FullReads

Is there a cooking theme in Siegfried to describe Mime’s brewing? Lavignac and others, who have listed the Ring motive, have neglected to catalogue it, but it is mentioned by Old Fogy. Practically a whole act is taken up in Louise with the preparation for and consumption of a dinner. Scarpia eats in Tosca and the heroine kills him with a table knife. There is much talk of food in Hansel und Gretel and there is a supper in The Merry Wives of Windsor. There are drinking songs in Don Giovanni, Lucrezia Borgia, Hamlet, La Traviata, Girofle-Girofla…. The reference to whiskey and soda in Madama Butterfly is celebrated. J. E. Cox, the author of “Musical Recollections,” describes Herr Pischek in the supper scene of Don Giovanni as “out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year round at the mit-tag or abend-essen feeding at one of their largely frequented tables-d’hote.” Eating or drinking on the stage is always fraught with danger, as Charles Santley once discovered during Papageno’s supper scene in The Magic Flute : “The supper which Tamino commands for the hungry Papageno consisted of pasteboard imitations of good things, but the cup contained real wine, a small draught of which I found refreshing on a hot night in July, amid the dust and heat of the stage. On the occasion in question I was putting the cup to lips, when I heard somebody call to me from the wings; I felt very angry at the interruption, and was just about to swallow the wine when I heard an anxious call not to drink. Suspecting something was wrong, I pretended to drink, and deposited the cup on the table. Immediately after the scene I made inquiries about the reason for the caution I received, and was informed that as each night the carpenters, who had no right to it, finished what remained of the wine before the property men, whose perquisite it was, could lay hold of the cup, the latter, to give their despoilers a lesson, had mingled castor-oil with my drink!”

A young husband of my acquaintance once bemoaned to me the fact that his wife seemed destined to become a great singer. “She is such a remarkable cook!” he explained to account for his despondency. I reassured him: “She will cook with renewed energy when she begins to sing Sieglinde and Tosca…. She will practise Vissi d’Arte over the gumbo soup and Du herstes Wunder ! while the Frankfurters are sizzling. Her trills, her chromatic scales, and her messa di voce will come right in the kitchen; she will equalize her scale and learn to breathe correctly bending over the oven. It is even likely that she will improve her knowledge of portamento while she is washing dishes. When she can prepare a succulent roast suckling pig she will be able to sing Ocean, thou mighty monster ! and she will understand Abscheulicher when she understands the mysteries of old-fashioned strawberry shortcake. If you hear her shrieking Suicidio ! invoking Agamemnon, or appealing to the Casta Diva among the kettles and pots be not alarmed…. For the love you bear of good food, man, do not discourage your wife’s ambition. The more she loves to sing, the better she will cook!”

July 17, 1917.