A National Opera
The American Opera Company was a professional stock company with the avowedly democratic intent of bringing world-class opera to a broad spectrum of the American public at affordable prices. The company's policies showed Mrs. Thurber's touch in several ways: it eschewed the "star system," championed native singers, and performed all operas in English translation. Its prospectus boasted that it had, among other features:
The largest regularly trained chorus ever employed in grand opera in America. . . . The largest ballet corps ever presented in grand opera in America and as far as possible, American in its composition. . . . Four thousand new and correct costumes for which no expense has been spared. . . . [S]cenery . . . painted by the most eminent scenic artists. . . . The musical guidance of Theodore Thomas . . . [and] the unrivalled Thomas Orchestra.
Mrs. Thurber's goal was larger than the opera company itself, though. It was nothing less than the creation of a national infrastructure that would encourage and support American opera throughout the entire country. The foundation for that organization was to be a network of training schools in metropolitan centers across the country, bound together by a professional ensemble that would tour from one center to another, presenting professional productions of the highest musical quality at reasonable ticket prices. She firmly believed that great music would create its own audience and that opera could prosper without conceding anything to the demands of the business office. Mrs. Thurber entrusted the business end of the venture to Charles Locke, who had managed the tours of the Thomas orchestra, and concentrated her attention on production and promotion.
Another aspect of her plan was the desire to create a company that would, as much as possible, feature American rather than imported European productions and would encompass the artistic aspirations of the entire nation. It was a grand scheme: a national opera company coupled to a national conservatory, housed in New York, but with branches all over the country and a professional touring company to connect them into a single network. The new company proposed to present, as the prospectus breathlessly put it, "Artists . . . of the front rank of American singers . . . supported by an ensemble which has never been equaled in this country." We shall return shortly to the brochure's special emphasis on the word ensemble , a significant feature of Mrs. Thurber's thinking.
An additional motivation for forming the company, one that was not announced openly, was social. The Academy of Music on East Fourteenth Street had been the socially preferred venue for opera at least since 1878 under the financing of August Belmont. The academy could not accommodate all the wealthy who hoped to take boxes, though, and the "old money"—the Bayards, Cuttings, Lorillards, Van Rensselaers, and their ilk—were not amenable to the influx of the nouveaux riches—the Astors, Vanderbilts, and their crowd. It was rumored that William K. Vanderbilt had offered $30,000 for a box but was politely turned away.
The Metropolitan Opera House, then, was created in 1883 to accommodate the needs of the new wealthy. Boxes, which cost $12,000 to $15,000 a season, sold out immediately. With a capacity of just over three thousand, one might think that there would be other seats in the hall from which to hear the performance; but a box at the opera was a statement of wealth and social position, not merely a listener's chair. "From an artistic and musical point of view," wrote Henry Theophilus Finck the morning after the opening of the Met, "the large number of boxes in the Metropolitan is a decided mistake. But as the house was avowedly built for social purposes rather than artistic, it is useless to complain about this." The Met had been founded as a cathedral for celebrating the gospel of opera; the intent of the American Opera Company, by contrast, was to spread the faith.
The board of the American Opera Company included Andrew Carnegie as president, along with his fellow New York multimillionaires August Belmont, Levi P. Morton, Henry Seligman, Brayton Ives, H. J. Jewett, and Deacon White. With an eye toward the eventual development of "branches" throughout the country, Mrs. Thurber also included a number of westerners: the meat-packing magnate N. K. Fairbank and George M. Pullman, of sleeping-car fame, both from Chicago, D. Washburn, a flour and wheat distributor from Minneapolis, Charles Crocker, the railroad builder from San Francisco, and Nevada's John W. Mackay, who owned the Comstock silver mines and laid the first transatlantic cable.
With the backing of that formidable list of incorporators, Mrs. Thurber approached the conductor Theodore Thomas, with whom she had already worked on projects such as the children's concerts and the Wagner Festival, and with whose ideas she sympathized. Thomas had recently had a bad experience with wealthy backers of the College of Music in Cincinnati, so he was a bit hesitant at first to get mixed up with another such group; but the attraction of a New York base of operations, combined with steady engagements for his orchestra, was irresistible. Besides, the support of all those multimillionaires made the scheme look foolproof. One of Thomas's biographers, filled with the wisdom of hindsight, lamented: "They approached him with this proposal and he accepted it. Despite the warnings of clearer-sighted friends, despite the lesson he had received at Cincinnati, he accepted. He believed with all his heart in the fable about the millionaire and art. God knows why he should have believed it, except for the reason that he wished it to be true."
Thomas threw himself into the company enthusiastically, hiring singers, edit-
ing scores, even making his own English translations for performances. This was to be an opera company that reflected his personality and his "ensemble" approach to production, which was almost certainly one of the reasons why Thurber was attracted to him as musical director. Unlike the symphony orchestra, where ensemble was all, opera from its earliest days had always depended on the personalities and vocal pyrotechnics of its stars. Balance and blend had long been one of Thomas's strongest points as an orchestra conductor, and this was a chance to show that those qualities could play an equally effective role in opera. He advocated opera in which "all the concomitant parts . . . [would be] equally balanced and excellent."
The plan was initiated as announced: twenty-nine lead singers were employed, twenty of whom were Americans, most of whom were relatively unknown, and some of whom, like Emma Juch, would later go on to fame in other operatic enterprises. An astonishing number of productions, eclectically chosen from classic and modern works, were put into rehearsal for the first season. The anglicized titles used at the time are preserved in the repertoire of the American Opera Company's first (1885–86) season, as compiled from clippings in Mrs. Thurber's scrapbooks and elsewhere:
Flying Dutchman (Wagner)
The Huguenots (Meyerbeer)
The Magic Flute (Mozart)
Marriage of Jeannette (Massé)
Martha (von Flotow)
Merry Wives of Windsor (Nicolai)
Orpheus Eurydice (Gluck)
Sylvia (ballet) (Delibes)
Taming of the Shrew (Goetz)
The company opened on 4 January 1886, at the Academy of Music, with the American premiere of Hermann Goetz's Taming of the Shrew . "It went without a hitch," wrote Russell, "a fact that caused universal comment and amazement."
The scenery, all specially painted by famous artists, was wonderfully good and beautiful, all the accessories were adequate, the chorus covered itself with glory, the soloists sang adorably. Critics, commentators, skeptics, joined the public in one swelling hymn of laudation. Operas had not been so produced in the memory of living man. What struck everyone was the flawless perfection of the details and their relation to the harmony of the whole.
Performing the best of the standard repertoire and featuring fine young artists in brilliantly staged productions, the company won the admiration of New York music lovers. A handful of deprecators carped at details, but there was a general outpouring of approval. Backers felt that the support warranted continuing with the plan for a national tour, and sure enough, the new company was greeted with popular enthusiasm and critical acclaim in major cities across the country. In view of the Metropolitan's single-minded emphasis on stars and its reputation for poor, if not downright shoddy, staging, there can be little wonder that Thomas's meticulous preparation brought such enthusiastic response. Of course, it also helped that chorus members were full-time employees with regular rehearsals conducted by their own chorus master.
Consistent with Mrs. Thurber's vision of a nationwide musical infrastructure united by a touring opera troupe, the company played with great acclaim in four major cities during its first year: New York in January, Washington, D.C., in February, New York again in March, followed by Philadelphia, and finally, in November, St. Louis. Only one flaw marked that first, brilliant season, but it was a most serious one: an enormous deficit. Many of Mrs. Thurber's co-sponsors, including Andrew Carnegie, whose name had headed the stationery as president, began to back-pedal away from the project. To avoid pending bills and frustrate lawsuits, the American Opera Company was dissolved and reorganized for 1886–87 as "The National Opera Company of New Jersey," a plan that allowed the new company to assume the assets of its predecessor but walk away from most of its debts. At this same time, as we shall shortly see, the name of its companion training institution was changed from "The American School of Opera" to the "National Conservatory of Music," further separating it from the sinking opera corporation.
Thomas, deeply committed to the project, soldiered on, reluctantly taking Carnegie's place as president. The renamed company opened its second season with great success in New York, and quickly became the musical conversation piece of the year. The season was crowned with the National Opera's American premiere of Anton Rubinstein's Nero at the Metropolitan Opera House, a production acclaimed as having been "placed upon the stage on a scale of splendor never before given to opera in this country . . . sung with enthusiasm, intelligence, and artistic devotion." As far away as Chicago, a critic proclaimed, "The National Opera Co. is making a decided success at the Metropolitan Opera House, and notably with Rubinstein's Nero ." In spite of rumored fiscal problems, Charles Locke, the company's manager, announced that the National Opera Company, like its predecessor, would undertake a transcontinental tour.
With the nearly unanimous acclaim of New York and Boston critics still ringing in the ears of Thomas and his troupe, the National Opera Company sped off across the country. The tour ran into increasing financial problems on its west-ward leg, culminating in a comic-opera-like fiasco in Omaha: unable to pay for the transportation of performers and baggage, the company had to be bailed out from New York before being permitted to leave. Hardly had the train departed Omaha,
however, when it was halted; a mistake, it was now said, had been made and the company would have to pay $7,000 more if it wished to continue its journey. The money was supplied by Mrs. Thurber's Onteora friend Washington Connor, whose son was married to the Thurbers' oldest daughter, Jeannette.
Finally arriving in San Francisco on 17 April 1887, the company performed brilliantly. "Lohengrin by the National Opera Company, was the finest operatic performance ever presented to a San Francisco audience," one paper exclaimed on 23 April. Encouraged by such enthusiasm, the company stayed on for an additional, uncontracted, performance. That last evening in San Francisco was marked by a fiasco of a different kind: steam lines constructed under the stage to provide "smoke" for the final scene of Rubinstein's Nero —the burning of Rome—burst. Thomas whipped the opera through the resulting chaos without losing a beat. "People said it was the best fire scene ever put upon any stage and the newspapers praised Thomas for arranging it."
Leaving San Francisco a day late, but showered with popular praise, the company chartered three trains to race to the next scheduled performance: Lohengrin , in Kansas City. That trip contributed still more stories to the mythology of the company, with breathless tales of hot-box fires and of railroad cars careening wildly as they took turns on one rail at seventy miles per hour to the accompaniment of prayers from the musicians. One member of the orchestra reported of the Kansas City performance, "I have never known it to go better. We were too excited to be tired. Sometimes a performance on bare nerves is the best in the world."
Back in New York, the shell game that had buried the debts of the defunct American Opera Company only to shuffle them furtively to the National Opera Company did not go unchallenged. Thomas had gamely swallowed personal financial loss and continued as director because of his faith in the ideal, but the prima donna, Emma Fursch-Madi, was not of so benevolent a disposition, and she sued the manager, Charles Locke, for $679 in back salary more than a year overdue.
The tour was an artistic triumph conducted against a backdrop of fiscal chaos and internal bickering. In Chicago, after one blowup, the choral director discharged a number of singers for incompetence; however, it was symptomatic that all those discharged were Americans, leaving a chorus of eighty-four, sixty-six of whom were Germans. When one of the fired American singers protested and threatened to sue, he was rehired as an assistant stage director, although he had no experience in stagecraft.
While Syracuse papers were heralding upcoming performances of Flotow's Martha , other, more foreboding newspaper articles were also appearing. "The American Opera Co., Limited, of New York, which started out with such grand prospects and was merged into the National Opera Company of New Jersey, has, in its legal evolutions toward dissolution, fallen into hands of a receiver," the St. Louis Tribune , for example, reported on 24 March. Mrs. Thurber quickly countered with a story that appeared just two days later:
The Opera is Prospering
No Receiver for the National Company
False Report Denied
"There is not a particle of truth in the report that the National Opera Company has gone into the hands of a receiver," said Mr. Jaffre, the cashier of the company, to a Herald reporter who sought an interview with Mr. Locke at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last night.
The press played a key role in keeping the story of the National Opera Company in the public eye. There were 84 articles about the National Opera Company in the 1887 New York Times alone, even more remarkable when one considers that the troupe was away on tour that year more than they were in the city. Articles such as "Mrs. Thurber's Triumph" (21 February 1887) supported the endeavor to the city's philanthropists:
Notwithstanding all, one cannot but admire the pluck of Mrs. Thurber, who has now raised for her scheme and spent about a quarter of a million dollars. Everyone hopes that the coming season will be the turning point in the company's career, and that New York capitalists will be found so impressed with the excellence of its performances as to put their hands in their pockets and establish the organization upon a firm footing.
Lawsuits, though, made better press than Mrs. Thurber's protestations or the critical acclaim the company was gathering around the country. On the same dates that the National Opera Company scored so brilliantly in San Francisco and Kansas City, New York papers were full of articles about the company fighting off suits from creditors. The tone often bordered on the salacious, as in the wonderful headline, "Six Poor Deceived Girls" atop the following story:
The American Opera Co. was a defendant in seven separate cases before judge Ehrlich in the city court yesterday. Six of the defendants were described by their lawyer, W. W. Badger, as "poor deceived girls." The other was a poor deceived man, William Parry, the stage manager. The poor deceived girls sat in two rows in the back part of the room, jauntily dressed and trying to look sad. One of them, Alice Richards, a ballet girl, who was engaged for $20 a week now enjoys the distinction of having sued more millionaires in a given time than any girl in New York. She first sued the American Opera Company for $380 or 19 weeks salary, and then, anticipating a failure to collect in that quarter, brought separate suits against C. P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Seligman, stockholders, each for $146 for damages.
Somehow, the company managed to fulfill performance contracts on its return leg as far as Buffalo, but there Thomas finally threw in the towel, leaving on 15 June. About five days later, the company returned to New York after one last performance in Toronto without him. On 9 July Thomas severed all connection with the National Opera Company in a distressed letter, lamenting, "We have had in ourselves all the elements for good work and prosperity if only the first and vital
condition of success in any undertaking had been observed . . . namely, prompt payment of all employees."
Mrs. Thurber claimed that the company's financial difficulties had arisen because private subscriptions promised in several cities, amounting to $250,000, had not been paid. She engaged District Attorney Winfield to represent her in the Hudson County Civil Court in an attempt to recover at least the amount she had loaned the company. The assets of the company, originally valued at $150,000, were sold for $26,101, or just a little more than 17¢ on the dollar.
What had happened? Why, in the space of less than two years' time, had Jeannette Thurber's experiment in Americanizing opera gone from a brilliant beginning to such ignominious failure? There is no question about the quality of the company, the artistry of its performers, or the readiness of late-nineteenth-century American audiences to welcome opera enthusiastically. The combination of lavish productions and low prices, though, left the company with a deficit at the end of its first season from which it never recovered. One of Thomas's biographers puts it most succinctly:
The notion that any enterprise taking money from the public must be self-sustaining to justify its existence is bred in the Anglo-Saxon bone. . . . The eminent gentlemen that Mrs. Thurber's eloquence and the popularity of her husband had induced to join in the American Opera Company believed they were starting a business enterprise like any other, and when they heard that it had not paid its way in one whole season of experiment, they called it a failure and scrambled ashore.
The assumption was that only those enterprises that survived in the marketplace could be called successes, and that in good, businesslike fashion, failures should be cut loose as quickly as possible. The robber barons were decisive and far from gentle in their manner. Cornelius Vanderbilt is reputed to have once sent a note to some businessmen who had tried unsuccessfully to best him, saying, "Gentlemen: I will not sue you for the law takes too long. I will ruin you. Sincerely, Cornelius Vanderbilt." Such men did not stand by a failing proposition for long, especially when there were more benefits to be had from a box at the Metropolitan than good reviews from Iowa. "Millionaires from other cities had no interest in financing an institution located in New York; while the millionaires of New York had no interest in financing an institution which was supposed to belong equally to other cities."
With the clarity of hindsight we can readily see instances of the company's reach exceeding its grasp. When the National Opera Company arose in 1886 like a parody of the proverbial phoenix from the ashes of the American Opera Company, it did so with only five signatories on the articles of incorporation, registered with the state of New Jersey: Jeannette M. Thurber, Parke Goodwin, Charles G. Buckley, Washington Connor, and Cleveland Connor. The management of the renewed company announced its good intentions for the National Opera in a newspaper story on New Year's Day 1887. These included cutting expenses, reducing
the performance season by 25 percent to less than thirty weeks, and restricting tours to the six or eight largest cities that could support the opera. Nevertheless, the troupe left the next day on an eight-week tour to Boston, Worcester, Providence, New Haven, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere to be followed by five weeks in New York—with assets of only $1,000 on hand and hopes to sell $500,000 in shares at $100 each. The Times opined:
Through bad management the enterprise lost heavily last season, and there is also a heavy shortage this season. It is said that Mrs. Thurber contributed not less than $100,000 of her private fortune to float the enterprise the first year. . . . She says the promoters of the enterprise are not trying to make money. There is not the least chance of their doing so with a daily expense of several thousand dollars.
Theodore Thomas later attributed the American Opera disaster to "inexperienced and misdirected enthusiasm in business management, and to misapplication of money." Charles Locke, manager of the company, seems to have been caught between Thomas on one side, demanding more rehearsal time, a larger chorus, and fuller instrumentation, and Mrs. Thurber on the other, calling for more elaborate stage effects and richer costumes. Liberal with her own money where artistic standards were concerned, Mrs. Thurber expected others to follow suit. The two complemented each other in their fiscal naïveté and trustingly left business matters which both found distasteful, in Locke's hands. There is no apparent reason to believe that the manager was dishonest, as some have charged; it rather appears that, confronted by two powerful personalities, he tried to please them both, a course of action that only contributed to the downfall of the company.
There were other causes as well. Although the principal singers were fine musicians, they did not engender the awe, adulation, or box-office draw of the international stars brought in by the Met, such as the De Reszke brothers and the brilliant, effervescent Marcella Sembrich. In addition, Thomas's successes had engendered resentment among some of New York's professional musicians, and, with the failure of the National Opera Company, many musicians, as well as patrons, turned against him. To add insult to injury, he was named as a defendant in suits brought by some of the same people whom he had supported out of his own pocket in the last days of the ill-fated tour.
A final factor in the collapse of the National/American Opera Company lay in Mrs. Thurber's failure—it might be better to say refusal—to court New York society sufficiently. Blakely Hall reflected on the results of that in an article that was reprinted across the country:
Society as such does not smile upon the National Opera. It is a pity and it is unfair to the last degree, for there can be no question of the critical excellence of the performances now being given [by the National Opera Company] at the Metropolitan Opera House. But society will not have it, so the great auditorium, which was ablaze with diamonds and showy toilets during the German opera season, is dimmed by the
sober costumes of the poor relations and out-of-town cousins of the millionaire box-owners. It would be difficult to describe in detail the change that has come over the entire opera house, but the effect is palpable. When a small section of society does venture out to one of the performances of the National Opera, it comes late, talks as though bored to death by the performance, and retires early. It is a pity that nothing that is American can become fashionable in New York.