A taste for the theatre is natural enough. It is also easy to understand why people who are fond of sport and animals enjoy races and dog shows. But the continued vogue2 of grand opera, and more especially of Wagner’s long-drawn-out compositions, among our restless, unmusical compatriots, remains3 unexplained.
The sheeplike docility4 of our public is apparent in numberless ways; in none, however, more strikingly than in their choice of amusements. In business and religion, people occasionally think for themselves; in the selection of entertainments, never! but are apparently5 content to receive their opinions and prejudices ready-made from some unseen and omnipotent6 Areopagus.
The careful study of an opera audience from different parts of our auditorium7 has brought me to the conclusion that the public there may be loosely divided into three classes—leaving out reporters of fashionable intelligence, dressmakers in search of ideas, and the lady inhabitants of “Crank Alley” (as a certain corner of the orchestra is called), who sit in perpetual adoration8 before the elderly tenor9.
First—but before venturing further on dangerously thin ice, it may be as well to suggest that this subject is not treated in absolute seriousness, and that all assertions must not be taken au pied de la lettre. First, then, and most important, come the stockholders, for without them the Metropolitan11 would close. The majority of these fortunate people and their guests look upon the opera as a social function, where one can meet one’s friends and be seen, an entertaining antechamber in which to linger until it’s time to “go on,” her Box being to-day as necessary a part of a great lady’s outfit12 as a country house or a ball-room.
Second are those who attend because it has become the correct thing to be seen at the opera. There is so much wealth in this city and so little opportunity for its display, so many people long to go about who are asked nowhere, that the opera has been seized upon as a centre in which to air rich apparel and elbow the “world.” This list fills a large part of the closely packed parquet13 and first balcony.
Third, and last, come the lovers of music, who mostly inhabit greater altitudes.
The motive14 of the typical box-owner is simple. Her night at the opera is the excuse for a cosy15 little dinner, one woman friend (two would spoil the effect of the box) and four men, without counting the husband, who appears at dinner, but rarely goes further. The pleasant meal and the subsequent smoke are prolonged until 9 or 9.30, when the men are finally dragged murmuring from their cigars. If she has been fortunate and timed her arrival to correspond with an entr’acte, my lady is radiant. The lights are up, she can see who are present, and the public can inspect her toilet and jewels as she settles herself under the combined gaze of the house, and proceeds to hold an informal reception for the rest of the evening. The men she has brought with her quickly cede17 their places to callers, and wander yawning in the lobby or invade the neighboring boxes and add their voices to the general murmur16.
Although there is much less talking than formerly18, it is the toleration of this custom at all by the public that indicates (along with many other straws) that we are not a music-loving people. Audible conversation during a performance would not be allowed for a moment by a Continental19 audience. The little visiting that takes place in boxes abroad is done during the entr’actes, when people retire to the salons20 back of their loges to eat ices and chat. Here those little parlors21 are turned into cloak-rooms, and small talk goes on in many boxes during the entire performance. The joke or scandal of the day is discussed; strangers in town, or literary and artistic22 lights—“freaks,” they are discriminatingly called—are pointed24 out, toilets passed in review, and those dreadful two hours passed which, for some undiscovered reason, must elapse between a dinner and a dance. If a favorite tenor is singing, and no one happens to be whispering nonsense over her shoulder, my lady may listen in a distrait25 way. It is not safe, however, to count on prolonged attention or ask her questions about the performance. She is apt to be a bit hazy26 as to who is singing, and with the exception of Faust and Carmen, has rudimentary ideas about plots. Singers come and go, weep, swoon, or are killed, without interfering27 with her equanimity28. She has, for instance, seen the Huguenots and the Rheingold dozens of times, but knows no more why Raoul is brought blindfolded29 to Chenonceaux, or what Wotan and Erda say to each other in their interminable scenes, than she does of the contents of the Vedas. For the matter of that, if three or four principal airs were suppressed from an opera and the scenery and costumes changed, many in that chattering30 circle would, I fear, not know what they were listening to.
Last winter, when Melba sang in Aida, disguised by dark hair and a brown skin, a lady near me vouchsafed31 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 amazement32 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 irresistible33 fascination34, to judge by the trend of conversation and direction of glasses. Although an imposing35 and sufficiently36 attentive37 throng38, it would be difficult to find a less discriminating23 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 bland39 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 dissent40. Faults that would set an entire audience at Naples or Milan hissing41 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 shrug42 her shoulders as she entered her dressing-room and exclaim: “Mon Dieu! How I shuffled43 through that act! They’d have hooted44 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-aged45 ladies nagging
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