In 1903, Oscar had quietly purchased a large lot on Thirty-fourth Street. He claimed he was building a spectacle house to rival the outsized Hippodrome Theatre, but his floor plans told a different story. Like the first Manhattan Opera House, this second one was shallower and wider than was traditional for grand opera. The stage was immense. Acoustics and sight lines were excellent. Oscar’s design invited his audience to see and hear, not see and be seen. This would be opera—Hammerstein-style. By 1906, Oscar had completed construction of his second Manhattan Opera House.
The Manhattan Opera House
The Manhattan Opera House interior
Oscar now set his competitive sights on the Metropolitan Opera House. What he saw at the Met were wealthy patrons and benefactors, no meaningful bottom line, the best singers and directors money could buy, exclusive publishing contracts, a daunting web of theatrical alliances, and a twenty-three-year domination of grand opera.
Metropolitan Opera House director, Heinrich Conried
Opera war cartoon
And they saw him back. The Met threatened career repercussions for wayward singers, they tied up a dozen singers with short-term contracts, and they instructed all of their theatre and publishing alliances not to play ball with Hammerstein’s new house.
Conductor Cleofonte Campanini confers with Oscar.
On opening night, December 3, 1906, thirty-one hundred people managed to squeeze inside the new Manhattan, while outside, curious thousands jammed traffic from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River, from Twenty-third Street to Forty-second. Hammerstein had to call in the police to control the crush of people.
The Manhattan Opera House, postcard
Oscar’s first aim was to invite comparison with the Met. For the premiere performance, he opened with Bellini’s I Puritani, chosen specifically to showcase tenor Alessandro Bonci’s astonishing upper-register control. The Met’s tenor Enrico Caruso had wisely dropped this awful opera from his repertoire early in his career. The obliging press framed it as the “duel of the tenors.”
Alessandro Bonci
In the autumn months preceding the opening, Oscar had publicly boasted that the great diva Nellie Melba would sing at the Manhattan, and then promptly steamed to Europe to arrive unannounced at Melba’s Parisian villa. When he asked her to perform at his new theatre, she tossed him out. But Oscar was not to be discouraged. He returned the next day to again plead his case. Melba turned him down once more. After a few more days of this, Oscar finally accepted her refusal, bowed, and pulled out a wad of thousand-franc bills. Declaring sadly, “I won’t be needing this,” he flung the wad into the air, turned on his heels, and walked out in a shower of money. For him it was all or nothing. Flabbergasted, Melba summoned him back and signed on the dotted line for 1907.
Oscar Hammerstein, impresario
Nellie Melba’s stunning performances throughout the second half of the Manhattan’s first season quickly cemented its reputation for opera of the highest quality. Melba’s exquisite voice had counterbalanced the potent threat of Caruso and made Oscar’s Manhattan shine. With the help of Willy’s vaudeville profits and Arthur’s constant assistance, Oscar had created a first-class opera company in a single year and had made more money than the Met had lost.
Nellie Melba
Oscar now gambled big. He had many goals: to keep the Met off balance; to make the rules of opera; to make musical history. In the Manhattan’s second season, Oscar expanded the definitions of opera and introduced the modern, morally complicated French repertoire to his American audiences. Oscar traveled to Paris to sign up the queen of this daring realm—Mary Garden.
Mary Garden
In contrast to the old-school charms of a Nellie Melba, to opera’s audiences Garden embodied the shock of the new. Her fearless singing style ranged from the beautiful to the horrific, all in the service of the larger demands of drama. She sang, danced, and acted. In her Oscar saw opera’s future.
Oscar focused great directorial attention on Mary Garden’s performance of the American debut of Claude Debussy’s controversial—and only opera—Pelléas et Mélisande. Debussy praised Oscar’s efforts to the skies: “I trust you will find in these few lines the expression of my sincere gratitude for your having dared to present Pelléas et Mélisande in America. It is a particularly happy event that the success of our efforts … helps the cause of French music admirably.” The French government went even further and awarded Oscar the French Legion of Honor medal.
For the first time in his life, Oscar was collaborating with an artist whose expansive vision of opera was equal to his own. Unlike most divas, Mary Garden never bolted to the competition for a better paycheck. The two were completely loyal to each other and fought like jealous lovers—a relationship that was rumored to be true.
Decades back, Oscar had briefly worked with Metropolitan Opera House director Heinrich Conried. Bad feelings had brewed, and the mutual animosity still strongly lingered. In Oscar’s second season, Conried made a costly error. Believing Oscar to be committed to French opera, Conried delayed in resigning the beloved, old-school diva of the Italian repertoire, Luisa Tetrazzini; he saw no reason to rush her contract renegotiation. Arthur Hammerstein saw fair game and pounced.
When a reporter mused that Conried was his own worst enemy, Oscar slyly retorted, “Not while I’m alive.”
Luisa Tetrazzini
Luisa Tetrazzini was a coloratura soprano whose voice control and personal style had won over all of Europe. Her new presence at the Manhattan jeopardized the dominance of the Met’s Italian repertoire. Her recent London debut had caused riots in the streets. It was the same at her New York debut on January 15, 1908. Up to this moment, audience defection from the Met to the Manhattan had trickled. Now it flowed.
Snobby opera journals portrayed Oscar’s audience for Tetrazzini as raucous ethnic immigrants who were out of control and lacking gentility. One thing was for sure: no New York debut of this century had ignited such hysteria. Tetrazzini packed the house. Oscar and Arthur, even the city police, were overwhelmed. Lucky Hammerstein now had two polar phenoms of the “old” and “new” schools, Luisa Tetrazzini and Mary Garden, under one roof.
The “Gallery Gods” on Tetrazzini Night at the Manhattan, an illustration from Musical America
Oscar’s public life was played out in the news every day. But in late November 1908, a scandal broke out that brought Oscar’s private life into the public eye as well.
Oscar and Malvina had an understanding. Malvina was a woman of propriety and feared public humiliation, not private betrayal. She demanded only discretion in Oscar’s affairs. As long as his occasional dalliances with his singers remained out of the public eye, their cool and practical marriage could endure. In fact, Oscar rarely even visited his Harlem home and lived a lone-wolf existence in a small room above the Victoria Theatre.
When the city’s newspapers began printing excerpts of five hundred love letters Oscar had penned to a singer with whom he’d consorted, and who he had then professionally spurned, Oscar and Malvina’s status quo arrangement abruptly ended. Oscar tried to explain to members of the press that a man in his profession needed some latitude in these matters, but, of course, this plea was also printed for public consumption. A humiliated, if not heartbroken, Malvina packed her bags and moved out.
Despite the end of his marriage and the precarious success of the Manhattan, Oscar continued to dream of an even bigger operatic empire. And so he waged a separate opera war with Philadelphia’s venerable and stodgy Academy of Music by building a competing opera house in that city. Arthur oversaw the breakneck pace of the theatre’s construction, and on November 17, 1908, the Philadelphia Opera House opened to the public.
The Philadelphia Opera House, postcard
Oscar’s fourth, and last, season at the Manhattan was a battle to the death: he ran summer and educational programs of opera and managed touring companies performing in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Boston, Washington, Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, all of which were straining resources, inflating costs, and ultimately dulling interest. Oscar had outmaneuvered the Metropolitan at almost every level but could not outspend them. He was secretly broke.
Otto Kahn, president and majority stockholder of the Metropolitan Opera board of directors, truly admired Oscar and often referred to him as “a very dangerous genius.” A devoted opera lover, he’d attended Oscar’s Manhattan operas from the beginning. Since Oscar was consummately hands-on and watched every performance on a kitchen chair, in the wings, stage right, he gave his empty box seats to Otto—with his compliments.
By the end of 1909, rumors of Oscar’s insolvency surfaced in the papers. Otto certainly may have known about Oscar’s money troubles, but he believed Oscar to be the best man by far to steer any opera company. He valiantly tried to persuade the board of directors to make Oscar the director of the Metropolitan Opera. But Oscar had angered too many rich, important people and burned too many bridges. Despite further rumors of a Manhattan-Metropolitan alliance, there unfortunately would be no rapprochement in this war.
Arthur Hammerstein
Then, in the spring of 1910, Arthur had an idea: he persuaded Oscar to assign him power of attorney and exile him to Paris. Then he penned a deal with Otto Kahn: the Met would buy out all of Oscar’s opera interests, with the exception of the opera house deed, in exchange for $1.2 million. Oscar and Arthur would sign a written promise to stay out of the opera business in the four largest opera cities in the United States—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago—for a period of ten years. On top of this, the Met demanded the deed to the Philadelphia house.
Proud Oscar was out of options and wearily signed. Otto and the Met extended their invitation to Oscar to be their guest of honor for a conciliatory banquet. He moodily replied, “Gentlemen, I am not hungry.”
