In the meantime negotiations had already begun looking to the transfer of the house for the next season to Mr. Ernest Gye, who was manager at the time of Covent Garden, London. These negotiations were continued till deep in the summer and came to naught at the end. Of the reasons for the failure several became known to the public. One was the unwillingness of the directors to give Mr. Gye a free hand in the engagement of artists. The directors, who were active in determining the policy of the opera, were all devoted admirers of Mme. Nilsson; they were, in fact, the donors of the laurel wreath of gold which she received on the first night of the season. They were desirous that she should be re-engaged, though the weight of her contract had done much to break Mr. Abbey's financial back, and they were also a little fearful that Mr. Gye, the husband of Mme. Albani, would, not unnaturally, seek to put that singer in Mme. Nilsson's place. Meanwhile, the opera season at Covent Garden came to a close, and though Mr. Gye had not had Colonel Mapleson at Her Majesty's Theater to cope with, as in former seasons, but only English opera at Drury Lane, under the direction of Carl Rosa, the financial outcome was such as to suggest that Mr. Gye's attitude toward opera at the Metropolitan was something like that which the Germans describe as a cat walking about a dish of hot porridge.
At intervals bits of gossip reached New York by cable, but none of them was of a comforting character. One week it was said to be the exorbitance of Mme. Nilsson's demands which gave Mr. Gye pause, and the next the difficulty of finding a tenor worthy of succeeding Signor Campanini and capable of satisfying the captious, critical, and fastidious people of New York. There were suspicions, too, that some of the embarrassments which confronted Mr. Gye and the Metropolitan directors were due to the machinations of that sly and persuasive old dog, Colonel Mapleson. Nilsson had but one rival, and she was Mme. Patti. Her Colonel Mapleson had secured; not only her, but, report said, Scalchi, Tremelli, and Tamagno also. Mme. Scalchi had been a strong prop of the first Metropolitan season, and Tremelli and Tamagno, though they had not been heard in America, had names to conjure with. Tremelli never came, and it was not until 1890, when Mr. Abbey was again in the traces of an Italian opera manager, and was exploiting both Mme. Patti and Mme. Albani, that Tamagno was heard in New York.
Failures of such magnitude as those of Mr. Gye in London, Colonel Mapleson at the Academy of Music, and Mr. Abbey at the Metropolitan Opera House, naturally set the beards of the wiseacres a-wagging. Clearly the world of opera was out of joint and a prophet with a new evangel seemed to be needed to set it right. In New York the efforts had been made along old lines, but Mr. Gye had ventured on an experiment which suggested the polyglot scheme which became the fixed policy of the Metropolitan Opera House some ten years later. Along with the old Italian list Mr. Gye gave some of Wagner's lyric dramas in German, and even ventured an English opera done into German—C. Villiers Stanford's "Savonarola." Was Italian opera dead? So it almost seemed; but the incidents attending its demise were familiar to operatic history and as old as Italian opera in London and New York. When the art form was making its first struggles for habilitation in the British metropolis Addison thought the spectacle so amusing that he wrote an essay in which he pictured the amazement of the next generation on learning that in the days of its predecessors English men and women had sat out entire evenings listening to an entertainment in a foreign tongue. And he said in that essay many other excellent things, the truth and force of which are just as deserving of appreciation (and just as needful) now as they were in the time of the writer.
The consciousness of the absurdity of Italian opera transported in the "original package" (to speak commercially) to England and America seems to have been constant with the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Of this the legion of managerial wrecks which strew the operatic shores or float as derelicts bear witness. Bankers, manufacturers, and noblemen have come to the rescue of ambitious managers, or become ambitious managers themselves, only to go down in the common disaster. Mr. Delafield wrote his name high among his fellows across the water by losing half a million of dollars in a single season—a feat which no man equaled till Mr. Abbey came. Taylor got himself into the King's Bench Prison by his venturesomeness, and, once there, found consolation in a philosophy which taught him that of all places in the world the properest one for an opera manager was a prison. But I have mentioned this before.
Time was when the popular taste found complete satisfaction in the melodies of the Italian composers. Time was when the desire for novelty in the operatic field could be satisfied only by importations from Italy. Time was when Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen went to Italy to study operatic composition and wrote in the Italian manner to Italian texts. All this had changed at the period of which I am writing—Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen had operas in their own languages and schools of composition of their own. But still New York and London clung to Italian sweets.
And Italy had become sterile. Verdi seemed to have ceased writing. There were whisperings of an "Iago" written in collaboration with Boito, but it was awaiting ultimate criticism and final polish while the wonderful old master was engaged in revamping some of his early works. Boito was writing essays and librettos for others, with the unfinished "Nerone" lying in his desk, where it is still hidden. Ponchielli had not succeeded in getting a hearing for anything since "La Gioconda." Expectations had been raised touching an opera entitled "Dejanice," by Catalani, but I cannot recall that it ever crossed the Italian border. The hot-blooded young veritists who were soon to flood Italy with their creations had not yet been heard of. The champions of a change from Italian to German ideals seemed to have the argument all in their favor. The spectacle presented by the lyric stage in Germany and France seemed to show indubitably what course opera as an art form must needs take if it was to live. Gluck, Weber, and Wagner, all Germans, had pointed the way. In 1883 five new operas by English composers reached the dignity of performance, and it was significant that two of them—Mr. Mackenzie's "Colomba" and Mr. Stanford's "Savonarola"—were performed in German, the former in Hamburg, the latter in London. There were many lovers of opera in New York besides the musical reviewer for The Tribune who believed that if America was ever to have a musical art of its own the way could best be paved by supplanting Italian performances by German at the principal home of opera in the United States. We should, it is true, still have foreign artists singing foreign works in a foreign tongue, but the change in repertory would promote an appreciation and an understanding of truthful, dramatic expression in a form which claimed close relationship with the drama.
This was the state of affairs when, negotiations having failed with both Mr. Abbey and Mr. Gye, the summer days of 1884 being nearly gone and the prospect of a closed theater confronting the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House, Dr. Leopold Damrosch submitted to them a proposition to give opera in German under his management, but on their account. Either the forcefulness and plausibility of his arguments or the direfulness of their need led the directors to make the venture. Dr. Damrosch went to Germany toward the end of August; toward the end of September he was back in New York, ready to announce a season of opera in German, with a completely organized company and a promising list of operas. Few persons knew what was coming, and the information brought with it a shock of surprise. Dr. Damrosch had been a vigorous factor in the musical life of New York for twelve years, but he had never been identified with opera in the public mind, and, in fact, his practical familiarity with it was little. He had come to New York from Breslau, where he was conductor of the Orchesterverein (a symphonic organization) in 1871. He had had some practical experience with the theater at Weimar, where he played with the orchestra of the Court Theater under the direction of Liszt, had been musical director at the Municipal Theater in Posen and Breslau, but for short periods only. He had not gone through the career of the typical German conductor for the reason that he was not a musician "vom Hause aus"—as the Germans express it. He was a physician turned musician—a member of one of the scientific professions who had abandoned science for art.
Dr. Damrosch was a remarkable man. He was born in Posen, Prussia, on October 22, 1832. He studied music in the home circle, like the generality of German lads, but his parents had chosen the profession of medicine for him, and he had acquiesced in the choice, matriculating in the medical department of the University of Berlin after he had completed the usual gymnasial course of studies. He had not abandoned his love for music, though he so devoted himself to medicine that in due course he was graduated with honors and received his degree. Incidentally, like Schumann at Heidelberg, he continued to study music, Hubert Ries being his teacher in violin playing, and the venerable Professor Dehn in counterpoint and composition. After graduation he returned to his native Posen to practise medicine, and remained there thus occupied till 1854.
In 1855 the physician's earlier and stronger love for music achieved the mastery over his adopted profession, and he started out into the world as a concert violinist. He played at Magdeburg and at Berlin, where his talents were so much admired that on the recommendation of friends in the Prussian capital he went to Weimar, where he won the friendship of Liszt and joined the body of enthusiastic young musicians—Peter Cornelius and others—who had rallied around the great musician and were fighting the battles of the new German school. His musical creed was formed here, as he himself confessed in a series of articles written for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. His first official appointment was as director of the music at the Stadttheater in Posen, and in 1866 he was called to fill the same post at Breslau. After he had resigned this position he remained in Breslau as director of the Orchesterverein, which he called into existence until he accepted the call of the Männergesangverein Arion in New York in 1871. Though Dr. Damrosch had achieved a European reputation before he came to New York, his best and most enduring work was accomplished here, where he organized the Oratorio Society, which has had a continuous existence since 1873, and the Symphony Society, which, amid many vicissitudes and with several reincarnations, has lived since 1877. The establishment of German opera, though it did not endure, was yet his crowning achievement, and at the culmination of the glory which it brought him he died. But of that presently and in its proper place.
The artistic basis of the scheme which Dr. Damrosch put into effect was essentially German. It dispensed with the star system (except so far as the engagement of Mme. Materna was a deference to it) and substituted instead a good ensemble, unusual attention to the mounting of operas, and the bringing out of dramatic effects through other stage accessories. The change of base brought with it of necessity a change of repertory, and the Italian operas which had formed the staple of New York lists for years were put aside for the masterpieces of German and French composers. One or two efforts to include works of a lighter lyrical character sufficed to demonstrate the wisdom of a strict adherence to the list of tragic works of large dimensions and spectacular nature, and the sagacity of Dr. Damrosch was shown in nothing more clearly than in his choice of operas for representation.