"Messaline" was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House on January 22, 1902. The list of those who took part in its performance reads thus:
Messaline ……………………………….. Mme. Calvé
Tyndaris ………………………………. Miss Marilly
La Citharode ………………………. Miss Van Cauteren
Tsilla …………………………. Miss Juliette Roslyn
Leoconce ………………………… Miss Helen Mapleson
Helion …………………………………. Mr. Alvarez
Myrtille |
Olympias | ……………………………… Mr. Journet
Myrrho ………………………………… Mr. Gilibert
Gallus …………………………………. Mr. Declery
Un Rameur de Galère …………………….. Mr. Dufriche
Un Mime Alexandrin ………………………. Mr. Viviani
Un Poète d'Atellanes ……………………. Mr. Giaccone
Le Loeno …………………………………. Mr. Vanni
Un Marchand d'Eau ……………………….. Mr. Maestri
L'Edile …………………………………. Mr. Judels
Harés …………………………………… Mr. Scotti
Conductor, M. Flon
When Mr. Grau produced "Salammbô" it was possible for the writers in the newspapers to give a detailed account of the purport and progress of the story, and also an account of its panoramic furniture without offending decency. This is scarcely possible in the present instance. "Salammbô" was written many years ago, before the conviction had dawned upon the minds of opera makers that thugs and thieves, punks and paillards, were proper persons to present as publishers of operatic themes. Since then there has grown up in Italy a notion that the mud of the slums is ennobling material for celebration by the most ethereal of the arts, and in France that lust and lubricity are lofty inspirations for dramatic song. Gautier's delectable account of one of Cleopatra's nights has furnished forth an opera book; the mysteries of Astarte have been hymned, and Phryne, Thaïs, and Messalina have been held up to the admiring views of the Parisians clothed in more or less gorgeous sound—and little else. There is no parallel between this movement on the part of opera and the contemporary tendency of the spoken drama. Those diligent regenerators of society, Ibsen, Pinero & Co., affect a moral purpose to conceal an obvious aim from the simpleminded; the French makers of opera are franker, for they seek to glorify impudicity in the persons of its greatest historical representatives by lavishing upon the subject the most gorgeous pictures, the most ingenious theatrical contrivances, and the most sensuous music at their command. "Messaline" is a case in point. This work has Armand Sylvestre and Eugène Morand, two brilliant Frenchmen in their way, for the authors of its book, and Isidore de Lara, at the time chief of the drawing-room musicians of London, as its composer. The story of the opera is a sort of variant of "Carmen" set in an antique key, its heroine being an historic Roman empress instead of a gipsy cigarette girl. But any one who shall take the trouble to glance at the sixth satire of Juvenal will recognize that all its motives were drawn from that source. The likeness to "Carmen" is accidental, after all, though Bizet's opera was not without influence upon the work of librettists and composer. Like Carmen, Messalina, merely to gratify her lust, draws an honest-minded and supposedly pure man into her toils, and then throws him over for the next man she meets who is handsomer and lustier. In Bizet's opera the men are the soldier Don José, and the bullfighter, Escamillo; in De Lara's Harés, a singer, and Helion, a gladiator. Both operas end with the arena as a background—the Plaza de Toros in Seville, on the one hand, the Roman Circus, on the other. But here the resemblances end unless we pursue the traces of Bizet's music into De Lara's score, and this I shall not do, out of respect for the most brilliant composer that France has produced since Berlioz. Echeon, the harper; Glaphyrus or Ambrosius, the flute players, who are castigated in Juvenal's diatribe against marriage, are the prototypes of Messaline's first victim, as also is Pollio, whom a lady of lofty rank so loved that she kept for her kisses the plectrum with which he had strummed his lyre. That lyre she had incrusted with jewels, and for the sake of him who twanged it she had not hesitated to veil her face before the altar of Janus, and speak the mystic formula after the officiating priest. ("What more could she do were her husband sick?" asks Juvenal; "what if the physicians had despaired of her infant son?") As for Helion, his prototype is the gladiator Sergius, save that we are permitted to find him comely to look upon, and not as one galled by his helmet, having a huge wen between his nostrils and "acrid rheum forever trickling from his eye."
So, too, in the exposition of Messalina's character the librettist, while constructing an entirely fanciful tale, and omitting all reference to the most notorious of her amours (the one which at the last wrung the decree of her death from the generally complacent Claudius), nevertheless managed to indicate Juvenal's description in the song which Harés sings against her, a recital by Myrrho, a scene in the slums, which she visits in disguise, and where she is rescued from a gang of roisterers by Helion, and in the scene of her wooing of the gladiator. (This scene, as it was played by Mme. Calvé, may not be pictured here.) A glimmer of palliation might be read out of a few passages in the book, and at the end there is an indication of something better than the groveling carnality of the woman whose name has been a byword for nineteen centuries in her offer of herself to Helion's sword, and her opening the door to the lurking assassin when the gladiator refuses to strike in obedience to his old vow to avenge the supposed death of his brother. But all of the stage Messalina's words and acts up to that time give the lie to the thought of her capability of feeling a single throb of pure sentiment. She is presented as all beast, and there is not one moment of cheer to relieve the horror of a play which shows how her lewdness compasses the death of two loving brothers, who, unknown to each other, were both her lovers. At the end the hand of Harés, stiffened in death, clings to her robe, and brings her face to face with that death which the veritable Messalina was too cowardly to give to herself when her own mother pleaded with her to do so at the fateful meeting in the garden of Lucullus.
But there is often palliation in music. To this fact I have called attention before. Music can chasten and ennoble; but not music like Mr. De Lara's, which, when it strives for anything, strives to give an added atmosphere to the incontinence portrayed by the stage pictures, and proclaimed in the text. It is not dangerous music, however, for it is impotent, with all its blatant pretense. The composer seeks to fill the opening scene with languor and lassitude; he fills it with ennui instead. If De Lara's music were a hymning of anything, I should say it was a hymning of sensuality in its lowest terms; but there are neither eloquent melodies nor moving harmonies in the score. De Lara is a feeble distemper painter. The current of his music never really flows; it moves sluggishly now and then, and eddies lazily about every petty incident. In the scene of debauchery in the second act, it waits for a xylophone to rattle an accompaniment to the dice; it holds its breath for a muted horn to obtrude its voice with an inane vulgarity which would be laughable were it not pitiful to hear it in a work which is admirable in its dramatic contrivance and scenic equipment.
Mr. Paderewski's opera, "Manru," had its first performance on February 14, 1902. Mr. Damrosch conducted. The composer, who had taken a hand in the preparations, listened to the representation from a box, and the list of performers was this:
Ulana …………………………….. Mme. Sembrich
Hedwig ………………………………. Mme. Homer
Asa ………………………….. Miss Fritzi Scheff
Manru …………………… Alexander van Bandrowski
Oros ………………………………. Mr. Mühlmann
Jagu …………………………………. Mr. Blass
Urok ……………………………….. Mr. Bispham
"Manru" had its original performance at the Court Opera in Dresden, on May 29, 1901. Before reaching New York it was given in Cracow, Lemberg, Zurich, and Cologne, and Mr. Bandrowski, whom Mr. Grau engaged to sing the titular part, had already sung it twenty times in Europe. Its production at the Metropolitan Opera House brought scenes of gladsome excitement. Hero worshipers had an opportunity to gratify their passion in connection with a man who had filled a larger place in the public eye for a decade than any of his colleagues the world over; students were privileged to study a first work by an eminent musician, whose laurels had been won in a very different field; curiosity lovers had their penchant gratified to the full. The popular interest in the affair was disclosed by the fact that never before in the season had the audience at the Metropolitan been so numerous or brilliant; naturally the presence of the admired composer whetted interest and heightened enthusiasm. Long before the evening was over Mr. Paderewski was drawn from his secluded place in a parterre box by the plaudits of the audience, and compelled to acknowledge hearty appreciation of his achievement along with the artists who had made it possible. Despite the flaws which were easily found in the work, "Manru," the performance showed, is a remarkable first opera. There will scarcely ever be a critic who will say of it as one of the composers now set down as a classic said of the first opera of a colleague, that first operas, like first litters of puppies, ought properly to be drowned. "Manru" has had its day, but it was brilliant while it lasted, and it is possible that now it is not dead, but only sleeping. The story, badly told in the libretto made after a Polish romance by a friend of the composer, Dr. Nossig, has the charm of novelty, and beneath it there lies a potent dramatic principle. But more than the story, more than the picturesque costumes and stage furniture, there is a fascination about the music which grew with each hearing. Many of its characteristic details are based upon national idioms, but on the whole Mr. Paderewski wrote like an eclectic. He paid his tribute to the tendency which Wagner made dominant (where is the composer of the last thirty years who has not?) and, indeed, has been somewhat too frank in his acknowledgment of his indebtedness to that master in falling into his manner, and utilizing his devices whenever (as in the second act) there is a parallelism in situation; but he has, nevertheless, maintained an individual lyricism which proclaims him an ingenuous musician of the kind that the art never needed so much as it needs it now. As a national colorist Mr. Paderewski put new things upon the operatic palette.
"Manru" is not an opera to be disposed of with a hurried ultimatum on either book or music. From several points of view it not only invites, it clamors for discussion. The book is awkwardly constructed, and its language is at times amazingly silly; yet the fundamental idea is kept before the mind persistently and alluringly by the devices of the composer. A Gipsy who forsakes his wife and child because he cannot resist the seductions of a maid of his own race would ordinarily be a contemptible character, and nothing more; but in this case, despite the want of dramatic and literary skill in the libretto, Manru is presented as a tragic type who goes to merited destruction, indeed, but doing so nevertheless creates the impression that he is less the victim of individual passion than of a fatality which is racial. I can easily fancy that the Polish novelist from whom the story was borrowed presented the psychological fact more eloquently than the librettist, but it is a question whether or not he did so more convincingly than Dr. Nossig plus Mr. Paderewski. Mr. Leland (after Mr. Borrow the closest of literary students of the Gipsies) has pictured for us the Romany's love for roaming, and our sympathy with his propensity. We look wistfully at the ships at sea, and wonder what quaint mysteries of life they hide; we watch the flight of birds and long to fly with them anywhere, over the world and into adventure. These emotions tell us how near we are to be affected or elected unto the Romany, who belong to out-of-doors and nature, like birds and bees. Centuries more than we think of have fashioned that disposition in the black-blooded people, and made it an irresistible impulse. Thus the poetical essence of Manru's character is accounted for, and the librettist has given it an expression which is not inept:
With longings wild my soul is fill'd,
Spring's voices shout within me;
Each fiber in my soul is thrill'd
With feelings that would win me.
In bush and brake
The buds awake,
Of nature's joy the woods partake,
And bear me helpless, spent, along
Where freedom lives far from the throng;
Thus pours the mountain torrent wild,
That stubborn rocks would check;
Thus rolls the molten lava stream,
Dispersing havoc dire, supreme,
Enfolding, whelming all in wreck!
Thus flies the pollen on the breeze
To meet its floral love;
The song, outgushing from the soul,
Thus seeks the starry vault above.
Is it a curse?
There is no other life for me.
'Tis written in the book of fate:
Thy race must ev'ry pledge abate
And wander, rove eternally!
But why? and where?
I know it not,—
I needs must fare!