Free Grand Opera: The Story of the Met by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron

Lecouvreur and Fedora have languished, but have refused to die. Nearly five decades after its company premiere, Rudolf Bing found the winning formula for Die Fledermaus . The survival rate of novelties under Conried’s much maligned leadership far exceeded that recorded by the premieres of Stanton and Abbey-Grau.
    TABLE 4. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1903–04 to 1907–08
     

     
     

FOUR
Modernity, 1908–1929
    PUCCINI
     

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
     
    Toscanini left New York suddenly in spring 1915. Farrar had pushed him to choose between his mistress and his family. And since divorce, from his point of view, was unthinkable, he was left with no choice at all. The diva’s ultimatum was not the only consideration. There was also the escalating conflict with Gatti, the conductor unmovable in matters of quality, never mind the cost; the intendant fixated on the balance sheet to the last penny. One of their many rows had erupted during the preparation for the 1913 Un Ballo in maschera, tied to the centennial celebration of Verdi’s birth. Toscaniniinsisted on a stage band for the act 3 masked ball. Gatti maintained that the music could just as well emanate from the pit. There were endless conflicts over rehearsal time. The camel’s back was broken, the story goes, by a mediocre Carmen . The infuriated Toscanini announced that he was canceling his six remaining performances. Besides, he was eager to return to Italy, by now at war with Austria-Hungary. Thus it was that the great man and his wife and daughters were not, as had been planned, on the Lusitania sailing from New York on May 1 and sunk by a German U-boat on May 7. Kahn and Gatti did their best to lure the irreplaceable conductor back to the Met, even at the price of naming him “General Musik Director” with increased power over repertoire, casts, and schedule. Toscanini refused to rejoin the company. In fact, he would never again conduct an opera at the Metropolitan. 18
    Two years after Toscanini’s departure, during the third intermission of the April 2, 1917, performance of De Koven’s The Canterbury Pilgrims, the audience was thunderstruck by the news that Woodrow Wilson had appeared before Congress to call for a declaration of war against Germany. Late editions of New York papers circulated from hand to hand in the Diamond Horseshoe. The recently recalled ambassador to Berlin James Gerard, a guest in one of the boxes, exhorted the crowd to cheer the president; from another box came a shout for cheers for the Allies and the US Army and Navy. The orchestra struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As act 4 began, the mezzo-soprano Margarete Ober, “one of a dozen German stars [more accurately, two stars and a handful of comprimarios] on the stage at the time, had the leading part with Mr. [Johannes] Sembach in the final scene. She was singing a phrase of the Wife of Bath when she stopped and fell full length upon her back, striking heavily on the floor. Sembach and [tenor] Max Bloch lifted her, but she sank again, and the two men carried her out through the stage crowd, considerably to the detriment of the Wife of Bath’s bridal gown” ( Times, April 3, 1917). The cast sang on without her or her character to the opera’s end. In the years of America’s neutrality, 1914–1917, Ober and her compatriots had had no problem singing with French and British colleagues, nationals of countries with which Germany was at war. Nor was there any serious threat of anti-German feeling affecting the repertoire. Among the premieres of the period were two works performed in German, Hermann Goetz’s Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung (The Taming of the Shrew) and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, in a version arranged by Richard Strauss.
    The challenge to the customary multinational casting lay principally in the perils of transporting European artists to the United States and backagain; passports and safe-conducts were precious commodities. By 1916, the dangers of ocean