BAYREUTH IN 1876—MY DOLL’S THEATRE
In the summer of 1876 Wagner inaugurated the Bayreuth Theatre with the first production of his great “Nibelungen Trilogy.” All the old friends and the musicians who had been in the forefront of the fight in the early days when Wagner’s genius was not generally recognized, gathered there from far and near in order to be present at what was destined to be a magnificent demonstration of the final triumph of the cause.
My father, naturally, was keen to be there and to rejoice with his old colleagues. He had not returned to Germany since he had left it in 1871 to found a home for his family in the New World. He had never regretted this step, but many bonds of sentiment and many old friends drew him to Europe. Alas, he had no money for such a trip and there seemed no way of obtaining it. There was a lottery formed by a few Wagner enthusiasts the proceeds of which should go to the Bayreuth Fund. The winner of the lucky number was to receive a ticket for the first performance, and my father bought a number, but of course he did not win, and there was the price of the steamship passage to pay and the expenses of maintenance in Europe besides. In his despair he told his old friend Schirmer, the New York music publisher, of his distress and Schirmer immediately said:
“Doctor, you simply must go, and here is a loan of five hundred dollars, which you can repay me whenever you can afford it.”
This was so friendly and generous an act that it gives me pleasure to record it here, especially as his two sons, Rudolph and Gustav, also continued on terms of friendliest intimacy with me from boyhood to their all-too-premature deaths. Another friend of my father, Charles A. Dana, the great editor of the New York Sun asked him to write some articles on his Bayreuth experiences for The Sun and paid him another five hundred dollars, so that my father was liberally supplied with funds for his trip to Europe.
This visit, the reunion with Wagner, Liszt, Raff, Lassen, Porges, and hosts of other old friends, together with all the marvels of the first production of the “Nibelungen Trilogy,” refreshed my father immensely in body and spirit, and when he returned home and recounted to us all the glories of the trip, I fairly ached with the joy of it and immediately proceeded to spend all my pocket money in the making of a very remarkable doll’s theatre about three feet wide and equally high in order to produce Wagner myself. I painted all the scenery and the actor dolls for it, and had the most brilliant lighting effects and a curtain that went up and down with a perfection not always witnessed even on the real stage.
As I had some talent for painting and had attended the drawing classes at Cooper Union, I knew something of colors and perspective and delighted especially in designing interiors of palaces with dozens of pillars which, beginning in large size at the proscenium, would dwindle down to the smallest pillarets, gradually lost in the dim distances, so that my palaces always looked as if they were miles long.
My fellow director was my boy friend, Gustav Schirmer, son of the publisher, and our first production was, of course, a Wagner music drama. Gustav’s mother was an enthusiastic Wagnerite who eventually spent much of her life in Bayreuth and Weimar. “Rhinegold” seemed to me especially fitted for our theatre as it offered almost boundless scenic opportunities. The effect of water in the first scene which is supposed to depict the depths of the Rhine, I achieved very successfully by several alternate curtains of blue and green gauze, and behind the rocky reef in the centre of this scene a gas-burner was very cleverly hidden, the light of which, as it gradually increased in strength, brilliantly simulated the awakening of the “Rhinegold.”
The united children of the Schirmer and Damrosch families together with their elders constituted the audience. The children paid fifty cents admission, but both Gustav and I permitted our respective parents to contribute as much above that as their generosity would permit, and we looked on it as very much the same kind of a subvention as the king of Bavaria had allowed Wagner at Bayreuth.
The theatre had been very cleverly placed in the doorway between two rooms, but as the piano was in the same room where the audience sat, I had to rush backward and forward continually. For instance, when Gustav pulled the curtain to disclose the depths of the Rhine, I played the Rhine music, then would creep back under the table on which the theatre was placed and help him manipulate the Rhine Maidens. Then I would rush back again to play the music accompanying the awakening of the Gold and so on until the change of scene when, as the rising sun shines upon the mighty walls of Walhalla, I would reproduce the stately harmonies of the Walhalla motive.
As I look back on it now, it must have been an absolutely crazy performance, but the audience was hugely delighted and contributed so liberally that my co-director and I had a surplus with which to begin preparations for another play.
Some parents on reading this may think that all this was a huge waste of time, but I cannot agree with them. Quite apart from the fact that it taught me a good deal in the use of the brush, it was a great stimulus to the imagination and a welcome outlet for the desire all children have to live in a make-believe world of fancy. At any rate, Gustav Schirmer and I can claim that we were the first to produce Wagner’s “Rhinegold” in America, and it is possible that this was the germ for my decision eighteen years later to form the Damrosch Opera Company solely for the purpose of producing Wagner throughout America.
The dolls’ theatre was, however, not my only diversion from my school and musical studies.
At one Christmas my father and mother gave me a very complete tool chest, with which I fashioned, among other things, a dolls’ house for my sisters and quite a little fleet of boats. I remember one three-master, about three feet in length, the wood for which I obtained from a foreman at the Steinway piano factory, then situated on Park Avenue. This three-master with all sails set won several races for me on the pond in Central Park.
In those days, Central Park was considered very far uptown, and where now the palaces of millionaires flank its borders, Irish squatters lived in improvised huts around which goats would gain a meagre livelihood from the rocks stretching on all sides. These squatters established a kind of lien on the land, which I believe was recognized as having some legal force when the property became more and more valuable and the owners began to grade the land for residential purposes.
Just as in the early days in Breslau, we continued to celebrate Christmas Eve in America in the good old fashion. Weeks before, a delicious atmosphere of mystery and secrecy began to envelop every member of the family. The “front parlor” became taboo for us children. Packages began to arrive and were stored there. The Christmas tree, which was always carefully chosen by my mother and which, according to old regulations, had to touch the ceiling with its top, was brought in in the evening after we had been carefully “shooed” upstairs into our respective bedrooms.
Dozens of sheets of gold and silver paper were cut by us into glittering garlands for the tree and we were, of course, expected to present our parents on Christmas eve with something fashioned by our own hands, or to be able to recite a poem or play a new piano solo. Of all this they were supposed to know nothing until the great day arrived, although they must have heard our dreary practising of it for weeks before.
The celebration was held on Christmas eve, before supper. My father and mother would disappear into the forbidden room to light the hundred candles on the tree and put the last touches on the heaps of presents. Then my father would play a march on the piano and we would all troop in and stand breathless before the tree so beautifully illuminated by the gentle light of the candles. Our presents would, of course, consist mainly of necessities in clothing and underclothing, shoes, etc., which we would have received anyhow, but which gained an added glow because of the occasion. But there were always books, and the tree was crowded with cakes and candies and gay-colored paper flowers and there were toys and joyous singing of Christmas songs and hymns around the tree. Then would come a delicious supper, accompanied by a cup of which Rhine wine and sliced pineapples were the constituent parts.
After supper we children had to recite our verses or play our piano solos, and, alas, these exhibitions sometimes ended in tears, as the exciting events that preceded this contribution to the festivities sometimes blunted our memories and we would get “stuck” in the middle. Then we would cast a frightened glance at my father, who would, perhaps, look rather serious until mother’s smile or some joking remark would put him and us in good humor again.
Those wonderful Christmas celebrations of my childhood continued into my married life. Then when my children came, besides participating in my mother’s tree, we tried, my wife and I, to bring into our own home on this beautiful day a kind of festive celebration which should pass on to our children and friends that which my father and mother and Tante Marie had so freely given to me.
We have had some wonderfully jolly Christmases. My four children and their cousin, Walker Blaine Beale, took on themselves the loving burden of our entertainment. A play was sometimes written or charades improvised, for which upstairs closets were ransacked for costumes and other paraphernalia in such haste and amid such ruthless confusion that Minna, our old Swedish nurse, who has been in our family since the birth of my oldest daughter, would often throw up her hands in horror at the bedrooms, which indeed looked as if a tornado had swept over them. I remember a delicious take-off on “Pelléas et Mélisande” which my oldest daughter, Alice, wrote. I had given a number of lecture recitals on the opera the previous season and it was much in the family mind. Then another year a drama on “The North Pole” was written. This was just after the dispute between Peary and Cook as to the discovery of the pole. There was a real shiver when we were heralded back to our transformed parlor. The Christmas tree had quickly become a lonely pine outlined against bleak areas of farthest north cotton sheets, stretching in all directions over “hummocks” of sofas and chairs. Our five children, for Walker seemed as much our very own in these celebrations as my own four girls, gave us a wonderfully spirited drama of the conquest of the polar regions!
I can see and hear dear David Bispham laugh, my old friends Doctor and Mrs. George Harris’s enthusiasm, Margaret Anglin, Julie Faversham. . . . Our happy, happy Christmases!
The last Christmas party at our home was that of 1916. Then in 1917 Walker was training at Camp Dix and we all went out with his mother and spent Christmas Day at an inn near by to which he could come. There was a rumor everywhere that his regiment was to embark for overseas in a few days, although he really did not sail until May. We all did our best to make it gay in that hotel dining-room, the rain falling dismally. We were so proud of our young khaki-uniformed lieutenant! My Polly played and played, rags, anything and everything, on the old hotel piano. We did not know it was to be our last happy Christmas together, but war had already given to joy a kind of yearning anguish.
My nephew was killed the 18th of the following September, 1918, at Saint-Mihiel. Reconnoitring to assure the safety of his men, he leaped a fence to join three fellow officers. A shell tore them to pieces. This was in the early afternoon. Walker was taken to a field hospital and died at eleven that night.
We know that he did not suffer very much, and we think we know that he never understood how severely he was wounded, that he never knew that what, as a soldier, he so freely offered had been accepted.
He was his grandfather’s, Mr. Blaine’s, youngest grandson, only twenty-two, his mother’s only son, our brightest and best.
There is no day we do not think of him, but Christmas, the day of giving, is his own especial day.
On a frigid day last winter (January, 1922) travelling with my wife on an untidy, dilapidated post-war train through Germany, on my way to Stockholm to fill an engagement to conduct the orchestra there, we read in an English magazine an article on Tennyson ending with a description of the old graveyard in which lie the bodies of his two grandsons, both killed in the war. “I did not know,” I said, looking out over the black wintry flat German country, “that Tennyson lost two grandsons in the war!”
“But so did my father,” my wife said proudly, and she spoke truly, for another nephew, Emmons Blaine of Chicago was no less a war victim than Walker. Unable to pass the physical tests required to enter the army he agonized to find the nation’s greatest need behind the lines in which to enlist. He chose shipbuilding and offered himself as a workman at Hogg Island, near Philadelphia. Although never overstrong, he worked early and late, and fell a victim of the terrible epidemic of the “flu,” dying at Lansdown on October 9, 1918. Though Walker had already died in France, we knew only at the time that he was wounded. Of his death we learned four days later. Thus these two cousins, Emmons and Walker, are forever enshrined together in our anguish, in our pride, and in our love.