Nowhere in Europe are better performances given, either operatic or dramatic. The principal characters are assigned to artists of the very highest order, the orchestra is made up of picked musicians, every one a soloist, and the chorus is not that mass of associated howlers that drive us mad in America; but the members are trained singers, as well as actors.
For the presentation of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” there was an orchestra of fifty-eight in number, a chorus of two hundred and fifty, and as many more supernumeraries. Nowhere is the detail of a presentation so carefully and conscientiously worked out, and nowhere an opera more satisfactorily given than in this little German city of less than fifty thousand.
The singers enter into a contract with the Direction for a term of years, and if they sing or act the full term they may go elsewhere, but they are pensioned by the city for life. Their salaries are very small, but the resultant pension is so comfortable a thing that they never break their engagements and never do slovenly work.
The Sunday night we reached Mannheim, Wagner’s “Lohengrin” was given, the performance commencing at half-past five in the afternoon and continuing till eleven at night. It was not as in American opera houses. There wasn’t a note omitted, a song, or line of text cut; the entire opera as it came from the composer was given with a degree of conscientious care that the American party had never heard before.
OPERA IN MANNHEIM.
Tibbitts was in a state of surprise all the time. First going to an opera, not a matinee, in daylight; and then another custom that was as novel and strange as the hour at which the performance began. After entering the vestibule we passed through a long hallway lined with shelves; on these shelves the gentlemen placed their hats, overcoats, canes and umbrellas, and then passed into the auditorium without getting any check for the articles so left.
“Imagine,” said Tibbitts, “an American theater with a free cloak room in the lobby! How many hats, coats and walking sticks would be left by the time the entertainment was over? Think of such a thing in New York, or even Oshkosh! Why, in Oshkosh the boys out of one such audience would supply themselves with overcoats, hats and umbrellas for a year. It is a temptation even to me, as well as I have been brought up.”
The opera of Lohengrin is extremely difficult to render, but in this little German town of only forty-seven thousand inhabitants, it was done in a manner that would surprise the grand opera goers of New York, or even Paris or London. The stage settings were magnificent, every detail being most carefully and faithfully attended to.