MY DÉBUT AND BREAKING INTO HARNESS
I HAD to sing Azucena, my first part on any stage, without rehearsal. The reason for this dawned upon me afterwards. Though I sang German well by this time, my conversational powers still left something to be desired. I have explained that the present director had never heard my voice; no one knew of what I was capable, and they quite expected that I would prove incompetent, and had engaged a native born contralto to provide for this contingency.
When I heard one evening, that I should have to sing Azucena on the next, I confess that something rather like panic assailed me for a few minutes. The stage manager called me onto the stage, and spent half an hour in showing me the entrances and exits, and giving me the merest outline of the positions. That is all the preparation I had for my so-called début. The other members of the cast had sung the opera together many times the year before, which made the performance possible. The lyric tenor was a decent enough colleague, though an absolute peasant in behaviour, with an extraordinary high voice which was rapidly degenerating from misuse. The baritone was of the tried and true type, and a great favourite, and the soprano was easy to get on with. They were all nice enough to me, if somewhat uninterested and indifferent, for I had had as yet so little to do with them that we hardly knew each other. They thought me a rich dilettante at that time I fancy. I was so horribly nervous all that day that I fainted whenever I tried to stand up, and when I began to sing my sister did not recognize my voice. However, I was very well received indeed, all the criticisms the next day were favourable, and there was no question after that as to who should sing the leading rôles.
It was fortunate for me that I succeeded in pulling myself together sufficiently to make a success, as at that time the old system of Kündigung was still in force. I have said that a contract was not valid until the singer had successfully completed the number of guest performances stated therein. I had not been called upon for these Gastspiele because I was a beginner, but they are almost invariably included in the contract. Now-a-days your engagement is settled after you have successfully made these trial appearances, and you then remain in that engagement for a full season; and the management must let you know before February first (sometimes January first) whether you are to be re-engaged or not. This is in order to give the singer time to make arrangements for the coming season. When I was engaged in Metz the management of a theatre had the right to dismiss any singer after three weeks, whether he had made his guest appearances beforehand or not, if he had failed in that time to make good with the public. He was also liable to dismissal after his first appearance, if he proved quite impossible. This was what they were expecting in my case. The arrangement was most unfair to the poor singer, leaving him stranded (with practically no chance of work that year) after he had moved all his possessions and thought himself established for the season. The big artists' society, the Genossenschaft, which is the only protective institution for singers in Germany, has at last succeeded in abolishing this unjust condition of affairs. There was a flagrant case of this kind in the theatre during the first three weeks of my engagement. The "high dramatic" soprano had finished the first three weeks of her engagement, during which she had had to learn two new parts, providing costumes, at her own expense, for a rôle which she had not expected to have to sing. She had had a fair success and thought herself secure. In the meantime, the management had had no idea of keeping her on permanently, but had merely engaged her to fill in the time, while they were waiting for another singer, who was filling an out-of-season engagement elsewhere, and could not report for three weeks. When she was free, they told the first one that she had not pleased sufficiently and dismissed her. The good theatres did not take advantage of this privilege of course, even while it still existed.
My second rôle was a very small one, one of the court ladies of "Les Huguenots." A native first contralto would probably not have been asked to do such a small part, but there being no regular part for my voice in the opera, I think they were glad to use my good stage appearance, and of course, as a beginner I made no protest, being glad of every chance to become more used to the stage. The part was sprung upon me suddenly, and I had no dress for it. The second contralto also had a court lady to do, and the good creature offered to lend me a gorgeous Elizabethan dress of white satin and silver (which, she told me, she also intended to wear as Amneris!) and she would "go in black." I was touched, but I could not deprive her of her splendour, so we arranged something out of the pointed pink bodice of one of my other gowns, and the long white skirt of a summer dress, with a ladder arrangement of pink velvet bands sewn on up the front.
I remember as I made my entrance, looking up suddenly and seeing the sinister eyes of Carlhof the stage manager, fixed on me from the wings. He proceeded to mock my walk, which was no doubt very American, and not that of a court lady at all. I never forgot the mental jolt it gave me and the sudden realization that every rôle should have a different walk.
The range of parts that one is called upon to perform is astonishing. Formerly the limits of a Fach (line of parts) were more rigidly observed than at present, when the personality of a singer in relation to a rôle is more often taken into consideration. Still, if a rôle definitely belongs to the Fach of a certain singer, he is supposed to have first right to it. Difficulties arise in apportioning the parts in very modern operas, whose composers seem no longer disposed to write definitely for a coloratura soprano or a serious bass, but mix up the voice range and styles of singing indiscriminately in one part. My second real part was Fricka in "Walkuere," in which I had a great success vocally, but unfortunately looked a great deal younger than the portly Brünnhilde and far more like her daughter than her stepmother. Then came the Third Lady in "Magic Flute," the Third Grace in "Tannhäuser," Martha in "Faust," Orlofsky in "Fledermaus," Frau Reich in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," the Gräfin in "Trompeter von Säkkingen," Pamela in "Fra Diavolo," Witch in "Haensel und Gretel"; and finally "Carmen." All these before Christmas of my first year. I did not have one of them on my repertoire when I arrived in Metz, except Fricka and Carmen, and the latter in French.
The three graces in "Tannhäuser" were done by the beauties of the theatre, two premières danseuses and myself! We were to dress in white Greek draperies with jewels, and of course, as we were to be seductive, pink roses. I wore my beautiful Bergcrystal necklace, made for me in Paris. The ladies could not contain their jealousy and said of course, "aufgedonnert" (thundered out) like that I naturally would stand out from them. Annoyed at their pettiness I removed the diamonds and flowers and all ornaments. They then said of course to go without any ornaments was palpably the best way of all to make myself conspicuous. So I let it go at that.
I well remember the Third Lady, for there are spoken passages in this opera, and I had to speak German for the first time before an audience of critically listening natives, and Mozartian German at that! Pamela nearly gave me nervous prostration. They were determined that I should do it because she had to speak German with an English accent, so they said it was made for me. As a matter of fact, after the months I had spent in carefully eradicating my English accent it was difficult suddenly to exaggerate it to order. I had to learn, rehearse and play the entire part in five days, and I thought I should go mad. I had never seen the wretched thing, so the baritone who played my husband kindly came over to help me with the business. Otherwise my sister and I hardly left the piano to eat and sleep. The dialect part of the libretto was in an ancient manuscript copy, torn, marked and dog's-eared, and written in an almost illegible German script. I could not take time enough to puzzle it out, so my sister spent hours poring over it, deciphering the German letters literally one by one by aid of a key, and writing it again in Latin script. I had no clothes for it, as it was not on my repertoire and it plays in 1820, but they costumed it for me in modern dress, so again my summer wardrobe was called into service.
I learned it so quickly that the colleagues called me "Die Notenfresserin" or note-eater, but the strain was awful. I remember when I was studying Pamela the Kapellmeister told me at least ten times, how the contralto who played the Pamela in his father's theatre and who was also an English-speaking woman, had so caught his father's fancy in that rôle, that from then on he had a tremendous affair with her. This he repeated to me again and again, but I never seemed to take the hint.
As Erda in "Siegfried" I had a most trying experience. The director had been, as I have said, a well-known Bayreuth singer, and he thought no one could sing Wagner but himself. Unfortunately he had a strong tendency to "look upon the wine," and when he had a part to sing nervousness attacked him to such an extent that he began drinking in self-defence to enable him to stand the strain. Perhaps his beverages were more potent than usual, but that night he was decidedly irresponsible. He struggled through the Wanderer's first scene, and conscious that he was doing it badly, he sent out for a bottle of champagne as a bracer. The consequence was that in our scene in the third act, he was utterly incapacitated. He sang all kinds of things not in the text, bits from Hunding in "Walkuere," from Daland in "Hollaender," from "Fidelio." He rolled about the stage and lurched in my direction with his spear pointed at me, shouting Pogner's advice to Eva while I was singing Erda's responses. It seemed to go on for ages, but at last Siegfried, waiting for his cue in the wings, realized that he must save the scene, entered and escorted his befuddled relation from the stage. I had made up with a creamy white grease paint and no red. My sister said, "Why did you make up with rouge and not have the pallor we agreed upon?" My cheeks were so scarlet from mortification that no grease paint would have paled them.
The audience took it splendidly, I must confess, and refrained from any expression of disapproval or joy—though it must have been funny! The next day there were announcements in all the papers that he had had a temporary lapse of memory owing to grief over the sudden death of his mother, who, as the stage manager cynically informed us, had reached out a hand from the grave to save her son, she having been dead for ten years! The director went to Berlin and stayed there for weeks. We afterwards learned that it was a plot, deliberately planned and put through by Carlhof to gain the direction of the theatre. I can see him now stalking around, six foot four, chewing his rag of a dyed moustache, his face pale and his eyes glittering with anxiety as to the success of his plan to encourage the director to drink. The director once told me the hours between the last meal and the time to go to one's dressing room to begin making up are the dangerous ones. He said, "First one takes a glass of wine to steady one's shaking nerves; later a glass is not enough so it becomes a bottle, then two bottles and so on till control is lost." It is easy for any singer to understand, and the best remedy is to omit that first glass.
"Carmen" was the second opera which I had to do without rehearsal. The soprano had failed in it and it was promised to me to keep if I could do it ohne probe (without rehearsal). I sang it for the first time, quaking with nerves, on Christmas Day, and my nick-name after that was "Die schoene Carmen." After Christmas we produced the "Merry Widow" which was new then, and I was cast for the Dutiful Wife. There was plenty of variety in my work. I would sing Carmen on Sunday, Orlofsky in "Fledermaus" on Tuesday, speaking German with a Russian accent, Pamela on Thursday night with an English accent, and Frau Reich on Friday night with no accent at all! I dressed Frau Reich in a gown of the time of Henry V while the rest of the cast "went Shakespearean." We were far too busy for dress rehearsals of an old opera, and I supposed of course that it would be costumed in the real period of the play. When I appeared on the stage, they all demanded "And what, pray, are you supposed to represent?" "I am playing Shakespeare's Frau Reich," I answered with dignity—"and I am the only person on the stage who is properly dressed." But you have to know your colleagues well before you can make an answer like that successfully, without their hating you for it.