March 8, 1923
MUSICAL COURIER
G
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: THE OPERATIC STEPCHILD OF
AMERICA
praised the Italians because they made “the air and the words conform to each other only in a general way,” so Mr. Krehbiel tells us. It is because Mozart, probably more than any other writer of lyric drama, made his music so closely reflect each word that each word is important to the auditor. The majority of people who attend opera barely reads the libretto. No doubt there are many who never know what even the most frequently heard operas are about. How great, then, is their difficulty when they attend Mozart, who in such circumstances must to their eyes and ears degenerate into a mere stringer-together of pleasing concert pieces, arias, duos, trios and ensembles sung in costume. Yet here is a composer who has written music to involved, complicated and complex plots. An audience may sit through the long second act of Tristan and Isolde and be held spellbound without more knowledge of the words than their eyes suggest— not that we commend or recommend such an act— but no audience can sit through the second act of The Marriage of Figaro and have the barest comprehension or appreciation of the merriment, the intrigue, the fascinating character development, the drama and the comedy, unless it knows what the singers are singing when they are singing it. And just as this is undeniably true, neither can they receive the full pleasure of the music. There is nothing more tedious than to watch action on the stage— and there always is plenty of it in Mozart—and discover it is all Greek. Even the lovely melodies cannot entirely wipe out the inevitable boredom of such proceedings, more especially in view of the recitative which occupies so much of the time in these operas. In fact the recitatives, unless they are comprehended, go far towards making Mozart unpopular with the average spectator.
The most elementary consideration of the case of Mozart must begin here, for what chance of success has a purveyor of entertainment in the highest or lowest sense of the word if his audience is destined to be bored, no matter how skillful he is in his method? What a difference there is if the persons out front know as each speech is sung that the Countess and Susanne have a secret which the Count is trying to explore, but which Figaro is blunderingly trying to prevent his knowing! What is true of this single scene in The Marriage of Figaro is more or less true of all the scenes in his operas.
It is often stated that since most opera books are silly, they are better sung in a tongue not understood. How absurd this is! If the stories and the words are ridiculous in the original language, do they remain less so because only a few grasp them? Because the tomfoolery is revealed in a foreign vernacular, are the sensibilities to the nonsense so much less keen, so much more debased that those who understand the diction can listen in patience? Such carpers at translated opera would do well in trying to gain credence for their argument by continuing their line of reasoning to its logical conclusion and insisting that all such trash be sung not in any intelligible words, but only in such vowels and consonants as are easily, beautifully and exquisitely vocal. One would believe that it is only when English is used that librettos become stupid, for then only is it that reviewers rend them to shreds.
What of Mozart’s librettos? Are they so inane that people of intelligence must needs go insane when they know what they are about? Are there so many better books on the operatic stage than The Marriage of Figaro or Don Juan? Both tell good stories that are legitimate subjects for treatment on the stage, but stories which must be grasped almost word for word in order that they and their music can be appreciated at their proper values. A lot of pother was made last spring because of the “ludicrousness” of the theme of Cosi Fan Tutte. Yet this was all because the spectators were asked to accept as the convention of the comedy the fact that two women might be deceived into not recognizing their lovers if the latter were disguised. Shades of Rigoletto! Season in and season out theater goers are made to assent to far less probable and possible circumstances in spoken plays and no one lifts an eyebrow. Furthermore, according to E. J. Dent in Mozart’s Operas, it has been said that the subject of this comic opera was based on events that had actually taken place in Vienna shortly before the Emperor chose it as a
By Ray Henderson
Copyrighted, 1923, by The Musical Courier Company.
THIS is a good argument, very convincing, very much to the point and timely. William Wade Hinshaw has tried the Impresario and Cosi Fan Tutte on the American public with his Society of American Singers and has found these operas very much to the public taste. The argument, however, need not only apply to Mozart. If Mozart should be given in English why should not all opera? Surely every opera would be better enjoyed if the words were understood!—The Editor.
enough to try The Elopement from the Seraglio, Cosi Fan Tutte, Idomeneo or The Clemency of Titus? Is it the fault of the producers or of the public ?
Whenever the absence of Mozart from our stage is lamented, the obloquy invariably is placed at the door of the singers of today, who are said either not to have the voices or the training properly to sing his music. If this is the cause, why did Mozart reach only the beggarly average of three performances a year when the American operatic stage possessed what is generally considered to be one of the most imposing arrays of great singers known in any single period in the history of singing? For instance, Mr. Krehbiel mentions that in the performance of Don Juan on November 28, 1883, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Nilsson was the Donna Anna, Sembrich the Zerlina and Fursch-Madi the Donna Elvira, which cast he describes as the finest distribution of the women’s roles New York has ever seen. Five performances of Don Juan were given that season, but it was the only Mozart opera in the list.
We also have a very recent remembrance of a finely spirited, excellently sung, captivating production of Cosi Fan Tutte at the Metropolitan Opera House; and yet the management has not been led to announce any further ventures into Mozartian representation for the current season, while on the other hand it is proceeding to restore Wagner to the theater and is hazarding two dubious new operas as the only novelties. The fact remains that Mozart does not hold his own in America with Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Mascagni or Leoncavallo. There are singers to give Mozart’s operas in brilliant fashion, if the operas are demanded. In Salzburg last summer we heard artists who are qualified for Mozart and hold their own with any of the past, Selma Kurz (the great soprano whose New York debut through several vexatious reasons failed of its purpose to reveal her tremendous artistic prestige), Elisabeth Schumann, whose Despina probably has never been surpassed if it has been equalled; Huni Mihacsek, Frl. Anday, Josef Manowarda and Richard Mayr, while our own stage can produce in addition to Florence Easton, Frances Peralta, Giuseppe de Luca and George Meader, who were in Cosi Fan Tutte last spring, John McCormack, Claire Dux, Emmy Destinn, Frieda Hempel, Maria Ivogun, Alma Gluck, and Paul Bender. Galli-Curci, if there were the necessary impulse, might reveal a Queen of the Night or a Susanne who would set tongues wagging.
It would seem that the case of Mozart is not merely that of the present day or generation. Nor is this condition likely to change until the two factors which operate so disastrously to his disadvantage are eliminated. One of the most serious handicaps against Mozart in this country is one that seemingly cannot be remedied at present, the absence of a suitable auditorium in which to sing his operas. Except for The Magic Flute and possibly Don Juan, the Metropolitan Opera House is not a happy place for Mozart; but until the ideal theater is at hand together with the necessary organization behind it, the device invented by Joseph Urban for Cosi Fan Tutte is not an impossible make-shift. However, we do not believe that the size of the opera house is so much to blame as is that of the language in which he has been sung. This we feel, is the rock that really has wrecked Mozart’s chances in America.
Since the spirit which prevails in Mozart’s operas is predominantly that of comedy, it is vital that the audience know what is going forward on the stage. It is not enough that the general outlines of the story are familiar, as may or may not suffice in the case of tragic music dramas or inconsequentially simple Italian compositions. Madame de Staël condemned German composers because in their music they followed too closely the sense of the words, and
HAT Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the first grand opera composers to be introduced to the American public, is of standard writers for the lyric stage the least heard in our opera houses today while he is a living figure, not a mere gesture, in the musical life of the Continent, is a fact worthy of serious consideration by those interested in the progress of musical art in America. The case of Mozart in this country is the more astounding since the center of the world of Orpheus has gravitated to our shores. Insofar as performance goes, whether in the opera house or in the concert hall, our much berated, uncultivated nation has taken the lead. In the creative realm we are yet to attain the dignity, the importance, the significance that we have assumed in the reproducing field. But Mozart, the greatest single force in the history of opera, is neglected in the land where^ execution, interpretation and appreciation have reached high standards.
It is the purpose of this article to set forth what the writer believes to be the cause of this deplorable state of affairs; to show, through the history of opera production in America, the status the composer has held and to point certain fallacies that have hindered the rightful succession of Mozart to a predominant position in our musical life.
Probably the first performance of a Mozart opera in New York was that given of Henry R. Bishop’s English arrangement of The Marriage of Figaro, at the Park Theatre, in 1821. During the first season of Italian opera in New York (which the Garcia company began on November 29, 1825, with Rossini’s The Barber of Seville) Mozart’s Don Juan was presented, reaching a total of ten or eleven representations in Italian. Turning to a later period, we find, according to the 1920 American supplement of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, that, between the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883 and the close of the season of 1919-1920, this theater presented The Marriage of Figaro twenty-seven times, Don Juan thirty-two times and The Magic Flute forty-two times. H. E. Krehbiel, in Chapters of Opera and More Chapters of Opera, records that The Magic Flute was sung six times at the Academy of Music by the American Opera Company, under direction of Theodore Thomas, in 1886, and that Don Juan had two performances at the Academy of Music under the direction of Colonel Mapleson in 1885-1886 and seven performances at the Manhattan Opera House during Oscar Hammerstein’s first two seasons of opera at that theater. Here we have a total of 116 performances of Mozart in thirty-seven years in New York City, an average of a trifle more than three a year.
Three significant facts are thus clearly shown. Mozart was given a hearing during the very beginnings of the production of grand opera in America. During what is known to be a golden era of singers, he averaged a bare three performances a year. Only three of his operas were received into the repertory of important companies, while The Elopement from the Seraglio apparently had its only production in New York when Carl Anschutz gave a short season of German opera at Wallack’s Theater, Broadway and Broome street, in 1862. Cosi Fan Tutte was not sung here until 1922. In 1916 Albert Reiss produced in New York an early work, Bastien and Bastienne, at the same time presenting H. E. Krehbiel’s veision of The Impresario.
The natural expectation is that, following the introduction of three such masterpieces as The Marriage of Figaro, Don Juan and The Magic Flute, sufficient interest was aroused to encourage impresarios to produce other works of the same composer. This has been the history of other successful writers for the lyric stage. Consider what we have had to hear because of the popularity of Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini, to mention the most notorious cases. Yet it is evident that no such demand was ever excited in the case of Mozart, for until the third decade of the twentieth century only three of Mozart’s larger works had been accepted in the standard repertory of American opera houses. When managers in search of novelties were driven to the extreme of offering the American public such things as Cristoforo Colombo, Fedora, Tiefland, Le Villi, The Girl of the Golden West, Julien, Lodoletta, The Polish Jew, Zingari, Francesca da Rimini, The Taming of the Shrew and the like, why had none been brave