SOME STAGE DELIGHTS
We had also what is known as _Abstecher_, on off nights. That is,
performances in a neighbouring and still smaller town about once a
month. We would travel altogether, taking our costumes and make-up with
us, principals second class and chorus third. Our fare was paid, and the
generous management allowed us two marks apiece (50c) extra for
expenses! As we left at five P.M. returning at one or two in the
morning, this allowance was not excessive for food alone, but the
thrifty took black bread and sausage with them, and expended only
fifteen pfennigs (3-1/2c) for beer. Our _Abstecher_ was a village with a
cavalry barracks, a railroad station, and not much else. The theatre was
built over a sort of warehouse and stable combined, and we fell over
bales and packing cases at the entrance. The dressing rooms were tiny
boxes, with a shelf, one gas light in a wire globe, and a red-hot stove
in each room, and no window. We dressed three in a room. The stage was
so small that once, as _Nancy_, I played a whole scene with the tail of
my train caught in the door by which I had entered, and never knew it!
We were always given a rapturous welcome. Sometimes one of the
principals would miss the train and be forced to come on by a later one,
and then the sequence of scenes in the opera would be changed quite
regardless of the plot, for we would play all the scenes, in which he
did not appear, first, and do his afterwards. After the opening chorus,
the soprano would go on for her aria, and while she was singing it, we
would decide what to give next. "I'll do my aria!" "Oh no! Not the two
arias together!" "Let's have the duet from the third act, and then the
soprano and tenor can just come in casually and we'll do the big
quartet, and then you can do your aria!" We would see the audience
hunting in a confused sort of way through their libretto, with
expressions rather like Bill the Lizard. This happened once in the
"Merry Wives," which is confusing at best.
After the performance there was no place in which to wait but the cafe
of the station. I was looked upon as recklessly extravagant because I
would order a _Wiener Schnitzel mit Salat_ for sixty pfennigs (15c) and
when I took two cents' worth of butter too, they would raise their
eyebrows and murmur, "_Diese Amerikaner!_" Sometimes the Director came
with us, and then the principals would be invited to his table and
treated to (German) champagne. But we were always glad when he stayed at
home, because we were much freer over our beer. There are always one or
two members of the company who are extremely amusing, and their antics,
imitations and reminiscences make the time fly. There was one little
chap, the son of a Rabbi, who lived on nothing a day and found himself,
and was an extraordinary mimic. His imitations of a director engaging
singers, the shy one, the bold one, the beginner; and his marvellous
take-off of the members of the company kept us in roars of laughter. He
could imitate anything--a horse, a worn-out piano--and is now one of the
most successful "entertainers" in Berlin. The ones in whose compartment
he travelled on the train thought themselves lucky and often arrived so
hoarse from laughing that they could hardly sing.
All this experience is invaluable for the beginner, his
self-consciousness melts like snow in July, and it gives him, as nothing
else can, that poise and authority on the stage which are almost as
important as the voice itself. But the work, especially for a foreigner,
is killing. It is not so much the performances themselves, great as the
strain of these actually is, but the constant, never-ceasing learning by
heart, and the drag of continuous rehearsing. The "room rehearsals" of
the music alone, take place, in a theatre of this kind, in one of the
dressing rooms where there is a piano. The room is almost always small
and very close, and there are eight or ten people packed into it, all
singing hard and exhausting the little air there is. The stage
rehearsals with the almost invariable and inevitable shouting and
excitement are very trying to the nerves, especially when one is making
two or three debuts a week, that is, singing a new part for the first
time almost every other night as I did, at the beginning of my career.
The better the theatre, of course, the greater the smoothness and lack
of confusion at stage rehearsals. The singers and orchestra men are more
experienced, and more competent, and the manners of the Kapellmeister
improve in ratio to the importance of the opera house. A little extra
excitement is permissible when a new production is being put on, but at
the rehearsals of repetitions undue exhibitions of "temperament" on
either side are discouraged, and the powers that be have to mind their
manners and stick to the conventional forms of address. The
_Heldentenor_ may sometimes have to allow his artistic nature to get the
better of him for a moment, but no one else may claim such license.
The stage during rehearsals is like a workshop--a certain amount of
noise and confusion is necessitated by the labour going on in it, but
no one has time to spare from his share of the job in hand, and the
discipline in a good theatre is remarkable. The native German is
trained, of course, both to give and take orders well, the result of the
whole system of government, both of the family and of the nation. Stage
etiquette and the relationship between principals and chorus, _erste und
zweite Kraefte_ (principals of first and second rank) singers and the
management, grows more conventional and regulated according to the class
of the theatre. Those in authority may exact perfect obedience, but they
must ask for it properly; and while an individual is entitled to proper
consideration, he must never forget that he is but a unit of the whole.
The dressing-room arrangements in Metz were rather primitive. The
theatre was 100 years old, for one thing, and no one had ever had the
money to install new conveniences. In a good German theatre, the
dressing rooms are rarely used for rehearsing, and the principals dress
alone, at least when they have a big role to sing. In Metz I shared my
room with several other women and had only a corner of it which I could
call my own. Long shelves with lockers under them ran down two sides of
the room, with lights over them at intervals, and under every light a
singer "made up." There was a long glass at one end of the room, but we
had to provide individual mirrors for ourselves. There was no running
water, only a couple of jugs and basins stood in one corner of the
shelf. Good routined dressers were provided by the theatre. Mine was an
Alsatian who loved to speak French with me, but whom I discouraged as I
wanted all the practise I could get in German. She used to call me
"Fraeulein Miss"--pronouncing the latter like the German word _miess_
which means mediocre, but she meant to be particularly respectful. I
have always found that it pays a hundred fold to make friends of the
dressers, stage-doorkeeper, property-man, carpenter, head scene-shifter,
fireman and all the other workers whose co-operation is necessary for a
good _ensemble_. It is usually quite easy to be on good terms with them,
and they have unlimited opportunities for making things go smoothly for
you, or the reverse.
Women's costumes are not kept in the theatre; as they are the personal
property of the singer they must be kept at home, and be sent over to
the theatre on the morning of a performance. A _Korbtraeger_ (basket
carrier) is usually provided to whom you give from 75 cents to $1.00 a
month, and who performs this service for you--but many singers send
their maids. With the usual discrimination against our sex, men's
costumes are provided in opera houses of all grades. In the largest
theatres the women's are furnished also, and you even have to have
special permission to wear your own.
The scenery and costumes in Metz were often surprisingly good when one
considered that so few "sets" must do such varied things. Our property
man was an inventive genius at making something out of nothing. He
prided himself upon certain realistic details. If the piece called for
coffee, the real article, though of some dreadful variety unknown to
contemporary culinary science, was provided, and really poured into the
cups. If a meal were to be served on the stage, some sort of real food
was there for the actors to eat, even if it were only slices of bread
served elaborately as the most _recherche_ French supper, though usually
it was ladyfingers. Eating scenes are usually confined to the drama,
though there are some operas in which a meal "comes before" as the
Germans say. In the "Merry Wives of Windsor" for example, the scene
containing _Anna's_ letter aria opens with the company at supper in
_Frau Reich's_ home. The wives are explaining their tricks and plotting
_Falstaff's_ final discomfiture in spoken dialogue. One night when I was
singing _Frau Reich_ in Metz there was a particularly attractive dish of
real apples on the stage supper table. The _Herr Reich_ was the serious
bass, a thrifty individual who couldn't bear to let a penny's worth of
anything escape him. As his guests rose to go he picked up the dish of
apples and pressed it upon them.
"Here," he improvised, "take these home to the children. Oh! You have no
children--well, take them anyway--the children will come later."
His hospitable wishes were received with bewilderment by the audience,
but as he made his exit with his guests and immediately began to eat the
apples, he bore his scolding from the _regisseur_ very philosophically.
On some stages where the provisions are more elaborate, the actors in
certain plays make a regular practise of eating their suppers on the
stage. In "Divorcons" for example or in the "Anatol Cyclus" of
Schnitzler.
Our property man in Metz, with the historic Shakespearean name of
Mondenschein, (Moonshine) was an ardent lover of drapery. An
artistocratic interior, to his mind, must be entirely filled with as
many different materials as possible, all hanging in folds. He had three
pairs of near-silk portieres, bright pink, dull green, and pale yellow,
and the combinations that he made with those six curtains were endless.
Garlands of roses, too, were a great resource of his--draped round a
couch with a fur rug upon it, and a red light over all, they transformed
the scene into the bower of a Messalina. In a white light festooned
upon a mantel-piece, or above a doorway, they could be depended upon to
supply the appropriate setting of the _Erste Naive's_ most appealing
scene. The young lovehaveress and first salon lady, had to receive them,
wired together into a bunch, with the same delightful surprise, and put
them into the same Japanese jar without any water in it, in play after
play. But the property man always squandered a perfectly new, uncreased
piece of paper for every performance with which to make a cornucopia for
them, in the approved German style. He was quite a specialist in such
matters as the colour of telegrams in different countries, and in the
manner of folding newspapers, points which are sometimes neglected in
many better theatres. Of course his talents in this direction had a
better chance in the dramatic than in the operatic productions.
It is a curious thing to note in this connection, how archaic the
arrangement of such details remains in operatic performances even on the
best stages. How in "Carmen" for example, the singers must pretend to
drink to _Escamillo_ out of perfectly dry tin cups, instead of using
real wine and glasses, as a quite second-rate dramatic company would do.
How _Butterfly_ and _Suzuki_ are never given real tea to serve to the
_Consul_ or _Yamadori_. Or how the girls in "Thais" bring up their
water-jars out of the well with the outsides quite dry.
Of course in theatres of the Metz class matters of costuming are
simplified, and historical accuracy is not one of the aims. For example,
everything before Christ is done in fur rugs and winged helmets for the
men, and flannel nightgowns and long hair for the women. Any period up
to the thirteenth century is costumed in mantles and gowns of furniture
brocade, after that it is _Alt-deutsch_ (old German), or _Spanisch_
(Shakespearean--mostly black velvet and jet or white satin and silver),
until it turns safely into _Rococo_, which means white wigs. After that
it is all _Modern_, and even the chorus has to supply its own modern
clothes. The men principals have their historical costumes, with the
exception of wigs, tights, and shoes, supplied to them, but the women
must have their own. The collection of men's clothes in an old theatre
is sometimes quite remarkable, some of the suits of a hundred years ago
being actually of the period.
They retain the smells of the period also, many of them; for in a
theatre like that of Metz I don't believe the men's clothes were ever
cleaned. Things which have been worn several times a week for seven
months a year during the past hundred years, accumulate a richness and
variety of odours which must be sniffed to be appreciated--a very
ancient and fish-like smell indeed. I often wished at Metz that I had no
use of my nose, and I have wished it many times since. As _Amneris_, to
force your way for the entrance in the triumph scene, through an
Egyptian populace composed of German Infantrymen, is a squeamish
business at best; but when they are attired in clothes that haven't been
washed for years, it is a feat before which any one may quail,
especially if he belongs to the number of unfortunates, unluckily far
from rare among singers, whose stomach nerves are affected in any case
when they have a big part before them.
Washing was not any too popular in Metz even among the principals. I
have dressed with leading women whose arms showed streaks of white where
the water had run down as they washed their hands, stopping
conscientiously at the wrists. Their make-up would be removed with the
same dirty rag night after night during the whole season; and their
personal garments under more or less smart outer raiment, had often done
overlong service. I must hasten to say, however, that this state of
affairs was the exception rather than the rule, and that in better
theatres, the women principals were always scrupulously cleanly.
Over ornamentation or fineness in undergarments is usually looked upon
as rather questionable, among the solid middle classes in Germany. My
mother had made me a dainty supply of be-ribboned linen, and I was told
after I had been in Metz for some time, that at first, the Alsatian
woman who dressed me reported me to be "_beaucoup trop soignee de ne pas
avoir un amant_." However, she changed her mind later on, and put it
down to American extravagance--always a safe play. Some of the men were
much more careless than the women. Our operetta tenor played the whole
season in the same shirt, powdering the bosom freshly each evening with
a yellowish powder which he used for his face.
At Carnival time, some of the Schauspieler remained for three days in
the clothes in which they had played on Saturday night, never going to
bed, or even removing their make-up till the fun came to an end early
Wednesday morning.
Many of the older members dyed their hair, as it had begun to turn grey.
Of course they did not have it done by competent people, or nearly often
enough, and the shades of rusty brown, green, or purple it assumed were
quite startling. Our first Kapellmeister used to dye his hair a rich
black. He was a good-looking man and very vain. He was also portly and
easily became over-heated. Of course when this happened, the
perspiration running down his neck was dyed black too, and he would be
intensely worried for fear we should see it. We knew his sensitiveness,
and took delight in sitting directly behind him at the piano, though he
would urge, beg, and finally command us to sit beside him. He was
kindhearted in his way, and I remember one instance of this. The stage
manager, in a vile humour, had come storming into the midst of a room
rehearsal one day, with some trivial complaint against me, and had
succeeded in making me cry, not a difficult matter at that time as I was
always in a state of nerve strain owing to continuous over-fatigue. The
Kapellmeister did his best to comfort me, telling me not to mind,
praising my work, and finally pressing upon me his huge, brand new silk
handkerchief--a real sacrifice, as he had probably intended to use it
for days! His fingertips used to split in the cold weather from much
piano pounding and I won his heart by prescribing collodion for them. He
continually praised my sight reading and quickness in learning and it
was he who gave me the nick-name of "Notenfresserin."