preparation of mushrooms: "Put a lump of butter in a chafing dish (or
a saucepan) and a slice of Spanish onion and the mushrooms minus the
stems; let them simmer until they are all deliciously tender and the
juice has run from them--about twenty minutes should be enough--then
add a cupful of cream and let this boil. As a last touch squeeze in
the juice of a lemon." When Luisa Tetrazzini was going mad with a
flute in our vicinity she varied the monotony of her life by sending
pages of her favourite recipes to the Sunday yellow press.
Unfortunately, I neglected to make a collection of this series. A
passion for cooking caused the death of Naldi, a buffo singer of the
early Nineteenth Century. Michael Kelly tells the story: "His ill
stars took him to Paris, where, one day, just before dinner, at his
friend Garcia's house, in the year 1821, he was showing the method of
cooking by steam, with a portable apparatus for that purpose;
unfortunately, in consequence of some derangement of the machinery, an
explosion took place, by which he was instantaneously killed." Almost
everybody knows some story or other about a _virtuoso_, trapped into
dining and asked to perform after dinner by his host. Kelly relates
one of the first: "Fischer, the great oboe player, whose minuet was
then all the rage ... being very much pressed by a nobleman to sup
with him after the opera, declined the invitation, saying that he was
usually much fatigued, and made it a rule never to go out after the
evening's performance. The noble lord would, however, take no denial,
and assured Fischer that he did not ask him professionally, but merely
for the gratification of his society and conversation. Thus urged and
encouraged, he went; he had not, however, been many minutes in the
house of the consistent nobleman, before his lordship approached him,
and said, 'I hope, Mr. Fischer, you have brought your oboe in your
pocket.'--'No, my Lord,' said Fischer, 'my oboe never sups.' He turned
on his heel, and instantly left the house, and no persuasion could
ever induce him to return to it." You perhaps have heard rumours that
Giuseppe Campanari prefers _spaghetti_ to Mozart, especially when he
cooks it himself. When this baritone was a member of the Metropolitan
Opera Company his paraphernalia for preparing his favourite food went
everywhere with him on tour. Heinrich Conried (or was it Maurice
Grau?) once tried to take advantage of this weakness, according to a
story often related by the late Algernon St. John Brenon. Campanari
was to appear as Kothner in _Die Meistersinger_, a character with no
singing to do after the first act, although he appears in the
procession in the third act. The singer told his impressario that he
saw no reason why he should remain to the end and explained that he
would leave his costume for a chorus man to don to represent him in
the final episode. "What would the Master say?" demanded Conried,
wringing his hands. "Would he approve of such a proceeding? No. That
would not be truth! That would not be art!" Campanari was obdurate.
The Herr Direktor became reflective. He was silent for a moment and
then he continued: "If you will stay for the last act you will find in
your room a little supper, a bottle of wine, and a box of cigars,
which you may consume while you are waiting." In sooth when Campanari
entered his dressing room after the first act of Wagner's comic opera
he found that his director had kept his word.... The baritone ate the
supper, drank the wine, put the cigars in his pocket ... and went
home!
If some singers are good cooks it does not follow that all good cooks
are singers. Benjamin Lumley, in his "Reminiscences of the Opera,"
tells the sad story of the Countess of Cannazaro's cook, which should
serve as a lesson to housemaids who are desirous of becoming moving
picture stars. "This worthy man, excellent no doubt as a _chef_, took
it into his head that he was a vocalist of the highest order, and that
he only wanted opportunity to earn musical distinction. His strange
fancy came to the knowledge of Rubini, and it was arranged that a
performance should take place in the morning, in which the cook's
talent should be fairly tested. Certainly every chance was afforded
him. Not only was he encouraged by Rubini and Lablache (whose gravity
on the occasion was wonderful), but by a few others, Costa included,
as instrumentalists. The failure was miserable, ridiculous, as
everybody expected." Frederick Crowest describes a certain Count
Castel de Maria who had a spit that played tunes, "and so regulated
and indicated the condition of whatever was hung upon it to roast. By
a singular mechanical contrivance this wonderful spit would strike up
an appropriate tune whenever a joint had hung sufficiently long on its
particular roast. Thus, _Oh! the roast beef of Old England_, when a
sirloin had turned and hung its appointed time. At another air, a leg
of mutton, _a l'Anglaise_ would be found excellent; while some other
tune would indicate that a fowl _a la Flamande_ was cooked to a nicety
and needed removal from the fowl roast."
To Crowest, too, I am indebted for a list of beverages and eatables
which certain singers held in superstitious awe as capable of
refreshing their voices. Formes swore by a pot of good porter and
Wachtel is said to have trusted to the yolk of an egg beaten up with
sugar to make sure of his high Cs. The Swedish tenor, Labatt, declared
that two salted cucumbers gave the voice the true metallic ring.
Walter drank cold black coffee during a performance; Southeim took
snuff and cold lemonade; Steger, beer; Niemann, champagne, slightly
warmed, (Huneker once saw Niemann drinking cocktails from a beer
glass; he sang Siegmund at the opera the next night); Tichatschek,
mulled claret; Rubgam drank mead; Nachbaur ate bonbons; Arabanek
believed in Gampoldskirchner wine. Mlle. Brann-Brini took beer and
_cafe au lait_, but she also firmly believed in champagne and would
never dare venture the great duet in the fourth act of _Les Huguenots_
without a bottle of Moet Cremant Rose. Giardini being asked his
opinion of Banti, previous to her arrival in England, said: "She is
the first singer in Italy and drinks a bottle of wine every day."
Malibran believed in the efficacy of porter. She made her last
appearances in opera in Balfe's _Maid of Artois_ during the fall of
1836 in London. On the first night she was in anything but good
physical condition and the author of "Musical Recollections of the
Last Half-Century" tells how she pulled herself through: "She
remembered that an immense trial awaited her in the finale of the
third act; and finding her strength giving way, she sent for Mr. Balfe
and Mr. Bunn, and told them that unless they did as they were bid,
after all the previous success, the end might result in failure; but
she said, 'Manage to let me have a pot of porter somehow or other
before I have to sing, and I will get you an encore which will bring
down the house.' How to manage this was difficult; for the scene was
so set that it seemed scarcely possible to hand her up 'the pewter'
without its being witnessed by the audience. After much consultation,
Malibran having been assured that her wish should be fulfilled, it was
arranged that the pot of porter should be handed up to her through a
trap in the stage at the moment when Jules had thrown himself on her
body, supposing that life had fled; and Mr. Templeton was drilled into
the manner in which he should so manage to conceal the necessary
arrangement, that the audience would never suspect what was going on.
At the right moment a friendly hand put the foaming pewter through the
stage, to be swallowed at a draught, and success was won!... Malibran,
however, had not overestimated her own strength. She knew that it
wanted but this fillip to carry her through. She had resolved to have
an encore, and she had it, in such a fashion as made the roof of 'Old
Drury' ring as it had never rung before. On the repetition of the
opera and afterwards, a different arrangement of the stage was made,
and a property calabash containing a pot of porter was used; but
although the same result was constantly won, Malibran always said it
was not half so 'nice,' nor did her anything like the good it would
have done if she could only have had it out of the pewter." Clara
Louise Kellogg in her very lively "Memoirs" publishes a similar tale
of another singer: "It was told of Grisi that when she was growing old
and severe exertion told on her she always, after her fall as Lucrezia
Borgia, drank a glass of beer sent up to her through the floor, lying
with her back half turned to the audience." Miss Kellogg complains of
the breaths of the tenors she sang with: "Stigelli usually exhaled an
aroma of lager beer; while the good Mazzoleni invariably ate from one
to two pounds of cheese the day he was to sing. He said it
strengthened his voice. Many of them affected garlic." It is
necessary, of course, that a singer should know what foods agree with
him. He must keep himself in excellent physical condition: small
wonder that many artists are superstitious in this regard.
Charles Santley, who was so fond of eating and drinking himself,
offers some excellent advice on the subject in "Student and Singer":
"How the voice is produced or where, except that it is through the
passage of the throat, is unimportant; it is reasonable to say that
the passage must be kept clear, otherwise the sound proceeding from it
will not be clear. I have known many instances of singers undergoing
very disagreeable operations on their throats for chronic diseases of
various descriptions; now, my observation and experience assure me
that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the root of the evil is
chronic inattention to food and raiment. It is a common thing to hear
a singer say, 'I never touch such-and-such food on the days I sing.'
My dear young friend, unless you are an absolute idiot, you would not
partake of anything on the days you sing which might disagree with
you, or over-tax your digestive powers; it is on the days you do not
sing you ought more particularly to exercise your judgment and
self-denial. I do not offer the pinched-up pilgarlic who dines off a
wizened apple and a crust of bread as a model for imitation; at the
same time, I warn you seriously against following the example of the
gobbling glutton who swallows every dish that tempts his palate."
Rossini, after he had composed _Guillaume Tell_, retired. He was
thirty-seven, a man in perfect health, and he lived thirty-nine years
longer, to the age of seventy-six, yet he never wrote another opera,
hardly indeed did he dip his pen in ink at all. These facts have
seriously disconcerted his biographers, who are at a loss to assign
reasons for his actions. W. F. Apthorp gives us an ingenious
explanation in "The Opera Past and Present." He says that after _Tell_
Rossini's pride would not allow him to return to his earlier Italian
manner, while the hard work needed to produce more _Tells_ was more
than his laziness could stomach.... Perhaps, but it must be remembered
that Rossini did not retire to his library or his music room, but to
his kitchen. The simple explanation is that he preferred cooking to
composing, a fact easy to believe (I myself vastly prefer cooking to
writing). He could cook _risotto_ better than any one else he knew. He
was dubbed a "hippopotamus in trousers," and for six years before he
died he could not see his toes, he was so fat. Sir Arthur Sullivan
relates an anecdote which shows that Rossini was conscious of his
grossness. Once in Paris Sullivan introduced Chorley to Rossini, when
the Italian said, "_Je vois, avec plaisir, que monsieur n'a pas de
ventre_." Chorley indeed was noticeably slender. Rossini could write
more easily, so his biographers tell us, when he was under the
influence of champagne or some light wine. His provision merchant once
begged him for an autographed portrait. The composer gave it to him
with the inscription, "To my stomach's best friend." The tradesman
used this souvenir as an advertisement and largely increased his
business thereby, as such a testimonial from such an acknowledged
epicure had a very definite value. J. B. Weckerlin asserts that when
Rossini dined at the Rothschild's he first went to the kitchen to pay
his respects to the _chef_, to look over the menu, and even to discuss
the various dishes, after which he ascended to the drawing room to
greet the family of the rich banker. Mme. Alboni told Weckerlin that
Rossini had dedicated a piece of music to the Rothschild's _chef_.
Anfossi, we are informed, could compose only when he was surrounded by
smoking fowls and Bologna sausages; their fumes seemed to inflame his
imagination, to feed his muse; his brain was stimulated first through
his nose and then through his stomach. When Gluck wrote music he
betook himself to the open fields, accompanied by at least two bottles
of champagne. Salieri told Michael Kelly that a comic opera of Gluck's
being performed at the Elector Palatine's theatre, at Schwetzingen,
his Electoral Highness was struck with the music, and inquired who had
composed it; on being informed that he was an honest German who loved
_old wine_, his Highness immediately ordered him a tun of Hock.
Beethoven, on the contrary, seems to have fed on his thoughts
occasionally, although there is evidence that he was not only a good
eater but also a good cook (the mothers of both Beethoven and Schubert
were cooks in domestic service). There is a story related of him that
about the time he was composing the _Sixth Symphony_ he walked into a
Viennese restaurant and ordered dinner. While it was being prepared,
he became involved in thought, and when the waiter returned to serve
him, he said: "Thank you, I have dined!" laid the price of the dinner
on the table, and took his departure. Gretry, too, lost his appetite
when he was composing. There are numerous references to eating and
drinking in Mendelssohn's letters. His particular preferences,
according to Sir George Grove, were for rice milk and cherry pie.
Dussek was a famous eater, and it is said that his ruling passion
eventually killed him. His patron, the Prince of Benevento, paid the
composer eight hundred napoleons a year, with a free table for three
persons, at which, as a matter of fact, one person usually presided. A
musical historian tells us that in the summer of 1797 he was dining
with three friends at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, when the waiter
came and laid a cloth for one person at the next table, placing
thereon a dish of boiled eels, one of fried flounders, a bowled fowl,
a dish of veal cutlets, and a couple of tarts. Then Dussek entered and
made away with the lot, leaving but the bones! In W. T. Parke's
"Musical Memoirs" justice is done to the appetite of one C. F.
Baumgarten, for many years leader of the band and composer at Covent
Garden Theatre. Once at supper after the play he and a friend ate a
full-grown hare between them. He would never condescend to drink out
of anything but a quart pot. On one occasion, at the request of his
friends, Baumgarten was weighed before and after dinner. There was
eight pounds difference! William Shield, the composer who wrote many
operas for Covent Garden Theatre, beginning aptly enough with one
called _The Flitch of Bacon_, was something of an eater. Parke tells
how at a dinner one evening there was a brace of partridges. The
hostess handed Shield one of these to carve and absent-mindedly he set
to and finished it, while the other guests were forced to make shift
with the other partridge. Handel was a great eater. He was called the
"Saxon Giant," as a tribute to his genius, but the phrase might have
had a satirical reference to his enormous bulk. Intending to dine one
day at a certain tavern, he ordered beforehand a dinner for three. At
the hour appointed he sat down to the table and expressed astonishment
that the dinner was not brought up. The waiter explained that he would
begin serving when the company arrived. "Den pring up de tinner
brestissimo," replied Handel, "I am de gombany." Lulli never forsook
the _casserole_. Paganini was as good a cook as he was a violinist.
Parke tells a story of Weichsell, not too celebrated a musician, but
the father of Mrs. Billington and Charles Weichsell, the violinist:
"He would occasionally supersede the labours of his cook, and pass a
whole day in preparing his favourite dish, rump-steaks, for the
stewing pan; and after the delicious viand had been placed on the
dinner-table, together with early green peas of high price, if it
happened that the sauce was not to his liking he has been known to
throw rump-steaks, and green peas, and all, out of the window, whilst
his wife and children thought themselves fortunate in not being thrown
after them."
Is there a cooking theme in _Siegfried_ to describe Mime's brewing?
Lavignac and others, who have listed the _Ring motive_, have neglected
to catalogue it, but it is mentioned by Old Fogy. Practically a whole
act is taken up in _Louise_ with the preparation for and consumption
of a dinner. Scarpia eats in _Tosca_ and the heroine kills him with a
table knife. There is much talk of food in _Hansel und Gretel_ and
there is a supper in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. There are drinking
songs in _Don Giovanni_, _Lucrezia Borgia_, _Hamlet_, _La Traviata_,
_Girofle-Girofla_.... The reference to whiskey and soda in _Madama
Butterfly_ is celebrated. J. E. Cox, the author of "Musical
Recollections," describes Herr Pischek in the supper scene of _Don
Giovanni_ as "out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of
champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he
held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own
middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year
round at the _mit-tag_ or _abend-essen_ feeding at one of their
largely frequented _tables-d'hote_." Eating or drinking on the stage
is always fraught with danger, as Charles Santley once discovered
during Papageno's supper scene in _The Magic Flute_: "The supper which
Tamino commands for the hungry Papageno consisted of pasteboard
imitations of good things, but the cup contained real wine, a small
draught of which I found refreshing on a hot night in July, amid the
dust and heat of the stage. On the occasion in question I was putting
the cup to lips, when I heard somebody call to me from the wings; I
felt very angry at the interruption, and was just about to swallow the
wine when I heard an anxious call not to drink. Suspecting something
was wrong, I pretended to drink, and deposited the cup on the table.
Immediately after the scene I made inquiries about the reason for the
caution I received, and was informed that as each night the
carpenters, who had no right to it, finished what remained of the wine
before the property men, whose perquisite it was, could lay hold of
the cup, the latter, to give their despoilers a lesson, had mingled
castor-oil with my drink!"
A young husband of my acquaintance once bemoaned to me the fact that
his wife seemed destined to become a great singer. "She is such a
remarkable cook!" he explained to account for his despondency. I
reassured him: "She will cook with renewed energy when she begins to
sing _Sieglinde_ and _Tosca_.... She will practise _Vissi d'Arte_ over
the gumbo soup and _Du herstes Wunder_! while the Frankfurters are
sizzling. Her trills, her chromatic scales, and her _messa di voce_
will come right in the kitchen; she will equalize her scale and learn
to breathe correctly bending over the oven. It is even likely that she
will improve her knowledge of _portamento_ while she is washing
dishes. When she can prepare a succulent roast suckling pig she will
be able to sing _Ocean, thou mighty monster_! and she will understand
_Abscheulicher_ when she understands the mysteries of old-fashioned
strawberry shortcake. If you hear her shrieking _Suicidio_! invoking
Agamemnon, or appealing to the _Casta Diva_ among the kettles and pots
be not alarmed.... For the love you bear of good food, man, do not
discourage your wife's ambition. The more she loves to sing, the
better she will cook!"
_July 17, 1917._
An Interrupted Conversation
_"We can never depend upon any right adjustment of emotion to
circumstance."_
Max Beerbohm.
An Interrupted Conversation
Ordinarily one does not learn things about oneself from Edmund Gosse,
but my discovery that I am a Pyrrhonist is due to that literary man. A
Pyrrhonist, says Mr. Gosse, is "one who doubts whether it is worth
while to struggle against the trend of things. The man who continues
to cross the road leisurely, although the cyclists' bells are ringing,
is a Pyrrhonist--and in a very special sense, for the ancient
philosopher who gives his name to the class made himself conspicuous
by refusing to get out of the way of careering chariots." Now the most
unfamiliar friend I have ever walked with knows my extreme impassivity
at the corners of streets, remembers the careless attitude with which
I saunter from kerb to kerb, whether it be across the Grand Boulevard,
Piccadilly, or Fifth Avenue. Only once has this nonchalant defiance of
traffic caused me to come to even temporary grief; that was on the
last night of the year 1913, when, in crossing Broadway, I became
entangled, God knows how, in the wheels of a swiftly passing vehicle,
and found myself, top hat and all, in the most ignominious position
before I was well aware of what had really happened. Then a policeman
stooped over me, book and pencil in hand, and another held the
chauffeur of the victorious taxi-cab at bay some yards further up the
street. But I was not hurt and I waved them all away with a
magnanimous gesture.... It is owing to this habit of mine that I often
make interesting _rencontres_ in the middle of streets. It accounts,
in fact, for my running, quite absent-mindedly, plump into Dickinson
Sitgreaves, who is more American than his name sounds, one August day
in Paris.
It was one of those charming days which make August perhaps the most
delightful month to spend in Paris, although the facts are not known
to tourists. Many a sly French pair, however, bored with Trouville, or
the season at Aix, take advantage of the allurements of a Paris August
to return surreptitiously to the boulevards. On this particular day
almost all the seduction of an October day was in the air, a splendid
dull warm-cool crispness, which filtered down through the faded
chestnut leaves from the sunlight, and left pale splotches of purple
and orange on the _trottoirs_ ... a really marvellous day, which I was
spending in that most excellent occupation in Paris of gazing into
shops and, passing cafes, staring into the faces of those who sat on
the _terrasses_.... But this is an occupation for one alone; so, when
I met Sitgreaves, we joined a _terrasse_ ourselves. We were near the
Napolitain and there he and I sat down and began to talk as only we
two can talk together after long separation. He explained in the
beginning how I had interrupted him.... There was a _fille_, some
little Polish beauty who had captivated his senses a day or so before,
brought to him quite by accident in an hotel where the _patron_
furnished his clients with such pleasure as the town and his address
book afforded.... I knew the _patron_ myself, a fluent, amusing sort
of person, who had been a _cuirassier_ and who resembled Mayol ... a
_cafe-concert_ proprietor of an hotel.... It was his boast that he had
never disappointed a client and it is certain that he would promise
anything. Some have said that his stock in trade was one pretty girl,
who assumed costumes, ages, hair, and accents, to please whatever
demand was made upon her, but this I do not believe. There must have
been at least two of them. The Grand Duchess Anastasia, it was
rumoured, had dined with Marcel at one time, in his little hotel, and
certainly one king had been seen to go there, and one member of the
English royal family, but Marcel remained simple and obliging.
"When will you look up the little _Polonaise_?" I asked, as we sipped
_Amer Picon_ and stared with fresh interest at each new boot and ankle
that passed. Paris in August is like another place in May.
"Why don't you come along?" queried Sitgreaves in reply, "and we could
go at once.... Oh, I know that you are in no mood for pleasure. You
see the point is that I shall have to wait. Marcel will have to send
for the _fille_. It is a bore to wait in a room with red curtains and
a picture of _Amour et Psyche_ on the walls.... What have you been
doing?" He paid the _consommation_ and started to leave without
waiting for a reply, because he knew of my complaisance. I rose with
him and we walked down the boulevard.