Grand opera—and its future

DEEMS TAYLOR

Last season there were only three permanently organized opera companies in the United States. This season there are— at this writing at any rate—two. For years the Chicago Civic Opera Company has been giving admirable performances in the teeth of heavy deficits, making its way by means of private subsidies. The close of last season found its public economically worried and its principal Maecenas a financial cripple. Whereupon, the current supply of Samuel Insulls being exhausted, the directors gave up the struggle, and the Chicago Company gave up the ghost.

The Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, battered but game, is still in the ring. The Metropolitan Opera Company, of New York, having reduced salaries all around and shortened its season, is still doing business at the old stand.

Something is wrong. Two years ago the idea of disbanding the Metropolitan would have seemed unthinkable. Yet last spring the idea was not only thinkable, but very nearly became a fact. Our greatest operatic institution was not nearly so deeply rooted in our native soil as we thought it was. its public is less loyal, and its hackers less devoted, than we had supposed.

What is wrong, I think, is that times have changed, and the opera has not. The Metropolitan, like other opera companies in America, travelling and permanent, has come to the end of an epoch. What that epoch was and what were some others that preceded it. is worth recording.

It is fair to say that the Metropolitan was founded primarily as a social, rather than an artistic, institution. Like a polo club or a cotillon, it came into being through the desire of the socially elect to do the socially distinguished thing. In its atmosphere, its ideals, even in the plan of its theatre, it sought to emulate the glories of La Scala of the middle nineteenth century or of the Paris Opera of Napoleon III.

It was an era of singing, and not much else, and it reached its apex under the regime of Maurice Grau, during the nineties and the early nineteen hundreds. Those were the days of great voices—the de Reszke brothers, Pol Plançon, Victor Maurel, Sembrich. Nordica, Scalchi, Melba, Eames, Calvé, and, toward the end, Caruso. The scenery was thoroughly conventional; the lighting, compared with our contemporary miracles, was primitive; and there was not much acting. The singers sang their roles gloriously, went through the routine of the traditional gestures, and let it go at that. The chorus addressed its sentiments exclusively to the conductor. Frequently the stars did not rehearse with the rest of the company.

Grau's successor enlarged the repertoire, but did not improve the state of the opera. The performances became more and more a matter of routine. To make matters worse. Oscar Hammerstein. the ex-cigar maker and vaudeville producer, chose just this time to enter the operatic field on his own account.

His opera house, the Manhattan, an ugly hut highly practical theatre on Thirty-fourth Street, was the scene of stirring events. New Yorkers began to see new faces, to hear new great voices—Bonci, Melba, Tetrazzini—and great singing actors—Mary Garden, Bressler-Gianoli. Mazarin, Maurice Renaud, Charles Dalmorès. His repertoire embraced new and exciting works that the Metropolitan had never ventured to produce—Pelléas et Mélisande, Louise, Electra, Salome. The public, the rank-and-file public, began to flock to the Manhattan in numbers that spelled disaster to the Metropolitan. In the end, of course, Hammerstein was doomed to failure, since he had no backers, and no socially acceptable box-holders to attract the more solvent class of subscribers.

In 1908 the Metropolitan's board of directors paid Hammerstein a rumored million dollars to get out of opera, and imported a new General Director from Italy. He came from La Scala, in Milan, where be had managed both to be brilliantly successful as an impresario and to be damned by Italian musical patriots because he was a Wagner enthusiast. For two seasons at the Metropolitan he shared the management with Andreas Dippel, who had been a leading tenor in Conried's company. But the two clashed frequently on questions of policy, and the deficits mounted. In 1910 the directors, chiefly upon the insistence of Otto II. Kahn, put GattiCasazza in sole command, raised a guarantee fund of half a million dollars, handed it over to him, and told him to go ahead.

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He went ahead. He reorganized the company throughout, turning the opera house from a battlefield of warring temperaments into a smoothly running, perfectly disciplined lyric theatre. In scenic production, stage direction, orchestral playing, and singing and acting, the Metropolitan is, judged by its average over any given season, as good as any opera company in the world, and better than most.

But Gatti-Casazza will not continue indefinitely as executive head of the Metropolitan. This season will he his twenty-fifth in New York, and the date of his retirement is obviously nearer than it was a quarter of a century ago. M hen he does retire, I do not envy his successor. It is no child's play to he both the shrewd business man who can make an opera house balance its budget, and the artistic head who can reach and maintain a high level of production.

But Gatti will he hard to follow for another reason. Opera is sick. Or, at least, ailing. An art that is an integral part of the cultural life of Germany, France, and Italy is still regarded by Americans as an expensive, exotic luxury, a sort of highbrow night-club in which to get rid of money during flush times; but, like a night-club, something to forego without hesitation when money is less than easy to find. It is not a genuinely popular form of entertainment.

Americans, as a rule, do not think of the opera as a branch of the drama at all. Most of us regard it as a place where—at a price—we may hear famous voices, accompanied by an orchestra—a three-hour vocal concert, given, for no clear reason, with scenery and costumes. Rut the thing that makes opera bearable is just its drama.

The American does not understand this fact, simply because the drama of the operas he hears is given in a foreign language: it tends to he meaningless to him. Without a libretto the average American listener is helpless. What he needs is opera produced in such a manner that Americans can understand it.

Let me describe my idea of how an experiment such as this could he carried out. I am thinking of an imaginary, permanent, well-financed company situated in an imaginary American metropolis.

First of all, the company would have an opera house built to satisfy contemporary needs. The plan of its auditorium would resemble, not a horseshoe, hut a fan, so that the spectators in the side seats might see something besides the other side of the house. There would he not more than two balconies, so that those in the upper tiers might see something besides the singers' wigs. If there were any boxes, they would he on the ground floor, presumably about the middle of the house, instead of killing the space that should he occupied by the two balconies. The orchestra pit would he covered. The stage, of course, in its size, layout, and equipment, would he that of 1932 rather than that of the Second Empire.

I can imagine such a house being under the management of an American theatrical producer. He would probably lack his European confrere's lifelong familiarity with the music, plots, conventions, and traditions of opera. Which would he a handicap. It would also he an enormous advantage, for he would thereby he in a position to comprehend his public's corresponding ignorance of such things. He would not he, probably, a sophisticated music lover, hut lie would he sensitive to music, and possess instinctive musical taste. He would he, above all, a showman, a man of the American theatre, knowing, without having to he told, the tastes and reactions of the American audience.

The American opera-goer is a more difficult problem than the European. He is an eager, hut impatient listener, and demands complete plausibility from his theatre. He listens harder than any audience in the world, and therefore tires more easily. He demands speed and economy in his dramas. He wants to lose himself completely in the action that is being unfolded on the stage, hut cannot do so unless he is in the presence of a perfect illusion. He can he annoyed, as the Latin sometimes is not, by flawless singing unsupported by dramatic sincerity, or, as the Teuton is not, by flawless sincerity unsupported by good singing. He can he completely thrown out of the proper mood, as the European seldom is, by the fact that the singer does not look his part.

All this my imaginary producer would know, instinctively, because his approach to the lyric theatre would he that of his hearers. He would consider the score of an opera exactly as he would consider the script of a play, producing it on its merits as a show for an American audience.

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I should like, for example, to see the Ring cycle produced by an expert American director who had never seen it performed, who had never—figuratively speaking—heard of Bayreuth. What the result would be, I do not know: but it would be interesting, and exciting.

And the scenery! Think of playing the second act of Siegfried in two scenes, with the fight with the dragon a separate tableau, when the Master had decreed otherwise! Think of throwing out those rich, chocolate-flavored rocks that had been there since 1880.

And the critics! Think of all those horrid nouns and adjectives: "incredible — blasphemy — vulgar •— cheap — popularization — effrontery — tawdry—sensational—lust for novelty!''

As the crowning, the unforgivable insult to the sacred cow of Art, many of the productions of this imaginary impresario would be given, from the start, in English. Eventually, employing skilled translators, he would evolve a complete repertoire in English. He would do this because, as he would explain to you, the public for which he is producing opera likes to be able to follow the dramatic action as it is unfolded on the stage.

All this may be a dream, of course. It is quite possible that Americans have no real interest in opera, that they would not go to hear it even when produced in terms of their own theatre and in their own tongue. Nevertheless, the experiment might be worth trying. For one thing is certain: that unless we try some experiment before long, those of us who love opera will not be able to hear it sung in terms of any theatre, or in any tongue whatsoever. It will have shrivelled and died because it had no roots—a brown and withered gardenia in the lapel of culture.