Part 14 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: =Christine Nilsson as Queen of the Night=
From a photograph by Pierre Pet.i.t]
”Great heavens!” I gasped, ”what is she doing? What is the woman thinking of!”
Of course I knew she was doing it to get volume and vibration and to give that trying climax some character. But to say that it was a fatal attempt is to put it mildly. She absolutely killed a certain quality in her voice there and then and she _never recovered it_. Even that night she had to cut out the second great _aria_. Her beautiful high notes were gone for ever. Probably the fatality was the result of the last stroke to a continued strain which she had put upon her voice. After that she, like Mario, began to be dramatic to make up for what she had lost. She, the cla.s.sical and cold artist, became full of expression and animation. But the later Nilsson was very different from the Nilsson whom I first heard in Paris during the winter of 1868, when, besides singing the music perfectly, she was, with her blond hair and broad brow, a living Ophelie. As I have said, Faure, the baritone, was her Hamlet in that early performance. He was a great artist, a great actor in whatever _role_ he took. His voice was not wonderful, but he was saved, and more than saved, by his style and his art. He was a particularly cultivated, musicianly man whose dignity of carriage and elegance of manner could easily make people forget a certain ungrateful quality in his voice. It was Faure who had the brains and perseverance to learn how to sing a particular note from a really bad singer. The bad singer had only one good note in his voice and that happened to be the worst one in Faure's. So, night after night, the great artist went to hear and to study the inferior one to try and learn how he got that note. And he succeeded, too. This is a fair sample of his careful and finished way of doing anything. He was a big artist, and to big artists, especially in singing, music is almost mathematical in its exactness.
Adelina Patti, who had also left London for the winter, was singing at the _Italiens_ in Paris. I went to hear her give an indifferent performance of _Ernani_. It was never one of her advantageous _roles_.
Adelina had a most extraordinary charm and a great power over men of very diverse sorts. De Caux, Nicolini, Maurice Strakosch, who married Adelina's sister Amelia, all adored her and felt that whatever she did must be right because she did it. Nicolini, who had been a star tenor singing all over Italy before she captured him, was willing to forget that he ever had a wife or children. Maurice was for years her ”manager and representative,” and as such put up with incredible complexities in the situation. There is a long and lurid tale about Nicolini's wife appearing in Italy when Nicolini, Maurice, and Adelina were all there.
The story ended with Nicolini being kicked downstairs and the press commented upon the episode with an apt couplet from Schiller to the effect that ”life is hard, but merry is art!”
The names of Paris and of Maurice Strakosch in conjunction conjure up the thought of Napoleon III, who, in his young days of exile, used to be very intimate with Maurice. Louis Napoleon, after he had escaped from the fortress of Ham, spent some time in London, and he and Maurice frequently lunched or dined together. By the way, some years later, at a dinner at the McHenrys' in Holland Park, I was told by Chevalier Wyckoff that it was he who rescued Napoleon from the prison of Ham by smuggling clothes in to him and by having a boat waiting for him. Maurice used to tell of one rather amusing incident that occurred during the London period. Louis Napoleon's dress clothes were usually in p.a.w.n, and one night when he wanted to go to some party, he presented himself at Maurice's rooms to borrow his. Maurice was out; but nevertheless Louis Napoleon took the dress clothes anyway, adding all of Maurice's orders and decorations. When he was decked out to his satisfaction he went to the party. Shortly after, in came Maurice, to dress for the same party, and called to his valet to bring him his evening clothes.
”Mr. Bonaparte's got 'em on, sir,” said the man: and Maurice stayed at home!
Napoleon III was a man of many weaknesses. Yet he kept his promises and remembered his friends--when he could. As soon as he became Emperor he sent for Maurice Strakosch and offered him the management of the _Italiens_; but Maurice declined the honour. He was too busy ”representing” Patti in those days to care for any other engagement. He did give singing lessons to the Empress Eugenie however, and was always on good terms with her and with the Emperor.
When I was in Paris in '68 Napoleon and Eugenie were in power at the Tuileries and day after day I saw them driving behind their splendid horses. Paris was extremely gay and yet somewhat ominous, for there was a wide-spread feeling that clouds were gathering about the throne. When thinking of that period I sometimes quote to myself Owen Meredith's poem, _Aux Italiens_,
At Paris it was at the opera there ...
The Emperor there in his box of state Looked grave, as if he had just then seen The red flag wave from the city gate, Where his eagles in bronze had been.
The Tuileries court was a very brilliant one and we were accustomed to splendid costumes and gorgeous turnouts in the Bois, but one day I came home with a particularly excited description of the ”foreign princess” I had seen. Her clothes, her horses (she drove postilion), her carriage, her liveries, her servants, all, to my innocent and still ignorant mind, proclaimed her some distinguished visiting royalty. How chagrined I was and how I was laughed at when my ”princess” turned out to be one of the best known _demi-mondaines_ in Paris! Even then it was difficult to tell the two _mondes_ apart.
A unique character in Paris was Dr. Evans, dentist to the Emperor and Empress. He was an American and a witty, talented man. I remember hearing him laughingly boast:
”I have looked down the mouth of every crowned head of Europe!”
When disaster overtook the Bonapartes, he proved that he could serve crowned heads in other ways besides filling their teeth. It was he who helped the Empress to escape, and the fact made him an exile from Paris.
He came to see me in London years afterwards and told me something of that dark and dramatic time of flight. He felt very homesick for Paris, which had been his home for so long, but the dear man was as merry and charming as ever.
We spent in all only a short time in Paris. Two months were taken out of the middle of that winter for travelling on the Continent, after which we returned to the French city for March. When we first started from Paris on our trip we were headed for Nice. It was Christmas Day, and cold as charity. Why _did_ we choose that day of all others on which to begin a journey? Our Christmas dinner consisted of cold soup swallowed at a station. Christmas!--I could have wept!
CHAPTER XV
MY FIRST HOLIDAY ON THE CONTINENT
It seemed very odd to be really idle. From the time I was thirteen I had been working and studying so systematically that to get the habit of leisure was like learning a new and a difficult lesson. It took time, for one thing, to find out how to relax; nervous persons never acquire this art naturally nor possess it instinctively. It is with them the artificial product of painful experience. All my life I had been expending energy at top pressure and building it up again as fast as I could instead of sometimes letting it lie fallow for a bit. When I became exhausted my mother would speedily make strong broths with rice and meat and vegetables and anything else that she considered nouris.h.i.+ng to stimulate my jaded vitality; then I would go at my work again harder than ever. When I had finished one thing I plunged, nerves, body, and brain, into another. To be an artist is bad enough; but to be an American artist--! To the temperamental excitability and intensity is added the racial nervousness; and lucky are such if they do not go up in a final smoke of over-energised effort. When I was singing I was always in a fever before the curtain rose. All the day before I was restless to the point of desperation. Instead of letting myself go and becoming comfortably limp so that I might conserve my strength for the performance itself, I would cast about for a hundred secondary ways in which to waste my nervous force. I was nearly as bad as the Viennese _prima donna_, Marie Willt. The story is told of her that a reporter from a Vienna newspaper went to interview her the afternoon before she was to sing in _Il Trovatore_ at the Royal Opera and enquired of the scrubwoman in the hall where he could find Frau Willt.
”Here,” responded the scrubwoman, sitting up to eye him calmly.
When the young man expressed surprise and incredulity she explained, as she continued to mop the soapy water, that she invariably scrubbed the floor the day she was going to sing. ”It keeps me busy,” she concluded sententiously.
Think of the force that went into that scrubbing-brush which might have gone into the part of Leonora! But it is not for me to find fault with such a course of action because I followed a very similar one. If I did not exactly scrub floors, I did, somehow, contrive to find other equally adequate ways of dissipating my strength before I sang. Yet here I was, actually taking a holiday, with no chance at all to work even if I wanted to!
When we arrived in Nice the lemons and oranges on the trees and a sky as blue as painted china made the place seem to me somewhat unnatural, like a stage setting. Not yet having learned my lesson of relaxation, I soon became restless and wanted to be again on the move. Nevertheless we stayed there for nearly a month. My mother seemed to like it. She made many friends and spent hours every day painting little pictures--quite dear little pictures they were--of the bright coloured wild flowers that grew roundabout. But possibly a few extracts from the diary kept by my mother of this visit will not be out of place here. The capital letters and italics are hers.
_Dec. 25_--Christmas morning. Sun shone for two hours. Left for Nice. Arrived at 5 P.M. A very cold night. Cars warmed by zink hollow planks [boxes] filled with Boiling water which are replaced every three hours at the different stations. Notwithstanding shawls and wraps suffered with the cold. Nothing to eat until we arrived at twelve at Ma.r.s.eilles, where [we] got a poor, cold soup and miserable cup of tea. Arrived at the Hotel Luxembourg in Nice at 6.30 P.M. The city and hotels crowded with people from all parts of the world. Rheumatic people rush here to get into the _suns.h.i.+ne_--a _thing_ seldom seen in Paris or London in winter. Nice is simply a watering-place _without the water_, unless one means the Sea Mediterranean which almost rushes into the Halls of the Hotels. All languages are here spoken; therefore no trouble for any nation to obtain what it desires. The streets are pulverised magnesia.
Everybody looks after walking as though they had been to mill ”turning hopper.”