MISPLACED MOISTURE AND THE STORY OF A COURT-LADY
The Bohemian, Hungarian and Croatian singers nearly always add to one's
joy in work by eating garlic. The "high dramatic" soprano in my next
engagement was from Croatia. The first time I went to Prague to sing, on
alighting from the train I sniffed a strangely familiar odour. The
impression of familiarity grew stronger and stronger as I drove to the
hotel--but I couldn't place it. At last it came to me--the whole town
smelled like our soprano! I have often wished, while on the stage, for
temporary atrophy of the senses. In addition to the fustiness of much
worn clothes and infrequent bathing, you really have all kinds of
horrors to endure.
Some terrible creatures with a passion for distinct enunciation and with
unfortunate dental formation, spray you copiously when uttering words
like _Mutter_ or _Freude_. This always seems to happen in some
impassioned scene when you simply can't get away from them, and have
absolutely no defence. Others have painfully hot and wet, or painfully
cold and wet hands with which they persistently paw you. I remember one
lyric tenor who was my bugbear because he had hands like a fresh, cold
fish. The soprano and I had a scene with him in one opera, in which she
had to say, "_Die Hand, so weich, so warm_" (the hand, so soft, so
warm), speaking of his clammy member. I dared her one night, to say
instead, "_Die Hand, so feucht, so kalt_" (The hand, so moist, so cold),
and when it came to the point, sure enough she did so, her voice so
shaky with suppressed laughter, that it came out in a tremulous
pianissimo. We both had to turn away from the front in silent
convulsions, but not a soul in the house was the wiser.
This is a horrible subject and I might enlarge upon it endlessly,
recalling for example, the pleasures of being folded in the embrace of a
large, warm, damp tenor smelling at best of onions; or still worse the
large drops which rain upon you during the most touching love scene from
his manly brow, while you, though shuddering with disgust, daren't try
to dodge them, or even change the wistfully adoring expression of your
countenance. It may be honest sweat, but it is a demned moist unpleasant
kind of honesty in my opinion. Goritz told me that he once, as
_Kurwenal_, in the last act of "Tristan," dripped on a prostrate
_Tristan's_ eye so long that the poor tenor was blind for days after.
This is German efficiency!
Some of the colleagues at Metz were a great contrast to others in their
scrupulous care of their personal appearance. The lyric baritone, a
youngster from the Rhineland making his debut in opera, attracted me at
the very first rehearsal by his groomed look and beautifully manicured
finger-nails. He came from quite ordinary people, and had been brought
up to be a "Tapizierer," curtain hanger, upholsterer, etc. He had never
met any Americans before and we grew to like him very much, and used to
let him go for walks with us, and come to us for tea. He was always
wanting to _tapizieren_ for us and criticizing the hang of the curtains,
etc., in our rooms. We taught him to play Canfield, more to keep him
from talking than for any other reason, for my sister and I used to play
patience for hours, so that we should not be tempted to talk when I was
resting my voice in the brief intervals between rehearsals and
performances. We used to play with pretty little German patience cards
in a pocket size, and he was simply infatuated with the game. He showed
all his friends how to play, and dozens of packs of these cards were
imported from Frankfort where they are made.
The craze spread rapidly; all the officers began to play in their
Casinos, and the principals in the theatre were always being roared at
for keeping the stage waiting during rehearsals, when they missed their
cues by being absorbed in the game of Canfield. It became the great
resource of those who had small parts in the first act of an opera, and
then had to wait in costume and make-up until the very end like the
_Meister_ in "Meistersinger," or _Mary_ in "Fliegender Hollaender" who
has a seemingly interminable wait after her one scene at the beginning
of the second act, until at the very last of the third she has to rush
in for the single phrase "_Senta, Senta, wass willst du tun?_"
In return for our tea, the little baritone would tell us amusing tales
of his experiences in a cavalry regiment while doing his military
service. His high spirits and his beautiful voice made him popular with
officers and men, but he was quite unamenable to discipline, and had
spent something like ninety days in prison during his first year, for
such offences as refusing to stop singing on the march, or for cheeking
an officer. He used to call us his goddesses, and speak to us as
"Fraeuleinchen." Our rooms, through him, were the starting place of new
culinary ideas in Metz. We taught him to make and like such American
delicacies as salted almonds, chocolate fudge, and hot chocolate
sauce for ice cream, an unheard of combination. We tried to make him
like fruit salad with mayonnaise; but the mixture of sweet with oil and
vinegar was too much for his burgher palate, and he used to quote to us
the Bavarian proverb, "_Was der Bauer net kennt frisst er net._" (What
the peasant doesn't know he doesn't eat.)
[Illustration: AMNERIS AS I USED TO DRESS IT]
The country round Metz is rarely beautiful, in its half-French,
half-German character. It retains its typical French poplars, planted in
long lines, which turn pure gold in autumn. A placid river, the Moselle,
runs between hills covered with orchards and vineyards, with picturesque
villages of grey stone and red tiling, piled steeply up their sides. The
meadows in the fall are filled with lavender crocuses--the kind that
Meredith's Diana got up at four A.M. to gather. Every village has of
course its "Gasthaus," some still absolutely French in the arrangement
of their marble topped tables, mirrors, and red upholstered benches
running round three sides of the room. We have drunk coffee in autumn,
and _Maibowle_ in spring in every one of them, I think. I dare say many
of them are still using the same card board circles under their
customers' beer-glasses which we marked with our initials. Can you flip
them from the edge of the table into your own hand?
The town of Metz itself is interesting enough, and we explored it
thoroughly. It is very ancient ground indeed, and there are Roman walls
still to be seen, with characteristically beautiful brick-work; old
chapels, a Gothic cathedral, and the remains of the mediaeval wall and
moat which once surrounded the town, with great arched fortified gates
at its east and west entrances.
On returning once from a long walk with the little baritone we entered
by the eastern gate, and as he was doing a small part that evening, and
it was getting unpleasantly near the hour of the performance, we took a
short cut through an unfamiliar part of the town. We soon found
ourselves in a narrow street of respectable enough looking houses, but
as we passed, out of nearly every window on both sides, a female head
was thrust, all in varying degrees of frowsiness, and remarks and
comments in half unintelligible dialect were yelled at us with shrieks
of hideous laughter. Our little escort grew purple with confusion,
walking faster and faster, and when we reached an open square he broke
into the most fervent apologies for unwittingly leading us into such a
street. It was a curious and unpleasant little experience and reminded
me of certain quarters in oriental cities of which I had heard tales. We
named it "the street of queer women" and avoided the eastern gateway in
our walks thereafter.
Later in the season another colleague sometimes joined our tea parties
and walking expeditions. This was an immensely talented youth, attached
to the theatre in an anomalous position of third Kapellmeister, in
reality a volunteer without pay, hoping to pick up an occasional chance
to gain experience in conducting an orchestra. He was a Frenchman of
excellent family who had studied in one of the great conservatories and
thought he spoke the German language. Such German I have never heard
before or since. His French inability to aspirate an "h," a pronounced
stutter, and the most nonchalant disregard of gender, formed a
combination which was enough to upset the gravity of a German customs
house official himself! It was his business among other things, to
"_einstudieren_" the new members of the chorus in any opera which they
did not know, but of course his version of their language rendered any
authority he might have had over them quite ineffectual, and his
position was anything but enviable. At the same time he was a really
magnificent pianist, a composer of promise, and a thorough musician; but
if ever a creature was out of his element he was that creature as
Kapellmeister in Metz. And yet what is a young fellow in his position to
do? The desire to conduct, the longing to interpret the great masters
through the medium of an orchestra, possessed him to the point of
obsession; but where to find an orchestra to conduct was a problem. The
barrier "no experience" was erected across his path as it had been
across mine, though he must serve an apprenticeship somewhere.
The musical life of Germany attracted him for the same reasons as it had
attracted me, and so he endured a veritable martyrdom in the pursuance
of his dream. He was a pupil of Nikisch and told us Nikisch had told him
he made half his career with his cuffs. Whoever has watched him shoot
them gently out as he begins to conduct will know what he meant.
Our rooms were a sort of haven for this boy, I think, where he could
talk of the things that absorbed him in a language that was his servant
instead of his master. In return he would play so gorgeously for us,
that our little upright piano rocked under the strain. He could suggest
a whole orchestra in his playing. Strauss' "Salome" was brand new then
and he revelled in it, and adopted the motif of _Jochanaan_ as a signal
which he and the baritone would whistle under our windows. Sometimes he
would get lost at the piano and play for hours, till our supper time was
past, and our good friend Emma Seebold, the "_Hoch Dramatische_," would
rush in and urge us to hurry and get ready for some mythical dinner to
which we were invited. This was always successful, owing to Seebold's
talent.
We grew very fond of her and often spent our evenings together. She had
a lovely voice and would put her head back on her chair sometimes in the
evening and sing us languorous Austrian peasant songs with her
fascinating Viennese accent. Her passion was remnants, and she would
send home boxes of scraps of passementerie and odds and ends of silk
trimmings which she would sew all over her costumes. The richness she
saw in it was pathetic. Bargain gloves were also irresistible, and she
had green ones and purple ones, spotted and mildewed ones, and loved
them all because they were cheap.
The pianist and the baritone often met at our rooms and got on
surprisingly well considering their utter lack of points of contact and
the natural contempt that they felt for each other. The Frenchman was
certainly mildly crazy. He believed that his astral body, or psychic
envelope, or something was visible as an aura of light around his hand,
and he would hold it up and look at it and say, "_Ah, oui, elle est
la--je vais bien aujourd'hui_," or shake his head and say, "_Non, pas la
aujourd'hui--je ne suis rien!_" He was good looking, bearing a strong
resemblance to the portraits of Oscar Wilde. He dressed well, and his
washing bills--amounting as we were told, with bated breath, to ten and
fifteen marks a week--were the scandal of the theatre! Since those days
he has gone back to his piano, though he persevered in the theatre long
enough to obtain a second Kapellmeister position in a good opera house.
I have met him casually all over Europe, and he is one of the very few
of the old _Kollegen_ from Metz whom I have ever seen again.
These three were the only ones that season whom we cared about, though
we were friendly enough with all of them after Christmas, and as I have
said, we dined at the hotel with a group of them every day. They were
all types in their way. First the director--a survival of the old
school, with rather long dyed hair and enormous dyed moustache, always
in _Gehrock_ (frock coat) with a large tie in which reposed a royal
monogram in pearls and diamonds presented to him by the Hereditary Grand
Duke of Glumphenbergen-Schlimmerheim or something, during his career as
_Heldenbariton_. In the street he wore a soft black felt hat which would
have done for the _Wanderer_ in "Siegfried," and of course a fur-lined
coat whenever the weather gave the least excuse for one. Champagne was
his universal panacea--his very present help in trouble. If he had a
disagreement with a singer for any cause and wished to make it right
again, he would always send a bottle of _Sekt_ if it were a woman, or
present the money to buy one if it were a man. He had been a famous
singer in his day, and known others far more so, and his reminiscences
could be interesting enough. His stories of Bayreuth under the old
regime, were really interesting, with the prescribed position of every
finger, every gesture studied to an inch, every tone closed, opened,
coloured according to strictest rule, every syllable enunciated with
minutest care, and the effect of all this schooling on the singer--the
strained and broken nerves, the wrecked voices that were the result of
it. Diction--_Aussprache_--was naturally enough his hobby, but his ideas
were absurdly exaggerated and caused much more or less hidden amusement
among the _Personal_. He insisted, for example, upon so much "t" in a
phrase like Mignon's "_Dahin, dahin, moecht ich mit dir_," that it
sounded like "_Moecht tich mit tier_." Anything of that sort among
colleagues is looked upon as a tremendous joke, especially when it is on
the director.
One result of his former glory was that famous people came to this
theatre to _gastieren_ and it also seemed to us as if every former
singer or actor in Germany of any pretension to fame, who had a son or
daughter to launch in either profession, sent them to our director for a
debut. This was looked upon by us as a bore; but the famous guests were
rather amusing, because when they had gone, the director used to relate
all kinds of derogatory stories about them. Possart---- Ritter, Ernst
von---- was perhaps the most renowned. He came to recite Manfred at a
special performance with our soloists and chorus. The director told us
how, during the most impassioned speeches of Goethe or Shakespeare his
eye would be on the upper gallery, counting empty places, and how after
the performance when the box office sheet showed an _ausverkauftes Haus_
he would demand, "What about those three empty seats in the second row
of the top gallery, at the left?"
He told a similar tale of a famous Austrian guest-artist, the leading
Teutonic exponent of his day of the negative side in the never-ending
argument of stage technique "to feel or not to feel." He had mechanical
as well as histrionic genius, and his dramatic art had become so
mechanical too, towards the end of his career, that he could utilize
such places in his great parts as Hamlet's soliloquy for thinking out
scientific puzzles, although his power over the emotions of his audience
never lost its effect.
[Illustration: AMNERIS AS I NOW DRESS IT]
The director's own story was a real romance. While still on the upward
side of the hill of fame, he had met and loved the wife of a nobleman,
the scion of an ancient house. She had been maid-of-honour at the most
exclusive court in Europe, the confidante of the royal family, and
was said to know the true story of many of the mysterious incidents in
court history. In fact she was supposed to have been married off
hurriedly to her much older husband to get her away from the royal
circle of whose secrets she knew altogether too many. The infatuation of
the singer for the lady was mutual, and in course of time a boy was born
to them, who reached the age of six years before the noble husband
consented to divorce his wife, or rather, I think, his lawyers consented
for him, as by that time dissipation had quite softened whatever brain
he may have had to begin with. This mental condition of his gave her the
care of their children, and in Metz their youngest son, their daughter a
girl of about twenty, and the director's little boy all lived together.
At holiday times another of her sons, a most charming young fellow, a
lieutenant in a crack cavalry regiment, used to visit them too. She
invited my sister and me to meet him, and the whole family often
attended the opera together. He liked me in several roles and used to
send me wonderful flowers. I still have a huge green bowl which he sent
me filled with violets, in return for the photograph for which he had
begged. He was an example of the most elegant type of young officer, the
aristocrat of _Uradlige Familie_, fair, with delicate features; his six
feet of slimness, with long slender limbs and very little body, clothed
in his glove-fitting uniform. He had the fashionable three creases
across the front of his smart Hussar jacket where his tummy should have
been. His poor little story turned into tragedy. He contracted
consumption and did not tell his people, but used their influence to get
himself transferred to German West Africa, on the plea of wanting to see
service. Arrived there, he quietly shot himself one evening as the
easiest way out of a life that promised him nothing but misery. A sort
of malignant fate seemed to pursue the children of that first marriage,
for the charming young daughter also came to a sudden and most tragic
end, as I shall tell later on.
The director's wife was very nice to us. She often invited us to visit
her although we did so but seldom. Her rooms were filled with relics of
her former life--portraits of herself as lady-in-waiting to the Empress
of Austria, in court dress, portraits of her Empress, old photographs of
groups on terraces and at castle gates, almost every person in them a
"personage." She herself still wore her hair as her Empress had done, in
a coronet of narrow braids set round her head. She said that they were
sewn together with the same coloured silk as the hair every morning
after being braided, to make them stand up. With us she always played
the _grande dame_, apparently quite without effort, but there were
stories about her which seemed to show that she could be something very
different.
She certainly could talk most interestingly of her former grandeur. One
of her tales was of a lady of the court who owned the smallest dog that
any one had ever seen. It was so tiny that she used to carry it, when in
evening dress, in the front of her decolletage. One night at dinner as
she leaned forward to eat her soup, the dog fell into the plate. There
was vermicelli in the soup, and before she could fish it out of this
entanglement, the poor little thing was drowned! Another time the Frau
Direktor showed us a photograph of a very slim and shapely young dragoon
in full regalia, cloak and all, holding a letter up to hide his face. As
there was evidently a story we begged her to tell it to us. She said
that there had been a certain young married Countess of the court, who
was known as a great prude and was always boasting of her exaggerated
wifely devotion. Her airs became, said the Frau Direktor, quite
insufferable, and so she herself resolved to put such armour-plate
virtue to the test. At Carnival time, therefore, she dressed herself as
a young officer for a ball at which the _Hofgesellschaft_ was to be
present, and a very dashing figure she made, according to the picture.
In this disguise she then proceeded to give the Countess the rush of her
life. The gallant pursued the virtuous Countess all the evening, and
was rewarded by being asked to escort her ladyship to her home. In the
carriage the "Lieutenant's" attentions became still more pressing, when
to his secret dismay, the fair creature suddenly melted entirely, cast
herself into his arms, and swore she adored him. Arrived at her house,
the "Lieutenant" beat a hasty retreat vowing all sorts of things for
their next meeting, which naturally never took place. But the vanished
Lieutenant did not resemble the gentlemen of Virginia who kiss and never
tell, for the Countess' share in the story leaked out, and her
reputation for unassailable devotion was irreparably damaged, to the
great satisfaction of all her acquaintance.