AMERICAN PERFORMANCES
Fortunately, also, it was this same Anton Seidl who conducted the first performances of the “Ring” in America, beginning with “Siegfried” in 1887. “Die Walküre” had previously been produced under Leopold Damrosch. The success in these cases was immediate; for the Metropolitan Opera House had imported the leading Wagnerian singers from Germany.
ANTON SEIDL
For years the leading conductor of Wagner opera in America
THEODORE THOMAS
Noted conductor who worked for years to make Wagner music known to the American public
The ground had been well prepared. Theodore Thomas had labored many years to educate the public up to Wagner; his activity culminating in the great Wagner festival of 1884, for which he imported three of the leading Bayreuth singers, Materna, Winkelmann, and Scaria. That same season Wagner’s operas and music-dramas began to lead the others at the Metropolitan, and among the singers who helped to popularize his works were Lilli Lehmann, Marianne Brandt, Milka Ternina, Albert Niemann, Heinrich Vogl (fo-gl), Max Alvary, Theodor Reichmann, Emil Fisher, most of whom had studied with Wagner, besides, somewhat later, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Olive Fremstad, Johanna Gadski, and the Americans Lillian Nordica, Emma Eames, Louise Homer, and Geraldine Farrar.
The first of the Nibelung operas heard in New York was “Die Walküre.” It was sung at the Academy of Music eight months after the festival at Bayreuth, but the performance was in every way inadequate. In a way it was fortunate for the Wagner cause that Abbey and Grau lost $250,000 giving operas in Italian and French during the first season (1883-84) of the Metropolitan Opera House, just built at a cost of $1,732,978. That failure induced the directors to try German opera, and for seven years it ruled supreme; but the German singers, great as they were in their own sphere, could not, with a few exceptions (notably Lilli Lehmann) do justice to Italian and French works. The eager desire to hear those again, under more favorable conditions, led to a temporary cessation of German opera; but it so happened that one of the famous singers engaged for French and Italian opera was the great tenor, Jean de Reszke, who gradually became an ardent Wagnerite, eager to appear in the Nibelung operas. He induced the management to reengage Seidl and some of the best German singers, and once more Wagner flourished, side by side with Verdi and Meyerbeer, Gounod and Bizet. Wagner now leads in the number of performances, followed by Puccini and Verdi. Singers of every nationality now seek to appear in the Wagner operas, and an ambition of the great conductors, including the Italian, Toscanini, is to interpret the Nibelung’s Ring, of which Liszt wrote: “It overtops and commands our whole art-epoch as Mont Blanc does our mountains.”