If I had not worked so hard at Gilda I should never have got through that first performance. I was not consciously nervous, but my throat—it is quite impossible to tell in words how my throat felt. I have heard singers describe the first-night sensation variously,—a tongue that felt stiff, a palate like a hot griddle, and so on. My throat and my tongue were dry and thick and woolly, like an Oriental rug with a "pile" so deep and heavy that, if water is spilled on it, the water does not soak in, but lies about the surface in globules,—just a dry and unabsorbing carpet.
My mother was with me behind the scenes; and my grandmother was in front to see me in all my stage grandeur. I am afraid I did not care particularly where either of them were. Certainly I had no thought for anyone who might be seated out in the Great Beyond on the far side of the footlights. I sang the second act in a dream, unconscious of any audience:—hardly conscious of the music or of myself—going through it all mechanically. But the sub-conscious mind had been at work all the time. As I was changing my costume after the second act, my mother said to me:
"I cannot find your grandmother anywhere. I have been looking and peeping through the hole in the curtain and from the wings, but I cannot seem to discover where she is sitting."
Hardly thinking of the words, I answered at once:
"She is over there to the left, about three rows back, near a pillar."
The criticisms of the press next day said that my most marked specialty was my ability to strike a tone with energy. I liked better, however, one kindly reviewer who observed that my voice was "cordial to the heart!" The newspapers found my stage appearance peculiar. There was about it "a marked development of the intellectual at the expense of the physical to which her New England birth may afford a key." The man who wrote this was quite correct. He had discovered the Puritan maid behind the stage trappings of Gilda.
If omens count for anything I ought to have had a disastrous first season, for everything went wrong during that opening week. I lost a bracelet of which I was particularly fond; I fell over a stick in making an entrance and nearly went on my head; and at the end of the third act of the second performance of Rigoletto the curtain failed to come down, and I was obliged to stay in a crouching attitude until it could be put into working order again. But these trying experiences were not auguries of failure or of disaster. In fact my public grew steadily kinder to me, although it hung back a little until after Marguerite. Audiences were not very cordial to new singers. They distrusted their own judgment; and I don't altogether wonder that they did.
The week after my début we went to Boston to sing. Boston would not have Rigoletto. It was considered objectionable, particularly the ending. For some inexplicable reason Linda di Chamounix was expected to be more acceptable to the Bostonian public, and so I was to sing the part of Linda instead of that of Gilda. I had been working on Linda during a part of the year in which I studied Gilda, and was quite equal to it. The others of the company went to Boston ahead of me, and I played Linda at a matinée in New York before following them. This was the first time I sang in opera with Brignoli. I went on in the part with only one rehearsal. Opera-goers do not hear Linda any more, but it is a graceful little opera with some pretty music and a really charmingly poetic story. It was taken from the French play, La Grâce de Dieu, and Rigoletto was taken from Victor Hugo's Le Roi S'Amuse. The story of Linda is that of a Swiss peasant girl of Chamounix who falls in love with a French noble whom she has met as a strolling painter in her village. He returns to Paris and she follows him there, walking all the way and accompanied by a faithful rustic, Pierotto, who loves her humbly. He plays a hurdy-gurdy and Linda sings, and so the poor young vagrants pay their way. In Paris the nobleman finds her and lavishes all manner of jewels and luxuries upon little Linda, but at last abandons her to make a rich marriage. On the same day that she hears the news of her lover's wedding her father comes to her house in Paris and denounces her. She goes mad, of course. Most operatic heroines did go mad in those days. And, in the last act, the peasant lover with the hurdy-gurdy takes her back to Chamounix among the hills. On the lengthy journey he can lure her along only by playing a melody that she knows and loves. It is a dear little story; but I never could comprehend how Boston was induced to accept the second act since they drew the line at Rigoletto!
I liked Linda and wanted to give a truthful and appealing impersonation of her. But the handicaps of those days of crude and primitive theatre conditions were really almost insurmountable. Now, with every assistance of wonderful staging, exquisite costuming, and magical lighting, the artist may rest upon his or her surroundings and accessories and know that everything possible to art has been brought together to enhance the convincing effect. In the old days at the Academy, however, we had no system of lighting except glaring footlights and perhaps a single, unimaginative calcium. We had no scenery worthy the name; and as for costumes, there were just three sets called by the theatre costumier "Paysannes" (peasant dress); "Norma" (they did not know enough even to call it "classic"); and "Rich!" The last were more or less of the Louis XIV period and could be slightly modified for various operas. These three sets were combined and altered as required. Yet, of course, the audiences were correspondingly unexacting. They were so accustomed to nothing but primitive effects that the simplest touch of true realism surprised and delighted them. Once during a performance of Il Barbiere the man who was playing the part of Don Basilio sent his hat out of doors to be snowed on. It was one of those Spanish shovel hats, long and square-edged, like a plank. When he wore it in the next act, all white with snowflakes from the blizzard outside, the audience was so simple and childlike that it roared with pleasure, "Why, it's real snow!"
It was also the time when hoop skirts were universally fashionable, so we all wore hoops, no matter what the period we were supposed to be representing. Scola first showed me how to fall gracefully in a hoop skirt, not in the least an easy feat to accomplish; and I shall always remember seeing Mme. de la Grange go to bed in one, in her sleep-walking scene in Sonnambula. Indeed, there was no illusion nor enchantment to help one in those elementary days. One had to conquer one's public alone and unaided.