announced a reduction of prices to two dollars for general admission, and five dollars for reserved seats. Under these conditions business improved somewhat, but in February, 1882, she found it necessary to organize an opera company in order to awaken interest fairly commensurate with her great merit and fame. It was a sorry company, and the performances, only a few, took place in the Germania Theater, on Broadway, at Thirteenth Street, formerly Wallack's; but they were received with much enthusiasm. So far as London was concerned, she was under engagement at the time to Mr. Gye, Colonel Mapleson's rival at Covent Garden. Mr. Abbey claimed that he had an option on any American engagement for opera, but she appeared next season at the Academy, and the doughty English manager held her as his trump card in the battle royal which ensued on the opening of the Metropolitan.

In the twenty years of Mme. Patti's absence from New York, Mme. Nilsson, who had come to the metropolis in the heyday of her European fame in 1870, had won her way deep into the hearts of the people. In 1883 she was no longer in her prime, neither her voice nor her art having stood the wear of time as well as those of Mme. Patti, who was six months her senior in age, and five years in stage experience, but she was more than a formidable rival in the admiration of the public. She was no less happy in the companionship of Mme. Sembrich as a junior partner than Patti was with Mme. Gerster. Both of the younger singers were fresh from their first great European successes. Three years later Mme. Gerster went back to Mme. Marchesi, her teacher, with her voice irreparably damaged. "The penalty of motherhood," said her friends; "the result of worry over the failure to hold her place in the face of opposition," said more impartial observers. Mme. Sembrich went back to Europe to continue her triumphs after disaster had overtaken her first American manager, and in a decade returned, to remain an ornament of the Metropolitan ever since.

In Mr. Abbey's ranks were also Mme. Fursch-Madi, Mme. Scalchi, Mme. Trebelli, Mme. Lablache (who gave way to her daughter till a quarrel over her between the impresarios was determined), and Mme. Valleria, who had come to the Academy some time before from London, though she was a Baltimorean by birth—a sterling artist who is remembered by all connoisseurs with gratitude and admiration. Chief among Colonel Mapleson's masculine forces was Signor Galassi, a somewhat rude but otherwise excellent barytone. At the head of the tenors was Signor Nicolini, the husband of Mme. Patti, who sang only when she did, but not always. The circumstance that Mme. Patti insisted upon his engagement, also, whenever she signed a contract gave rise to a malicious story to the effect that she had two prices, one of, let us say merely for illustration, 6,000 francs for herself alone, one of 4,000 francs for herself and Nicolini. The rest of the male contingent was composed mostly of small fry—Vicini, Perugini, and Falletti, tenors, Cherubini and Lombardini, basses, and Caracciolo, buffo. Mr. Abbey had carried off three admired men singers from the Academy—Campanini, Del Puente, and Novara—and brought an excellent barytone, Kaschmann, from Europe, and a redoubtable tenor, Stagno.

There was little to interest a public supposedly weary of the barrel-organ list in the promises made in the rival announcements. Colonel Mapleson held forth the prospect of Patti in Gounod's "Romo et Juliette," and "Mireille" (in Italian, of course), as well as in Rossini's "La Gazza ladra," a forgotten opera then and again forgotten now; other old works which were to be revived for her and Mme. Gerster were "Crispino e la Comare," and "L'Elisir d'Amore." Mme. Pappenheim's presence as the dramatic soprano of the company (a less necessary personage in the companies of that day than now) led to the promise of "Norma" and "Oberon." Only the Italian work was given. Mr. Abbey's book of good intentions embraced twenty-four operas, all of them familiar except "La Gioconda," which had been the novelty of the preceding London season.

The outcome of the battle between the opera houses was defeat for both. The Academy of Music survived for two more campaigns, out of which the new house came triumphant, while the old went down forever. It was different with the men. Mr. Abbey retired after one season, forswearing opera, as he said, for all time; Colonel Mapleson, though defeated, was a smaller loser, and he was not only brave enough to prepare for a second encounter, but also adroit enough to persuade Mme. Patti to place herself under his guidance again. Mr. Abbey's losses have been a matter of speculation ever since. It was known at the time that he had lost all the profits of three or four other managerial enterprises, and some years ago I feared that I might be exaggerating when I set down the deficit of the Metropolitan Opera House in its first season at $300,000. As I write now, however, I have before me a letter from Mr. John B. Schoeffel, who was associated with Mr. Abbey as partner, in which he says that the losses of the season were "nearly $600,000."

[The operas performed at the Academy of Music in the season 1883-1884 were: "La Sonnambula," "Rigoletto," "Norma," "Faust," "Linda di Chamouni," "La Gazza ladra," "Marta," "La Traviata," "Ada," "L'Elisir d'Amore," "Crispino e la Comare," and "Les Huguenots" (in Italian).]



CHAPTER IX

FIRST SEASON AT THE METROPOLITAN

Twenty-five years ago there was no opera in the current repertory comparable in popularity with "Faust." If I am told that neither is there to-day I shall neither gainsay my informant nor permit the fact to give me heartburnings in spite of my attitude toward the modern lyric drama. To that popularity Mme. Nilsson contributed a factor of tremendous puissance. No singer who is still a living memory was so intimately associated in the local mind with Gounod's masterpiece as she, whose good fortune it had been to recreate the character of Marguerite, when, on March 3, 1869, the opera in a remodeled form was transferred from the Thtre Lyrique to the Grand Opra in Paris. Coming to New York soon afterward, it was she who set the standard by which, for a long time, all subsequent representatives of the character were judged. With her, Mme. Scalchi (who never had more than one rival in the part of Siebel so far as New Yorkers are concerned, viz., Annie Louise Cary), and Signor Campanini (the most popular Faust who has ever sung in New York) in the company, it was no wonder that the opera was chosen for performance on the opening night at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 22, 1883. The opera was sung in Italian, no manager's fancy having yet attained such a conception, as that all operas ought to be sung in the language in which they were composed—and might be; for this reason the names in the cast, though given in their familiar French forms may be transliterated into Italian if so they will better please the reader. The cast then was as follows: Marguerite, Mme. Nilsson; Siebel, Mme. Scalchi; Martha, Mlle. Lablache (whose mother had been expected to appear in the part, but was prevented by judicial injunction); Faust, Signor Campanini; Valentine, Signor Del Puente; Mephistopheles, Signor Novara.