PREPARING ROLES IN BERLIN
The first of September, without a word of German, I set out for Berlin.
My mother had come over during the preceding Spring, to make her home in
Paris with my sculptor brother Cecil and my sister. From this time on I
went to them for the summers, and my sister joined me when I went to
Metz, and has never left me since. It made it harder to leave both
family and Paris behind and go into an unknown land, but I felt it to be
the best way.
Lilli Lehmann's studio was my objective point. I found her address in a
musical journal, and armed with that, and the address of an inexpensive
_pension_, I took the train. Arrived in Berlin, I took a _Droschke_,
directing the driver to my pension by showing him the street and number
on a piece of paper. Somewhere between that _Droschke_ and my room, my
travelling clock got lost, and what a time I had to recover it! The
apple-cheeked maid knew of the existence of no other language beside
her own. In vain I made a pendulum of my finger and tirelessly repeated
"tick, tick"--no gleam of intelligence dawned in her Prussian blue eyes.
The first few days brought a series of disappointments. The Lehmann idea
had to be abandoned. She was out of town and recommended me by letter to
a certain Herr----, to whom she was sending every one who applied to
her. I found him a dear old man indeed, but one who had nothing to say
to me on the subject of voice production which I had not heard already.
However, I decided to begin the study of German repertoire with him,
painstakingly re-learning the operas I already knew in French, and
adding the new ones required for a German engagement. Later I found a
good _repetiteur_, who knew the operas thoroughly, quite sufficient and
much cheaper, as he charged only four marks ($1.00) an hour. I studied
the words of my roles with Herr----'s wife, who had been an actress and
a good one, and who laid the foundation of what I am proud to say is now
a perfect German accent. These lessons were five marks an hour and were
quite worth it. I would learn a role by heart, sentence by sentence,
looking up every word in the dictionary and writing in the translation
over the German, spending hours in fruitless search for a past
participle which did not look as if it belonged to its infinitive, the
only part of the verb, of course, to be given in the dictionary! Then,
sentence by sentence, I would go over it with Frau----, repeating each
word after her, sometimes twenty times! We also used those splendid
books, known I found afterwards to every German actor, in which
paragraphs of words with the same vowel sound or combination of vowel
and consonants are given to be repeated over and over again. Besides
this drudgery, I had German lessons for four months (at three marks or
seventy-five cents) for which I had to translate and write exercises.
All the labyrinths of the declension of articles, nouns and adjectives
in three genders and plurals, lay before me to be explored. The datives
and accusatives haunted my dreams by night, and by day I was reduced to
the sign language.
I had left my first pension, and crushing down the temptation to live in
one of the big, gay German-American pensions, where justice is tempered
with mercy, so to speak, I moved myself and my piano into a real German
one, where I was the only alien. It was one floor of a large house in a
quiet side street--the top floor, and no elevator! I climbed
eighty-seven steps by actual count every time I came home from a lesson.
I had a huge room, heated by steam, with board for four marks a day. The
meals were _echt Deutsch_. Breakfast was set ready on the dining-room
table at some unearthly hour, and the guests went in and helped
themselves when they chose. The coffee and hot milk were kept warm over
little alcohol flames, and there were delicious Berlin rolls and the
best of unsalted butter. Dinner was at two, and was good in its plain
way. We had some North German dishes which one had to learn to enjoy,
like olives. Hot chocolate soup I grew quite fond of, but beer soup,
sorrel soup, and cabbage soup with cherries in it were never exactly
intimates of mine. One dish of baked ham with dumplings and hot plum jam
sounds strange, but improves on acquaintance; _Pumpernickel_, and
_Schmierkaese_ are better than their names, and _Kartoffelpuffen mit
Preisselbeeren_ (potato cakes with cranberries) are delicious. We had
good plain puddings and black coffee for dessert every day, and quite
wonderful roast Pomeranian goose and _Eistorte_ with whipped cream on
Sundays. Supper was at eight, and the menu was certainly a model for the
simple life. Bread and butter with slices of sausage and cold ham,
sometimes big dishes of roast chestnuts instead of cold meat, or
potatoes in their jackets, or some of the endless variety of
North-German cheeses--to drink, tea or beer, and that was all.
My fellow pensionnaires were nearly all teachers, or students preparing
to be teachers. They all spoke German and nothing but German, and, at
first, I used to think my mind would drown in the overwhelming floods of
it that assailed my ears. Gradually it came to sound like individual
words and phrases, and soon I dared occasionally to launch a small
conversational barque upon it, avoiding the disastrous rocks of gender
as skilfully as possible, though often at first, by the time that my
genders and cases were all arranged for a sentence, the subject had
changed, and I could not use it. We had a Fraeulein Lanz, Fraeulein Franz,
and Fraeulein Kranz, four or five other Fraeuleins and no males at all.
Another American student of singing came to live there, and in the
evening we used to go to the opera or to concerts together. Everything
begins early in Berlin, and those who had tickets for some entertainment
missed the eight o'clock supper. So plates of _belegte Broedchen_ (rolls
with cold meat) would be set out for them on the dining-table, and all
the others would be sitting there with their needle-work, and would
demand "_Nun, wie war es?_" when we came in. On Saturdays the evening
paper announced the program at the opera for the week, and we could
hardly wait to look at it. The cheaper seats are in great demand.
Students wait for hours, sometimes from earliest dawn, outside the box
office on Sunday mornings when the sale for the week begins. We had an
arrangement with the keeper of a little fruit and vegetable shop, to
save ourselves the wait. We would decide what we wished to see and go
over to his shop on Saturday evening to order the seats from him. He
then went down early enough to secure the front row in the top gallery
for us at two marks fifty, and we paid him twelve cents for his trouble.
Sixty-two cents is quite a high price in comparison to those of the rest
of the Opera House, for the orchestra chairs cost only eight marks. The
top gallery is vast, and the back rows are much cheaper, but the
authorities show their sense in keeping up the price of the front rows
and I don't think there is ever an empty seat there. To concerts we were
often admitted free, on saying that we were students, unless the artist
was a great favourite, and in that case we could buy standing room, or
seats in the gallery for one mark. We always went and came home in the
street cars, paying the two cent fare with a one cent tip to the
conductor, and dressing in our ordinary street clothes, with scarves
over our hair. I used to go alone sometimes, and was never spoken to or
molested in any way. No one looked at you twice, unless you looked at
him three times.
On Sundays I would take a day off, and, in true German fashion, make an
expedition; in bad weather to some museum or picture gallery, in Autumn
or Spring to some out-of-door restaurant. Sometimes I was too tired to
go further than the _Tiergarten_. Then I would stroll gently across it
and have coffee and cakes at the _Zelt_, or big open-air refreshment
gardens where the band plays. They are the resort of _hoi polloi_ of
Berlin in countless family groups: the father rather fat with hirsute
adornments, the mother also rather massive, and their plump children,
all drinking beer out of tall glasses and mugs, or coffee in inch-thick
white cups, and eating wedges of highly decorated _Torte_, with or
without the addition of heaped-up whipped cream.
If I felt more strenuous, I would take a car out to the Grunewald, a
villa-colony suburb, with roads winding through pine woods. I would sit
under the trees and invite my soul. As I sat there, some girl or boy's
school would come trooping by, singing a _Volkslied_ of interminable
verses, in four parts, having tramped all day for the pure joy of motion
in the open air. Then I would have coffee and a triangle of cherry pie,
and what cherry pie! at the _Hundekehle_, an immense restaurant on the
border of a small lake, accommodating I don't know how many fat
Prussians at once with refreshments. Every German town has some such
resort, where inexpensive creature comforts are the reward of a long
walk. Such an expedition of the whole family is their greatest treat,
and one in which they have the sense to indulge as often as possible.
Even on week day afternoons the housewives find time for a stroll, a
reviving cup of coffee, and a little gossip, though of course that is
not the same thing as going _en masse_ with Hans and the Kinder. Of
course, this was long before the war.