Part 7 (1/2)

CHAPTER VII

STEPS OF THE LADDER

In the three years between my _debut_ and my appearance in _Faust_ I sang, in all, a dozen operas:--_Rigoletto_, _Linda_, _I Puritani_, _Sonnambula_, _Ballo in Maschera_, _Figlia del Reggimento_, _Les Noces de Jeannette_, _Lucia_, _Don Giovanni_, _Poliuto_, _Marta_, and _Traviata_. Besides these, I sang a good deal in concert, but I never cared for either concert or oratorio work as much as for opera. My real growth and development came from big parts in which both musical and dramatic accomplishment were necessary.

Like all artists, I look back upon many fluctuations in my artistic achievements. Sometimes I was good, and often not so good; and, curiously enough, I was usually best, according to my friends and critics, when most dissatisfied with myself. But of one thing I am fairly confident:--I never really went backward, never seriously retrograded artistically. Each _role_ was a step further and higher. To each I brought a clearer vision, a surer touch, a more flexible method, a finer (how shall I say it in English?) _attaque_ is nearest what I mean. This I say without vanity, for the artist who does not grow and improve with each succeeding part is deteriorating. There is no standing still in any life work; or, if there is, it is the standing still of successful effort, the hard-won tenure of a difficult place from which most people slip back. The Red Queen in _Through the Looking Gla.s.s_ expressed it rightly when she told Alice that ”you have to run just as hard as you can to stay where you are.”

As Gilda I was laying only the groundwork. My performance was, I believe, on the right lines. It rang true. But it was far from what it became in later years when the English critics found me ”the most beautiful and convincing of all Gildas!” As Linda I do not think that I showed any great intellectual improvement over Gilda, but I had acquired a certain confidence and authority. I sang and acted with more ease; and for the first time I had gained a sense of _personal responsibility_ toward, and for, an audience. When I beheld only three hundred people in my first-night Boston audience and determined to win them, and did win them, I came into possession of new and important factors in my work.

This consciousness and earnest will-power to move one's public by the force of one's art is one of the first steps toward being a true _prima donna_.

_I Puritani_ never taught me very much, simply as an opera. The part was too heavy as my voice was then, and our production of it was so hurried that I had not time to spend on it the study which I liked to give a new _role_. But in this very fact lay its lesson for me. The necessity for losing timidity and self-consciousness, the power to fling oneself into a new part without time to coddle one's vanity or one's habits of mind, the impersonal courage needed to attack fresh difficulties:--these points are of quite as much importance to a young opera singer as are fine breath control and a gift for phrasing. _Sonnambula_, too, had to be ”jumped into” in the same fas.h.i.+on and was even more of an undertaking, though the _role_ suited me better and is, in fact, a rarely grateful one. Yet think of being Amina with only one week's rehearsing! _Sonnambula_ was first given by us as a benefit performance for Brignoli. It was generally understood to be in the nature of a farewell. Indeed, I think he said so himself. But, of course, he never had the slightest idea of really leaving America. He stayed here until he died. But to his credit be it said that he never had any more ”farewell” appearances. He did not form the habit.

I have spoken of how hopeless it is for an opera singer to try to work emotionally or purely on impulse; of how futile the merely temperamental artist becomes on the operatic stage. Yet too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of feeling what one does and sings. It is in just this seeming paradox that the truly professional artist's point of view may be found. The amateur acts and sings temperamentally. The trained student gives a finished and correct performance. It is only a genius--or something very near it--who can do both. There is something balanced and restrained in a genuine _prima donna's_ brain that keeps her emotions from running away with her, just as there is at the same time something equally warm and inspired in her heart that animates the most clear-cut of her intellectual work and makes it living and lovely.

Sometimes it is difficult for an experienced artist to say just where instinct stops and art begins. When I sang Amina I was greatly complimented on my walk and my intonation, both most characteristic of a somnambulist. I made a point of keeping a strange, rhythmical, dreamy step like that of a sleep-walker and sang as if I were talking in my sleep. I breathed in a hard, laboured way, and walked with the headlong yet dragging gait of someone who neither sees, knows, nor cares where she is going. Now, this effect came not entirely from calculation nor yet from intuition, but from a combination of the two. I was in the _mood_ of somnambulism and acted accordingly. But I deliberately placed myself in that mood. This only partly expresses what I wish to say on the subject; but it is the root of dramatic work as I know it.

The opera of _Sonnambula_, incidentally, taught me one or two things not generally included in stage essentials. Among others, I had to learn not to be afraid, physically afraid, or at any rate not to mind being afraid. In the sleep-walking scene Amina, carrying her candle and robed in white, glides across the narrow bridge at a perilous height while the watchers below momentarily expect her to be dashed to pieces on the rocks underneath. Our bridge used to be set very high indeed (it was especially lofty in the Philadelphia Opera House where we gave the opera a little later), and I had quite a climb to get up to it at all. There was a wire strung along the side of the bridge, but it was not a bit of good to lean on--merely a moral support. I had to carry the candle in one hand and couldn't even hold the other outstretched to balance myself, for sleep-walkers do not fall! This was the point that I had to keep in mind; I could not walk carefully, but I had to walk with certainty. In a sense it was suggestive of a hypnotic condition and I had to get pretty nearly into one myself before I could do it. At all events, I had to compose myself very summarily first. Just in the middle of the crossing the bridge is supposed to crack. Of course the edges were only broken; but I had to give a sort of ”jog” to carry out the illusion and I used to wonder, the while I jogged, if I were going over the side _that_ time! In the wings they used to be quite anxious about me and would draw a general breath of relief when I was safely across.

Every night I would be asked if I were sure I wanted to undertake it that night, and every time I would answer:

”I don't know whether I _can_!”

But, of course, I always did it. Somehow, one always does do one's work on the stage, even if it is trying to the nerves or a bit dangerous. I have heard that when Maud Adams put on her big production of _Joan of Arc_, her managers objected seriously to having her lead the mounted battle charge herself. A ”double” was costumed exactly like her and was ready to mount Miss Adams's horse at the last moment. But did she ever give a double a chance to lead her battle charge? Not she: and no more would any true artist.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Muzio=

From a photograph by Gurney & Son]

_Sonnambula_ also helped fix in my mentality the traditions of Italian opera; those traditions that my teachers--Muzio particularly--had been striving so hard to impress upon and make real to me. The school of the older operas, while the greatest school for singers in the world, is one in which tradition is, and must be, pre-eminent. In the modern growths, springing up among us every year, the singer has a chance to create, to trace new paths, to take venturesome flights. The new operas not only permit this, they require it. But it is a pity to hear a young, imaginative artist try to interpret some old and cla.s.sic opera by the light of his or her modern perceptions. They do not improve on the material. They only make a combination that is bizarre and inartistic.

This struck me forcibly not long ago when I heard a young, talented American sing _A non giunge_, the lovely old _aria_ from the last act of _Sonnambula_. The girl had a charming voice and she sang with musical feeling and taste. But she had not one ”tradition” as we understood the term, and, in consequence, almost any worn-out, old-school singer could have rendered the _aria_ more acceptably to trained ears. Traditions are as necessary to the Bellini operas as costumes are to Shakespeare's plays. To dispense with them may be original, but it is bad art. And yet, while I became duly impressed with the necessity of the ”traditions,” during those early performances, I always tried to avoid following them too servilely or too artificially. I tried to interpret for myself, within certain well-defined limits, according to my personal conception of the characters I was personating. The traditions of Italian opera combined with my own ideals of the lyric heroines,--this became my object and ambition.

The summer after my _debut_, I went on a concert tour under Grau's management, but my throat was tired after the strain and nervous effort of my first season, and I finally went up to the country for a long rest. In New Hartford, Connecticut, my mother, father, and I renewed many old friends.h.i.+ps, and it was a genuine pleasure to sing again in a small choir, to attend sewing circles, and to live the every-day life from which I had been so far removed during my studies and professional work. People everywhere were charming to me. Though only nineteen, I was an acknowledged _prima donna_, and so received all sorts of kindly attentions. This was the summer, I believe, (although it may have been a later one) when Herbert Witherspoon, then only a boy, determined to become a professional singer. He has always insisted that it was my presence and the glamour that surrounded the stage because of me that finally decided him.

I did not sing again in New York until the January of 1862. Before that we had a short season on the road, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other places. As there were then but nine opera houses in America our itinerary was necessarily somewhat limited. In November of that year I sang in _Les Noces de Jeannette_, in Philadelphia, a charming part although not a very important one. It is a simple little operetta in one act by Victor Macci. The _libretto_ was in French and I sang it in that language. Pleasing speeches were made about my French and people wanted to know where I had studied it--I, who had never studied it at all except at home! The opera was not long enough for a full evening's entertainment, so Miss Hinckley was put on in the same bill in Donizetti's _Betly_. The two went very well together.

The critics found _Jeannette_ a great many surprising things, ”broad,”

”risque,” ”typically French,” and so on. In reality it was innocent enough; but it must be remembered that this was a day and generation which found _Faust_ frightfully daring, and _Traviata_ so improper that a year's hard effort was required before it could be sung in Brooklyn. I sympathised with one critic, however, who railed against the translated _libretto_ as sold in the lobby. After stating that it was utter nonsense, he added with excellent reason:

”But this was to have been expected. That anyone connected with an opera house should know enough about English to make a decent translation into it is, of course, quite out of the question.”

It was really funny about _Traviata_. In 1861 President Chittenden, of the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, made a sensational speech arraigning the plot of _Traviata_,[1] and protesting against its production in Brooklyn on the grounds of propriety, or, rather, impropriety. Meetings were held and it was finally resolved that the opera was objectionable. The feeling against it grew into a series of almost religious ceremonies of protest and, as I have said, it took Grau a year of hard effort to overcome the opposition. When, at last, in '62, the opera was given, I took part; and the audience was all on edge with excitement. There had been so much talk about it that the whole town turned out to see _why_ the Directors had withstood it for a year.

Every clergyman within travelling distance was in the house.

[1] The book is founded upon Dumas's _La Dame aux Camelias_.

Its dramatic sister _Camille_ was also opposed violently when Mme.

Modjeska played it in Brooklyn in later years. These facts are amusing in the light of present-day productions and their morals, or dearth of them. _Salome_ is, I think, about the only grand opera of recent times that has been suppressed by a Directors' Meeting. But in my youth Directors were very tender of their public's virtuous feelings. When _The Black Crook_ and the Lydia Thompson troupe first appeared in New York, people spoke of those comparatively harmless shows with bated breath and no one dared admit having actually seen them. The ”Lydia Thompson Blonds” the troupe was called. They did a burlesque song and dance affair, and wore yellow wigs. Mr. Brander Matthews married one of the most popular and charming of them. I wonder what would have happened to an audience of that time if a modern, up-to-date, Broadway musical farce had been presented to their consideration!

At any rate, the much-advertised _Traviata_ was finally given, being a huge and sensational success. Probably I did not really understand the character of Violetta down in the bottom of my heart. Modjeska once said that a woman was only capable of playing Juliet when she was old enough to be a grandmother; and if that be true of the young Verona girl, how much more must it be true of poor Camille. My interpretation of the Lady of the Camellias must have been a curiously impersonal one. I know that when Emma Abbott appeared in it later, the critics said that she was so afraid of allowing it to be suggestive that she made it so, whereas I apparently never thought of that side of it and consequently never forced my audiences to think of it either.