About this time my attention was drawn by my friend Zimelli, the manager of the theatre at Malta, to a most charming young soprano, who he assured me was destined to take a very high rank; and about the same time I received a letter from a regular subscriber to the house, a distinguished officer, pointing out the excellence of this young lady. I at once opened negotiations which ultimately led to favourable results. Colonel McCray, I may add, had written to me from Florence on the same subject. The name of the young singer was Emma Albani; and having, as I thought, secured her services—positively promised in a letter written to me by the lady—I found myself deprived of them by Mr. Gye; who I find, now that I look back on the past, paid me an attention of this kind—sometimes greater, sometimes less—regularly every year.
On her arrival Mdlle. Albani was to sign the contract; and as soon as she got to London she, with perfect good faith, drove to what she believed to be my theatre. She had told the cab-man to take her to the manager's office at the Italian Opera. She was conveyed to the Royal Italian Opera, and, sending in her card to Mr. Gye, who had doubtless heard of her, was at once received. On Mdlle. Albani's saying that she had come to sign the contract which I had offered her, Mr. Gye, knowing that I never made engagements but with artists of merit, gave her at once the agreement she desired.
To do Mr. Gye justice I must here mention that after the contract had been signed he, in the frankest manner, avowed to Mdlle. Albani that he was not Mr. Mapleson, for whom she had hitherto mistaken him. He explained to her that there was a manager named Mapleson who rented an establishment somewhere round the corner where operas and other things were from time to time played; but the opera, the permanent institution known as such, was the one he had the honour of directing. If, he concluded, Mdlle. Albani was sorry to have dealt with him she might still consider herself free, and he would at once tear up the contract.
Mdlle. Albani, however, was so impressed by the emphatic manner in which Mr. Gye dwelt on the superiority of his theatre to mine that she declared herself satisfied, and kept to the contract she had signed. Colonel McCray called on me soon afterwards to beg that out of consideration for the lady I would give up the letter in which she declared herself ready to sign with me. I assured him that I had no intention of making any legal use of it, but that I should like to keep it as a souvenir of the charming vocalist who had at one time shown herself willing to be introduced to the London public under my auspices.
Why, it may be asked, as a simple matter of business—indeed, as an act of justice to myself—did I not take proceedings for an enforcement of the agreement which Mdlle. Albani had virtually contracted? I, of course, considered the advisability of doing so, and one reason for which I took no steps in the matter was that Titiens, Nilsson, Murska, and Marimon were members of my Company, and that even if Mdlle. Albani had come to me I should have found it difficult to furnish her with appropriate parts.
The young lady duly appeared at Covent Garden about the beginning of April in La Sonnambula, and at once achieved a remarkable success, which caused me very much to regret the loss of her. She afterwards appeared as "Elsa" in Lohengrin in an Italian version, which had been made for me by Signor Marchesi, husband of the well-known teacher of operatic singing, and himself an accomplished musician.
I had ordered from Signor Marchesi as long before as 1864 an Italian version of Tannhäuser, which I duly announced in my prospectus for that year, but which I was dissuaded by some critical friends, who did not believe in Wagner, from presenting to the public. I had been advised, and there was certainly reason in the advice, that if I had quite decided to run such a risk as would be necessarily incurred through the production of an opera by Wagner (whose Tannhäuser had three years previously been hissed and hooted from the stage of the Paris Opera-house) I should at least begin with his most interesting and most attractive work, the poetical Lohengrin. Accordingly, reserving Tannhäuser for a future occasion, I determined to begin my Wagnerian operations with the beautiful legend of Elsa and the Knight of the Swan; and I commissioned Signor Marchesi to execute such a version of Lohengrin as he had previously given me of Tannhäuser—a version, that is to say, in which, without any departure from the meaning of the words or from the forms of the original versification, the musical accents should be uniformly observed.
But in England the laws relating to dramatic property seem to have been made for the advantage only of pirates and smugglers. I had printed the Italian translation of Lohengrin which Signor Marchesi had executed for me, and for which I had paid him the sum of £150. But I had not secured rights of representation in the work by going through the necessary farce of a mock performance before a sham public; and anyone, therefore, was at liberty to perform a translation which in any country but England would have been regarded as my property. How Signor Marchesi's translation of Lohengrin got into Mr. Gye's hands I do not know. But the version prepared for me at my cost was the one which Mr. Gye produced, and which somehow found its way to all the Italian theatres.
It has amused me in glancing through the history of my operatic seasons since 1861 to see how persistently Mr. Gye endeavoured by some stroke—let us say of policy—to bring my career as operatic manager to an abrupt end.
In 1861, when at Adelina Patti's own suggestion I was engaging a Company and taking a theatre with a view to her first appearance in England, he entangled her in an engagement by means of a fifty-pound loan.