47. Hammerstein's Opera House, Part Two

COPYRIGHT 2023 Peter Schmitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Now back to our story. When we left the opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein, it was November 19th, 1908, the inaugural night of his huge beautiful new opera house in Philadelphia. All of the city’s theater and music world had been clearly impressed, and the newspapers buzzed daily with stories about all the big opera stars coming to Philadelphia to perform every week. The Metropolitan Opera only brought one show down to Philly on Tuesday evenings, but Hammerstein was putting on four operas a week: Tuesdays, Thursday, and two on Saturdays! His conductor Cleofante Campanini was working double shifts, running back and forth between Hammerstein’s Opera House in New York and the one in Philadelphia. In the weeks following the grand Philadelphia opening of Bizet’s Carmen, Hammerstein was also was soon mounting Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Verdi’s La Traviata, and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with the diva Luisa Tetrazzini, as well as Mary Garden in The Juggler of Notre Dame and Richard Strauss’ Elektra.

But even though he was performing four shows a week, even with rehearsals and necessary set change overs, that left four nights a week when the opera house was dark. But unlike the managers of the good old Philadelphia Academy of Music, Hammerstein would allow no lectures, plays or popular music acts to take over his theater. In an interview, Oscar Hammerstein stated his impresario’s philosophy. To Hammerstein, being a leader of the opera world was like being a high priest in a great civic and artistic religion:

“Grand opera is not regarded by me as a money-making enterprise.  . .  It is a physical impossibility to make it such a thing. But my experience has taught me that it can be made self-sustaining, by the people, not only to their pleasure but to their profit - a profit that can not be computed in dollars and cents - and makes the people lovers of art. . . Grand opera is more than music. It is more than drama, it is more than spectacle; it is more than a social function . . it is an awakening of the soul to the sublime and the divine!”

And then, in December 1908 Hammerstein brought the great Nellie Melba herself to sing Mimi in La Boheme! The Met (who held the rights) could not forbid the rights from him in Philadelphia - only in New York - so he brought the great Australian soprano down to the Quaker City, followed by legions of her New York fans who wanted to hear her in the role. And by all accounts the divine Melba, now in her forties, was at the absolute peak of her form. And this was opera, of course, so all the conventions of theatrical realism and plausibility were forever suspended. Because, as one Philadelphia reviewer admitted, even when she was younger Melba had never looked much the part of a girl dying of consumption - but this was “A comparatively minor matter, upon which it would be ungracious to insist. If Madame Melba does not look like a woman in the last or in any other stage of tuberculosis, she is singing more than ever like an angel, and this is the chief, the primary, and the nearly all-important thing.”

Remember this period of time is just before Hollywood becomes a big deal in world culture - for the moment, opera was having its time in the spotlight. Melba and Tetrazzini and Garden were treated like goddesses who had momentarily consented to dwell upon the earth with us. And the audiences packed the spacious balcony of the new Opera House to see and hear them. Of course, the fees that these goddesses had demanded, and received, from Hammerstein, likely offset the ticket sale receipts, by a good measure. Still, for the moment, the absolute feast of opera in Philadelphia that December, as the great ladies of Society swept in and out of their boxes night after night, the great divas swept on and off the stage, and the orchestra played all the magnificent music again and again, it all seemed like a glorious dream.

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That’s why it came as such a shock when on January 1st, 1909, when startling headlines suddenly were blazed across the front page of all the Philly newspapers: HAMMERSTEIN THREATENS TO WITHDRAW STARS - he was going to take all these glittering operatic divinities back to New York with him, and turn his new Broad Street Opera House into a vaudeville house. “I will be a sucker - and please spell it out S U C K E R - for no one! Nor will I tamely submit to gratuitous insult.” He was quoted as saying. He needed a respectful response from a Philadelphia bank or another lender, he huffed - a mortgage against the value of his opera house. Or his company was leaving town. Immediately.

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT” THEME MUSIC]

Well, of course, everyone was in an absolute tizzy. At one point his entire ‘box committee’ - the grandees who were supposed to gather commitments to rent the private boxes for the opera season - all resigned. Other season ticket holders started a letter writing campaign begging him to stay. The Mayor of Philadelphia, Mr. Reyburn and his wife were calling him, daily. An elaborate banquet was announced to celebrate and honor him, in case he felt neglected by the city in some way. Nellie Melba herself issued a public statement absolutely forbidding him to close the house. What was going on? If you had just been reading the papers and the press releases up to this point, Hammerstein’s Opera House had been a massive success, and you would have had every reason to think so. But, the secret truth was it wasn’t making him enough money. It couldn’t make him enough money. He knew, or at least his long-suffering accountants certainly knew, it had been losing money from the very first day it opened. Deep down, he had always known that it would be like that, but he had not cared.

Remember this Philadelphia venture was meant as a tool to destroy his great enemy, the Metropolitan Opera - to drive them out of business, to steal their audiences. It was to be the first in a series of opera houses across the country. He was already buying up land in Brooklyn and Chicago and Cleveland for his next ones. Heck he was going to build another one in Manhattan! He was supposed to be a sucker, in another manner of speaking, but the big sucking sound he had wanted to create was that of audiences and wealthy box holders abandoning the Met and coming to him. But The Met wasn’t going anywhere. Its board and its supporters had very deep pockets indeed - and very deep loyalty. At present, artistically Hammerstein’s operas were far outshining those of his rivals, true. But the Met was slowly shoring up its artistic problems -  and the recently hired conductor Arturo Toscanini was whipping the Met’s orchestra and singers into shape.

All the alarming headlines in the Philly papers died away after a few weeks when the great Philadelphia financier Edwin Stotesbury, one of Hammerstein’s most fervent supporters of opera in the city came up with a mortgage of $400,000, and that satisfied Hammerstein. Indeed Stotesbury even took over running the Box Committee and reorganized all new membership. Now $400,000 in 1909 was quite a nice amount, all he needed, declared Oscar, since by his estimate the building was worth well over a million. Indeed he turned down an absolute gift of $750,000 from Philadelphia transportation magnate Peter Widener in exchange for it, which you think he would have snapped right up. But Hammerstein was always deeply suspicious - paranoid, in fact - of the control benefactors wanted in return for money. Indeed the very next month he absolutely insulted and drove away Mrs. Clarence Mackay, his biggest society backer in New York City - a tiff that eventually led to the departure of his prize conductor Campanini as well.

It’s possible, frankly, Oscar was not entirely at the top of his game. His frantic activity and many sleepless nights were likely wearing down a man of 62. “Think of it, I would surely have had to give up had it not been for Mr. Stotesbury’s kindness.” He was quoted as saying. “I was in a bad way. You understand, not financially, but I could not stand the strain. I felt something coming on. You know, I’m only human.”

You’ll often see nothing about that strain he was under, in many quick summaries and assessments of what happened to Hammerstein’s Philadelphia venture. Often people blame something else, that well, the location on North Broad was too unfashionable, or that Philadelphians just would not come out for grand opera four times a week, or that the Met had hired singers like Caruso and that gave them the edge to defeat Hammerstein. But when you look at all the evidence closely, it seems that none of that was true. With all the streetcars in the city it was quite easy for Philadelphians to get to the location. Many of his rich supporters still lived quite close by, in fact, in all the stunning mansions and apartment blocks that at that point still lined North Broad Street. Philadelphians regularly filled the balcony and orchestra level seats, society box holders were very loyal to Hammerstein, and the stars that he brought in were much more exciting than those that the Met were bringing in down at the Academy of Music. 

Like many an ambitious entrepreneur, Hammerstein just was overextended and undercapitalized. The regular expenses of commissions, salaries, transportation, production, insurance, construction and so forth were overwhelming him, financially and as we’ve seen, emotionally. He never missed a single payroll, to his credit, and his artists and crews were intensely loyal to him because of that. But there was not enough coming in to cover what had to go out, every day. He had thought, with his genius and his vision, that he could do it alone, and it turned out that he could not. True, for the moment, with those loans providing him some cash flow, he could keep everything going for another year or so. But then what? Well, like the Dickens character Mr. Micawber, he was always sure that Something Would Turn Up. Meanwhile, his great Philadelphia opera house would definitely go on for the entire planned 20-week season, right through the spring of 1909. And he would not allow any other organization to rent it out on evenings when he was not using it - no no no. Maybe Isadora Duncan, for one night, but that was it.

Maybe we should remind ourselves that Oscar Hammerstein originally made his money from cigars and from vaudeville, not opera. He did make a small profit, just barely, from his Manhattan Opera House in 1908, but his Victoria Theatre on Times Square in New York, run by his son Willie Hammerstein, was really going great guns at the time. With his genius for self-promotion, if he had just been in the vaudeville business alone, if he had just stuck to that, he would have been okay - he had a real talent for it.  As we noted last time, most new theaters being built around Philadelphia in these early years of the 20th Century era were, in fact, vaudeville houses - before the movies really arrived - it was a highly lucrative business. We will come back to the topic of vaudeville in Philadelphia in later episodes, absolutely. But let’s stick to opera for the moment, because right after this Hammerstein was about to undertake a formidable task. On January 28th 1909 he was staging a hugely ambitious production of the new Richard Strauss’ Biblical opera Salome, based on the scandalous Oscar Wilde play, at his Manhattan Opera on 34th Street. This production again, was meant as a deliberate poke in the eye to the Metropolitan Opera, because it had dropped Salome from its schedule the previous year, after outraged protests from its boxholders, especially the daughter of financier J.P. Morgan.

Hammerstein had engaged soprano Mary Garden to sing the role of the tempting Judean princess, and this very talented performer would also do the Dance of the Seven Veils herself on stage, rather than step aside while a ballet dancer took over that part of the show, as was the usual practice. Hammerstein didn’t mind people protesting or objecting to the show - in fact, he played it up, and announced it would be five special shows, outside of the normal subscription, and charged extra for each show. It was a great sensation in New York, and all accounts, and Mary Garden had been splendid in the role, agreed the critics.

Ever the showman, Hammerstein then announced the entire production of Salome, along with Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande was being transferred to Philadelphia, and he had hired a series of special trains to bring down all of his stunning sets. Eighty stage hands were coming from New York just to manage them, and for the occasion the orchestra would be increased to 120 musicians

But before he could pull all this off, Hammerstein had to run the gauntlet of another formidable Philadelphia group of citizens - ones that, if not as wealthy as all his high society box holders, held a different type of power and social capital. Oscar was about to meet Philadelphia's ministers and churchmen.

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I can’t emphasize enough how influential the mainline Christian denominations were in Philadelphia back then. I spend a lot of time looking at the show biz sections of old newspapers these days, but every once in a while my gaze transfers to the sections devoted to covering the Sunday sermons, and the goings on of church councils and synods and so forth. There was often a lot more coverage about them than there is about the theater, as a matter of fact, and I guess this editorial deference reflected the relative importance of religion, more than art, in most people’s lives back then. 

Though the Quakers had long since faded in numbers and importance, the Presbyterian Church had always been prominent and well-organized and it remained particularly powerful in white congregations, and the Lutheran and Episcopal Church was not far behind. For the most part these clergymen’s world did not overlap with the theater world. Conservative Baptists and Methodists, for their part, generally were suspicious of the theater, generally, anyway. But all of the Protestant denominations were increasingly nervous about how American women seemed to be doing things, including riding bicycles in public and going to the theater all on their own. And now the Catholic Church had the largest congregations in the city, and it was always particularly squirrely when it came to any hints of explorations of female sexuality, let alone homosexuality on the stage. And the Protestants did not want to seem less diligent in morality than the Catholics, of course. And even some rabbis worried aloud about the effect of a Jewish theatrical producer bringing shame by causing all this fuss among the Gentiles.

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It did not help that Hammerstein’s son Arthur, who had been directing the building of the opera house, had recently been hauled up in court for committing some unspecified “indecent act” in Fairmount Park, which had also made all the papers - it was a little embarrassing.  Of all these groups, everybody knew that there were certain parts of the Bible that detailed the exploits of sexy women in pretty violent stories - Samson and Delilah, Judith and Holofernes and of course Salome and her desire to see the death and the severed head of John the Baptist. And even imagining putting this sort of thing on the stage - well it just blew all sorts of uptight people’s gaskets, in all sorts of directions. Even if they weren’t quite sure what was in the show. Because of course they weren’t going to see that sort of thing.

And, after all, weren’t they supposed to be the moral leaders of their flocks? The white clergy could hardly have escaped noticing when the all the Black ministers of the city had gotten organized just two years before against The Clansman (from our earlier episodes). The mayor had listened to them, and banned the entire show! They were hoping to stage a similar blow for decency and propriety as they saw it, in this case.

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Why, everybody knew that the opera Salome had all sorts of sexy dances and was based on that nasty play by the infamous Oscar Wilde! She sang a whole aria about kissing a dead man’s mouth! And Strauss’ music was clearly drenched in eroticism, I mean, just listen to it! (no really listen to it, there it is) Or rather, no don’t! Ban it! Ban it! After all, the mayor of Boston would forbid its performance in HIS city.

The Reverend Floyd W. Tompkins, of the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, issued a letter condemning the opera Salome. So did Rev. Upjohn, of St. Luke's Protestant Episcopal Church in Germantown. The Lutheran Ministerial Union, in congregation, issued one too. The Rev. William Roberts of the Presbyterian General Assembly, wanted the Philadelphia police to raid the opera and stop the show, just as they would any other lewd performance. And some of their congregants were clearly listening - reportedly sixty ‘society women’, who were regular attendees at the opera, wrote to Oscar Hammerstein and said for their part they would NOT be in the audience if he insisted on giving this offensive show.

The leading lady Mary Garden, learning of these growing protests, had already defiantly given a concert recital of the work at the Orpheus Club in Philadelphia, in order to acquaint the city with the artistic merit of the work, but the opponents were not mollified. Oh they had heard all about the Dance of the Seven Veils, and how Miss Garden, in character, would kiss the severed head of John the Baptist on the mouth, and they wanted it stopped. For her part, Miss Garden refused to be impressed by all the agitation, Why there was nothing more sensational and irreligious in this opera than there was in all the other operas in the standard repertoire, for goodness sakes! I mean, had they seen Tosca? Let alone Pelleas and Melisande? Had they seen the burlesque shows and musical comedy ensembles performing every night in the city's theaters! When she was asked by reporters if she would modify or tone down her performance in some way, she trumpeted scornfully, “CERTAINLY NOT! Modify my performance? No indeed. When I am compelled to do that, I'll turn the role over to Tetrazzini.” And scores of letters to the Editor filled the newspapers with opera lovers supporting her, and Hammerstein’s production, too. Feelings were running quite high. 

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As Oscar Hammerstein, accompanied by another of his sons, Harry, who was at that point taking over the day to day management of the opera house, arrived at the Philadelphia station platform along with his company, a stranger suddenly rushed up to him, grabbed him and hissed in his ear: “You better not give ‘Salome’!” The impresario jumped nervously, understandably, while Harry Hammerstein grabbed the man and dragged him away from his father.

The entire city, it seemed, was divided into two camps, those who wanted to see the performance and those who wanted to see it stopped. Who would win ‘The Salome War’, as the journalist’s inevitably called it?

On the day before the first public performance, Feb 10, 1909, the headline on page one of the Philadelphia Inquirer, read:

OFFERS TRUCE IN SALOME WAR

“Insisting that as a matter of good faith to the public, he must give tomorrow night his production of Salome, as announced, Oscar Hammerstein, facing the great audience that filled the Philadelphia Opera House last night, announced from the stage that the work would not again be produced in this city unless at the request of the public and with the sanction of the clergy.”

“A storm of applause hailed the impresario's appearance before the footlights after the second act of Pelleas and Melisande.  He commanded silence with a wave of his hand,  and then began to speak . . .

"I regret to be compelled to come before the curtain. But it is a necessity. I have advertised 'Salome' for Thursday evening. It has been given five times in New York and there has been no opposition on the part of the press or the pulpit. I must keep my agreement concerning this modern master-piece."

"I respect the sentiments of the gentlemen of the church of any denomination . . Their objection and the objections of some of your leading citizens puts me in a very peculiar position. . . What am I to do? I owe the audience the productions I have promised. I owe the church the respect that is its due . . "

"Any persons who have tickets to Thursday's performance and who do not choose to come can have their money refunded at the box office. Then I will produce the opera only for those who choose to see it. After that I cannot conscientiously . . . produced the opera again unless asked by the public to do so, and if, after the first performance, the clergy sanction it."

Well all this publicity was just catnip to the Philadelphia opera-going public of course. Thousands of people were clamoring to buy tickets to see the show, at prices five times the regular level. Mayor Reyburn refused to ban the play, he said, for the moment, saying he wished to see it for himself, first, and um, er, study the matter carefully. So did hundreds of other prominent men and women of Philadelphia, declaring their own personal rectitude and stern disapproval of obscene subjects of course, but that they were keeping an open mind. Who wanted to miss this, after all.

Mrs. Reyburn, the Mayor’s wife and a frequent patron of the opera herself stated publicly that she was just as opposed to anything erotic on stage as any other woman was, as all women should be [pause a moment, while we consider that statement] but she was not going to choose sides in this dispute of one Philadelphian against another.  “I know it is some of the preachers who are doing this. Some of them started a similar move against the operatic production of Samson and Delilah. . . it is a very fine advertisement for an opera or play to have the suggestion thrown out that the performance should not be permitted. My idea is that we should wait until AFTER that. Then if we hear aught of offense in it, hold the manager responsible!”

The whole dispute was the talk of the town, and society ladies rushed to their dressmakers to come up with ensembles that would somehow match the tone of the occasion. And of course all the burlesque houses, the vaudeville theaters, the dime museums and minstrel shows in Philadelphia were having a field day with the topic - there were suddenly Salome acts and jokes and skits all over town. 

Oscar Hammerstein invited every single minister who had signed the petition against him to come to the show, see it, to judge for themselves. Few took him up on the offer.

Thursday evening, the 11th of February finally arrived, and all 120 of the orchestra took their places. All the boxes were filled except for three leased by Society women who were some of the sixty signers of the protest against ‘immoral operas’. And once again, just as it had been in November the opera house at the corner of Poplar and Broad was a mob scene.  Reported a critic, It was already an enthusiastic house, but then he said, “the weird, bizarre strains of Strauss’ music began.“

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Though technically the house was supposed to hold only 4100 patrons, the box office had been selling standing room in all the aisles. Some people paid $50 for a 5 dollar seat. Perhaps up to 5000 Philadelphians were there, all waiting to be scandalized, or thrilled - or who knows?

“I know women who deliberately fibbed, who declared they had no intention of going, and at the very moment they were instructing their maids as to the gown they would wear,” wrote one Philadelphia girl to her friend Susie. “One woman I speak of in particular, whose gown was equally as scant as Mary Garden’s . . promenaded the peacock walk of the [opera] in a clinging skin tight robe. . . Men, famous in their respected professions, who cast dignity and dollars to the wind in their eagerness to see the widely heralded shameless Salome! . . Gray-haired pillars of the church, teachers of Sunday school classes, who salved their conscience with the belief that they came to pass an unprejudiced opinion whether ‘Salome’ was such as . . their friends should see!  . . What was the result? She failed to shock. . . Men and women who came prepared to blush, looked inquiringly at one another and said “I find nothing to blush for.”

When the curtain came down, of course, the crowd all went wild. In the wings, with tears of joy reportedly coursing down his cheeks, Oscar Hammerstein cried out: “Didn’t I say so? Didn’t I say so? There’s nothing immoral in it!”

Out in the house one woman in the audience reportedly regretfully agreed. “Anna Held’s shows are a thousand times more suggestive.” Her male companion replied: “Twenty five dollars for two seats, and there isn’t a show in town as moral. I wish I had my money back.”

But Mary Garden as Salome was after all an amazing performer, and the show had been quite a spectacle, and most people thought they had absolutely gotten their money’s worth, or at least wanted to make sure that everybody thought they had. The calls of Bravo! and Hammerstein! Rang out over and over again. There were five curtain calls, in total, for the cast. For the final one, the diminutive but very strong and determined Mary Garden literally dragged Hammerstein himself out onto the stage to take his bows, and receive his rightful applause, after which he made a hurried retreat. 

Still, as the curtain finally came down Hammerstein walked around and jubilantly shook hands with all the cast and crew milling around the stage. Mayor Reyburn and his wife suddenly were there, too, having apparently made up their minds that it was a fine thing, after all. “Best performance of an opera ever given!” somebody yelled. 

That production of Salome, far from being banned, went on to be presented in Philadelphia four more  times in the next few weeks. And in April 1909 the very first opera season at the grand new house on Broad Street, the one that Hammerstein had built just within that past year, ended with a final bravura performance by Tetrazzini in Lucia di Lammermoor.

But despite all the praise and all these newspaper headlines and all this triumph, some folks were not satisfied. Rev. Charles H. Bond, one of the few members of the protesting clergy who had actually accepted Hammerstein’s invitation to attend, was not mollified or illuminated by all this glorious art. “Mr. Hammerstein has alienated the decent citizenship of Philadelphia,” he declared to a reporter. “We will try to induce the Mayor to revoke his license.” Those of a censorious frame of mind had been beaten for the moment, but they were determined to have their day. And they would, too! Not yet. But soon. 

And there was another group of men who were no doubt giving the scene of the opera house some very shrewd glances that evening, too. Edwin Stotesbury and his associates looked about and thought calculatingly - “Huh. All these people, and he’s still not breaking even! Whaddya know about that.” The day of reckoning for Hammerstein’s Opera House was fast approaching - not the day of reckoning the preachers had in mind, true. The bankers were coming for it even quicker, and literally, they had the receipts.

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So, there we are, only at the end of Hammerstein’s very first season in April 1909! There’s so much more to talk about! I really had intended to get much further along in the story this episode, but here we are, I’m exhausted, and like Hammerstein I’m only human! It’s really time to wrap things up for now. I’ll get to work soon on the conclusion (I promise, the conclusion) of Hammerstein’s Opera House, Part Three. 

I’m Peter Schmitz. Our theme music and sound engineering are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Join us again, won't you please, in a few weeks time, for another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

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