Grand Opera: The Story of the Met Read Online Free Page B

second season with the proviso that the stockholders shoulder his losses; the directors refused to levy the requisite assessments. The board received bids from two managers based in England, and another from Leopold Damrosch, founder and conductor of the Oratorio Society of New York and of the New York Symphony Society, rival of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society led by Theodore Thomas. German-born like Thomas, Damrosch had been a musical force in the citysince his arrival in 1871. His proposition departed radically from conventional arrangements between owners and leasing impresarios. For an annual salary and a percentage of the profits, Damrosch agreed to put on a season of fourteen operas at ticket prices cut by half and more, and at an anticipated average cost per performance less than half that incurred by Abbey—all the while balancing the books. Risks and rewards would accrue to the stockholders in their new capacity as producers. 1
German New York
     
    Damrosch had in mind a season of opera not in Italian, but in German, its repertoire principally consigned to works composed on German texts, with casts recruited in Germany at fees far lower than Abbey’s stars had commanded. The orchestra would be drawn from the German players of his New York Symphony Society, by all accounts superior to the Italian instrumentalists Abbey had hired. Damrosch would do all the conducting. In making his case, he contended that the German speakers of New York, the population he was confident of luring to the half-empty upper tiers, were interested neither in Italian opera nor in German opera sung in Italian. Ultimately, and despite resistance from influential box holders, the bottom line won out. On and off the stage for the next seven years, German was in every way the lingua franca of the Metropolitan.
    Damrosch had come to New York to direct the by then well-established Arion Society, one of the many singing groups active in the United States in the second half of the century. The influx of German intellectuals and cultural workers, musicians in particular, had begun with their flight from Europe following the aborted 1848 revolutions. In 1855, the Philharmonic was 79 percent German; by 1892, 97 percent of its players were of German descent. German music dominated programming; until World War I, 70 percent of the repertory of US orchestras was German or Austrian. The 1880 federal census recorded 360,000 persons of German origin in Manhattan alone, roughly 30 percent of the population. Had their Lower East Side Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) been an independent municipality, it would have been the fourth largest in the United States. New York had become the third German-speaking metropolis in the world, outstripped only by Berlin and Vienna. The immigrant audience that was still too small to support Palmo in 1844 and that, in spite of its greater numbers, had eluded Abbey in 1883 would become Damrosch’s target market. By that time, theGerman community had established cultural institutions of all sorts. The Atlantic Garden on the Bowery was a favored destination where “German families sang songs of the fatherland and listened to orchestras perform Strauss, Wagner, and Beethoven.” The Stadt Theater, founded in 1854, and later the Germania, the Thalia, and the Irving Place Theatre brought distinguished German actors to New York for seasons of classical drama: Schiller’s Don Carlos, Hauptmann’s Die Weber, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House . Two, three, and sometimes more professional repertory companies were active in Manhattan from mid-century to 1918 or so, when anti-German sentiment put them out of business. The most prominent and durable of the twenty-eight German-language papers that could be found on New York newsstands in the early 1850s was the Staats-Zeitung; it carried extensive reviews of Met performances well into the twentieth century. 2
    The trans-Atlantic