A YOUTHFUL REALIST
As I have said, I studied Gilda for nine months. At the end of that time
I was so imbued with the part as to be thoroughly at ease. Present-day
actors call this condition "getting inside the skin" of a _role_. I
simply could not make a mistake, and could do everything connected with
the characterisation with entire unconsciousness. Yet I want to add that
I had little idea of what the opera really meant.
My _debut_ was in New York at the old Academy of Music, and Rigoletto
was the famous Ferri. He was blind in one eye and I had always to be on
his seeing side,--else he couldn't act. Stigelli was the tenor. Stiegel
was his real name. He was a German and a really fine artist. But I had
then had no experience with stage heroes and thought they were all going
to be exactly as they appeared in my romantic dreams, and--poor man, he
is dead now, so I can say this!--it was a dreadful blow to me to be
obliged to sing a love duet with a man smelling of lager beer and
cheese!
Charlotte Cushman--who was a great friend of Miss Emma Stebbins, the
sister of Colonel Stebbins--had always been interested in me; so when
she knew that I was to make my _debut_ on February 26 (1861), she put
on _Meg Merrilies_ for that night because she could get through with it
early enough for her to see part of my first performance. She reached
the Academy in time for the last act of _Rigoletto_; and I felt that I
had been highly praised when, as I came out and began to sing, she
cried:
"The girl doesn't seem to know that she has any arms!"
My freedom of gesture and action came from nothing but the most complete
familiarity with the part and with the detail of everything I had to do.
In opera one cannot be too temperamental in one's acting. One cannot
make pauses when one thinks it effective, nor alter the stage business
to fit one's mood, nor work oneself up to an emotional crescendo one
night and not do it the next. Everything has to be timed to a second and
a fraction of a second. One cannot wait for unusual effects. The
orchestra does not consider one's temperament, and this fact cannot be
lost sight of for a moment. This is why I believe in rehearsing and
studying and working over a _role_ so exhaustively--and exhaustingly.
For it is only in that most rigidly studied accuracy of action that any
freedom can be attained. When one becomes so trained that one cannot
conceivably retard a bar, and cannot undertime a stage cross nor fail to
come in promptly in an _ensemble_, then, and only then, can one reach
some emotional liberty and inspiration.
If I had not worked so hard at Gilda I should never have got through
that first performance. I was not consciously nervous, but my throat--it
is quite impossible to tell in words how my throat felt. I have heard
singers describe the first-night sensation variously,--a tongue that
felt stiff, a palate like a hot griddle, and so on. My throat and my
tongue were dry and thick and woolly, like an Oriental rug with a "pile"
so deep and heavy that, if water is spilled on it, the water does not
soak in, but lies about the surface in globules,--just a dry and
unabsorbing carpet.
My mother was with me behind the scenes; and my grandmother was in front
to see me in all my stage grandeur. I am afraid I did not care
particularly where either of them were. Certainly I had no thought for
anyone who might be seated out in the Great Beyond on the far side of
the footlights. I sang the second act in a dream, unconscious of any
audience:--hardly conscious of the music or of myself--going through it
all mechanically. But the sub-conscious mind had been at work all the
time. As I was changing my costume after the second act, my mother said
to me:
"I cannot find your grandmother anywhere. I have been looking and
peeping through the hole in the curtain and from the wings, but I cannot
seem to discover where she is sitting."
Hardly thinking of the words, I answered at once:
"She is over there to the left, about three rows back, near a pillar."
The criticisms of the press next day said that my most marked specialty
was my ability to strike a tone with energy. I liked better, however,
one kindly reviewer who observed that my voice was "cordial to the
heart!" The newspapers found my stage appearance peculiar. There was
about it "a marked development of the intellectual at the expense of the
physical to which her New England birth may afford a key." The man who
wrote this was quite correct. He had discovered the Puritan maid behind
the stage trappings of Gilda.
If omens count for anything I ought to have had a disastrous first
season, for everything went wrong during that opening week. I lost a
bracelet of which I was particularly fond; I fell over a stick in making
an entrance and nearly went on my head; and at the end of the third act
of the second performance of _Rigoletto_ the curtain failed to come
down, and I was obliged to stay in a crouching attitude until it could
be put into working order again. But these trying experiences were not
auguries of failure or of disaster. In fact my public grew steadily
kinder to me, although it hung back a little until after Marguerite.
Audiences were not very cordial to new singers. They distrusted their
own judgment; and I don't altogether wonder that they did.
The week after my _debut_ we went to Boston to sing. Boston would not
have _Rigoletto_. It was considered objectionable, particularly the
ending. For some inexplicable reason _Linda di Chamounix_ was expected
to be more acceptable to the Bostonian public, and so I was to sing the
part of Linda instead of that of Gilda. I had been working on Linda
during a part of the year in which I studied Gilda, and was quite equal
to it. The others of the company went to Boston ahead of me, and I
played Linda at a _matinee_ in New York before following them. This was
the first time I sang in opera with Brignoli. I went on in the part with
only one rehearsal. Opera-goers do not hear _Linda_ any more, but it is
a graceful little opera with some pretty music and a really charmingly
poetic story. It was taken from the French play, _La Grace de Dieu_, and
_Rigoletto_ was taken from Victor Hugo's _Le Roi S'Amuse_. The story of
_Linda_ is that of a Swiss peasant girl of Chamounix who falls in love
with a French noble whom she has met as a strolling painter in her
village. He returns to Paris and she follows him there, walking all the
way and accompanied by a faithful rustic, Pierotto, who loves her
humbly. He plays a hurdy-gurdy and Linda sings, and so the poor young
vagrants pay their way. In Paris the nobleman finds her and lavishes all
manner of jewels and luxuries upon little Linda, but at last abandons
her to make a rich marriage. On the same day that she hears the news of
her lover's wedding her father comes to her house in Paris and denounces
her. She goes mad, of course. Most operatic heroines did go mad in those
days. And, in the last act, the peasant lover with the hurdy-gurdy takes
her back to Chamounix among the hills. On the lengthy journey he can
lure her along only by playing a melody that she knows and loves. It is
a dear little story; but I never could comprehend how Boston was induced
to accept the second act since they drew the line at _Rigoletto_!
I liked Linda and wanted to give a truthful and appealing impersonation
of her. But the handicaps of those days of crude and primitive theatre
conditions were really almost insurmountable. Now, with every assistance
of wonderful staging, exquisite costuming, and magical lighting, the
artist may rest upon his or her surroundings and accessories and know
that everything possible to art has been brought together to enhance the
convincing effect. In the old days at the Academy, however, we had no
system of lighting except glaring footlights and perhaps a single,
unimaginative calcium. We had no scenery worthy the name; and as for
costumes, there were just three sets called by the theatre _costumier_
"Paysannes" (peasant dress); "Norma" (they did not know enough even to
call it "classic"); and "Rich!" The last were more or less of the Louis
XIV period and could be slightly modified for various operas. These
three sets were combined and altered as required. Yet, of course, the
audiences were correspondingly unexacting. They were so accustomed to
nothing but primitive effects that the simplest touch of true realism
surprised and delighted them. Once during a performance of _Il Barbiere_
the man who was playing the part of Don Basilio sent his hat out of
doors to be snowed on. It was one of those Spanish shovel hats, long and
square-edged, like a plank. When he wore it in the next act, all white
with snowflakes from the blizzard outside, the audience was so simple
and childlike that it roared with pleasure, "Why, it's _real_ snow!"
It was also the time when hoop skirts were universally fashionable, so
we all wore hoops, no matter what the period we were supposed to be
representing. Scola first showed me how to fall gracefully in a hoop
skirt, not in the least an easy feat to accomplish; and I shall always
remember seeing Mme. de la Grange go to bed in one, in her sleep-walking
scene in _Sonnambula_. Indeed, there was no illusion nor enchantment to
help one in those elementary days. One had to conquer one's public alone
and unaided.
I confided myself at first to the hands of the _costumier_ with
characteristic truthfulness. I had considered the musical and dramatic
aspects of the part; it did not occur to me that the clothes would
become my responsibility as well. That theatre _costumier_ at the
Academy, I found, could not even cut a skirt. Linda's was a strange
affair, very long on the sides, and startlingly short in front. But this
was the least of my troubles on the afternoon of that first _matinee_
in New York. When it came to the last act--there having been no
rehearsals, and my experience being next to nothing--I asked innocently
for my costume, and was told that I would have to wear the same dress I
had worn in the first act.
"But, I can't!" I gasped. "That fresh, new gown, after months are
supposed to have gone by!--when Linda has walked and slept in it during
the whole journey!"
"No one will think of that," I was assured.
But _I_ thought of it and simply could not put on that clean dress for
poor Linda's travel-worn last act. I sent for an old shawl from the
chorus and ripped my costume into rags. By this time the orchestra was
almost at the opening bars of the third act and there was not a moment
to lose. Suddenly I looked at my shoes and nearly collapsed with
despair. One always provided one's own foot-gear and the shoes I had on
were absolutely the only pair of the sort required that I possessed;
neat little slippers, painfully new and clean. We had not gone to any
extra expense, in case I did not happen to make a success that would
justify it, and that was the reason I had only the one pair. Well--there
was a moment's struggle before I attacked my pretty shoes--but my
passion for realism triumphed. I sent a man out into Fourteenth Street
at the stage door of the Academy and had him rub those immaculate
slippers in the gutter until they were thoroughly dirty, so that when I
wore them onto the stage three minutes later they looked as if I had
really walked to Paris and back in them.
The next day the newspapers said that the part of Linda had never before
been sung with so much pathos.
"Aha!" said I, "that's my old clothes! That's my dirt!"
I had learned that the more you look your part the less you have to act.
The observance of this truth was always Henry Irving's great strength.
The more completely you get inside a character the less, also, are you
obliged to depend on brilliant vocalism. Mary Garden is a case in point.
She is not a great singer, although she sings better than she is
credited with doing or her voice could not endure as much as it does,
but above all she is intelligent and an artistic realist, taking care
never to lose the spirit of her _role_. Renaud is one of the few men I
have ever seen in opera who was willing to wear dirty clothes if they
chanced to be in character. I shall never forget Jean de Reszke in
_L'Africaine_. In the Madagascar scene, just after the rescue from the
foundered vessel, he appeared in the most beautiful fresh tights
imaginable and a pair of superb light leather boots. Indeed, the most
distinguished performance becomes weak and valueless if the note of
truth is lacking.
Theodore Thomas was the first violin in the Academy at the time of which
I am writing, and not a very good one either. The director was
Maretzek--"Maretzek the Magnificent" as he was always called, for he was
very handsome and had a vivid and compelling personality--on whom be
benisons, for it was he who, later, suggested the giving of _Faust_, and
me for the leading _role_.
I was not popular with my fellow-artists and did not have a very
pleasant time preparing and rehearsing for my first parts. The chorus
was made up of Italians who never studied their music, merely learned it
at rehearsal, and the rehearsals themselves were often farcical. The
Italians of the chorus were always bitter against me for, up to that
time, Italians had had the monopoly of music. It was not generally
conceded that Americans could appreciate, much less interpret opera; and
I, as the first American _prima donna_, was in the position of a
foreigner in my own country. The chorus, indeed, could sometimes hardly
contain themselves. "Who is she," they would demand indignantly, "to
come and take the bread out of our mouths?"
One other person in the company who never gave me a kind word (although
she was not an Italian) was Adelaide Phillips, the contralto. She was a
fine artist and had been singing for many years, so, perhaps, it galled
her to have to "support" a younger countrywoman. When it came to
dividing the honours she was not at all pleased. As Maddalena in
_Rigoletto_ she was very plain; but when she did Pierotto, the boyish,
rustic lover in _Linda_, she looked well. She had the most perfectly
formed pair of legs--ankles, feet and all--that I ever saw on a woman.
In singing with Brignoli there developed a difficulty to which Ferri's
blindness was nothing. Brignoli seriously objected to being touched
during his scene! Imagine playing love scenes with a tenor who did not
want to be touched, no matter what might be the emotional exigencies of
the moment or situation. The bass part in _Linda_ is that of the Baron,
and when I first sang the opera it was taken by Susini, who had been
with us on our preparatory _tournee_. His wife was Isabella Hinckley, a
good and sweet woman, also a singer with an excellent soprano voice. I
found that the big basso (he was a very large man with a buoyant sense
of humour) was a fine actor and had a genuine dramatic gift in singing.
His sense of humour was always bubbling up, in and out of performances.
I once lost a diamond from one of my rings during the first act. My
dressing-room and the stage were searched, but with no result. We went
on for the last act and, in the scene when I was supposed to be
unconscious, Susini caught sight of the stone glittering on the floor
and picked it up. As he needed his hands for gesticulations, he popped
the diamond into his mouth and when I "came to" he stuck out his tongue
at me with the stone on the end of it!
While I was working on the part of Linda myself, I heard Mme. Medori
sing it. She gave a fine emotional interpretation, getting great tragic
effects in the Paris act, but she did not catch the _naive_ and
ingenuous quality of poor, young Linda. It could hardly have been
otherwise, for she was at the time a mature woman. There are some
parts,--Marguerite is one of them, also,--that can be made too
complicated, too subtle, too dramatic. I was criticised for my
immaturity and lack of emotional power until I was tired of hearing such
criticism; and once had a quaint little argument about my abilities and
powers with "Nym Crinkle," the musical critic of _The World_, A. C.
Wheeler. (Later he made a success in literature under the name of "J. P.
Mowbray.")
"What do you expect," I demanded, in my old-fashioned yet childish way,
being at the time eighteen, "what do you expect of a person of my age?"
[Illustration: =Brignoli, 1865=
From a photograph by C. Silvy]