My farewell performance in Boston was a Saturday matinée of the “Walküre” with Materna as Brunhilde. In the morning the orchestra struck. We had made arrangements to send the entire company to New York on one of the large Fall River steamers, but they vowed that they would not go by steamer and insisted on being sent by train. I was equally determined to send them by water. The steamers were palatial, the weather excellent spring weather, and there was no valid reason for objecting. When they persisted in their demands I told them that I would consider them as having broken their contracts, that I would not pay them their salaries for the week, and would give the “Walküre” performance accompanied on two pianos, by John Lund and myself. This was, of course, a crazy bluff, but it worked and they decided to accept passage by steamer.
At the close of the third act of “Walküre,” when Materna as Brunhilde had snuggled into the artificially deep hollow of the rocky couch which sustained her bulky form and on which she was to begin her slumber of years until the hero, Siegfried, should awaken her, and when Staudigl (Wotan) had disappeared in the flames, I suddenly noticed, while conducting the beautiful monotony of the last E-major chords of the Fire Charm, that the grass mats just below Brunhilde’s couch had caught fire, and that just as the curtain was descending slowly on the last bars a Boston fireman with helmet on his head and bucket in his hand quietly came out from the wings and poured a liberal dose of water on the flames. The thing happened so late and so quickly that there was no panic. The people went mad with enthusiasm and Materna, Staudigl, and I had to bow our farewells many, many times. Just after one of these recalls I noted the little fireman standing in the wings and saying: “Be jabbers, I ought to come out too.”
“So you should,” I said, and with that took him by one hand and Materna by the other and thus we dragged him before the footlights where, with true Hibernian sense of humor, he bowed right and left with a delighted grin on his face.
Thus ended my first opera tour.
While I was on tour the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House met to consider their future policy, and, in view of the success of the opera in German inaugurated by my father, they decided to continue on the same lines. Curiously enough they appointed a young man as director of the opera who had never had any managerial or musical experience in his life. His name was Edmund C. Stanton. He was a relative of one of the directors and had acted as recording secretary for the Board of Directors. He was tall, good-looking, with gentle brown eyes, always well groomed, of a kindly disposition and the most perfect and courtly manners which indeed never failed him and which were about all that he had left at the end of his seven years’ incumbency, at which time the German opera crumbled to dust as a natural result of his curious ignorance and incompetency in matters operatic. The directors at the same time very generously appointed me as his assistant and as second conductor, granting me a salary which was large enough to enable me to support my mother and my father’s family decently. This was naturally a great relief to me and I determined to strain every nerve to show myself worthy of such confidence and generosity.
VII
LILLI LEHMANN
In the spring of 1885 I was to accompany Mr. Stanton as assistant director and musical adviser to engage singers for the following season of German opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, but as Mr. Stanton’s little daughter became ill and subsequently died, I went over alone and have always been quite proud of the four contracts I had ready for Stanton’s signature when he, a month later, arrived in Germany. These were Lilli Lehmann, soprano from the Royal Opera House in Berlin; Emil Fischer, bass from the Royal Opera House in Dresden; Max Alvary, lyric tenor from Weimar, and Anton Seidl, conductor of the Angelo Neumann Wagner Opera Company. These four artists became subsequently the mainstay of the German opera and in America developed to greater and greater power and fame.
Lilli Lehmann, at that time forty years of age, had sung principally the coloratura rôles, and with these had made a great local reputation throughout Germany and Austria. She had sung the First Rhine Maiden at Bayreuth in 1876, and an occasional Elsa in “Lohengrin,” but it was not until she came to America that she began to sing the Brunhildes and Isoldes which made her one of the greatest dramatic sopranos of her time. Curiously enough, she insisted on making her first appearance in America as Carmen, a rôle to which she gave a dramatic, tragic, and rather sombre significance, but in which the lighter, coquettish touches were perhaps not sufficiently emphasized.
She had achieved her pre-eminence as a dramatic soprano only after years of the hardest kind of work, and had only through her indomitable will and energy changed her voice from a light coloratura to a dramatic soprano, and as I was at that period only twenty-three and already occupied a position of considerable responsibility, it took some time before she was ready to concede that I was really a musician of serious purpose who was working day and night to fit myself for the various responsibilities so suddenly thrust upon me.