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The Grand Opera Fad
by
Last winter, when Melba sang in Aida, disguised by dark hair and a brown skin, a lady near me vouchsafed the opinion that the “little black woman hadn’t a bad voice;” a gentleman (to whom I remarked last week “that as Sembrich had sung Rosina in the Barber, it was rather a shock to see her appear as that lady’s servant in the Mariage de Figaro”) looked his blank amazement until it was explained to him that one of those operas was a continuation of the other. After a pause he remarked, “They are not by the same composer, anyway! Because the first’s by Rossini, and the Mariage is by Bon Marché. I’ve been at his shop in Paris.”
The presence of the second category-the would-be fashionable people-is not so easily accounted for. Their attendance can hardly be attributed to love of melody, as they are, if anything, a shade less musical than the box-dwellers, who, by the bye, seem to exercise an irresistible fascination, to judge by the trend of conversation and direction of glasses. Although an imposing and sufficiently attentive throng, it would be difficult to find a less discriminating public than that which gathers nightly in the Metropolitan parterre. One wonders how many of those people care for music and how many attend because it is expensive and “swell.”
They will listen with the same bland contentment to either bad or good performances so long as a world-renowned artist (some one who is being paid a comfortable little fortune for the evening) is on the stage. The orchestra may be badly led (it often is); the singers may flat-or be out of voice; the performance may go all at sixes and sevens-there is never a murmur of dissent. Faults that would set an entire audience at Naples or Milan hissing are accepted herewith ignorant approval.
The unfortunate part of it is that this weakness of ours has become known. The singers feel they can give an American audience any slipshod performance. I have seen a favorite soprano shrug her shoulders as she entered her dressing-room and exclaim: “Mon Dieu! How I shuffled through that act! They’d have hooted me off the stage in Berlin, but here no one seems to care. Did you notice the baritone to-night? He wasn’t on the key once during our duo. I cannot sing my best, try as I will, when I hear the public applauding good and bad alike!”
It is strange that our pleasure-loving rich people should have hit on the opera as a favorite haunt. We and the English are the only race who will attend performances in a foreign language which we don’t understand. How can intelligent people who don’t care for music go on, season after season, listening to operas, the plots of which they ignore, and which in their hearts they find dull?
Is it so very amusing to watch two middle-aged ladies nagging each other, at two o’clock in the morning, on a public square, as they do in Lohengrin? Do people find the lecture that Isolde’s husband delivers to the guilty lovers entertaining? Does an opera produce any illusion on my neighbors? I wish it did on me! I see too plainly the paint on the singers’ hot faces and the cords straining in their tired throats! I sit on certain nights in agony, fearing to see stout Romeo roll on the stage in apoplexy! The sopranos, too, have a way, when about to emit a roulade, that is more suggestive of a dentist’s chair, and the attendant gargle, than of a love phrase.
When two celebrities combine in a final duo, facing the public and not each other, they give the impression of victims whom an unseen inquisitor is torturing. Each turn of his screw draws out a wilder cry. The orchestra (in the pay of the demon) does all it can to prevent their shrieks from reaching the public. The lovers in turn redouble their efforts; they are purple in the face and glistening with perspiration. Defeat, they know, is before them, for the orchestra has the greater staying power! The flutes bleat; the trombones grunt; the fiddles squeal; an epileptic leader cuts wildly into the air about him. When, finally, their strength exhausted, the breathless human beings, with one last ear-piercing note, give up the struggle and retire, the public, excited by the unequal contest, bursts into thunders of applause.