Memoirs of an American Prima Donna Part 4

I never did anything in my life without study. The ancient axiom that "what is worth doing at all is worth doing well" is more of a truth than most people understand. The thing that one has chosen for one's life work in the world:--what labour could be too great for it, or what too minute?

When I knew that I was to make my _debut_ as Gilda, in Verdi's opera of _Rigoletto_, I settled down to put myself into that part. I studied for nine months, until I was not certain whether I was really Gilda--or only myself!

I was taking lessons in acting with Scola then, in addition to my musical study. And, besides Scola's regular course, I closely observed the methods of individuals, actors, and singers. I remember seeing Brignoli in _I Puritani_, during that "incubating period" before my first appearance in opera. I was studying gesture then,--the free, simple, _inevitable_ gesture that is so necessary to a natural effect in dramatic singing; and during the beautiful melody, _A te, o cara_, which he sang in the first act, Brignoli stood still in one spot and thrust first one arm out, and then the other, at right angles from his body, twenty-three consecutive times. I counted them, and I don't know how many times he had done it before I began to count!

"Heavens!" I said, "that's one thing not to do, anyway!"

Languages were a very important part of my training. I had studied French when I was nine years old, in the country, and as soon as I began taking singing lessons I began Italian also. Much later, when I sang in _Les Noces de Jeannette_, people would speak of my French and ask where I had studied. But it was all learned at home.

I never studied German. There was less demand for it in music than there is now. America practically had no "German opera;" and Italian was the accepted tongue of dramatic and tragic music, as French was the language of lighter and more popular operas. Besides, German always confused me; and I never liked it.

Many years later than the time of which I am now writing, I was charmed to be confirmed in my anti-German prejudices when I went to Paris. After the Franco-Prussian War the signs and warnings in that city were put up in every language in the world except German! The German way of putting things was too long; and, furthermore, the French people didn't care if Germans did break their legs or get run over.

Of course, all this is changed--and in music most of all. For example, there could be no greater convert to Wagnerism than I!

My mother hated the atmosphere of the theatre even though she had wished me to become a singer, and always gloried in my successes. To her rigid and delicate instinct there was something dreadful in the free and easy artistic att.i.tude, and she always stood between me and any possible intimacy with my fellow-singers. I believe this to have been a mistake.

Many traditions of the stage come to one naturally and easily through others; but I had to wait and learn them all by experience. I was always working as an outsider, and, naturally, this att.i.tude of ours antagonised singers with whom we appeared.

Not only that. My brain would have developed much more rapidly if I had been allowed--no, if I had been _obliged_ to be more self-reliant. To profit by one's own mistakes;--all the world's history goes to show that is the only way to learn. By protecting me, my mother really robbed me of much precious experience. For how many years after I had made my _debut_ would she wait for me in the _coulisses_, ready to whisk me off to my dressing-room before any horrible opera singer had a chance to talk with me!

Yet she grieved for my forfeited youth--did my dear mother. She always felt that I was being sacrificed to my work, and just at the time when I would have most delighted in my girlhood. Of course, I was obliged to live a life of labour and self-denial, but it was not quite so difficult for me as she felt it to be, or as other people sometimes thought it was. Not only did I adore my music, and look forward to my work as an artist, but I literally never had any other life. I knew nothing of what I had given up; and so was happy in what I had undertaken, as no girl could have been happy who had lived a less restricted, hard-working and yet dream-filled existence.

My mother was very strait-laced and puritanical, as I have said, and, naturally, by reflection and a.s.sociation, I was the same. I lay stress on this because I want one little act of mine to be appreciated as a sign of my ineradicable girlishness and love of beauty. When I earned my first money, I went to Mme. Percival's, the smart lingerie shop of New York, and bought the three most exquisite chemises I could find, imported and trimmed with real lace!

I daresay this harmless ebullition of youthful daintiness would have proved the last straw to some of my Psalm-singing New England relatives.

There was one uncle of mine who vastly disapproved of my going on the stage at all, saying that it would have been much better if I had been a good, honest milliner. He used to sing:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Musical notation; "Broad is the road That leads to h.e.l.l!"]

in a minor key, with the true, G.o.d-fearing, nasal tw.a.n.g in it.

How I detested that old man! And I had to bury him, too, at the last. I wonder whether I should have been able to do so if I had gone into the millinery business!

CHAPTER IV

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 r.e.t.a.r.d 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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.bleman 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 a.s.sistance 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 "cla.s.sic"); 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 fas.h.i.+onable, 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 a.s.sured.

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 pa.s.sion 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.