and so on for quantity. Of the old hurdy-gurdy list "Favorita," "Traviata," "Trovatore," "Lucia," and "Rigoletto" were given, but unitedly they had only ten representations, and most of them were on Saturday nights, when popular prices prevailed. Even though Melba sang in "Lucia," it had to be consorted at the last with "Cavalleria," which Mme. Calvé made attractive. Against this fact we have the other that "Carmen" alone had a greater number of representations than the entire old-fashioned list, and that the operas which were most popular after it were "Tristan und Isolde," "Faust," and "Lohengrin."

Of the ten German performances three were devoted to "Tristan," two to "Tannhäuser," one to "Fidelio," two to "Lohengrin," and two to "Die Walküre." "Tristan," "Tannhäuser," and "Lohengrin" were in the repertory of the regular subscription season. Only two unfamiliar works were brought forward—Bizet's "Pêcheurs de Perles" (two acts only) and Massenet's "La Navarraise"; but there was an interesting revival of Boito's "Mefistofele" after a lapse of twelve years, and a more than interesting revival of "Tristan und Isolde," with Mmes. Nordica and Brema and the brothers de Reszke in the principal parts. Mme. Melba did not join the company until December 27th; she added Massenet's "Manon" to her repertory. Jean de Reszke increased the list of parts in which he was known by adding Tristan to it and the German Lohengrin. Mme. Nordica's new rôles were Isolde, Venus in "Tannhäuser," and Elsa in German. Miss Brema's operas were "Tristan," "Lohengrin," "Orfeo," "Aïda," and "Die Walküre," and, like Mme. Nordica, Mlle. Lola Beeth and Signor Kaschmann, she sang in German as well as Italian. "La Navarraise" was brought forward for Mme. Calvé on December 11, 1895; the two acts of "Les Pêcheurs de Perles" at a matinée on January 11, 1896.

Colonel Mapleson provided a prelude to the Metropolitan season of 1896-97 with a short season of Italian opera of the archaic sort at the Academy of Music. The doughty manager could no longer fly his old London colors, so he appeared as the sole director of "The New Imperial Opera Company." With two or three exceptions all his singers were strangers to the opera-goers of New York. Mme. Scalchi was again with him, and Signor de Anna; but the rest were newcomers. Among them were Mme. Hariclée-Darclée, Mme. Bonaplata-Bau, Susan Strong, and Mme. Giuseppina Huguet, sopranos; Mme. Parsi, Mlle. Ponzano, and Mme. Meysenheim, contraltos; Signori de Marchi, Randacio, Betti, Olivieri, and Durot, tenors; Signori Ughetto and Alberti, barytones, and Pinto, Terzi, Giordano, Borelli, and Dado, basses. The conductors, capable men both of them, were Signori Bimboni and Tango. Within a fortnight "Aïda," "Trovatore," "Traviata," "Les Huguenots," "Sonnambula," and "Faust" had been sung and a new work brought out. This was "Andrea Chenier," by Illica and Giordano, which had its first performance in America on November 13, 1896, the cast being as follows:

Andrea Chenier …………………………….. Durot
Carlo Gerard …………………………….. Ughetto
Maddalena di Coigny …………………. Bonaplata-Bau
La Mulatta Bersi ………………………. Meysenheim
La Contessa di Coigny …………………….. Scalchi
Madelon …………………………………… Parsi
Roucher ……………………………………. Dado
Il Romanziero ……………………………. Alberti
Fouquier Tinville …………………………. ———
Mathieu …………………………………. Borelli
Un Incredibile |
L'Abate, poeta |…………………………. Giordano
Schmidt, Carceriere a San Lazzaro ……………. Terzi
Il Maestro di Casa ………………………. Olivieri
Dumas …………………………………….. Pinto

Tango conducted and the performance had a rude forcefulness quite in keeping with the character of the opera. Under better conditions "Andrea Chenier" would doubtless have held its own for a respectable space in the local repertory. But the seeds of dissolution were germinating in the company even before the performances began, and Colonel Mapleson did not dare to appear long in rivalry with the Metropolitan when it opened its doors on November 16th. In a week or so he went to Boston, where after one or two performances the orchestra went on strike and the Imperial Opera Company went to pieces. With it the last effort of the veteran manager. Mapleson had held out a promise of the likelihood that Giordano would come to New York to give personal superintendence to the production of his opera and carried his fiction to the extreme of telling a reporter of The Sun newspaper that the composer was in the city. Meeting the reporter in the Academy of Music, I expressed my doubt touching the correctness of his information, whereupon he pointed out the gentleman whom Colonel Mapleson had introduced to him as the composer. It was Giordano, the barytone! After its introduction to America "Andrea Chenier" disappeared for nearly a dozen years, when, on March 27, 1908, it had a single performance at the Manhattan Opera House, so that Mme. Eva Tetrazzini, the wife of Cleofonte Campanini, who had retired from the stage, might help at a gala representation in honor of her husband.

No season since the Metropolitan Opera House was opened was so full of vicissitudes as that of 1896-97. First came the death of Mme. Klafsky, who, under the reciprocal arrangement between Mr. Damrosch and Abbey & Grau, was to sing the chief Wagner rôles with Jean de Reszke. This happened in September, and was followed by the death of Mr. Abbey (nominally the leader of the managing directors, though from the beginning it was Mr. Grau who did the practical work of management), and of Mr. William Steinway, who had formulated and carried through the plan of reorganization which relieved the firm of Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau of its burden of indebtedness and transferred it to the shoulders of the Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau Company (Ltd.). Just before the season began Mme. Nordica, who had won her way to a high place in the favor of the public, and whose absence from the company's roster was widely and sincerely deplored, came forward with a story charging her failure to secure a re-engagement to the intrigues of Mme. Melba and M. Jean de Reszke. So far as the gentleman was concerned the story seemed improbable on its face, and long before the season was over Mme. Nordica was willing to admit publicly that she had been misinformed as to the facts in the case. It remained, however, that Mme. Melba had reserved the exclusive right to herself to sing the rôle of Brünnhilde in Wagner's "Siegfried." It soon turned out that the failure to secure Mme. Nordica was to cost the management dear. Mme. Melba sang the part once, and so injured her voice that she had to retire for the season and cede the rôle to Mme. Litvinne (the Mlle. Litvinoff of Colonel Mapleson's company in 1885-86), who up to that time had not succeeded in convincing the public that she was equal to so great a responsibility, although she had been engaged to sing the part of Isolde after Mme. Klafsky's death and the failure of negotiations between Mr. Grau and Mme. Nordica. The manager's judgment was never at fault in these negotiations; he wanted to secure the services of Mme. Nordica, for he well knew their value, but the unhappy contract with Melba stood in his way, and Mme. Nordica was beyond his reach when the failure of Melba's voice and her departure for France on January 23d left the company crippled. Happily the popularity which Mme. Calvé's impersonation of Marguerite in Gounod's "Faust" had found restored that perennial work to its old position as one of the principal magnets of the season. Mme. De Vere-Sapio was engaged to make possible the production of such operas as "Hamlet," "Le Nozze di Figaro," and Massenet's "Le Cid." Then there fell a double blow: Mme. Eames went into a surgeon's hands and Mozart's scintillant comedy had to be withdrawn. It was to have been given on February 10th. Flotow's "Martha" was substituted for it, and in the midst of the performance the representative of Tristan, M. Castelmary, fell on the stage, fatally stricken with heart disease.

It would be pleasant to say that the facts thus detailed exhaust the story of the institution's misfortunes; but they do not. I have already told of its financial outcome. Throughout the season a determined and wicked effort was made to injure the opera, and was helped along by columns of idle speculation and gossip in three or four newspapers. Without ground, so far as anybody could see, the notion was given publicity that there was grave doubt that opera would be given in the following year. The talk seemed wholly gratuitous, for if there were any signs of falling off in popular interest so far as the opera was concerned or in the confidence and satisfaction of the stockholders of the opera house company so far as Mr. Grau's administration was concerned, it escaped the notice of experienced and interested observers. The total attendance was larger than in the preceding season, and the interest displayed in the representations was fully as keen. But the newspaper gossips would have their way, and in the end turned out to be prophets, for there was no opera in 1897-98, for reasons which will have to be discussed in the next chapter.

The season began on November 16th. The regular subscription was for thirteen weeks, three nights a week and Saturday afternoons. Extra subscription performances were thirteen Saturday nights and three Wednesday afternoon representations at popular prices and an extra week—three nights and a matinée—at subscription prices. There were, therefore, in all, seventy-two performances, at which twenty-four different operas were brought forward, as shown in the table which is to follow. There was a less elaborate organization than in the preceding season, but the average merit of the performances was higher, there being no ill-equipped German contingent to spoil the record. There were, however, quite as many German performances without the special singers and the extra subscription. In place of the latter, an attempt was made to give extra Wednesday matinées, but the experiment was abandoned after three weeks.

The most sensational incident of the season was the collapse of Mme. Melba after her ill-advised effort to sing the music of Brünnhilde. To the loveliness of her devotion and the loftiness of her ambition honest tribute must be paid, but it must also be said that nature did not design her to be an interpreter of Wagner's tragic heroines. Her vocal and temperamental peculiarities put a bar to her singing the Brünnhilde music. It did not lie well in her voice, and she was not then, and is not now, of the heroic mould, and her experience should have taught her that her voice would not admit of the expansion necessary to fit her for that mould. That the music wearied her was painfully evident long before the end of the one scene in which Brünnhilde takes part in "Siegfried." Never did her voice have the lovely quality which had always characterized it in the music of Donizetti and Gounod. It lost in euphony in the broadly sustained and sweeping phrases of Wagner, and the difference in power and expressiveness between its higher and lower registers was made pitifully obvious. The music, moreover, exhausted her. She plunged into her apostrophe with most self-sacrificing vigor at the beginning of the scene, and was prodigal in the use of her voice in its early moments; but when the culmination of its passion was reached, in what would be called the stretto of the piece in the old nomenclature, she could not respond to its increased demands. It was an anti-climax. Wagner's music is like jealousy; it makes the meat it feeds on if one be but filled with its dramatic fervor. Recall what I have related of Mme. Lehmann's statement of how she was sustained by the emotional excitement which Wagner's dramas created in her, and how it made it easier for her to sing the music of Brünnhilde than that of Norma. But Mme. Lehmann was a woman of intense emotionality, and her voice was colored for tragedy and equal to its strain. It would be a happiness to say the same of Mme. Melba, but no judicious person would dream of saying it. "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory." Mme. Melba should have been content with her own particular glory.

Massenet's "Le Cid" was the only novelty of the season It was given on
February 12, 1897, with the following distribution of parts: