Patrick Bade
Operatic War: Oscar Hammerstein and The Met

Patrick Bade - Operatic War: Oscar Hammerstein and The Met

- So between 1906 and 1910, the music lovers of New York were treated to the most extraordinary feast of great singing, unequalled, I would say, in any other place at any other time in the 20th century. They would’ve been going backwards and forwards between these two opera houses, the Manhattan Opera on 34th Street and the Metropolitan Opera on Broadway. And this was all down to the hubris and chutzpah, oops, where is he gone? Sorry, the, I’m looking for, ah, yes. Sorry, I’m going back to the beginning of this man. Yes, this is Oscar Hammerstein the first. Well, you all know about Oscar Hammerstein the second, ‘cause it’s, in fact, this man’s grandson who collaborated with Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern and so on. Oscar Hammerstein the first was born in 1846 into an assimilated Jewish family in Stettin, which was then in Prussia, it’s now in Poland. And when he was 17, he had a huge row with his father and he fled the family, taking his violin, which he sold in order to buy a one-way ticket to America via Liverpool. When he got to America, here he is again, you see in his maturity in a “Vanity Fair” cartoon on the left, he got to America, or this is Stettin as it was in the 19th century. He worked in a cigar factory in very lowly employment, but he was a clever, inventive man, and he invented devices that streamlined the manufacturer of cigars. You can see him with one of them here. And he patented these, and they made him rich, not quite in the Vanderbilt level, but nevertheless, a very rich man. And he’d been fascinated by music and by opera since an early age. Here you can see him at the time of the Manhattan Opera wearing his top hat, sitting on stage. And he commissioned and built a whole series of theatres in New York.

This was the very first one in 1889. It’s the Harlem Opera House, and I don’t think it did present opera, but I think it presented musicals. And there are later theatres. Not exactly architectural masterpieces, and this one, which the Olympia Theatre, it’s a little bit more impressive. This dates from, he built it in 1895. Notice these fire escapes, by the way, 'cause there had been, in the late 19th century, a whole series of really terrible theatre fires with great loss of life, notably in Vienna in the 1880s, and so theatres built around this time tended to have these very elaborate systems of fire escapes, I think particularly before it became really common to have electric lighting 'cause gas lighting is much more dangerous. But this is the Olympia Theatre. He, it opened in 1895, and he actually presented an operetta that he’d written himself in this theatre in 1896 that had good reviews, but he was always incredibly profligate in, it was such an elaborate production, it really couldn’t get back the money he invested in it. So now we get up to 1906 in these two theatres, the Manhattan Theatre, which was built specifically for him in that year, and the Metropolitan on the other side. This is the interior of the Manhattan Theatre, and you can see it’s quite different from the Metropolitan. It has no boxes, no downward horseshoe. And that is, I think, a rather attractive side of Oscar Hammerstein, that he was very, I think one of his main motivations for setting up his own opera house was a dislike of all the snobbery that surrounded opera at the Metropolitan.

And for him, it was more important that theatre should have good sight lines and it should have a good acoustic, and apparently, it was very, very respectful in both respects. So it was really a kind of duel between the two houses, each having to invest as much as possible in getting the world’s greatest singers and musicians. So here again is the Metropolitan. Here are the two directors of the Metropolitan during this four-year period, the German, Heinrich Conried, on the left-hand side, he retired in 1908, and on the right is Giulio Gatti-Casazza who took over the Metropolitan in 1908. And he was regarded as a kind of new brew. He’d been very, very successful in rejuvenating the fortunes of La Scala in Milan around the turn of the century, so he was certainly a great asset and a rather more formidable opponent for Oscar Hammerstein than Heinrich Conried had been. So one of the first things that Giulio Gatti-Casazza did was to employ the world’s two greatest conductors. I mean, it’s incredible to think that they were both working in the same house from 1908 to 1910. Now, Arturo Toscanini, he’d worked with him in Milan and Gustav Mahler, who had fallen out with the Vienna Opera in 1907, and so took up this offer from New York. So it was quite a bit, so as well as a war going on between the two houses, I think there was a bit of a civil war going on at the Metropolitan between these two conductors who disliked each other. In some ways, they had quite a lot in common. They were, both of them, very determined to promote opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

That’s a total work of art. They wanted to discipline singers. Toscanini famously said, when Geraldine Farrar said, “I’m a star,” he said, “No, the only stars are in the heavens.” So they wanted to make the whole performance work together as a unified and disciplined art form. They certainly raised orchestral standards at the Metropolitan. But the biggest single asset in this war for the Metropolitan Opera was the tenor, Enrico Caruso. I talked last time about how he arrived in 1903 and was more or less instantly recognised as the world’s greatest tenor. And he opened every season at the Metropolitan until his death in 1921, and you can see him as Radames in “Aida” on the left and in “Pagliacci” on the right-hand side. So he was an absolutely incomparable draw for the Metropolitan Opera. On the soprano front, in 1906, the Met still had the great Emma Eames on the left-hand side and Marcella Sembrich, who were revered by the New York critics and adored by the New York public, but both of them were coming to the end of their careers. In fact, both of them retired in 1909. So the, probably the biggest soprano box office draw at the Met were the sopranos, Emmy Destinn and Geraldine Farrar. Emmy Destinn was widely regarded as having the most magnificent soprano voice of the period in terms of size and quality. Maybe not a vocalist quite as refined as Eames or Melba, but she hugely moved audiences, both with just the sound of her voice and with her emotional par. And Geraldine Farrar, as you can see, was a very beautiful woman, and she was a good singer and a very good singing actress, although she didn’t please Puccini for whatever reason, I’m not quite sure, but she certainly pleased the New York public, especially young girls, and she had a following of young girls who were named Gerry-flappers after Geraldine Farrar. And another huge asset that the Metropolitan had, advantage, shall we say, over the Manhattan Opera was that they had a monopoly on the world’s most popular opera composer, Giacomo Puccini.

So although there was an occasion where Oscar Hammerstein put on a performance of “Boheme,” but the Metropolitan immediately litigated to stop him performing, Puccini. Puccini came over twice during this period for the New York premiere of “Butterfly” in 1907. And then just at the very end of this period in 1910, when finally victorious but battered, the Metropolitan came out of this conflict with the Manhattan Opera and they presented the world premiere of Puccini’s “La fanciulla del West” and this photograph was taken on that occasion. And you can see there’s Gatti-Casazza on the left, there’s David Belasco who wrote the play that both Madame Butterflies and “La fanciulla” were based on. There’s Toscanini, the conductor, looking young and dapper, and Puccini on the right-hand side. So, and here is, of course, the original cast of “La fanciulla del West” with Caruso as Dick Johnson, the bandit, and Emmy Destinn as Minnie. This is the final scene as it looked in 1910. And I have to tell you a rather scandalous story, 'cause I like it so much, about this moment. Actually, in the opera, in the dress rehearsal, Emmy Destinn has to come onto stage on a horse, on horseback. And she was a large lady, and the horse took exception to this and it threw her off. And the singer, Dinh Gilly, the Algerian baritone, Dinh Gilly, who you can see, he’s actually in, as you look at this photograph, to the left of Caruso. And he’s the insert as well. He was a hunky guy, and he caught, he must be very strong, he caught Destinn and broke her fall, and she was so grateful about this that she took him into her bed, and where she was even more grateful, 'cause she was apparently very, very impressed by his anatomy, shall I put that politely, and she had a certain part of his anatomy cast, she made a plaster cast of it, which she displayed under a glass dome in her castle in Bohemia. And they were an item for several years, Emmy Destinn and Dinh Gilly.

And his nickname in the business was La forza del destin. So, back to Manhattan. What did Manhattan have? Well, they had a very good conductor too, a man of great reputation, greatly respected, Italian Cleofonte Campanini who you see with Hammerstein in this photograph. His reputation, I suppose, it hasn’t lasted quite in the way that Toscanini’s and Mahler’s have, Mahler because of his symphonies and Toscanini because of his many later recordings. 'Cause Campanini died in 1919 without having made recordings, but was, as I said, considered a very fine opera composer. So Hammerstein scrambled around to find the best tenors he possibly could to counter Caruso. So there’s the French Dalmorès for the more heroic roles on the left. Next in is Alessandro Bonci, very exquisite tenor for the lyric roles. In fact, he had been, when the Metropolitan were rooting around to try and find a successor to Jean de Reszke, they initially were going to ask Bonci, but changed their mind and asked Caruso instead, and the rest is history. Middle right, John McCormack, in his way, a marvellous tenor, very elegant, and on the right, an equally elegant French tenor that I will play you tonight. This is David Devriès. All four, marvellous singers. All four made wonderful records. But even the full four of them could never really compete with the box office draw of Caruso. It was on the soprano front that Hammerstein really won out. And these were his three biggest draws in the first season. It was Nellie Melba. The second season, he got in her great rival, Luisa Tetrazzini, you see in the middle. But his, the biggest draw of all was the Scottish soprano, Mary Garden. She was an absolute superstar. I’ll talk quite a lot, a lot more about her later.

He had to pay her enormous sums of money to lure her across the Atlantic, but he always said she was actually his cheapest star, because once her name was on the playbills, he was guaranteed that the opera would sell out. And he had another secret weapon, I could say, in a soprano, not on the same level as those three, but nevertheless, an extraordinary draw, and this is Lina Cavalieri. She was basically a courtesan who slept her way to the top. She worked very hard on her singing voice and technique, and apparently she could give a perfectly decent vocal performance, if not top level. But people didn’t pay to see her for her singing. They went to look at her 'cause she was reputed. She was always said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. That was her reputation, the most beautiful woman in the world. And through her, her earnings were largely horizontal rather than vertical, shall we say, and she was often paid in jewels by Russian archdukes and kings and very wealthy people. You can see she’s wearing some pretty spectacular pearls in both these images, portrait by Boldini, on the right-hand side. And she used to wear them on stage. So people went to admire her beauty, and they went to gasp at the jewels that she was wearing on stage. She had actually made her New York debut at the Met in 1907 in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and she used to specialise in roles where she played courtesans, so in fact, her two most famous roles were in “Manon Lescaut” and “Thaïs” who were both, so she was really, in a way, playing herself, and she sang that opposite Caruso in 1907 at the Met with considerable success.

But having got her, worked her way through a couple of Russian archdukes, she then got her claws into a very rich American socialite. And he was an artist, quite a gifted artist, called Robert Winthrop Chanler, you see on the right-hand side. He was a member of the Astor family that I was talking about a week or so ago, so he was one of the super rich of New York. And there are various scandalous versions of this story. She got him to sign over his entire fortune to her before the wedding. According to some versions, the wedding lasted as long as the honeymoon. The version I like 'cause it’s more colourful, but I’m not sure if it’s true, is that the marriage lasted one night. She got him drunk and she laid him out on the floor like Scarpia in act two of “Tosca” with candles either side of him, and she fled into the night to her French lover. Anyway, this was a massive scandal. It really rocked New York high society. She was, of course, immediately dismissed from the Met, and Hammerstein thought, Hmm, well, this will be good box office, so he took her on at, briefly, at the Manhattan Opera. And 'cause the end of this story, I’m anticipating the end of this story, is that the Metropolitan, the backers of the Metropolitan Opera, who were, as we’ve heard, New York super rich, they paid the sum of $1.2 million, an immense, immense sum in 1910, to Hammerstein on the condition that he would not present any operas in America for 10 years.

So that, it killed a couple of birds with one stone, because first of all, the Met was heading for bankruptcy as well with this competition with the Manhattan Opera, but also, New York high society had closed ranks behind the Astor family, and they were very determined that to get rid of the troublesome, the beautiful Lina Cavalieri, so by shutting down the Manhattan Opera, that meant she had no more possibility of appearing on the stage in New York. She continued her career very happily in Russia until the Russian Revolution. And actually her, she had a rather extraordinary end to her life. She was killed in a bombing raid in 1944 on the city of Ravenna, but she, of course, she still had her wonderful collection of jewels. And if you know the story of Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” which is her most famous role, her jewels were her undoing 'cause she went back to get them and then was arrested and shipped off to Louisiana, but as a prostitute. But in the case of Lina Cavalieri, she and her, all her servants were, there was a bombing raid and they all went into the shelter in the garden but she went back to get her jewels and was, as I said, killed by a bomb. So it was a kind of, in a way, a sort of poetic ending for her career. Anyway, back to the Manhattan Opera. Opening night, 1906, God, what a dilemma for New York opera fans because Hammerstein had poached Nellie Melba, who had briefly appeared at the Metropolitan.

Actually, no, she appeared there several times and he presented her in “La traviata” with the Enrico Caruso’s nearest rival, Alessandro Bonci as Alfredo, and the very distinguished and elegant baritone, Maurice Renaud as Germont-père so that was a big draw. But back at the Metropolitan that night, there was “Tosca” with Emma Eames, Caruso, and Scotti. So which one to go to? My guess is that there were many wealthy and keen opera lovers, who on these occasions when the two houses were presenting such wonderful cast, they may, 'cause they’re close enough, you could run from one to the other, and you could see one act in one house, and then in the interval, hop over to the other house. So you could have heard Nellie Melba in her famous act one aria from “La traviata” I’m going to play you now, and you could have nipped across to Broadway to hear Caruso in the last act sing “E lucevan le stelle.” Here is Melba in act one of “La traviata.” All her great vocal qualities on display, but also, I think her, for me, her limitations. Very beautiful, very pure sound, wonderful clean attack on the notes, immaculate trill and so on, but in the end, is one moved? I’m not really very moved by her singing. So yes, if you sprinted, you could have got, you could have heard that at the Manhattan Opera House and you could have got across to Broadway for act two of “Tosca,” in which case, you would’ve been able to hear Nellie Melba’s bitter enemy, Emma Eames. I’ve talked about this before, how the two of them absolutely loathed each other. They had the same teacher, Mathilda Marchesi, and a somewhat similar technique. And Eames is also, I would say, a cool singer, though Puccini, who generally wanted warmth and emotion, was actually very impressed by her and said her “Tosca” had the quality of Greek tragedy. So here is the cast of “Tosca” at the Met on the very same night in 1906. Caruso with a rather anachronistic moustache for an 18th-century character.

And the great singing actor, Scotti, I think you get a sense of, you know, his stage presence and his power from that photograph of him on the right-hand side. So in 1907, another great coup for Hammerstein, that he presents Luisa Tetrazzini to the American public. She’d been around for quite a long time, or to the New York public rather, 'cause I think she’d sung in other places in America and she’d sung in South America, but without great success. She became a star overnight in London, 1907, and I’ve told this story before about Melba, who was always very jealous of her position as queen of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, would never let anybody in who might threaten her position. But she was on tour in Australia when Tetrazzini appeared and took London by storm, and instantly, they became very bitter rivals. Very, very different personalities. If you read all the autobiographies of the singers of the period, I think I’ve read them all, really, nobody ever really has a nice thing to say about Melba. She was pretty obnoxious, but everybody loved Tetrazzini. Oh, here are the two dishes named after each of them, which probably tell you quite a bit about their different personalities. It’s that appropriate really, that it should be an ice cream named after the rather frigid Nellie Melba and a very hearty pasta that’s named after Tetrazzini, Pollo Tetrazzini. Apparently, she liked nothing better than cooking up a delicious pasta for her colleagues backstage. And as I said, they all, she was cuddly in appearance and very cuddly and warm and friendly in her personality. I think you can sense it really, can’t you, from these pictures of her.

And the amazing thing was that she, despite her, I mean she doesn’t look tubercular, she doesn’t look fragile. You can’t quite imagine her as the Lady of Camellias or the fragile Lucia di Lammermoor. She sang with a lot more emotion than Melba, and she certainly had an absolutely dazzling technique. So there would’ve been another one of those evenings where you really had to think long and hard, which opera house are you going to go to? You had to choose, on this occasion, between “Lucia di Lammermoor” with Tetrazzini in this 1907 opening night. And John McCormack, who writes very lovingly and affectionately of Tetrazzini, he clearly was very fond of her and liked singing with her. So they were at the Manhattan, and then over at the Metropolitan, there was “Gioconda” with Emmy Destinn and Caruso. So we start off with the dazzling technique pyrotechnics of Luisa Tetrazzini in the mad scene from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” I’m afraid the flute never had a chance there. So here is her Edgardo, who must have looked like her son, I suppose. This is a very, very young John McCormack who, as I said, writes about her so affectionately and wonder, actually, probably vocally, he was really a perfect match for Melba 'cause he is such a fine and refined and exquisite vocalist as you’ll hear in this scene from “Lucia di Lammermoor.” I’m moving on quite swiftly because I’m going to run out of time. But so, that lovely light lyric voice of John McCormack. Wonderful, of course. There’s a story about John McCormack bumping into Caruso in the street during this period and saying to him, “How is the world’s greatest tenor today?” And Caruso answering him, with an Italian accent of course, “Why are you being so modest?” 'Cause I think he certainly respected John McCormack’s vocal art, but of course, he could never match the sheer voluptuous fullness of tone of Caruso. So here, over at the other house on the same evening, here is Caruso in the aria, “Cielo E Mar” from “La Gioconda.” In 1907, Hammerstein went French.

And I think this was, in a way, an inevitable choice for him. Without Puccini, of course, his Italian wing was going to be very diminished, and he could hardly compete in the German repertoire with Mahler and Toscanini. So in a way, French was the obvious alternative. And in 1906, he’d been in Paris and he’d witnessed the incredible sensation that Mary Garden made in the role of “Aphrodite.” And apparently, she appeared more or less nude, and that was part of the appeal, I suppose, from the public. She was a very, very beautiful woman and very seductive, and a wonderful actress. Here she is in “Aphrodite.” So he more or less stalked her, he chased her. She played very, very hard to get. But eventually, he made her, as he did with other female singers, offers she couldn’t refuse. She was a toughie, so she wasn’t going to be a walkover for him. And there was a kind of wary, mutual respect between the two of them. So she was Scottish born, but brought up in Chicago and had a huge success in Paris in 1900, and for a few years, she was pretty well queen of Paris, on the covers of all the magazines, and you find hundreds of postcards of her in the flea markets. Here she is as Thais, the role that in which she was presented to New York and New York fell under her spell exactly as Paris had done, and as Chicago would do later in the 1920s. I’ll play you, I’m a bit spoilt for choice here, but the opera that made her was Charpentier’s “Louise,” and this was in 1900. She had not, she was just not, she was not even an understudy for the main role.

She haunted the rehearsals for the first production of “Louise” in 1900. And one night, the star, Marthe Rioton, had a kind of vocal collapse halfway through the opera, and it happened that the understudy, another very fine singer called Katrine Masteau was ill, and there was a panic and she just said, “Me, me, me, I know it, I can do it.” And they, a bit sceptically, they said, okay, and they pushed her out onto the stage. And her first notes before the public on the stage in Paris were the aria, “Depuis le jour.” Very difficult, difficult aria. And next day, she was famous. She had all Paris at her feet. So here is that aria in which, in fact, she took Paris by storm in 1900. Mary Garden, as I said, she certainly conquered the New York public and the New York critics, but there’s a strange mismatch, really, between what the critics said about her and what we hear on the records, what I just played to you. She was always praised for her extraordinary vocal acting and for her charisma, no doubt about that, but the critics were often quite negative about her voice and her singing. I love her records. I’d rather have her records than Melba’s or Eames’ any day. Her voice doesn’t have that instrumental purity of the sopranos who were taught by Mathilda Marchesi. You can hear there’s a ripple of vibrato in the voice, but it’s a good voice. You know, one critic said her voice was like snakes in Ireland. In other words, that she didn’t have a voice. But to me, it’s a very, a pretty voice, and a very good technique, and I always find her records very touching. What is missing, perhaps, is this kind of elemental passion that she conveyed on stage. She was chosen by Debussy to sing in the premiere of “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Apparently, one of the reasons that he liked her so much was that she sang French with a Scottish accent and he thought that was exotic and exciting.

Here she is as Melisande. There is a little recording I was planning to play you, but you can check it out on YouTube of her singing a little excerpt of “Melisande” with Debussy himself accompanying her on the piano. She was such a big star, and all this repertoire was new repertoire to the Americans, this French repertoire. They hadn’t heard “Thais,” “Louise,” or “Pelléas et Mélisande” before. And Hammerstein was so confident in his huge investment in Mary Garden that he imported from the Opera-Comique the cast that had surrounded her in those performances in Paris, including the very first Golaud in “Pelléas et Mélisande” in the 1902 premiere, a very fine singer called Dufranne, Hector Dufranne. And he obviously had a very good technique ‘cause he went on a long time. And so I’m going to play you, this is an electric recording, so much better quality recording, of Dufranne singing a bit of “Pelléas et Mélisande” and you hear the beautiful, smooth voice, similar to that I played you last time. Now, the tenor who is chosen by Hammerstein to sing Pelléas to the Mélisande of Mary Garden was David Devriès. And he also sang in many other operas in this French season, including the New York premiere of another opera by Massenet, “Grisélidis.” Now he is one of my absolute favourite singers of all time, and if I had to name my top three or four tenors, he’d be one of them. It’s not to everybody’s taste. It’s a very French sound, indeed, slightly bleating sound with a rapid vibrato, slightly nasal, but such an exquisite tenor, such an interesting artist in everything he does. And this is an aria from “Grisélidis” in which he took part in the New York premiere. Ooh, notice, what is this? Got something else here.

It’s Borthayre. And it’s not him. Oh, dear, sorry about, move on, but you can look him up. He’s a wonderful singer. Try and find him on YouTube. So this is Mary Garden in other roles. I mean she, she took on, you know, the voice on record sounds small, it sounds like a lyric voice, but she sang very dramatic roles like Fiora in “L'Amore dei Tre Re.” You see on the left-hand side. She also sang in the New York premiere of “Jongleur de Notre-Dame” of Massenet with the tessitura rewritten especially for her because it was actually a role for a tenor, so she took the role on in drag. And made, oh, there’s a battle going on between the two houses for presenting Strauss’s “Salome,” the most scandalous opera of the period. And initially, it was the Metropolitan that got in there first with Olive Fremstad, who took the role so seriously that when she was preparing it, she went to a morgue 'cause she wanted to pick up a severed head to see how heavy it was. Well, she got, this is her in the dress rehearsal. She only got as far as the dress rehearsal because one of the wives, a wife of one of the wealthy backers of the Met was so scandalised by the opera that she got her husband to pay the Met to take it off, so it left this, left the way open for Hammerstein to present it, the premiere with Mary Gardner. How she got through this opera I do not know. You wouldn’t have thought that she had anything like the vocal base. A huge orchestra, over 100 man, going full pelt all the way through.

In fact, Strauss admired her very much, and he even conceived the role of Octavian in “Rosenkavalier” partly inspired by her, although she never sang that. And she did go to visit him in his house in Garmisch, and she went through the score with him, so he presumably must have given her his blessing. My guess is that she actually simply didn’t sing some of what was written. You could get away with that in those days. Nowadays, of course you can’t 'cause everybody’s got recordings and they know what notes are supposed to be there. But I think she was quite, you know, she felt free to sing the roles as they suited her. Hammerstein also put on the American premiere of “Elektra,” strangely, but with a French cast and sung in French. I’ve only talked about tenors and sopranos today, 'cause I suppose those were the, they were the big guns, they were the draws that drew people in. He had a star mezzo, Jeanne Gerville-Réache, but he’d also hired a young Peruvian, a Peruvian stroke British mezzo called Marguerite d'Alvarez. And he was obviously obsessively, I won’t say in love, in lust with her. And she describes all of this in great detail in her very colourful autobiography, “Forsaken Alters.” I mean, that book, some people have said, oh, she’s exaggerating. I’ve reread it recently when I was preparing this talk, and I must say, I believe every word she says in the light of the Me Too scandal. It’s a classic me too situation with him trapping her into a contract and then trying to blackmail her into having sex with him by not, either not letting her sing, not letting her sing for anybody else, and it’s a long, rather painful story really. But, so my last vocal excerpt is Marguerite d'Alvarez. I mean, she actually, in the end, had to go to the law.

She had to litigate to allow him to let her sing. And here she is in her signature role of Delilah. So with $1.2 million under his belt, he up sticks, left New York. His entire company was disbanded, but they were lucky because they were taken up by the Chicago company, and that’s going to be a talk I’m going to be doing shortly, the Golden Age of Chicago, which is from 1910 up 'til 1931, and they had most wonderful cast that could also rival those of the Met. So with all that money, Hammerstein came back over the Atlantic and he built himself another opera house in London, and he tried the same old trick. Between 1910 and 1914, he tried to give the Royal Opera House in London a run for the money. And he built this, actually, the most magnificent of all the theatres that he actually had built was the Stoll Theatre. You can see the interior of it. This is what it looked like on the outside. Sadly demolished in the 1950s. So that’s another very interesting story, really. Oscar Hammerstein in London in competition with Covent Garden. But that’s for another lecture and another time. I see a few questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you for your greetings. You’re surprised to see Puccini in the photo with Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini. Well, Puccini and Gatti-Casazza, I think they got on pretty well actually. And Toscanini without a cigarette.

Oh, Natasha, hello, Natasha. Lina Cavalieri. Oh, well, now that is really a badge of honour, isn’t it? My goodness, your father, who’s an opera-loving doctor having an affair with the most beautiful woman in the world. And next time I visit you, Natasha, I want you to show me that photo of her.

Yes, of course, thank you, Dennis, for reminding me. I should have said that Maria Callas would be 100 today if she was still alive.

And Rita mentions that “My Secrets of Beauty,” 'cause Lina Cavalieri, after she gave up her operatic career, became a sort of celebrity beautician.

And thank you, Madeleine. Oh, I’m cross with myself. I’m really cross that I managed to screw up. There’s the wonderful David Devriès, so I do hope you follow that up and listen to him.

Q: Was there another opera house or company in New York?

A: Yes, there had been opera in New York since the beginning of the 19th century.

Jack, the difference between electrical and previous recording was that the former used a microphone rather than horn. Yes, you are correct, that is absolutely true, and that was introduced in 1925. Katrine, nice to hear from you, thank you. It was, no, I think it was, well it depended where you sat, of course. It was certainly very expensive if you sat in the better seats, but I think probably you, there are many, many stories. You know, I’m going to talk about Rosa Ponselle, for instance, who came from a very humble family, but I think if you were prepared to sit up in the gods, it wasn’t that expensive.

Thank you, Greta and Yudhishthira and Erica, lovely to hear from you all. It must be unbelievable. That’s why I always disapprove of booing singers, even if they sing badly. It must be so terrifying to go out there and everything depending on those little vocal chords.

Thank you, Margaret. Yes, well, you know, I do love to play. There wasn’t really time to do that tonight, but I do like doing comparative demonstrations of singing the same aria with different singers.

Thank you, Lorna. And thank you all, and I’ll be back with you again at the Met, but with three of the greatest singers to have appeared at the Met, Ponselle, Tibbett, and Grace Moore on Wednesday.

Thank you all very much indeed, bye bye.