In the summer of 1876 Wagner inaugurated the Bayreuth Theatre with the
first production of his great “Nibelungen Trilogy.” All the old friends
and the musicians who had been in the forefront of the fight in the
early days when Wagner’s genius was not generally recognized, gathered
there from far and near in order to be present at what was destined to
be a magnificent demonstration of the final triumph of the cause.
My father, naturally, was keen to be there and to rejoice with his old
colleagues. He had not returned to Germany since he had left it in 1871
to found a home for his family in the New World. He had never regretted
this step, but many bonds of sentiment and many old friends drew him to
Europe. Alas, he had no money for such a trip and there seemed no way of
obtaining it. There was a lottery formed by a few Wagner enthusiasts the
proceeds of which should go to the Bayreuth Fund. The winner of the
lucky number was to receive a ticket for the first performance, and my
father bought a number, but of course he did not win, and there was the
price of the steamship passage to pay and the expenses of maintenance in
Europe besides. In his despair he told his old friend Schirmer, the New
York music publisher, of his distress and Schirmer immediately said:
“Doctor, you simply must go, and here is a loan of five hundred dollars,
which you can repay me whenever you can afford it.”
This was so friendly and generous an act that it gives me pleasure to
record it here, especially as his two sons, Rudolph and Gustav, also
continued on terms of friendliest intimacy with me from boyhood to their
all-too-premature deaths. Another friend of my father, Charles A. Dana,
the great editor of the _New York Sun_ asked him to write some articles
on his Bayreuth experiences for _The Sun_ and paid him another five
hundred dollars, so that my father was liberally supplied with funds for
his trip to Europe.
This visit, the reunion with Wagner, Liszt, Raff, Lassen, Porges, and
hosts of other old friends, together with all the marvels of the first
production of the “Nibelungen Trilogy,” refreshed my father immensely in
body and spirit, and when he returned home and recounted to us all the
glories of the trip, I fairly ached with the joy of it and immediately
proceeded to spend all my pocket money in the making of a very
remarkable doll’s theatre about three feet wide and equally high in
order to produce Wagner myself. I painted all the scenery and the actor
dolls for it, and had the most brilliant lighting effects and a curtain
that went up and down with a perfection not always witnessed even on the
real stage.
As I had some talent for painting and had attended the drawing classes
at Cooper Union, I knew something of colors and perspective and
delighted especially in designing interiors of palaces with dozens of
pillars which, beginning in large size at the proscenium, would dwindle
down to the smallest pillarets, gradually lost in the dim distances, so
that my palaces always looked as if they were miles long.
My fellow director was my boy friend, Gustav Schirmer, son of the
publisher, and our first production was, of course, a Wagner music
drama. Gustav’s mother was an enthusiastic Wagnerite who eventually
spent much of her life in Bayreuth and Weimar. “Rhinegold” seemed to me
especially fitted for our theatre as it offered almost boundless scenic
opportunities. The effect of water in the first scene which is supposed
to depict the depths of the Rhine, I achieved very successfully by
several alternate curtains of blue and green gauze, and behind the rocky
reef in the centre of this scene a gas-burner was very cleverly hidden,
the light of which, as it gradually increased in strength, brilliantly
simulated the awakening of the “Rhinegold.”
The united children of the Schirmer and Damrosch families together with
their elders constituted the audience. The children paid fifty cents
admission, but both Gustav and I permitted our respective parents to
contribute as much above that as their generosity would permit, and we
looked on it as very much the same kind of a subvention as the king of
Bavaria had allowed Wagner at Bayreuth.
The theatre had been very cleverly placed in the doorway between two
rooms, but as the piano was in the same room where the audience sat, I
had to rush backward and forward continually. For instance, when Gustav
pulled the curtain to disclose the depths of the Rhine, I played the
Rhine music, then would creep back under the table on which the theatre
was placed and help him manipulate the Rhine Maidens. Then I would rush
back again to play the music accompanying the awakening of the Gold and
so on until the change of scene when, as the rising sun shines upon the
mighty walls of Walhalla, I would reproduce the stately harmonies of the
Walhalla motive.
As I look back on it now, it must have been an absolutely crazy
performance, but the audience was hugely delighted and contributed so
liberally that my co-director and I had a surplus with which to begin
preparations for another play.
Some parents on reading this may think that all this was a huge waste of
time, but I cannot agree with them. Quite apart from the fact that it
taught me a good deal in the use of the brush, it was a great stimulus
to the imagination and a welcome outlet for the desire all children have
to live in a make-believe world of fancy. At any rate, Gustav Schirmer
and I can claim that we were the first to produce Wagner’s “Rhinegold”
in America, and it is possible that this was the germ for my decision
eighteen years later to form the Damrosch Opera Company solely for the
purpose of producing Wagner throughout America.
The dolls’ theatre was, however, not my only diversion from my school
and musical studies.
At one Christmas my father and mother gave me a very complete tool
chest, with which I fashioned, among other things, a dolls’ house for my
sisters and quite a little fleet of boats. I remember one three-master,
about three feet in length, the wood for which I obtained from a foreman
at the Steinway piano factory, then situated on Park Avenue. This
three-master with all sails set won several races for me on the pond in
Central Park.
In those days, Central Park was considered very far uptown, and where
now the palaces of millionaires flank its borders, Irish squatters lived
in improvised huts around which goats would gain a meagre livelihood
from the rocks stretching on all sides. These squatters established a
kind of lien on the land, which I believe was recognized as having some
legal force when the property became more and more valuable and the
owners began to grade the land for residential purposes.
Just as in the early days in Breslau, we continued to celebrate
Christmas Eve in America in the good old fashion. Weeks before, a
delicious atmosphere of mystery and secrecy began to envelop every
member of the family. The “front parlor” became taboo for us children.
Packages began to arrive and were stored there. The Christmas tree,
which was always carefully chosen by my mother and which, according to
old regulations, had to touch the ceiling with its top, was brought in
in the evening after we had been carefully “shooed” upstairs into our
respective bedrooms.
Dozens of sheets of gold and silver paper were cut by us into glittering
garlands for the tree and we were, of course, expected to present our
parents on Christmas eve with something fashioned by our own hands, or
to be able to recite a poem or play a new piano solo. Of all this they
were supposed to know nothing until the great day arrived, although they
must have heard our dreary practising of it for weeks before.
The celebration was held on Christmas eve, before supper. My father and
mother would disappear into the forbidden room to light the hundred
candles on the tree and put the last touches on the heaps of presents.
Then my father would play a march on the piano and we would all troop in
and stand breathless before the tree so beautifully illuminated by the
gentle light of the candles. Our presents would, of course, consist
mainly of necessities in clothing and underclothing, shoes, etc., which
we would have received anyhow, but which gained an added glow because of
the occasion. But there were always books, and the tree was crowded with
cakes and candies and gay-colored paper flowers and there were toys and
joyous singing of Christmas songs and hymns around the tree. Then would
come a delicious supper, accompanied by a cup of which Rhine wine and
sliced pineapples were the constituent parts.
After supper we children had to recite our verses or play our piano
solos, and, alas, these exhibitions sometimes ended in tears, as the
exciting events that preceded this contribution to the festivities
sometimes blunted our memories and we would get “stuck” in the middle.
Then we would cast a frightened glance at my father, who would, perhaps,
look rather serious until mother’s smile or some joking remark would put
him and us in good humor again.
Those wonderful Christmas celebrations of my childhood continued into my
married life. Then when my children came, besides participating in my
mother’s tree, we tried, my wife and I, to bring into our own home on
this beautiful day a kind of festive celebration which should pass on to
our children and friends that which my father and mother and Tante Marie
had so freely given to me.
We have had some wonderfully jolly Christmases. My four children and
their cousin, Walker Blaine Beale, took on themselves the loving burden
of our entertainment. A play was sometimes written or charades
improvised, for which upstairs closets were ransacked for costumes and
other paraphernalia in such haste and amid such ruthless confusion that
Minna, our old Swedish nurse, who has been in our family since the birth
of my oldest daughter, would often throw up her hands in horror at the
bedrooms, which indeed looked as if a tornado had swept over them. I
remember a delicious take-off on “Pelléas et Mélisande” which my oldest
daughter, Alice, wrote. I had given a number of lecture recitals on the
opera the previous season and it was much in the family mind. Then
another year a drama on “The North Pole” was written. This was just
after the dispute between Peary and Cook as to the discovery of the
pole. There was a real shiver when we were heralded back to our
transformed parlor. The Christmas tree had quickly become a lonely pine
outlined against bleak areas of farthest north cotton sheets, stretching
in all directions over “hummocks” of sofas and chairs. Our five
children, for Walker seemed as much our very own in these celebrations
as my own four girls, gave us a wonderfully spirited drama of the
conquest of the polar regions!
I can see and hear dear David Bispham laugh, my old friends Doctor and
Mrs. George Harris’s enthusiasm, Margaret Anglin, Julie Faversham. . . .
Our happy, happy Christmases!
The last Christmas party at our home was that of 1916. Then in 1917
Walker was training at Camp Dix and we all went out with his mother and
spent Christmas Day at an inn near by to which he could come. There was
a rumor everywhere that his regiment was to embark for overseas in a few
days, although he really did not sail until May. We all did our best to
make it gay in that hotel dining-room, the rain falling dismally. We
were so proud of our young khaki-uniformed lieutenant! My Polly played
and played, rags, anything and everything, on the old hotel piano. We
did not know it was to be our last happy Christmas together, but war had
already given to joy a kind of yearning anguish.
My nephew was killed the 18th of the following September, 1918, at
Saint-Mihiel. Reconnoitring to assure the safety of his men, he leaped a
fence to join three fellow officers. A shell tore them to pieces. This
was in the early afternoon. Walker was taken to a field hospital and
died at eleven that night.
We know that he did not suffer very much, and we think we know that he
never understood how severely he was wounded, that he never knew that
what, as a soldier, he so freely offered had been accepted.
He was his grandfather’s, Mr. Blaine’s, youngest grandson, only
twenty-two, his mother’s only son, our brightest and best.
There is no day we do not think of him, but Christmas, the day of
giving, is his own especial day.
On a frigid day last winter (January, 1922) travelling with my wife on
an untidy, dilapidated post-war train through Germany, on my way to
Stockholm to fill an engagement to conduct the orchestra there, we read
in an English magazine an article on Tennyson ending with a description
of the old graveyard in which lie the bodies of his two grandsons, both
killed in the war. “I did not know,” I said, looking out over the black
wintry flat German country, “that Tennyson lost _two_ grandsons in the
war!”
“But so did _my_ father,” my wife said proudly, and she spoke truly, for
another nephew, Emmons Blaine of Chicago was no less a war victim than
Walker. Unable to pass the physical tests required to enter the army he
agonized to find the nation’s greatest need behind the lines in which to
enlist. He chose shipbuilding and offered himself as a workman at Hogg
Island, near Philadelphia. Although never overstrong, he worked early
and late, and fell a victim of the terrible epidemic of the “flu,” dying
at Lansdown on October 9, 1918. Though Walker had already died in
France, we knew only at the time that he was wounded. Of his death we
learned four days later. Thus these two cousins, Emmons and Walker, are
forever enshrined together in our anguish, in our pride, and in our
love.