The three graces in "Tannhäuser" were done by the beauties of the theatre, two premières danseuses and myself! We were to dress in white Greek draperies with jewels, and of course, as we were to be seductive, pink roses. I wore my beautiful Bergcrystal necklace, made for me in Paris. The ladies could not contain their jealousy and said of course, "aufgedonnert" (thundered out) like that I naturally would stand out from them. Annoyed at their pettiness I removed the diamonds and flowers and all ornaments. They then said of course to go without any ornaments was palpably the best way of all to make myself conspicuous. So I let it go at that.
I well remember the Third Lady, for there are spoken passages in this opera, and I had to speak German for the first time before an audience of critically listening natives, and Mozartian German at that! Pamela nearly gave me nervous prostration. They were determined that I should do it because she had to speak German with an English accent, so they said it was made for me. As a matter of fact, after the months I had spent in carefully eradicating my English accent it was difficult suddenly to exaggerate it to order. I had to learn, rehearse and play the entire part in five days, and I thought I should go mad. I had never seen the wretched thing, so the baritone who played my husband kindly came over to help me with the business. Otherwise my sister and I hardly left the piano to eat and sleep. The dialect part of the libretto was in an ancient manuscript copy, torn, marked and dog's-eared, and written in an almost illegible German script. I could not take time enough to puzzle it out, so my sister spent hours poring over it, deciphering the German letters literally one by one by aid of a key, and writing it again in Latin script. I had no clothes for it, as it was not on my repertoire and it plays in 1820, but they costumed it for me in modern dress, so again my summer wardrobe was called into service.
I learned it so quickly that the colleagues called me "Die Notenfresserin" or note-eater, but the strain was awful. I remember when I was studying Pamela the Kapellmeister told me at least ten times, how the contralto who played the Pamela in his father's theatre and who was also an English-speaking woman, had so caught his father's fancy in that rôle, that from then on he had a tremendous affair with her. This he repeated to me again and again, but I never seemed to take the hint.
As Erda in "Siegfried" I had a most trying experience. The director had been, as I have said, a well-known Bayreuth singer, and he thought no one could sing Wagner but himself. Unfortunately he had a strong tendency to "look upon the wine," and when he had a part to sing nervousness attacked him to such an extent that he began drinking in self-defence to enable him to stand the strain. Perhaps his beverages were more potent than usual, but that night he was decidedly irresponsible. He struggled through the Wanderer's first scene, and conscious that he was doing it badly, he sent out for a bottle of champagne as a bracer. The consequence was that in our scene in the third act, he was utterly incapacitated. He sang all kinds of things not in the text, bits from Hunding in "Walkuere," from Daland in "Hollaender," from "Fidelio." He rolled about the stage and lurched in my direction with his spear pointed at me, shouting Pogner's advice to Eva while I was singing Erda's responses. It seemed to go on for ages, but at last Siegfried, waiting for his cue in the wings, realized that he must save the scene, entered and escorted his befuddled relation from the stage. I had made up with a creamy white grease paint and no red. My sister said, "Why did you make up with rouge and not have the pallor we agreed upon?" My cheeks were so scarlet from mortification that no grease paint would have paled them.
The audience took it splendidly, I must confess, and refrained from any expression of disapproval or joy—though it must have been funny! The next day there were announcements in all the papers that he had had a temporary lapse of memory owing to grief over the sudden death of his mother, who, as the stage manager cynically informed us, had reached out a hand from the grave to save her son, she having been dead for ten years! The director went to Berlin and stayed there for weeks. We afterwards learned that it was a plot, deliberately planned and put through by Carlhof to gain the direction of the theatre. I can see him now stalking around, six foot four, chewing his rag of a dyed moustache, his face pale and his eyes glittering with anxiety as to the success of his plan to encourage the director to drink. The director once told me the hours between the last meal and the time to go to one's dressing room to begin making up are the dangerous ones. He said, "First one takes a glass of wine to steady one's shaking nerves; later a glass is not enough so it becomes a bottle, then two bottles and so on till control is lost." It is easy for any singer to understand, and the best remedy is to omit that first glass.
"Carmen" was the second opera which I had to do without rehearsal. The soprano had failed in it and it was promised to me to keep if I could do it ohne probe (without rehearsal). I sang it for the first time, quaking with nerves, on Christmas Day, and my nick-name after that was "Die schoene Carmen." After Christmas we produced the "Merry Widow" which was new then, and I was cast for the Dutiful Wife. There was plenty of variety in my work. I would sing Carmen on Sunday, Orlofsky in "Fledermaus" on Tuesday, speaking German with a Russian accent, Pamela on Thursday night with an English accent, and Frau Reich on Friday night with no accent at all! I dressed Frau Reich in a gown of the time of Henry V while the rest of the cast "went Shakespearean." We were far too busy for dress rehearsals of an old opera, and I supposed of course that it would be costumed in the real period of the play. When I appeared on the stage, they all demanded "And what, pray, are you supposed to represent?" "I am playing Shakespeare's Frau Reich," I answered with dignity—"and I am the only person on the stage who is properly dressed." But you have to know your colleagues well before you can make an answer like that successfully, without their hating you for it.
CHAPTER XI
SOME STAGE DELIGHTS
WE had also what is known as Abstecher, on off nights. That is, performances in a neighbouring and still smaller town about once a month. We would travel altogether, taking our costumes and make-up with us, principals second class and chorus third. Our fare was paid, and the generous management allowed us two marks apiece (50c) extra for expenses! As we left at five P.M. returning at one or two in the morning, this allowance was not excessive for food alone, but the thrifty took black bread and sausage with them, and expended only fifteen pfennigs (3½c) for beer. Our Abstecher was a village with a cavalry barracks, a railroad station, and not much else. The theatre was built over a sort of warehouse and stable combined, and we fell over bales and packing cases at the entrance. The dressing rooms were tiny boxes, with a shelf, one gas light in a wire globe, and a red-hot stove in each room, and no window. We dressed three in a room. The stage was so small that once, as Nancy, I played a whole scene with the tail of my train caught in the door by which I had entered, and never knew it! We were always given a rapturous welcome. Sometimes one of the principals would miss the train and be forced to come on by a later one, and then the sequence of scenes in the opera would be changed quite regardless of the plot, for we would play all the scenes, in which he did not appear, first, and do his afterwards. After the opening chorus, the soprano would go on for her aria, and while she was singing it, we would decide what to give next. "I'll do my aria!" "Oh no! Not the two arias together!" "Let's have the duet from the third act, and then the soprano and tenor can just come in casually and we'll do the big quartet, and then you can do your aria!" We would see the audience hunting in a confused sort of way through their libretto, with expressions rather like Bill the Lizard. This happened once in the "Merry Wives," which is confusing at best.
After the performance there was no place in which to wait but the café of the station. I was looked upon as recklessly extravagant because I would order a Wiener Schnitzel mit Salat for sixty pfennigs (15¢) and when I took two cents' worth of butter too, they would raise their eyebrows and murmur, "Diese Amerikaner!" Sometimes the Director came with us, and then the principals would be invited to his table and treated to (German) champagne. But we were always glad when he stayed at home, because we were much freer over our beer. There are always one or two members of the company who are extremely amusing, and their antics, imitations and reminiscences make the time fly. There was one little chap, the son of a Rabbi, who lived on nothing a day and found himself, and was an extraordinary mimic. His imitations of a director engaging singers, the shy one, the bold one, the beginner; and his marvellous take-off of the members of the company kept us in roars of laughter. He could imitate anything—a horse, a worn-out piano—and is now one of the most successful "entertainers" in Berlin. The ones in whose compartment he travelled on the train thought themselves lucky and often arrived so hoarse from laughing that they could hardly sing.