OPERA AND NATION: FANCIULLA IN CONTEXT

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1 OPERA AND NATION: FANCIULLA IN CONTEXT CAROLYN GUZSKI State University of New York, College at Buffalo My hope, when I came to America, was to be able to discover some good American 1 operas, which I could produce and maintain in the repertoire. When Giulio Gatti-Casazza ( ) came to the Metropolitan as General Manager in 1908, he brought a spirit of New World exploration to an American Plan imbued with the nineteenth-century European impresario tradition in its ambition to augment the lyric repertory with new works. Yet a scheme to raise the international profile of the theater through an aggressive program of repertoire renewal was already in progress, spearheaded by future Metropolitan Opera Company chairman Otto H. Kahn ( ) from his arrival on the board in The world premiere of La Fanciulla del West, far from being an isolated musical event, in fact inaugurated a multifaceted artistic plan at the house that encompassed an alluring range of possibilities: Weber s Oberon, Humperdinck s Königskinder, the American operas Natoma and The Pipe of Desire, and projected works by Debussy and Charpentier. [Photo (1): Kahn] A charismatic emigrant from Mannheim, the Wall Street financier began his brilliant ascent as the Progressive Era s leading arts patron with a longstanding desire not only to establish the Metropolitan as an international artistic leader by presenting innovative repertoire premieres, but to transform it into a truly national theater as well: It has been the idea of a number of directors for a long time now that the Metropolitan Opera House would be more truly a national institution if English opera were given there. 2 This dramatic reorientation of mission compelled the theater, for the first time in the quarter-century of its history, to look to contemporary works as a source of artistic prestige. American composers in particular had begun to advocate for serious recognition in the new century, and Kahn soon became the movement s de facto point man for the lyric stage, responding to the burgeoning question of artistic nationalism on three fronts: opera by composers born in the United States, which he enthusiastically encouraged; opera in English, which he endorsed only for works originally composed in that language; and opera on American subjects. Although Europeans had set librettos on New World events practically since the birth of the genre, the Metropolitan had never considered producing such a scenario. 1 2 Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Memories of the Opera (New York: Charles Scribner s Sons Inc., 1941; rprt., London: John Calder, 1977), 236. New-York Daily Tribune, 14 February 1908, 7, quoted in Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler s American Years, (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1989), 79.

2 Guzski, 2 The situation changed dramatically in 1907, when competing impresario Oscar Hammerstein I ( ) granted celebrated musical comedy composer and naturalized American citizen Victor Herbert ( ) the first commission in American operatic history to write for the stage of his rival Manhattan Opera House, publicly promoting the venture by offering a $1,000 prize for a suitable libretto by an American. The New York Times even identified playwright David Belasco as a potential contestant, adding in a dramatic headline, Girl of the Golden West May be Taken as Foundation if Puccini Doesn t Want It. 3 Gatti-Casazza was then at the helm of La Scala, together with conductor Arturo Toscanini, but the pair had been courted for months by a newly reorganized Metropolitan increasingly under the control of Kahn, who became chair of its powerful Executive Committee 4 in October The Italians discussed the developing Fanciulla project with their old friend Puccini and his publisher Giulio Ricordi during an evening in Milan that same month. Puccini s reluctance to pursue a Scala premiere said to be a bitter remnant of the 1904 Butterfly debacle there served the situation well, and plans to reunite the trio on more receptive American shores began to coalesce. 5 Once Gatti actually arrived at the Metropolitan, he immediately responded to Hammerstein s startling threat by proposing a rival national prize: $10,000 for an opera of American authorship, a princely sum clearly intended to keep emerging native talent out of 6 Hammerstein s reach. Even before Gatti sailed for New York, Kahn found himself compelled to respond to calls from the nationalist fringe to produce all repertoire in English translation. At a February 1908 summit, the new chairman announced that recently arrived conductor Gustav Mahler ( ) would bring his version of Carl Maria von Weber s Oberon to the Met stage as its premiere production in English. 7 [Photo (2): Mahler] Herbert Opera for Hammerstein, New York Times, 5 April 1907, 9. Board of Directors and Executive Committee meetings, 17 October 1907, Conried Metropolitan Opera Company Minute Book, , Metropolitan Opera Archives. Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis, Puccini & The Girl: History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 63; Notizie Teatrale-Lirica, Corriere della sera [Milan], 30 December 1907, quoted in Randall and Davis, 69, 198. Board of Directors meeting, 19 November 1908, Metropolitan Opera Company Minute Book ( ), 37, Metropolitan Opera Archives. Apart from Hammerstein s precedent, Gatti may have been inspired by a 1908 London contest for an English opera to commemorate the Ricordi centennial. Daily Tribune, 14 February 1908, 7. The plan did not materialize due to Mahler s untimely death in 1911; the production was eventually premiered in German (Köln, 1913) and came to Met in 1918 under the direction of Mahler protégé Artur Bodanzky.

3 Guzski, 3 The fateful winter meeting had another ramification: when Mahler returned to Europe in April 1908 for his annual summer holiday in the Austrian Tyrol, he took with him a portfolio of manuscript scores from which he selected the house s first projected American work, The Pipe of Desire by respected New England School composer Frederick Shepherd Converse ( ), 8 set to a libretto by Boston architect George Edward Barton. This shrewd move, engineered by Kahn, afforded more authoritative control over the choice of American premiere than the vagaries of a competition. There was only one problem: Converse s opera had already received a semi-professional performance at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1906, thus disqualifying it for world premiere status and shattering any plans to award the Metropolitan s first such honor to a native composer. The Met nonetheless remained untroubled, and for good reason: the unexpected turn of events ceded the American slot to Fanciulla and the prospect of a glittering inaugural world premiere far beyond what Converse s worthy but modest one-act could have offered. Opera-in- English plans were also upgraded to premiere-level status, as Oberon was superseded by Engelbert Humperdinck s operatic recasting of his dramatic melodrama Königskinder, an enchanting successor to Hänsel und Gretel in the Romantic Märchenoper genre, intriguingly said 9 to have been planned in English (but eventually sung in German). [Photo (3): Königskinder] The distinguished world premieres, with both composers in attendance, eventually took place within three weeks of each other in December 1910, but were carefully preceded by the Converse American premiere in March of the previous season. The Metropolitan also attempted to ease the sting of the Puccini honor by saturating its advance publicity for Fanciulla with claims to the opera s Americanness. The move apparently backfired, however, when the composer himself expressed annoyance with the tactic. 10 Suspecting that the vaunted premieres would intensify audience demand in future seasons, Gatti did not neglect to attend to long-range planning. During the summer of 1908, while Mahler was immersed in American manuscripts, and months before plans with Puccini began to solidify, the general manager-designate approached Claude Debussy ( ) and Gustave Charpentier ( ) in Paris and convinced both composers to grant the United States premieres of dramatic works in progress exclusively to the Metropolitan. The theater s 5 July 1908 agreement granted Debussy a modest advance of 2,000 francs for the exclusive [H.T. Parker], Mr. Converse s Opera at the Metropolitan, Boston Evening Transcript, 10 September 1908, 13, quoted in Robert Joseph Garofalo, Frederick Shepherd Converse ( ): His Life and Music (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 37; To Give American Opera, New York Times, 23 August 1908, sec. 3, 1. Ensemble Effects for Metropolitan, New York Times, 19 July 1908, sec. 3, 3. Randall and Davis,

4 Guzski, 4 American performing rights to potential settings of Poe s La chute de la maison Usher ( ), Le diable dans le beffroi ( ) and possibly a Legend of Tristan, despite the composer s remonstrations: It is a bad business you are doing.... I do not believe I will ever finish any part of all this. 11 [Photo (4): Debussy paybook excerpt] Charpentier s Julien, ou La vie du poète (a sequel to his popular Louise) temporarily enjoyed a happier fate, with a 26 February 1914 American premiere, starring Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar, that brought to fruition a 5,000-franc advance agreement originally signed 10 April [Photo (5): Charpentier paybook excerpt] [Photo (6): Charpentier photo] The resolution of Victor Herbert s situation was more complex: incipient bankruptcy at the Manhattan Opera impelled the composer to audition his first opera, Natoma (after a Native American scenario by Joseph Deighn Redding), at the Metropolitan. But a rejection by Gatti rendered the score homeless until Kahn gallantly proffered it to the newly formed Philadelphia- Chicago Opera Company assembled from former artists of the Hammerstein regime. Music director Cleofonte Campanini, a man of palpable ambition, elected to make the world premiere production (Philadelphia, 25 February 1911) a lightning rod for debate on the nationalist agenda, hoping to usurp the Metropolitan and achieve national theater status for the new company. [Audio clip: John McCormack (tenor), excerpt from No Country Can My Own Outvie, Natoma (Victor Talking Machine Company, rec. 1912)] Toward this end, Herbert produced a centerpiece aria for the leading tenor to expound on the virtues of patriotism in a soaring apostrophe to Columbia, and Sunset: The Magazine of the Pacific and All the Far West published a piece on the premiere under the title A Real American Metropolitan Opera Company Paybook, , 261, Metropolitan Opera Archives; Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy et Edgar Poe (Monaco, 1961) and Debussy: His Life and Mind (London, 1965), 2:141, quoted in Robert Orledge, Debussy s House of Usher Revisited, The Musical Quarterly 62 (October 1976): 538, 550. Gatti s assistant manager, Edward Ziegler, suggested that the Tristan work may have been abandoned by the time the Metropolitan remitted payment, as its records cite only the two Poe operas; Ziegler to Oscar Thompson, 22 June 1937, Metropolitan Opera Archives, Ziegler correspondence, , D. It is possible that Debussy s sudden return to his preliminary libretto sketches for Usher in June 1908, after having last mentioned the idea in a letter to Chausson of 6 September 1893, was a result of Gatti s interest. A reconstruction of La chute de la maison Usher was prepared by Juan Allende-Blin from the extant autograph manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (Paris: Société des Éditions Jobert, 1979). The premiere performance, nearly seventy years after the Debussy-Gatti agreement, was given by the Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Hessischer Rundfunk, cond. Eliahu Inbal, on 1 December Metropolitan Opera Company Paybook, , 278, Metropolitan Opera Archives.

5 Guzski, 5 Opera, an obvious swipe at Fanciulla that no doubt found considerable resonance beyond Manhattan. While Herbert s celebrity made Natoma the first American opera to have any of its music recorded for commercial release (Victor Talking Machine Company, 1912), his fledgling operatic effort deemed artistically immature by critics ultimately had little hope of achieving the centenary status now enjoyed by Fanciulla. How did Puccini ultimately view his role in the culture wars on the national landscape? Despite his objections to the marketing of Fanciulla as an American opera, he may have remained sanguine about the concept, for an intriguing (albeit rather suspicious) New York Times item from 1912 contained the startling report that Puccini had decided to compose a new American opera, and has announced that he probably would choose as his librettist an American college student ; seeking fresh ideas and novel execution, he had invited the undergraduates 13 of Cornell University to write a libretto for his next American work. The prolonged search for a suitable English libretto was not likely to be fulfilled by an inexperienced dramatist, however, and the tantalizing prospect of a second Puccini American opera never came to fruition. In the aftermath of the Metropolitan s remarkable repertoire initiative, the operatic Great Tradition seemed to be drawing to a close as well. Under Gatti and Kahn s aegis, the pace of new European productions at the house remained brisk, but the rate of absorption of operas into the repertory declined precipitously from the genre s glory days of the nineteenth century. By the 14 mid-1920s, Gatti was referring to Fanciulla as an opera that we no longer give. (He reversed his verdict in 1929 for the celebrity cast of Maria Jeritza, Giovanni Martinelli, and Lawrence Tibbett.) Yet his elegant appreciation of Puccini s incomparable dramatic gift still rings true: To tell the truth, by now I am rather fed up with the theater and things theatrical, and sooner or later I may end up sending this whole weary world of papier-mâché to the devil. Yet, I hope to go once more unto the breach to have the pleasure and the honor of presenting to the public for the first time a new opera by the only composer who in each of the five parts of the world is considered capable of moving, entertaining, persuading and finally knowing how to create a true theatrical opera. A composer whose name and works will certainly never perish despite all the stupidities, malignancies and baying of Beckmessers large and small! Wants Cornell Libretto; Puccini Asks Collegians to Write Book for American Opera, New York Times, 3 December 1912, 15. È inutile però che il Pomé studii la Fanciulla del West, opera che noi non diamo più. Gatti-Casazza to Conte Luigi Grabinski Broglio, Milan, 26 January 1924, Metropolitan Opera Archives, Gatti-Casazza correspondence, Gatti-Casazza to Giacomo Puccini, Torre del Lago, 16 January 1920, Metropolitan Opera Archives, Gatti- Casazza correspondence,

6 [Per dire la verità, io ormai sono piuttosto stufo di teatro e di teatrerie, e una volta o l altra finirò col mandare al diavolo tutto questo mondo di carta pesta. Tuttavia mi auguro di essere ancora sulla breccia per avere il piacere e l onore di presentare per il primo al pubblico una nuova opera del solo compositore che in ciascuna delle cinque parti del mondo è considerato capace di commuovere, divertire, convincere e insomma saper fare una vera opera teatrale. Compositore il nome e le opere del quale non periranno certamente malgrado tutte le stupidità e le malignità e gli abbaiamenti dei Bekmesser grandi e piccoli!] Guzski, 6