Conried’s patience and optimism were inexhaustible. He met every rebuff squarely and surmounted every barrier. He won in the courts. The press attacks and the pulpit onslaughts only furnished publicity; he found other singers to take the place of the rebels, and so, as the event proved, in conferring the leadership of the orchestra on Hertz, he opened a brilliant career for an excellent conductor until then little known in America. As for the public response, the demand for seats was unparalleled, even in Metropolitan history: the directors were all besieged by applications, and I alone made over a hundred people happy by securing seats for them.
Nevertheless, on the eve of the first production everything within the Opera House seemed in utter chaos. We were there until two o’clock in the morning and beheld a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The famous Munich stage manager Lautenschlager, imported for this special performance, was then still rehearsing raising and lowering the drops for Kundry’s big scene, and supernumeraries were scurrying about answering the conflicting demands of their directors; weary stage carpenters and “hands” were lying in the wings snatching such minutes of sleep as were possible, while high up in the stage lofts were stowed away the chorus boys to keep them out of the clutches of the S.P.C.C. To the onlooker, professional or amateur—to everybody except the confident Conried—there seemed nothing but disaster ahead. The brilliant success that evolved is too much a matter of operatic history to require recounting here.
Conried had always drawn unsparingly on his reserves of energy and resistance, and there came at last a moment when those reserves were exhausted. An unpleasant episode, involving not himself, but one of his company, enlisted all his efforts. At its conclusion, he was met with a piece of bad news: Dr. Holbrook Curtis told him that he feared that a growth which had just appeared in the throat of Caruso would prevent this, now his particular star, from singing during the coming season and might end his career altogether. Conried went from the doctor’s office to the Opera House to watch an important, long-drawn-out rehearsal. Shortly thereafter he had a breakdown from which he never recovered.
When he died, his widow and son requested me to arrange the funeral, and readily adopted my suggestion that as Heinrich Conried’s greatest success had been won in the Metropolitan Opera House, so his obsequies should be held there as Anton Seidl’s had been ten years before. I knew that Conried had not been connected with any synagogue, but I asked whether he had mentioned a preference.
“None,” said his son.
Being president of the Free Synagogue, I requested Rabbi Wise to officiate. I communicated with the directors of the Conried Opera Company, who consented to the plan, and every branch of the organization from the orchestra to the scene-shifters volunteered to help.
It was an event which none who witnessed it will ever forget. The proscenium arch was hung with black, and the “set” was the mediæval interior used in the third act of “Lucia.” In the centre was the great catafalque, its outlines almost obscured by masses of flowers—lilies, roses, orchids, literally by tens of thousands—flanked by two Hebrew candelabra, surmounted by the bust of the impresario that had been presented to him, during his illness, by the members of the company.
Promptly at eleven the Metropolitan Orchestra began the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and, carried by six skull-capped bearers, the coffin, entirely covered by a pall of violets, was placed upon the stage. Mme. Homer and Riccardo Martin and Robert Blass sang Handel’s “Largo”; the choir-boys from Calvary Church who had appeared in the first American production of “Parsifal” intoned a setting of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”; Dr. Wise and Professor William H. Carpenter, of Columbia, spoke of the dead man’s work, and then, with the notes of the Chopin funeral-march sobbing through the Opera House—attended by music-lovers, judges, artists, financiers, leaders in almost every walk of life, there was taken from the scene of his greatest work the body of the weaver-boy of Bielitz.
These memories have taken me somewhat far afield and consumed much of the space that I had intended to devote, in this chapter, to my own activities. I should like to tell of my service as director of the Educational Alliance, the consolidation of a dozen activities for the benefit of children—and particularly the Jewish children—of that Lower East Side neighbourhood; and, too, of my work on the Board of Directors of the Mt. Sinai Hospital, the institution which my father helped so many years before; and of my interest in the Henry Street Settlement so ably developed by my friend Lillian Wald, my connection with which eventually led Mrs. Morgenthau and me to establish the Bronx House. Mrs. Morgenthau once taught in the Louis’ Downtown Sabbath School at 267 Henry Street, and right next door to it Miss Lillian D. Wald and Miss MacDowell, the daughter of General MacDowell of Civil War fame, had started an experiment that was to grow into a vast benefit for the entire community. Up to that time the people of the Lower East Side who were unable to afford regular medical treatment for themselves or their babies went without it until the last minute and then sought the rare dispensaries; for any other sort of help, they turned to the district political bosses, who never failed to require a substantial return for favours and who had few favours to dispense to those who neither voted themselves nor controlled the votes of others. Miss Wald practically originated the idea of the house-to-house, or the tenement-to-tenement, visiting trained nurse, who made friends with the sick and needy in their own homes, cared for the ill, showed their relatives how to care for them, gave practical lessons on the bringing up of children, and demonstrated that household hygiene is the ounce of prevention that is worth a pound of cure. Out of this evolved the now famous Henry Street Settlement.
This work deeply interested me, and I have been a constant and frequent visitor at the house, and have supported a visiting nurse on Miss Wald’s staff for the past twenty-two years.