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Cover of Chapters of Opera Being historical and critical observations and records concerning the lyric drama in New York from its earliest days down to the present time — Edition Insights

Chapters of Opera Being historical and critical observations and records concerning the lyric drama in New York from its earliest days down to the present time — Edition Insights

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In Category - Music History

Authors: Krehbiel, Henry Edward, 1854-1923 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2005 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Opera -- New York (State) -- New York Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 140,150

Reading time 610 min

Text sections 12

Chapters of Opera Being historical and critical observations and records concerning the lyric drama in New York from its earliest days down to the present time — Edition Insights can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 140,150 words, 10 hr 10 min estimated reading time, and 12 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 22.6 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Opera -- New York (State) -- New York,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #5995

Henry Edward Krehbiel, music critic for the New York Tribune, draws on his quarter-century in stall D-15 to examine the Metropolitan Opera House's first twenty-five years, focusing on the shift from German to Italian-French repertory and the financial and artistic tensions that shaped New York's lyric drama.

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Title & short description10 pts
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Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
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ille. Richard Grant White, writing in The Century Magazine for March, 1882, calls him a "Spanish Hebrew," on what authority I am unable to guess. Not only was Manuel Garcia, the elder, a chorister in the Cathedral of Seville at the age of six, but it seems as likely as not that he came of a family of Spanish church musicians who had made their mark for more than fifty years before the father of Malibran was born. But it is a habit with some writers to find Hebrew blood in nearly all persons of genius.

The new Park Theater was looked upon as a magnificent playhouse in its day, and it is a pity that Mr. White, writing about it when it was a quarter of a century old, should have helped to spread the erroneous notion that it was quite unworthy of so elegant a form of entertainment as Garcia brought into it. It remained a fashionable house through all its career or at least for a long time after it gave refuge to the Italian muse, though it may not have been able to hold one of its candles to the first house built especially to house that muse eight years later. The barrel hoop of the first New York theater gave way to "three chandeliers and patent oil lamps, the chandeliers having thirty-five lights each." Mr. White's description of this house after it had seen about a quarter of a century's service is certainly uninviting. Its boxes were like pens for beasts. "Across them were stretched benches consisting of a mere board covered with faded red moreen, a narrower board, shoulder high, being stretched behind to serve for a back. But one seat on each of the three or four benches was without even this luxury, in order that the seat itself might be raised upon its hinges for people to pass in. These sybaritic inclosures were kept under lock and key by a fee-expecting creature, who was always half drunk, except when he was wholly drunk. The pit, which has in our modern theater become the parterre (or, as it is often strangely called, the parquet), the most desirable part of the house, was in the Park Theater hardly superior to that in which the Jacquerie of old stood upon the bare ground (par terre), and thus gave the place its French name. The floor was dirty and broken into holes; the seats were bare, backless benches. Women were never seen in the pit, and, although the excellence of the position (the best in the house) and the cheapness of admission (half a dollar) took gentlemen there, few went there who could afford to study comfort and luxury in their amusements. The place was pervaded with evil smells; and, not uncommonly, in the midst of a performance, rats ran out of the holes in the floor and across into the orchestra. This delectable place was approached by a long, underground passage, with bare, whitewashed walls, dimly lighted, except at a sort of booth, at which vile fluids and viler solids were sold. As to the house itself, it was the dingy abode of dreariness. The gallery was occupied by howling roughs, who might have taken lessons in behavior from the negroes who occupied a part of this tier, which was railed off for their particular use."

This was the first home of Italian opera, strictly speaking. It had long housed opera in the vernacular, and remained to serve as the fortress of the English forces when the first battles were fought between the champions of the foreign exotic and the entertainment which had been so long established as to call itself native. Its career came to an end in 1848, when, like its predecessor and successor, it went up in flames and smoke.

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Henry Edward Krehbiel, musical editor of the New York Tribune, occupied stall D-15 at the Metropolitan Opera House for twenty-five seasons, from the house's opening in 1883 through 1908. In Chapters of Opera, he writes not as a distant historian but as a witness and chronicler, one who watched the failure of the original artistic policy, the German revolution under Leopold Damrosch, and the eventual return of Italian and French opera under Henry Abbey and Maurice Grau. The book is a blend of critical observation and financial record, grounded in the conviction that the lyric drama's fortunes in New York are best understood through the interplay of artistic ambition, managerial calculation, and the shifting tastes of a fashionable audience.

A Critic's Vantage Point

Krehbiel makes no secret of his position. He is not a neutral compiler but a participant-observer, one who has "seen the failure of the artistic policy" and the subsequent revolutions in repertory. His preface establishes his authority by specifying his seat—stall D-15—and his role as reviewer. This personal stake colors his language: he describes the German period as one that "did much to develop tastes and create ideals," while the later return to Italian opera is framed as a capitulation to "fad and fashion." The critic's voice is present in the very structure of the book, which moves from general historical chapters to a detailed account of the Metropolitan's first quarter-century, each section shaped by his judgment of what constituted serious artistic endeavor.

The Ledger of Taste

Krehbiel's analysis of the German seasons (1884–1891) is notable for its reliance on financial data. He prints tables comparing Wagnerian and non-Wagnerian receipts, showing that Wagner performances consistently earned higher average box-office returns—by margins ranging from $465 to $777 per performance. Yet he also records that the stockholders faced a floating debt of over $84,000 by the end of the German period, with unpaid assessments from shareholders themselves. The tension between artistic success and financial strain is a recurring motif. Krehbiel notes that Abbey, despite his initial skepticism, admitted that German opera was "more advantageous to the manager" because it allowed a repertory built around singers rather than the reverse. The numbers, in Krehbiel's hands, become evidence of a deeper conflict between aesthetic ideals and the economic realities of running a grand opera house.

The Manager's Gamble

Krehbiel's portrait of Henry Abbey is drawn from direct conversation. He reports that Abbey, after signing the contract for Italian and French opera in 1891, confided that he had once considered bringing Wagnerian singers to America himself. Abbey believed the German years had created a public ready for different service from Italian artists—a belief Krehbiel calls "foolish" and notes was "soon painfully disillusionized." The critic's language is precise: Abbey had "speculated successfully with Patti under the 'farewell' device," and the "managerial virus was again in his veins." Krehbiel does not merely narrate events; he interprets motives, using the manager's own words to reveal the mix of calculation, hope, and self-deception that drove the shift in policy. The result is a history that reads like a backstage drama, with the critic as a shrewd observer of human fallibility.

The Weight of a Quarter-Century

Krehbiel's book is organized as a series of chapters that move from the earliest days of opera in New York to the specific history of the Metropolitan. The first seven chapters provide context for the detailed account that follows, a structure that reflects his belief that "existing institutions and conditions" can only be understood through their development. The prose is dense with specific figures—the number of stockholders, the amount of unpaid assessments, the percentage of house capacity—but these details serve a larger argument about the fragility of artistic enterprise. Krehbiel's tone is measured, even clinical, yet his choice of evidence reveals a clear point of view: the German period, despite its financial difficulties, represented a high point of "serious artistic interest," while the subsequent years saw those gains "frittered away." The book is as much a judgment as a record.

Readers approaching Chapters of Opera should expect a work that is part financial audit, part critical essay, and part memoir. Krehbiel's voice is authoritative but not omniscient; he limits his claims to what he witnessed or can document. The book rewards those interested in the mechanics of opera management—the contracts, the deficits, the shifting repertory—as much as those seeking a narrative of artistic triumph. It is a document of its time, written by a critic who believed that the history of an institution could be told through its balance sheets and its box-office receipts, and that the truth of a performance lay not only in the music but in the decisions that brought it to the stage.

Years among the opera stalls taught me how much hinges on those quiet intermissions—the shift of a mood, a repertory’s changing tide. Krehbiel’s chronicle of that Metropolitan struggle reminds me of an older harmony, where even lost modes once carried a nation’s feeling. There is a gentle kinship there, found in The Modes of Ancient Greek Music — Reading Notes, a book I often revisit when pondering what fades from the stage.