Part of the summer of 1894 I had spent in beginning the music of an opera on Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” The subject had always fascinated me and I had years before prepared a dramatic scenario for which I finally induced Hawthorne’s son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop, to prepare a libretto. I completed the composition of the music the following summer and decided to produce it during the season 1895-96 with the Damrosch Opera Company in Boston, where the scene of the original novel is laid, in the old Colonial days of Governor Endicott.
I gave the rôle of Hester Prynne to Johanna Gadski. David Bispham played Roger Chillingworth, and Barron Berthold sang the clergyman, Arthur Dimmesdale.
The first performance took place February 10, 1896. American audiences are proverbially kind to authors on first nights, and Boston was especially interested in this opera because of Hawthorne’s novel. The scenery presented old Boston in very picturesque fashion, and I had spent a good deal of time with my stage-manager and costumer in the different Boston collections of Colonial belongings in order to give a correct picture of that period. Early portraits were consulted for the “make-up” of Governor Endicott and other old Boston celebrities, and the “company of ancient and honorable artillery” who appeared in the last act carried an exact copy of the banner which still hangs, I think, in Faneuil Hall.
Gadski gave a very touching impersonation of Hester, and Bispham fairly revelled in the fiendish machinations of Roger Chillingworth. The artists and composer received numberless recalls and the members of my company united in presenting me with several charming mementos of the day.
Mrs. John L. Gardner, who had already in those days become a real and loyal friend and supporter, and who has, according to her wonderful capacity for friendship, continued as such during these many years, sent a huge laurel wreath to the stage for me, the centre of which contained a large scarlet letter “A”! The reader may imagine what jokes were cracked at my expense about that very prominently displayed letter.
The music was, I think, well written and orchestrated, but so much of it had been conceived under the overwhelming influence of Wagner, that I am afraid Anton Seidl was right when, after hearing the work in New York, he confided cynically to his friends that it was a “New England Nibelung Trilogy.”
Reviewing the work critically myself after these many years, I would say that it showed sufficient talent and musicianly grasp to warrant a composer’s career, but life and its exigencies willed otherwise, and all the “might have beens” are but idle speculation.
An evil star seemed to shine over that winter’s opera season from the financial standpoint. The entire country was suffering from a severe financial depression and my company was large and expensive. I had to travel continually, and during the entire five months carried a company of one hundred and seventy people, including an orchestra of seventy men, as I considered so large an aggregation my solemn duty as a Wagner disciple and propagandist.
As Abbey and Grau finally decided to embark on a German opera department of their own, adopting my suggestion when it was too late for me to combine with them, they very naturally shut me out of the Metropolitan Opera House and I was compelled, for my New York season, to lease the old Academy of Music which had become a house for cheap theatrical productions and had lost its high fashionable estate of other years.
My seasons in Chicago and Boston had been profitable, but many cities in the South, with the exception of New Orleans, which gave me a wonderful welcome, could not pay expenses, as the theatres were too small and my company too large and literally too good.