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<h2> CHAPTER X </h2>
<h3> [How Wagner Operas Bang Along] </h3>
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<p>Three or four hours. That is a long time to sit in one place, whether one
be conspicuous or not, yet some of Wagner's operas bang along for six
whole hours on a stretch! But the people sit there and enjoy it all, and
wish it would last longer. A German lady in Munich told me that a person
could not like Wagner's music at first, but must go through the deliberate
process of learning to like it—then he would have his sure reward;
for when he had learned to like it he would hunger for it and never be
able to get enough of it. She said that six hours of Wagner was by no
means too much. She said that this composer had made a complete revolution
in music and was burying the old masters one by one. And she said that
Wagner's operas differed from all others in one notable respect, and that
was that they were not merely spotted with music here and there, but were
<i>all</i> music, from the first strain to the last. This surprised me. I said I
had attended one of his insurrections, and found hardly <i>any</i> music in it
except the Wedding Chorus. She said "Lohengrin" was noisier than Wagner's
other operas, but that if I would keep on going to see it I would find by
and by that it was all music, and therefore would then enjoy it. I <i>could</i>
have said, "But would you advise a person to deliberately practice having
a toothache in the pit of his stomach for a couple of years in order that
he might then come to enjoy it?" But I reserved that remark.</p>
<p>This lady was full of the praises of the head-tenor who had performed in a
Wagner opera the night before, and went on to enlarge upon his old and
prodigious fame, and how many honors had been lavished upon him by the
princely houses of Germany. Here was another surprise. I had attended that
very opera, in the person of my agent, and had made close and accurate
observations. So I said:</p>
<p>"Why, madam, <i>my</i> experience warrants me in stating that that tenor's voice
is not a voice at all, but only a shriek—the shriek of a hyena."<br/>
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<p>"That is very true," she said; "he cannot sing now; it is already many
years that he has lost his voice, but in other times he sang, yes,
divinely! So whenever he comes now, you shall see, yes, that the theater
will not hold the people. <i>Jawohl bei Gott!</i> his voice is <i>wunderschoen</i> in
that past time."</p>
<p>I said she was discovering to me a kindly trait in the Germans which was
worth emulating. I said that over the water we were not quite so generous;
that with us, when a singer had lost his voice and a jumper had lost his
legs, these parties ceased to draw. I said I had been to the opera in
Hanover, once, and in Mannheim once, and in Munich (through my authorized
agent) once, and this large experience had nearly persuaded me that the
Germans <i>preferred</i> singers who couldn't sing. This was not such a very
extravagant speech, either, for that burly Mannheim tenor's praises had
been the talk of all Heidelberg for a week before his performance took
place—yet his voice was like the distressing noise which a nail
makes when you screech it across a window-pane. I said so to Heidelberg
friends the next day, and they said, in the calmest and simplest way, that
that was very true, but that in earlier times his voice <i>had</i> been
wonderfully fine. And the tenor in Hanover was just another example of
this sort. The English-speaking German gentleman who went with me to the
opera there was brimming with enthusiasm over that tenor. He said:</p>
<p>"<i>Ach Gott!</i> a great man! You shall see him. He is so celebrate in all
Germany—and he has a pension, yes, from the government. He not
obliged to sing now, only twice every year; but if he not sing twice each
year they take him his pension away."</p>
<p>Very well, we went. When the renowned old tenor appeared, I got a nudge
and an excited whisper:</p>
<p>"Now you see him!"</p>
<p>But the "celebrate" was an astonishing disappointment to me. If he had
been behind a screen I should have supposed they were performing a
surgical operation on him. I looked at my friend—to my great
surprise he seemed intoxicated with pleasure, his eyes were dancing with
eager delight. When the curtain at last fell, he burst into the stormiest
applause, and kept it up—as did the whole house—until the
afflictive tenor had come three times before the curtain to make his bow.
While the glowing enthusiast was swabbing the perspiration from his face,
I said:</p>
<p>"I don't mean the least harm, but really, now, do you think he can sing?"</p>
<p>"Him? <i>No! Gott im Himmel, aber</i>, how he has been able to sing twenty-five
years ago?" [Then pensively.] "<i>Ach</i>, no, <i>now</i> he not sing any more, he only
cry. When he think he sing, now, he not sing at all, no, he only make like
a cat which is unwell."<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>Where and how did we get the idea that the Germans are a stolid,
phlegmatic race? In truth, they are widely removed from that. They are
warm-hearted, emotional, impulsive, enthusiastic, their tears come at the
mildest touch, and it is not hard to move them to laughter. They are the
very children of impulse. We are cold and self-contained, compared to the
Germans. They hug and kiss and cry and shout and dance and sing; and where
we use one loving, petting expression, they pour out a score. Their
language is full of endearing diminutives; nothing that they love escapes
the application of a petting diminutive—neither the house, nor the
dog, nor the horse, nor the grandmother, nor any other creature, animate
or inanimate.</p>
<p>In the theaters at Hanover, Hamburg, and Mannheim, they had a wise custom.
The moment the curtain went up, the light in the body of the house went
down. The audience sat in the cool gloom of a deep twilight, which greatly
enhanced the glowing splendors of the stage. It saved gas, too, and people
were not sweated to death.</p>
<p>When I saw "King Lear" played, nobody was allowed to see a scene shifted;
if there was nothing to be done but slide a forest out of the way and
expose a temple beyond, one did not see that forest split itself in the
middle and go shrieking away, with the accompanying disenchanting
spectacle of the hands and heels of the impelling impulse—no, the
curtain was always dropped for an instant—one heard not the least
movement behind it—but when it went up, the next instant, the forest
was gone. Even when the stage was being entirely reset, one heard no
noise. During the whole time that "King Lear" was playing the curtain was
never down two minutes at any one time. The orchestra played until the
curtain was ready to go up for the first time, then they departed for the
evening. Where the stage waits never reach two minutes there is no
occasion for music. I had never seen this two-minute business between acts
but once before, and that was when the "Shaughraun" was played at
Wallack's.</p>
<p>I was at a concert in Munich one night, the people were streaming in, the
clock-hand pointed to seven, the music struck up, and instantly all
movement in the body of the house ceased—nobody was standing, or
walking up the aisles, or fumbling with a seat, the stream of incomers had
suddenly dried up at its source. I listened undisturbed to a piece of
music that was fifteen minutes long—always expecting some tardy
ticket-holders to come crowding past my knees, and being continuously and
pleasantly disappointed—but when the last note was struck, here came
the stream again. You see, they had made those late comers wait in the
comfortable waiting-parlor from the time the music had begun until it was
ended.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>It was the first time I had ever seen this sort of criminals denied the
privilege of destroying the comfort of a house full of their betters. Some
of these were pretty fine birds, but no matter, they had to tarry outside
in the long parlor under the inspection of a double rank of liveried
footmen and waiting-maids who supported the two walls with their backs and
held the wraps and traps of their masters and mistresses on their arms.</p>
<p>We had no footmen to hold our things, and it was not permissible to take
them into the concert-room; but there were some men and women to take
charge of them for us. They gave us checks for them and charged a fixed
price, payable in advance—five cents.</p>
<p>In Germany they always hear one thing at an opera which has never yet been
heard in America, perhaps—I mean the closing strain of a fine solo
or duet. We always smash into it with an earthquake of applause. The
result is that we rob ourselves of the sweetest part of the treat; we get
the whiskey, but we don't get the sugar in the bottom of the glass.</p>
<p>Our way of scattering applause along through an act seems to me to be
better than the Mannheim way of saving it all up till the act is ended. I
do not see how an actor can forget himself and portray hot passion before
a cold still audience. I should think he would feel foolish. It is a pain
to me to this day, to remember how that old German Lear raged and wept and
howled around the stage, with never a response from that hushed house,
never a single outburst till the act was ended. To me there was something
unspeakably uncomfortable in the solemn dead silences that always followed
this old person's tremendous outpourings of his feelings. I could not help
putting myself in his place—I thought I knew how sick and flat he
felt during those silences, because I remembered a case which came under
my observation once, and which—but I will tell the incident:</p>
<p>One evening on board a Mississippi steamboat, a boy of ten years lay
asleep in a berth—a long, slim-legged boy, he was, encased in quite
a short shirt; it was the first time he had ever made a trip on a
steamboat, and so he was troubled, and scared, and had gone to bed with
his head filled with impending snaggings, and explosions, and
conflagrations, and sudden death. About ten o'clock some twenty ladies
were sitting around about the ladies' saloon, quietly reading, sewing,
embroidering, and so on, and among them sat a sweet, benignant old dame
with round spectacles on her nose and her busy knitting-needles in her
hands. Now all of a sudden, into the midst of this peaceful scene burst
that slim-shanked boy in the brief shirt, wild-eyed, erect-haired, and
shouting, "Fire, fire! <i>Jump and run, the boat's afire and there ain't a
minute to lose!</i>" All those ladies looked sweetly up and smiled, nobody
stirred, the old lady pulled her spectacles down, looked over them, and
said, gently:</p>
<p>"But you mustn't catch cold, child. Run and put on your breastpin, and
then come and tell us all about it."</p>
<p>It was a cruel chill to give to a poor little devil's gushing vehemence.
He was expecting to be a sort of hero—the creator of a wild panic—and
here everybody sat and smiled a mocking smile, and an old woman made fun
of his bugbear. I turned and crept away—for I was that boy—and
never even cared to discover whether I had dreamed the fire or actually
seen it.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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<p>I am told that in a German concert or opera, they hardly ever encore a
song; that though they may be dying to hear it again, their good breeding
usually preserves them against requiring the repetition.</p>
<p>Kings may encore; that is quite another matter; it delights everybody to
see that the King is pleased; and as to the actor encored, his pride and
gratification are simply boundless. Still, there are circumstances in
which even a royal encore—</p>
<p>But it is better to illustrate. The King of Bavaria is a poet, and has a
poet's eccentricities—with the advantage over all other poets of
being able to gratify them, no matter what form they may take. He is fond
of opera, but not fond of sitting in the presence of an audience;
therefore, it has sometimes occurred, in Munich, that when an opera has
been concluded and the players were getting off their paint and finery, a
command has come to them to get their paint and finery on again. Presently
the King would arrive, solitary and alone, and the players would begin at
the beginning and do the entire opera over again with only that one
individual in the vast solemn theater for audience. Once he took an odd
freak into his head. High up and out of sight, over the prodigious stage
of the court theater is a maze of interlacing water-pipes, so pierced that
in case of fire, innumerable little thread-like streams of water can be
caused to descend; and in case of need, this discharge can be augmented to
a pouring flood. American managers might want to make a note of that. The
King was sole audience. The opera proceeded, it was a piece with a storm
in it; the mimic thunder began to mutter, the mimic wind began to wail and
sough, and the mimic rain to patter. The King's interest rose higher and
higher; it developed into enthusiasm. He cried out:</p>
<p>"It is very, very good, indeed! But I will have real rain! Turn on the
water!"</p>
<p>The manager pleaded for a reversal of the command; said it would ruin the
costly scenery and the splendid costumes, but the King cried:</p>
<p>"No matter, no matter, I will have real rain! Turn on the water!"</p>
<p>So the real rain was turned on and began to descend in gossamer lances to
the mimic flower-beds and gravel walks of the stage. The richly dressed
actresses and actors tripped about singing bravely and pretending not to
mind it. The King was delighted—his enthusiasm grew higher. He cried
out:</p>
<p>"Bravo, bravo! More thunder! more lightning! turn on more rain!"<br/>
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<p>The thunder boomed, the lightning glared, the storm-winds raged, the
deluge poured down. The mimic royalty on the stage, with their soaked
satins clinging to their bodies, slopped about ankle-deep in water,
warbling their sweetest and best, the fiddlers under the eaves of the
stage sawed away for dear life, with the cold overflow spouting down the
backs of their necks, and the dry and happy King sat in his lofty box and
wore his gloves to ribbons applauding.</p>
<p>"More yet!" cried the King; "more yet—let loose all the thunder,
turn on all the water! I will hang the man that raises an umbrella!"</p>
<p>When this most tremendous and effective storm that had ever been produced
in any theater was at last over, the King's approbation was measureless.
He cried:</p>
<p>"Magnificent, magnificent! <i>Encore</i>! Do it again!"</p>
<p>But the manager succeeded in persuading him to recall the encore, and said
the company would feel sufficiently rewarded and complimented in the mere
fact that the encore was desired by his Majesty, without fatiguing him
with a repetition to gratify their own vanity.</p>
<p>During the remainder of the act the lucky performers were those whose
parts required changes of dress; the others were a soaked, bedraggled, and
uncomfortable lot, but in the last degree picturesque. The stage scenery
was ruined, trap-doors were so swollen that they wouldn't work for a week
afterward, the fine costumes were spoiled, and no end of minor damages
were done by that remarkable storm.</p>
<p>It was a royal idea—that storm—and royally carried out. But
observe the moderation of the King; he did not insist upon his encore. If
he had been a gladsome, unreflecting American opera-audience, he probably
would have had his storm repeated and repeated until he drowned all those
people.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/></p>
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