Chapters of Opera | Page 4

Tetrazzini Craze
Repertory of the Season
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION OF OPERA IN NEW YORK
Considering the present state of Italian opera in New York City (I am
writing in the year of our Lord 1908), it seems more than a little strange
that its entire history should come within the memories of persons still
living. It was only two years ago that an ancient factotum at the
Metropolitan Opera House died who, for a score of years before he
began service at that establishment, had been in various posts at the
Academy of Music. Of Mr. Arment a kindly necrologist said that he
had seen the Crowd gather in front of the Park Theater in 1825, when
the new form of entertainment effected an entrance in the New World. I
knew the little old gentleman for a quarter of a century or more, but
though he was familiar with my interest in matters historical touching
the opera in New York, he never volunteered information of things
further back than the consulship of Mapleson at the Academy.
Moreover, I was unable to reconcile the story of his recollection of the
episode of 1825 with the circumstances of his early life. Yet the tale
may have been true, or the opera company that had attracted his boyish
attention been one that came within the first decade after Italian opera
had its introduction.
Concerning another's recollections, I have not the slightest doubt.
Within the last year Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, entertaining some of her
relatives and friends with an account of social doings in New York in
her childhood, recalled the fact that she had been taken as a tiny miss to

hear some of the performances of the Garcia Troupe, and, if I mistake
not, had had Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart's "Nozze di
Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" pointed out to her by her brother. This
brother was Samuel Ward, who enjoyed the friendship of the old poet,
and published recollections of him not long after his death, in The New
York Mirror. For a score of years I have enjoyed the gentle
companionship at the opera of two sisters whose mother was an Italian
pupil of Da Ponte's, and when, a few years ago, Professor Marchesan,
of the University of Treviso, Italy, appealed to me for material to be
used in the biography of Da Ponte, which he was writing, I was able,
through my gracious and gentle operatic neighbors, to provide him with
a number of occasional poems written, in the manner of a century ago,
to their mother, in whom Da Ponte had awakened a love for the Italian
language and literature. This, together with some of my own labors in
uncovering the American history of Mozart's collaborator, has made me
feel sometimes as if I, too, had dwelt for a brief space in that Arcadia of
which I purpose to gossip in this chapter, and a few others which are to
follow it.
There may be other memories going back as far as Mrs. Howe's, but I
very much doubt if there is another as lively as hers on any question
connected with social life in New York fourscore years ago. Italian
opera was quite as aristocratic when it made its American bow as it is
now, and decidedly more exclusive. It is natural that memories of it
should linger in Mrs. Howe's mind for the reason that the family to
which she belonged moved in the circles to which the new form of
entertainment made appeal. A memory of the incident which must have
been even livelier than that of Mrs. Howe's, however, perished in 1906,
when Manuel Garcia died in London, in his one hundred and first year,
for he could say of the first American season of Italian opera what
Æneas said of the siege of Troy, "All of which I saw, and some of
which I was." Manuel Garcia was a son of the Manuel del Popolo
Vicente Garcia, who brought the institution to our shores; he was a
brother of our first prima donna, she who then was only the Signorina
Garcia, but within a lustrum afterward was the great Malibran; and he
sang in the first performance, on November 29, 1825, and probably in
all the performances given between that date and August of the next

year, when the elder Garcia departed, leaving the Signorina, as Mme.
Malibran, aged but eighteen, to develop her powers in local theaters
and as a chorister in Grace Church. Of this and other related things
presently.
In the sometimes faulty and incomplete records of the American stage
to which writers on musical history have hitherto been forced to repair,
1750 is set down as the natal year for English ballad opera in America.
It is thought