Patrick Bade
The Metropolitan Opera: 1883 - 1910

​​Patrick Bade - The Metropolitan Opera, 1883 - 1910

- Well, this is what the old Met looked like on Broadway from its opening in 1883 to its demolition in the 1960s. And it was the creation of a group of very wealthy people in New York, new wealthy people, like the Vanderbilts and the Astors and so on, who found themselves excluded from the previous opera house, the Academy of Music, which was monopolised by old money. And so the old money resented the new money, and the new wealthy people were unable to acquire or rent boxes, so they just decided to build their own opera house. And the whole thing completely absurd really, when you think even the old money in New York wasn’t really very old, it was only a couple of generations older than the Vanderbilts and the Astors and so on. But on the 28th of April, 1880, a group of 22 men, men, no women I don’t think, from these families got together at Delmonico’s, and they hatched a plot to finance this great opera house, which I suppose ever since its opening in 1883, has been perhaps the most prestigious opera house in the world. So it was very much a social thing. Opening nights of the seasons were very, very, glitzy occasions as you see here. And it was never a beautiful building, I don’t think anybody claimed that. Although people had great affection for it, it was often referred to as the yellow brick brewery, ‘cause that’s what it looked like. And the interior was designed more for these rich people to be seen, than for views of the stage. So the lowest level of boxes here is what was called the Diamond Horseshoe. And these boxes were rented out through the season for enormous sums of money to very wealthy families.

And they had a really, a system that seems, you know, very, very weird to Europeans. In the programme you can see there is a map of the boxes. They’re all numbered. And also in the programme was a list of everybody who was in those boxes. So you could take your programme and you could identify all these people sitting in the Diamond Horseshoe. And if you look down that list, you can see obviously Vanderbilts, and Harriman, there’s Archer Huntington. So all these very prominent names in New York high society. First night was October 22nd, 1883, and inevitably the first performance presented was Gounod’s “Faust”. This was by far and away the most popular opera of the second half of the 19th century, right up to the First World War, and it was done so often at the Metropolitan that some people dubbed the Opera House the Faust-Spielhaus. The first performance starred the very celebrated Swedish Soprano Christine Nilsson, who you see here as Marguerite. She was, after Adelina Patti, I suppose the most famous soprano in the world, sadly retired before the introduction of the recording process. So we don’t know really what she sounds like, apart from descriptions of critics. Those however, I will say, were extraordinarily detailed, and I’m going to quote and show you some of these criticisms. I mean, it’s been very interesting for me putting together this talk, 'cause I went through reviews of all these performances between 1883 and the early 1900s. And as I said, they’re extremely detailed, quite different from any modern opera reviews, and certainly the critics of that time had a far deeper and more detailed understanding of the art of singing.

There’s much, much more discussion of technique, of coloratura, of trills and all these sorts of things. Most modern critics really, most opera critics, haven’t got a clue about any of that stuff. We can hear the voice of the star of the second performance put on at the Met, which was two nights later on October the 24th, 1883. For me, it’s something of a miracle. It’s amazing that we can hear this. This is the Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich, never quite as famous or adored by the public as say, Adelina Patti or Nellie Melba or Emma Calve, but always a adored by the critics and by the cognoscenti. She was very, very, highly reputed indeed, partly 'cause she was incredibly musical, which is not always the case actually, with famous opera stars. And one of her best party tricks, when she was performing in “The Barber of Seville”, there is the lesson scene, and it was customary at this time that the soprano would actually would break off from the opera in the lesson scene, and the soprano would give a sort of popular concert, with folk songs, and popular songs, or with other coloratura show pieces. She in this scene, in “The Barber of Seville”, she would have a piano wheeled on, and she might play a movement of a Chopin piano concerto, and then they’d hand her a violin, and she’d play a movement of a violin concerto, apparently in both cases, up to professional standard. So these are reviews that she got in 1883, and as you can see, absolute rave reviews.

“No singer ever won the recognition of a New York audience more easily than Madame Sembrich. The very first note she uttered seemed to establish her in the favour of her hearers, and before the curtain had been lowered upon the first act, the new prima donna’s triumph was complete.” Talk about the quality of her voice, her tones, singly clear and brilliant, and so on. The recording I’m going to play you is part of the mad scene from Lucia, and it’s made more than 20 years later, towards the end of her career. But all those qualities that the critics note here, fine texture of voice, velvety softness, brilliance, a very lovely individual timbre to the voice. And in fact, most of the singers I’m going to play you tonight seem to me to have extraordinary techniques. The absolute accuracy of the attack, the flexibility of the voices in this period, was beyond I think anything you’re likely to encounter today. So here is Marcella Sembrich, as she looks in 1883 as Lucia in the mad scene. Marvellous, the way she, those high notes, the way she attacks them, bang in the middle, we get the same sort of thing, of course, with Melba and Emma Eames, other singers that we’re going to hear tonight, no lifting onto the notes. So the system in the early years was that the backers, the financial backers of the house, would hire a manager, an impresario for the season, and then he would hire all the singers and determine the repertoire. And the manager of the first season was a man called Henry Abbot. The season was a social and artistic success, but a financial failure, and the backers were left with heavy debts. So they turned to a conductor called Leopold Damrosch, he was of German origin, and they handed over the management to him, and he had it then up until 1891. And all his contacts were with Germany, so rather strangely really, in New York, all the opera for those years, 1883 to '91, it was performed in German, whether it was Italian, French, or German, and all the singers were German.

The most notable of these singers was Lilli Lehmann, who you see here on the screen, is older. She’s one of the oldest singers to have lived and sung long enough to make records. She was born in the 1840s, and she took part in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, singing quite small roles, but she attracted the attention of Wagner, who admired her very much. And she went on to become the world’s leading dramatic Wagner soprano. The most famous is Alder Brünnhilde and so on. But she also cultivated her bel canto skills. And Wagner always says he didn’t want his operas to be barked and shouted, as they so often are, he wanted them to be sung, and she could really do this. And she maintained her technique into quite an advanced age. I’ll play you a record of her singing, not Wagner, but Casta Diva from Bellini’s “Norma”. She was generally reckoned, well to be the Norma of her era. I suppose within the last 100 years or so, there have only really been three singers who satisfied most critics in this terribly demanding role. Lilli Lehmann in the 1890s, Rosa Poncell in the 1920s, And of course Maria Callas in the 1950s, we’re celebrating her centenary this year, so you are very likely to hear her singing “Casta Diva” on the radio. In fact, I heard it yesterday on the radio and it’s very fine, but Maria Callas quite quickly developed a wobble. The voice is not, in fact almost never was, from the start, completely steady. What is remarkable about Lilli Lehmann here, is here she is after a long career, singing Brünnhilde’s, Isolde’s and so on, singing with absolutely steady, instrumental term. I can’t say this is a record I particularly love.

I don’t know what it is about her singing that, you know, doesn’t completely please me. But it is nevertheless very remarkable for the reasons I’ve just stated. Now, if you want to hear that aria perfectly sung, to my mind the very best version ever made is Rosa Poncell, and I will be playing that to you in a couple of weeks’ time. Now, there was enormous excitement in, oh yes I should have said, that these German seasons came to an end in 1890, and 1891, Italian Opera comes back again, and it’s Italian Opera that is fairly dominant from then onwards at the Met, although there’s plenty of German and French Opera being performed as well. But there was enormous excitement in 1891 with the return of Adelina Patti, whose portrait you see here. She was universally recognised as the world’s greatest soprano, the world’s greatest singer. When somebody said to Verdi, “Who are your three favourite sopranos?” He said, “First, Adelina Patti, second Adelina Patti, and third Adelina Patti.” Rossini had not been quite so pleased with her, ‘cause when she, in order to try and impress him, she put so many extra difficulties and showy passages into his music, that he barely recognised his own music, and asked her rather brusquely at the end, “Very nice,” he said to her, “very nice, young lady, but who wrote that music?” So she was still, I think in pretty good voice in 1891, although she was 49, and had been singing since she was a little girl. And the reviews are really quite amusing, 'cause there were almost, there were scenes of pandemonium. Of course she went completely over the top in the lesson scene, and sang all sorts of things, “Home Sweet Home”, and “The Last Rose of Summer”, “And she did sing it better than anybody else in the world could’ve done,” the critic says. And then at the end of the opera, the audience didn’t want to let her go, and she didn’t want to go. She was enjoying all the attention and the ecstatic applause. And so a piano had to be wheeled out for her to do more encores.

There’s a very amusing description in the reviews of what went on. So we do have her voice on record, but she was born in 1844 and she made her records in the 20th century. So she was in her 60s. And there are some people who say she shouldn’t have made those records, because they’re obviously a travesty of what she was at her best. And she was one of those prima donnas, Melba was another one, who couldn’t stop having return farewell concerts. She went on doing them for years and years and years and years, and the critics became quite sour and said, you know, said, “She really should stop, she can’t sing anymore.” But I’m glad she did make the records. And although in some ways they’re excruciating, but you can still hear I think, traces of what made her so great. I think you can hear again, there’s no wobble, absolutely no wobble. The voice is completely steady, even as an old lady, and the timbre is still there. I mean, it’s become a very limited range, and even notes in the upper middle part are a bit stressed. But the timbre itself, this is something everybody remarked upon, it was so special. It was a combination of great purity and lusciousness. And I think you can hear that. Here she is singing “The Last Rose of Summer”. I think by this point you can no longer say she was singing it better than anybody else in the world. But I think you can still get something of her peculiar magic from this recording. ♪ Tis the last rose of summer left blooming alone ♪ ♪ All her lovely companions are faded and gone ♪ ♪ No flower of her kindred, no rosebud is nigh ♪ ♪ To reflect back her blushes, and give sigh for sigh ♪

• Well, she herself liked her own records. Perhaps she wasn’t very self-critical. Of course, it was such an amazing thing to be able to hear your own voice. And when, in fact Gramophone Typewriter Company, later HMV, they took the recording equipment to her castle in Wales, and when she made her first record, she insisted on hearing it played back immediately, and shrieked with delight and jumped up and down and cried, “ , at last I understand why I am Patti.” Now in 1891, there was a performance of Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet”, which introduced two singers who are going to be very important in the history of the Met, the Polish tenor Jean de Reszke, as Romeo on the left-hand side, and the very beautiful American soprano Emma Eames. So for the rest of the decade, they were to be major stars of the Met. But interestingly, this review is far from ecstatic about either of them. It says, “Miss Eames not a great artist, nor yet a ripe artist, is a singer of good intuitions and fine gifts.” So somewhat lukewarm praise. It says, “Her voice is scarcely large enough for a room like that at which she sang last night.” Although she later sang much heavier roles, and nobody complained about not being able to hear.

And the great Jean de Reszke, what it says about him is also a little bit lukewarm. It says, “Jean de Reszke is more generously equipped with artistic ability, histrionic and musical, than with voice.” So here is the lovely Emma Eames. She, well of course at this point in her career, she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. She was a pupil of the famous voice teacher Mathilde Marchesi, who was also the teacher, as we shall hear, of Nellie Melba and Emma Calve. And you can hear all the pupils of Mathilde Marchesi, they have a certain family resemblance. She taught a very particular technique with this extraordinary vocal purity, instrumental, a rather instrumental sound. Eames and Melba were bitter enemies, they really hated each other, and in her autobiography, Emma Eames, she never refers to Melba by name, but she says all sorts of terrible things about her, and just refers to her as, “My enemy”. So I’m going to play you an aria from “Romeo and Juliet”, the opera she made her debut in. This is a recording, again made 15 years later. In the meantime, she’d been singing really heavy roles like Sieglinde and Aida and Tosca and so on. But the voice retains its fabulous purity and nimbleness, and the way she runs up and down the scales with absolute perfection. It’s like a row of pearls, and wonderful trills and so on.

• Here singing, as I said, much more heavy roles, Aida, Tosca, she was considered to be a very cool singer. In fact, one of the most famous critical put-downs in the history of opera concerned her first performance of Aida at the Met. And the next day, one of the critics said, “Last night when Madame Eames sang Aida, there was skating on the river Nile.” She was also a very cool Tosca, but interestingly, Puccini really liked her. Puccini generally disliked singers of the Anglo-Saxon school. He couldn’t stand Melba, and he didn’t like Geraldine Farrar, but he did like Eames. He thought that her interpretation of Tosca had the quality of Greek tragedy. And I have another little excerpt here, 'cause this is so beautiful, I love it. I can’t resist playing it to you. This is the latter duet from “The Marriage of Figaro”, and here we have the voices of Emma Eames and Marcella Sembrich blending together so exquisitely. But I have to come back to the great Jean de Reszke, for a generation he was the world’s greatest tenor for his musical abilities, but also for his famed good looks. He was considered to be the sexiest, handsomest man in the world. Women absolutely swooned for him, including all his partners on stage. All of them gush over how charming and how, what a wonderful man he was, what a wonderful partner. And they all wanted to present the idea that somehow they were his favourite partner. As the world’s greatest tenor, this is the point where Wagner was really coming into vogue around the world. All the critics said, “Well, you are the world’s greatest tenor, of course you must sing Siegfried, you must sing Tristan.” And he took this on board, and you can see from this review they’re saying, praising him for his courage in taking on these roles.

And apparently he did sing them absolutely wonderfully because see, “Never before have we had a Tristan able to sing the declamatory music of the first and last acts with correct intonation, to say nothing of the duet in the second act.” But singing these heavy roles certainly took their toll, and it shortened his career by several years. And we have have to regret this, because he gave up singing just as recording was taking off. So he, he, his career ended in 1902, the very same year that of course Caruso made the first important operatic recordings. We have the faintest trace of his voice, recorded by a man called Lionel Mapleson. He was the librarian at the Met, and he constructed this rather alarming-looking machine, which was hung above the stage, until in 1904 it came crashing down on the performance, and that put an end to his experiments. But his recordings, recorded on these wax cylinders, they’re the first recordings ever made of live performances, and they’re really hard work to listen to. It sounds like there’s a whole army of chefs frying eggs in the foreground. And you can just hear a faint sound in the background of the singing. They’ve been transferred to CD, and they’re very fascinating. I think you actually get something out of them. And there are several fragments of performances with de Reszke. They’re particularly poor in sound quality because everybody was so curious, they wanted to hear them, So they’ve been played too many times. I was going to play you two excerpts, but I’m not sure I can inflict that punishment on you. I’ll play you the end of the aria “O Paradiso” from “L'Africaine” of Meyerbeer, 'cause it’s also interesting. You can tell he’s absolutely wowed the audience. They just go crazy at the end of the aria. And for me, it’s moving, it’s extraordinary to hear an audience responding to a musical performance from over 120 years ago.

• So November the 29th, 1893, brought the debut in two short operas of two of the greatest singers of the period, Emma Calve and Pol Plancon. CalVe made her debut in “Cavallieria Rusticana”. She was also a pupil of Mathilde Marchesi, and also a singer with a really extraordinary technique. But she had other things to offer than just beautiful singing. She was considered the greatest singing actress. She was an absolute powerhouse on stage, particularly in dramatic roles like Santuzza and Carmen. She was the probably the greatest Carmen of all time. Although the critics could sometimes be a bit sniffy, because of what was considered the excessive realism and brutality of her acting in this role. Even George Bernard Shaw was rather shocked by her acting on stage in London. Very little of this comes, the recordings were extremely beautiful. The voice is very, very lovely indeed, the singing immaculate. But the spectacular, dramatic, temperamental stage performance doesn’t really come across in the recordings. But I’ll play you this, “The Gypsy Song” from Carmen. I’ll play this through to the end, because notice all the little ornaments. You probably never even noticed them before in other performances of Carmen, 'cause no other singer, not to my knowledge, articulates these little ornaments quite so precisely. And then she ends with an absolutely perfectly turned trill. Well, when did you ever hear a Carmen who could trill? And you get a little sense of her wayward personality in the, “Ole, ola”, that she does right at the end.

• So on the same evening in a different opera by Gounod, the Met heard the great bass, Pol Plancon. And from purely from the point of view of technique, I think he is the greatest bass singer ever to have made records. He could do anything. Apparently he, as a party piece, he would sing the “Queen of the Nights” aria in falsetto. He’s a coloratura bass. He was very famous in the role of Mephistopheles, You see him here on the left, but I’m going to play you probably his most famous record, is of the “Air du Tambour Majeur”, where you hear this, it was a great big, dark bass voice, which he can use with incredible nimbleness.

• Now we come to the formidable Nellie Melba. She made her debut in, I think it was also in 1893, but at the end of the year. She made her debut after Emma Eames, and as I said, they were very bitter rivals, and their repertoire largely overlapped. But so Melba, it was a fantastic technique of course, and a very, very beautiful voice, but never much of an interpretive artist. And as I said, she was detested by Puccini, who always thought from the start, that she was too old and too matronly for the part of Mimi. You can see her as a rather healthy-looking Violetta wielding a flower on the right hand side, as though it’s a weapon. She, oh yes, December the 4th, 1893. And you can see once again, she gets pretty well a rave review for her finished vocalisation, though they don’t say much about her acting abilities. So her debut actually was in “Lucia de L'Amour”, but I’ve already played you that with Sembrich. So I thought I’d pay you an another mad scene for which Melba was very famous, 'cause these these mad scenes, the romantic period, where the soprano has to sing a duo with a flute. This is a mad scene from Ambrose Thomas’ “Hamlet”, so it’s the madness of Ophelia.

• Again, that fantastic accuracy and purity of tone in the hitting the note, bang in the middle. So I’ve concentrated, of course, on sopranos and tenors, but the greatest contralto of the period was Ernestine Schumann-Heink, and she made her debut in the role of Fides in Meyerbeer’s “La Prophete”, and she sang for a few seasons in the 1890s and into the early 1900s, and actually came back to the Met as late as 1929. She was an adored figure, personality in America. When radio was invented, every year she sang “Silent Night” on the radio, every year at Christmas, and she was sort of regarded as the mother of the nation. I can’t remember how many sons, she had an enormous number, I think it was eight, and half were fighting on the German side, and half were fighting on the American side in the First World War. Nobody held that against her, they just loved her, and she was a very warm, lovable personality and a magnificent booming contralto voice.

• Many famous stories about Ernestine Schumann-Heink, and her legendary appetite. I think everybody knows the story about her being stuck between two pieces of scenery, when she was supposed to make a stage entry, and the assistant saying to her, “Madame Schumann-Heink, please turn sideways,” and she said, “But I don’t have a sideways.” And the other story about her eating in a restaurant, with Caruso, and who also was a man of a certain appetite, but she was served with this absolutely enormous steak that sort of flopped over the sides of the plate, and even Caruso was astonished. And he said, “Ah, ah Tina, you no eat that alone.” And she said, . Now Mozart is so much part of the repertoire at every opera house today. He’s one of the most frequently performed composers. This was not the case, really not until the 1930s, and the only two Mozart operas that were done at the Met in the early years were “Don Giovanni” and “The Marriage of Figaro”, and they weren’t popular with the public, and they were critically admired, but not popular. And there are various articles like this one, after a performance of “Don Giovanni” saying it’s to be feared that Mozart’s operas are going to disappear from the recipe, because nobody’s really interested anymore. That changed to some extent with the arrival at the end of the 1890s of this man, Antonio Scotti, who was, he was considered to be very sexy, and very charismatic, and he was the great Don Giovanni of his period. And here he’s singing the duet “La Ci Darem” with Geraldine Farrar, who of course came along a few years later, doesn’t belong to the period I’m talking about today.

• This is the man who really inherited the mantle of Pol Plancon, the French bass baritone Marcel Journet. And he made his debut at the Met in 1900 in the local premiere of Puccini’s “Boheme”. It’s quite interesting to read this review. It didn’t get good reviews, “Boheme”, from the critics. You can see, “‘La Boheme’ is a foul in subject and fulminant, but futile in its music. It’s heroine is a twin sister of the woman of the camellias whose,” and so on and so on, absolutely trashes the opera and says, “Well, this opera has no chance of surviving in the repertoire, and it’s only going to last a little while, because the tenor Salazar who sang in the first performance pleased the public.” So here is Journet in “The Coach Song” from the last act of “Boheme”.

• Now I’m going to stir up a real hornet’s nest with my next comments. This is Journet, on the left-hand side, with the French tenor Edmond Clement, who came along actually a few years later, I think around about 1908. And they are singing the famous baritone tenor duet from “The Pearl Fishers”, And I know there’ll be many people out there who will be completely devoted to the Robert Merrill and Jussi Bjorling version, which is very beautiful. But in my view, the version I’m going to play you is much more idiomatic.

• Now I regret having to cut that off, it’s so beautiful. Now there, the critic Michael Scott who wrote, oh, it’s beside me actually, this book, “The Record of Singing”, a rather infuriating book, but very informative. He talks about tenors being BC or AC, meaning before Caruso or after Caruso. Caruso is somebody who changes absolutely everything. He really changes the sound that tenors aspired to. And part of his luck was timing. He made his great breakthrough at La Scala in 1900. As I said, his debut coincided with the birth of serious recording of the operatic voice. He made the first great operatic recordings in Milan in 1902, in a hotel room in the Grand Hotel. His timing was also very lucky in the tenor, who had for a generation being considered the greatest tenor in the world, Jean de Reszke, retired that very same year, 1902. So the Met are looking around, “Who can we get to replace Jean de Reschke?” They considered various tenors, including the very fine Alessandro Bonschi, but it was Caruso who got the job, and the rest is certainly history. And you can see straight away he got very, very good, if not totally ecstatic reviews. And the the interesting, “His voice is smooth and mellow and without the typical Italian bleat,” which characterised, for instance, Alessandro Bonschi, who I was just talking about. So it’s like, it’s a wonder, it’s like a bowing of a cello, Caruso’s sound. And also interesting in this review, if you can read it, is how dismissive the critic is of the opera “Rigoletto”, describing it as “shop-worn and jangling.” But so here is a recording made in 1903. That’s the year that Caruso made his debut in the role of the Duke of Mantua.

• And I want to move on to my last recording. Now Caruso’s career, I would say, was the most celebrated, most glorious, of any singer in the history of the Met. So he opened, I think every opera season, from after 1903, up until 1920, the year in which he died. And he made enormous numbers of records, for somebody in his period. The complete recordings of Caruso run to 12 CDs, and we can follow his development, how the voice grows in size, and how it darkens in colour, and how he began to take on bigger and more heroic roles. And the very last role that he took on in his last season was Eleazar in Halevy’s opera, “La Juive”. And he was a very serious artist, he took his preparation for this role immensely seriously. He had very good, particularly warm relations with New York’s Jewish community, and he went to them and he asked them to help him prepare this role. He went to synagogues, he listened to cantors and so on. He totally steeped himself in Jewish culture for the preparation of this role. And so this recording made in 1919, it’s one of the absolute last ones he made. You can see the voice is unbelievably magnificent, it’s just become fuller and darker and richer, it has this gorgeous velvety quality, and as I said, the phrasing is like the bowing of a cello.

• Well, I better finish. I’ve run out of time. So let’s see what comments and questions you have.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: “Were Jews allowed?”

A: Do you mean were they allowed, I don’t think in the, I don’t know if there were many in the initial group who formed the Met. Certainly later on there were prominent Jewish families who supported the Met and were very involved with it.

This is Madeleine who went to the last performance in the old house, it must have been, I think, a very sad occasion, as well as being exciting.

Apparently watching the play, “The Gilded Cage”, fabulous costumes, Julian Burrows, “Downton Abbey”, and so on.

“AI might be able to be used to,” I don’t know if they could revive some of the operas if they were not recorded at all, but what they probably could do, I know it is already theoretically possible, for instance, that you could take the old recordings, and replace all the sort of vibrations or whatever they are, that are missing from the old recordings, and you could probably make the old singers sound like they’d been recorded today.

Q: Do I have a favourite 19th century, indeed 20th century opera critics?

A: Well the critics from New York, Aldrich for instance, in this period are all worth reading, and you know, in Britain too, in people like Ernest Newman. I wouldn’t say I have a particular favourite, but I do think that opera criticism has fallen. It’s not as informed or detailed as it used to be.

This is Hannah, who heard, presumably, the Casta Diva. “To me, Sutherland is unbeatable in all the coloratura bits, but I wouldn’t choose her for the, as my personal taste for the Casta Diva.”

“De Reszke’s cigarettes,” yes I know. Well, cigarettes were thought to be good for the singing voice, isn’t that extraordinary? I’m sure there is a problem with taking away all the surface noise, that certainly in the past, when people tried to do that, you lost a lot of the voice as well. But I’m sure it must be theoretically possible now.

Lorna, I’m so glad you like my old recordings. Of course the Proms, they actually, and the same with the Liceu in Barcelona, the sold those boxes, you know, permanently. They didn’t rent them out. So you could inherit, you could pass on your box to your family after you died.

Margaret, I love Victoria Angeles’ rendition of Carmen, but it’s a very special one. Not everybody likes it. You know, she almost never sang it on the stage. There are people who think that she is too ladylike, but I think there are different ways of doing Carmen, and certainly I absolutely adore Victoria de Los Angeles, wonderful, wonderful singer. “And how nice to have a box at La Scala.” There’s more than one Damrosch, so I’m not sure which Damrosch, there’s Walter Damrosch as well. So I don’t know which Damrosch the park is named after.

Thank you for your comments. No Dame Clara, she went to America, she sang in America, but she never sang at the Met. In fact, she almost never sang in opera. I think there were just a couple of performances “Otheo”. The problem was that she was so tall, that she absolutely towered over any tenor that she might be paired with. Surprising that, well I, you know, I don’t, chutzpah. Do you think that’s chutzpah? As I said, he was much loved in the New York Jewish community, and I’ve never heard that anybody objected to it.

Thank you Margaret. Lorna, I’m not sure what you’re saying there. Gali Kuchi did make it to the Met, and she first sang there after the First World War. So she didn’t really belong in this lecture, but I’m going to talk about her when I talk about Chicago, ‘cause her story is integral to the story of the Chicago Opera. Thank you, I’m so glad you put up with my scratchy old recordings. And thank you for your thanks.

Yes, isn’t it funny? Well you know, “Carmen” had terrible reviews, and there were critics, can you imagine it? God, critics would be so ignorant, even in those days. There were critics who said that “Carmen” had no tunes. You think, oh, were they deaf, what? Couldn’t they hear the tunes?

This is Jane, who’s only had tickets at the Met, probably in the 1900s. I do hope you get the programmes, that would be nice to know.

Q: “Unrelated to this lecture, can you repeat the title of the book about the art?”

A: Yes. It’s Charles Delheim, and it’s called “Belonging and Betrayal”, and strongly recommend it. Actually, I’m reading another completely fabulous book, where is it, that I want to recommend to you. Just, I’m halfway through it. “Music of Exile: by Michael Haas, H-double A-S. Such an interesting book, about all the Jewish composers were forced to leave, and where they went and what happened to them. Brilliantly written, brilliantly researched. I thought I knew all about it, but I’m discovering something new on every page of this book. To the original Opera House. I’m afraid it was, no, it didn’t lose its audience.

Oh, you mean the, yes it did. If we’re talking about the Academy of Music, it absolutely lost its audience, and it ceased to, I think the building still exists, but it ceased to be an opera house. How do I get hold, I’ve been collecting them for, you know, since early childhood, and I inherited my grandparents’. Yes, and I so agree with you. I don’t want to lose the scratchiness because as you say, it retains the integrity of the performance, and thank you. It really reassures me that you are able to put up, oh right. Gali Kuchi’s nickname in South Africa. She probably sang there, she did sing all around the world later in her career.

Thank you all very, very much indeed. And it’s a bit more of the same, but some rather scandalous stories about Oscar Hammerstein coming up on Sunday.