Eugenie Delarue is now in a terrible dilemma. Should she betray the Confederacy by keeping her knowledge to herself, or denounce the man she still loves? At this point a brief armistice is announced to enable an exchange of prisoners deemed permanently hors de combat. The man with the destroyed face qualifies for inclusion in the exchange; covered wagons arrive with wounded Confederate soldiers from the North, to pick up their own crippled soldiers in the hands of the South.
At this point I must describe the amazing events that happened backstage during the entr’acte. It seems (and my source is quite certain of this that Mr Melrose sprayed a soothing linctus upon his throat to ease the larynx. It must have been contaminated in some way, for within seconds he was croaking like a frog. Disaster!! The curtain was about to rise. Then appeared an understudy, miraculously made up for the part, his face swathed in bandages, just in time to step into the breach.
Normally this would have been a terrible disappointment for the audience. But in this case all the gods of opera must have been smiling upon Mr Hammerstein. The understudy, unlisted in the programme and still unknown to me, sang in a tenor to match that of the great Signor Gonci himself.
Miss Delarue decided that as Captain Regan would never fight again she had no need to reveal what she knew of the man in the mask. As the wagons prepared to roll north Colonel Howard learned that somewhere the wanted leader of Regan’s Raiders had been injured and was presumably behind Confederate lines. Notices offering a reward for his capture were posted. Every Union soldier leaving for the North was compared with a sketch of Regan’s face. To no avail. For by now Captain Regan has no face.
As the soldiers destined to be repatriated to the North wait through the night for their dawn departure, we are treated to a most charming interlude. Colonel Howard, the great Gonci himself, has throughout the action been attended by a young aide-de-camp, no more than a boy of perhaps thirteen. Until this point he has uttered no sound. But as one of the Union soldiers tries to coax a tune out of his soldier’s fiddle the boy quietly takes the instrument from him and plays a beautiful melody as if he were handling a Stradivarius. One of the wounded men asks if he can sing the song of the tune; in answer the boy lays aside the fiddle and gives us an aria in a treble of such sweet clarity that I know it brought a lump to the throat of almost everyone present. And when I studied my programme for his name, lo! he turned out to be none other than Master Pierre de Chagny, son of the diva herself. So, a chip off the old block.
In the parting scene of quite exquisite pathos Miss Delarue and her Unionist fiance say their farewells. Mme de Chagny had already sung throughout with a purity of voice normally ascribed only to angels. But now she rose to new and seemingly unattainable heights of vocal beauty, the like of which I have never heard. As she began the aria ‘Will we never meet again?’ she seemed to be singing her heart out, and as the unknown understudy returned the ring she had given him with the words ‘Take back this band’ I saw a thousand squares of cambric fly to the faces of the ladies of New York.
It was an evening that will remain in the hearts and minds of any who were there. I swear I saw the normally fiercely disciplined Maestro Campanini almost in tears as Mme de Chagny, alone on the stage and lit only by candle lamps in the darkened hospital ward, brought the opera to a close with ‘O cruel war’.
There were thirty-seven standing ovations and curtain-calls, and that was before I had to leave to find out what had happened to Master Melrose and his throat linctus. Alas, he had left in tears.
While the rest of the company was superb and the orchestra under Signor Campanini nothing less than one would expect, the night must belong to the young lady from Paris. Her beauty and charm already have the entire staff at the Waldorf-Astoria literally at her feet and now the unalloyed magic of that voice has conquered every opera-lover who had the good fortune to be at the Manhattan last night.
What a tragedy that she must depart so soon. She will sing for us for another five evenings and must then depart for Europe to fulfil previous engagements at Covent Garden before Christmas. Her place will be taken early next month by Nellie Melba, Oscar Hammerstein’s second triumph over his cross-town rivals. She too is a legend in her lifetime, and she too will be singing her New York debut, but she must look to her laurels, for no-one who was present last night will ever forget La Divina.
And what of the Metropolitan? Among the great dynasts whose wealth backs the Met I think I noted, mixed with their delight at the new masterpiece, some sharp glances to each other as if to ask: what now? Clearly, despite its smaller auditorium, the Manhattan has finer front-of-house facilities, a huge stage, the very latest technology and deeply impressive sets. If Mr Hammerstein can continue to offer us the quality we saw last night the Met will have to dig deep to match him.
15
THE REPORT OF AMY FONTAINE
SOCIETY COLUMN, NEW YORK WORLD, 4 DECEMBER 1906
WELL, THERE ARE PARTIES AND THERE ARE PARTIES, but surely the one held last night at the new Manhattan Opera House following the triumphal rendition of The Angel of Shiloh must rank as the party of this decade.
Attending as I do on behalf of World readers nearly a thousand social events a year, I can still truly say I have never seen so many celebrated Americans under one roof.
When the last and final curtain came down after ovations and curtain-calls too numerous to count, the glittering audience began to drift towards the great West 34th Street portico where a jam of carriages awaited them. These were the unfortunates not coming to the party itself. Those in the audience with invitations tarried until the curtain went up again, then walked up the hastily erected ramp over the orchestra pit and up to the stage. Others who had not been able to make the performance came in through the stage door.
Our host for the evening was tobacco magnate Mr Oscar Hammerstein, who has designed, built and owns the Manhattan Opera House. He took centre stage and personally welcomed each guest coming from the auditorium. Among them were surely every name even remotely associated with New York, prominent among them the World‘s proprietor Mr Joseph Pulitzer.
The stage itself formed a magnificent backdrop to the party, for Mr Hammerstein had retained the Southern mansion that features in the opera, so that we were gathering under its very walls. Round the perimeter, stage-hands had quickly placed a range of genuine antique tables which groaned with food and drink, with a lively bar and six tenders to en
sure no-one went thirsty.
Mayor George McClellan was quickly there, mingling with Rockefellers and Vanderbilts as the crowd swelled and swelled. The whole party was in honour of the young prima donna Vicomtesse Christine de Chagny who had just established such a magnificent triumph on that very stage, and the most notable people of New York could hardly wait to meet her. At the start she was resting in her dressing-room, bombarded with messages of congratulation, bouquets of flowers so numerous that they had to be sent down to the Bellevue Hospital at her personal request, and invitations to the greatest houses in the city.
Moving through the growing crowd I sought out people whose exploits might fascinate readers of the New York World and came across two young actors, D. W. Griffith and Mr Douglas Fairbanks, in earnest conversation. Mr Griffith, fresh from playing in Boston, informed me that he was toying with the notion of leaving New England for a sunny village outside Los Angeles, where he was interested in a (crazy-sounding) new form of entertainment called biographs. Apparently these involve moving images on a strip of celluloid. I heard Mr Fairbanks laughingly tell his fellow thespian that when he became a star on Broadway he might follow him to Hollywood, but only if anything ever became of the biographs. At this point a tall marine emerged from the portico of the mansion and announced in a loud voice: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.’
I could hardly believe my ears, but it was true, and in seconds there he was, President Teddy Roosevelt, eyeglasses perched on his nose, beaming his cheery grin and moving through the crowd shaking hands with everyone. Nor had he come alone, for he has a deserved reputation for surrounding himself with the most colourful characters from our society. Within minutes I found my poor hand gripped in the giant fist of former heavyweight champion of the world Bob Fitzsimmons, while standing a few yards away were another former champion, Sailor Tom Sharkey, and the reigning champ, Canadian Tommy Burns. I felt a midget among these towering men.
At that moment there appeared in the doorway of the mansion the star herself. She descended to a rapturous round of applause led by the President, who advanced to be introduced by Mr Hammerstein. With old-world gallantry Mr Roosevelt took her hand and kissed it, to a cheer from the assembled throng. Then he greeted chief tenor Signor Gonci and the rest of the cast as Mr Hammerstein introduced them.
With the formalities over our roguish Chief Executive took the lovely young French aristocrat on his arm and escorted her round the room to introduce her to those he knew. She was especially delighted to meet Colonel Bill Cody, Buffalo Bill himself, whose Wild West Show is entrancing crowds across the river in Brooklyn. With him was none other than Sitting Bull, whom I had never seen before. Like many of us I recall as a small girl hearing with horror what the Sioux had done to our poor boys at the Little Big Horn, and yet here was this gentle old man, looking as old as the Black Hills themselves, giving the open-handed sign of peace to our President and his French guest.
Moving closer to the presidential entourage I heard Teddy Roosevelt introduce Mme de Chagny to his niece’s new husband and soon found a chance to have a few words with this startlingly handsome young man. He is just down from Harvard and studying at the Columbia Law School in New York. Of course, I asked him if he contemplated a career in politics like his famous uncle by marriage and he conceded that he might one day. So perhaps we will hear of Franklin Delano Roosevelt again.
With the party livening up, the food and drink circulating merrily, I noted that a piano had been positioned in one corner with a young man at the keyboard producing light-hearted music of our era in contrast to the more serious classical arias of the opera. He turned out to be a young Russian immigrant, still with a strong accent, who told me he had composed some of the airs he was playing himself and wished to become an established composer. Well, good luck, Irving Berlin.
In the early part of the festivities there seemed to be one person missing whom many would have liked to meet and congratulate - the unknown understudy who had taken over the role of the hospitalized David Melrose as the tragic Captain Regan. At first one thought his absence could be explained by the difficulty of removing the considerable make-up that covered most of his face. The rest of the cast was circulating freely, a pageant of dark blue and gold Union uniforms with the dove-grey coats of the Confederate soldiers. But even those who had been playing the ‘wounded’ soldiers of the hospital scenes had speedily removed their bandages and thrown away their rough crutches. And still the mysterious tenor was missing.
His appearance, when he came, was in the main doorway of the plantation house, atop the double stairway leading down to the stage where we were all enjoying the party. And what a brief appearance it was! Is this extraordinarily talented singer really that shy? Many of those below the portico missed him completely. But there was one who did not.
As he came through the doorway I saw that he had still retained his heavy make-up, the bandage that covered most of his face in the opera, allowing only his eyes to show, and a line of the jaw. He had his hand on the shoulder of the young treble who had so entranced us with his singing, Pierre, the son of Mme de Chagny. He seemed to be whispering in the boy’s ear and the child was nodding in understanding.