Читать книгу All in a Life-time онлайн

126 страница из 133

Conried’s patience and optimism were inexhaustible. He met every rebuff squarely and surmounted every barrier. He won in the courts. The press attacks and the pulpit onslaughts only furnished publicity; he found other singers to take the place of the rebels, and so, as the event proved, in conferring the leadership of the orchestra on Hertz, he opened a brilliant career for an excellent conductor until then little known in America. As for the public response, the demand for seats was unparalleled, even in Metropolitan history: the directors were all besieged by applications, and I alone made over a hundred people happy by securing seats for them.

Nevertheless, on the eve of the first production everything within the Opera House seemed in utter chaos. We were there until two o’clock in the morning and beheld a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The famous Munich stage manager Lautenschlager, imported for this special performance, was then still rehearsing raising and lowering the drops for Kundry’s big scene, and supernumeraries were scurrying about answering the conflicting demands of their directors; weary stage carpenters and “hands” were lying in the wings snatching such minutes of sleep as were possible, while high up in the stage lofts were stowed away the chorus boys to keep them out of the clutches of the S.P.C.C. To the onlooker, professional or amateur—to everybody except the confident Conried—there seemed nothing but disaster ahead. The brilliant success that evolved is too much a matter of operatic history to require recounting here.