The difference between hearing opera where it grows and hearing it in New York is the difference between eating strawberries warm from their vines in June and strawberries in January that have come a thousand miles by freight. Where opera grows, it is the blend of native music, singers and listeners that gives a ripe flavor of a warmth which Fifth Avenue can never purchase.
This, every performance in Frankfurt had; but even this could be raised to a higher key of inspiration. I walked in one night and found myself amid a pious ceremonial. They were giving an old work, of bygone design, stiff in outline, noble, remote from all present things. Why did they revive this somewhat pale and rigid classic? For contrast, variety? Not at all. Two hundred years ago this day, Gluck had been born. Gluck had written this opera. For this reason, then, Frankfurt was assembled to hear Gluck's music and remember him; and, as I looked at these living Germans honoring their classics, I thought it was truly a splendid people that not only possessed but practically nourished themselves with these masterpieces of their great dead.
But this was not all. This was Germany looking at its Past. In the Frankfurt opera house I also learned one of the ways in which Germany attends to its Future. It was on a Sunday afternoon. As I crossed the open space toward the opera house it seemed as though I were the only grown person bound there. Children by threes and fours, and in little groups, were streaming from every quarter, entering every door, tripping up the wide, handsome stairs, filling all the seats—boys and girls; it was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. After a few minutes I found that I was indeed almost alone amid a rippling sea of children—nearly two thousand, as I later learned. In the boxes here and there was a parent or two with a family party, and dotted about the house a few scattered older heads among the young ones.
The overture began. "Hush!" went several little voices; the sprightly, expectant Babel fell to silence; they listened like a congregation in church.
Then the curtain rose. It was a gay old opera, tuneful, full of boisterous, innocent comedy and simple sentiment. Not Gluck this time; Gluck would have been a trifle severe for their young understandings. The enthusiasm and the attention of these boys and girls, with their clapping of hands and their laughter, soon affected the spirits of the singers as a radiant day in spring; it affected me. I envied the happy parents who had their children round them; it was like some sort of wonderful April light. Beneath it the quaint, sweet old opera shone like a fruit tree in blossom. The actors became as children again themselves; so did the fiddlers; so did the conductor. I doubt if that little old opera, Czaar und Zimmermann, had ever felt younger in its life; and I thought if the spirit of Goethe were watching Frankfurt, his city, to-day, it would add a new happiness to a moment of his Eternity.
Between the acts I was full of questions. What occasion was this? I read the program, wherein was set forth a most interesting account of the composer—his character, life and adventures, with a historic account also of Peter the Great, the hero of the opera; but nothing about the occasion. So in the lobby I addressed myself to a group of the men I had seen dotted among the rows of children. The men were schoolmasters. The occasion was an experiment. The children were of the public schools of Frankfurt—not the oldest scholars, but the middle grades of the schools. For the oldest, Frankfurt had already provided opera days, but this was the first ever given for these younger boys and girls. The cost was twelve-and-a-half cents a seat. If it proved a success, a second would follow in two weeks. At the theater, throughout each winter school term, plays were given expressly for them in this way—the great German classics; but never any opera before to-day.
Well, the performance went on; but I was obliged, near the end of it, to hasten away to my train for Nauheim, most reluctantly leaving the sight and company of those two thousand joyous children of the Frankfurt public schools. "Rosy cheeks predominated; eyeglasses were rare."—Again I quote from my own diary:—"The children seemed between ten and fifteen. The boys had good foreheads and big backs to their heads."