Grand Opera: The Story of the Met by Affron Charles & Affron Mirella Jona

Author:Affron, Charles & Affron, Mirella Jona [Affron, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520250338
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Made in USA

Two weeks before his first night, Giulio Gatti-Casaza announced that the Met would at last present an American opera, Frederick S. Converse’s The Pipe of Desire. Soon after, the impresario persuaded the board to fund a $10,000 prize for a new work by an American-born composer. “I am convinced,” he declared, “that there is enough musical talent in this country to justify a movement in favor of an American grand opera, and I am sure that if the movement is properly organized we shall be able to have operas worthy of the name” (Times, Nov. 21, 1908). In his 1925 “Statement,” Otto Kahn thought it politic to recognize the Italian intendant’s Americanization of the company; Gatti had introduced nine American operas in seventeen years. Kahn neglected to mention the anemic total of thirty-nine performances they had registered; and only two productions had survived into a second season. He elided also the point later made by Frances Alda in her witty account of a rehearsal of Walter Damrosch’s Cyrano: “I had just finished my first duet with [Pasquale] Amato. The pencil marks on my score were misleading. ‘Where do we go from here?’ I asked Amato. Before he could reply, [Richard] Hageman, the assistant conductor, who was rehearsing us, spoke up: ‘From Gounod to Meyerbeer.’ ” At its 1937 Met premiere, Hageman’s own Caponsacchi would be savaged for its borrowings. Gatti let six years elapse between Henry Hadley’s 1920 Cleopatra’s Night (starring Alda) and 1927 when Deems Taylor’s The King’s Henchman became the first American opera to reach double-digit iterations. Before Gatti left in 1935, there were only two more.9

As time went by, the stubborn hope that America would find its operatic voice was repeatedly dashed. On October 15, 1935, Edward Johnson informed the board that he had obliged the Juilliard mandate by examining twenty-nine American scores; only Vittorio Giannini’s The Scarlet Letter and David Tamkin’s The Dybbuk, one saddled with a poor libretto, the other too costly, got as far as a second look. Like Krehbiel and Henderson before him, Olin Downes was an advocate for American opera in the abstract and a feared critic in the particular. Still, as director of music for the World’s Fair, he pitched revivals of Cyrano, The Emperor Jones, and Amelia Goes to the Ball for the Met’s special 1939 spring season. An all-Wagner program won the day. In 1941, the Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded grants-in-aid to composer William Schuman and librettist Christopher LaFarge so that they might learn the workings of the opera house from within. Their residency produced no tangible result. Johnson managed only six indigenous entries. Newsweek summed it up: “As far as American opera at the Metropolitan is concerned, the years have shown it to be a case of damned when it does, and damned again when it doesn’t” (Jan. 20, 1947).10

As for Bing, neglect of American titles (he trotted out a pathetic four in twenty-two seasons) was just one aspect of the hidebound programming of which he was justly accused.

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