CHAPTER IV
HOUSES BUILT FOR OPERA
"His wit was not so sharp as his chin, and so his career was not so long as his nose," says Richard Grant White of the impresario who, ten years after the failure of the Italian Opera House, made the third effort to establish Italian opera in New York of which there is a record. The man with a sharp chin and long nose was Ferdinand Palmo. He was the owner of a popular restaurant which went by the rather tropical name "Café des Milles Colonnes," and was situated in Broadway, just above Duane Street. Palmo knew how to cook and how to cater, and his restaurant made him fairly rich. What he did not know about managing an opera house he was made conscious of soon after the ambition to be an impresario took hold of him. His was an individual enterprise, like Mr. Hammerstein's, with no clogs or entangling alliances in the shape of stockholders, or managing directors, or amusement committees. He seems to have been strongly impressed with the idea that after the public had been total abstainers for ten years they would love opera for its own sake, and that it would not be necessary to give hostages to fortune in the shape of a beautiful house, with a large portion set apart for the exclusive use of wealth and fashion. Except in name, says Mr. White, there were no boxes. Palmo did not even build a new theater. He found one that could be modeled to his purposes in Stoppani's Arcade Baths, in Chambers Street, between Broadway and Center Street. The site is now occupied by the building of the American News Company. The acoustics of the new opera house are said to have been good, but the inconvenience of the location and unenviable character of the neighborhood are indicated quite as much as Signor Palmo's enterprising and considerate nature by his announcement that after the performances a large car would be run uptown as far as Forty-Second Street for the accommodation of his patrons; and also that the patrons aforesaid should have police protection. The house seated about eight hundred persons, the seats being hard benches, with slats across the back shoulder high. Opera lovers given to luxury were permitted to upholster their benches. The orchestra numbered "thirty-two professors," but their devotion to the art which they professed was not so great as to make them willing to starve for its sake or to refuse to resort to the methods of the more modern workingmen's unions to compel payment for their services, as we shall see presently. The first performance under Signor Palmo took place on February 3, 1844, the opera being the same one with which Mr. Hammerstein began his latest venture sixty-two years later—"I Puritani." The prima donna soprano was Borghese, who was attractive in appearance, though not beautiful; who dressed well, sang with passionate intensity, and won a popularity that found vent in praise which may have been extravagant. One critic, "balancing her beauties against her defects," pronounced her the best operatic singer that the writer had yet heard on this side of the Atlantic. This remark leads Mr. White to surmise that the critic had not been five years in America, for, says he, Signora Borghese was not worthy to tie the shoes of Malibran, Pedrotti, Fanti, Garadori, or Mrs. Wood, the last two of whom had sung in English opera. Her chief defect seems to have been the tremolo—that vice toward which the American critics of to-day are more intolerant than those of any other people, as they are toward the sister vice of a faulty intonation. Mr. White talks sensibly on the subject in his estimate of Borghese.
She had a fine voice, although not a great one; her vocalization, regarded from a merely musical point of view, was of the corresponding grade, but as stage vocalization it had great power and deserved higher commendation. Her musical declamation was always effective and musico-rhetorically in good taste. She had a fine person, an expressive face, and much grace of manner. One might be content never to hear a better prima donna if one were secured against never hearing a worse. In her was first remarked here, among vocalists of distinction, that trembling of the voice when it is pressed in a crescendo, which has since become so common as greatly to mar our enjoyment of vocal music. This great fault, unknown before the appearance of Verdi, is attributed by some musical critics to the influence of his vociferous and strident style. It may be so; but that which follows is not always a consequence of that after which it comes. Certain it is, however, that from this time forward very few of the principal singers who have been heard in New York—only the very greatest and those whose style was formed before Verdi domineered the Italian lyric stage—were without this tremble. Grisi, Mario, Sontag, Jenny Lind, Alboni, and Salvi were entirely without it; their voices came from the chest pure, free and firm.
I can scarcely believe that the distressful vocal wabble either came in with Verdi's music or was greatly promoted by it. In the lofty quality of style Mme. Sembrich is the most perfect exemplar whom it is the privilege of New Yorkers to hear to-day; and she is the best singer we have of Verdi's music. Did anyone ever hear a tone come out of her throat that was not pure, free, and firm? Frequently the tremolo is an affectation like the excessive vibrato of a sentimental fiddler; sometimes it is the product of weakness due to abuse of the vocal organ. In all cases it is the sign of bad taste or vicious training, or both, and is an abomination. On the opera stage to-day Italian prima donnas are most afflicted with it. In turn Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Wagner have been accused of having caused it, but anyone who has listened intelligently to the opera singers of the last forty years will testify with me that the truly great singers of their music have been as free from the vicious habit as have been those whose artistic horizons have been confined by the music of Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti.
The tenor of the Palmo company was Antognini, who effected his entrance on the American stage five weeks after the opening of the season. In the opinion of Mr. White, he was the greatest tenor ever heard here, not excepting Mario and Salvi, and Mr. White's opinion is so judiciously expressed that one is fain to give it credence. Whether or not it can be extended over the period which he has covered, which is that reaching from the last days of the Academy of Music, when Campanini was still in his vocal prime but had not developed the dramatic powers which he put into play with the decay of his voice, I shall not undertake to say; taste in tenor voices has changed within the last generation in favor of the robust quality so magnificently exemplified in Signor Caruso. To judge from Mr. White's description Antognini, as a singer merely, was a Bonci of a manlier mould. His fame seems to have died with those who heard him, and perhaps this is a good reason for reprinting what Mr. White said about him in full:
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 Artôt, the violinist. In the eyes of Fétis 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 rôles in "Le Siège de Corinth" and "Moïse," 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 Café 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 bonbonnière. 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 wingèd 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 Fräulein 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. Fräulein 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. Fräulein 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 Fräulein 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."