And so, in order that Italian opera might not perish from the earth, but live on, surrounded by the architectural splendor appropriate to it, one hundred and fifty men of social prominence got together and guaranteed to support it for five years, and Messrs. Foster, Morgan, and Colles built the Astor Place Opera House. Instead of the eight hundred seatings of Palmo's institution, this held 1,800. The theater had "a fine open front and an excellent ventilation." That it was an elegant playhouse and admirably adapted to the purpose for which it had been designed there are many people still alive in New York to testify. Mr. White says enthusiastically that it was "one of the most attractive theaters ever erected." Even Max Maretzek, who began his American career there, first as conductor, afterward as impresario, while throwing ridicule upon its management (his own administration excepted, of course) and its artistic forces, praises the architectural arrangement of the house. "Most agreeably surprised was I," he writes in his "Crotchets and Quavers," published in 1855, "on entering this small but comfortably arranged bonbonnière. It contained somewhere about 1,100 excellent seats in parquet (the Parisian parterre), dress circle and first tier, with some seven hundred in the gallery. Its principal feature was that everybody could see, and, what is of infinitely greater consequence, could be seen. Never, perhaps, was any theater built that afforded a better opportunity for a display of dress. Believe me" (he is indulging in the literary fiction of a letter to a journalistic friend in Paris), "that were the Funambules built as ably for this grand desideratum, despite the locality and the grade of performance at this theater, my conviction is that it would be the principal and most fashionable one in Paris." Maretzek is, of course, here aiming chiefly to cast discredit upon one of the vanities and affectations of society—the love of display; but if Mr. White is to be believed, the patrons of the Astor Place Opera House, on its opening (which means the fashionable element of New York society) were temperate and tasteful in the matter of dress. Speaking of the first performance at the new house, he says: "Rarely has there been an assembly, at any time or in any country, so elegant, with such a generally suffused air of good breeding; and yet it could not be called splendid in any one of its circles. At the Astor Place Opera House that form of opera toilet for ladies which is now peculiar to New York and a few other American cities came into vogue—a demi-toilet of marked elegance and richness, and yet without that display either of apparel and trimmings or of the wearer's personal charms which is implied by full evening dress in fashionable parlance. This toilet is very pleasing in itself, and it is happily adapted to the social conditions of a country in which any public exhibition of superior wealth in places set apart for common enjoyment of refined pleasure is not in good taste." Mr. White wrote in 1881; would he have been able to be so complimentary to the opera audiences of 1908? What relation does the present extravagance of dress, the vulgar ostentation which Mr. White would have us believe was foreign to the taste of New York's cultured society in 1847, bear toward the support which opera has received since the Metropolitan Opera House was opened? The factors which are to determine the question seem to be marshaling themselves since Mr. Hammerstein opened the Manhattan Opera House, but they are not yet fairly opposed to each other. There are features in which the new opera house recalls memories of the old Academy which met its downfall when the amalgamation between the old Knickerbockers and the newer New Yorkers was effected; but there are also other features which make a repetition of that occurrence under present circumstances very improbable, and the chiefest of these is that inculcated by the failure of the Palmo enterprise; opera must have an elegant environment if it is to succeed. But it had this in the Astor Place Opera House; why, then, did it live its little span only?
The question is easily answered—the Astor Place Opera House was killed by competition; not the competition of English opera with Italian, which had been in existence for twenty-five years, but of Italian opera with Italian opera. The first lessees of the new institution were Messrs. Sanquirico and Patti, who had first tried their luck in Palmo's Opera House. They endured a season. [At the Astor Place Opera House in its first season Sanquirico and Patti produced Verdi's "Ernani," Bellini's "Beatrice di Tenda," Donizetti's "Lucrezia Borgia," Mencadante's "Il Giuramento," and Verdi's "Nabucco." Mr. Fry's season in 1848 when Mr. Maretzek was the conductor, brought forward Donizetti's "Linda di Chamouni," "Lucrezia Borgia," "L'Elisir d'Amore," "Roberto Devereux," and "Lucia di Lammermoor" and Verdi's "Ernani."] Then the first American manager appeared on the field—I mean the first American manager whose thoughts were directed to opera exclusively as distinguished from the managers of theaters who took hold of opera at intervals, as they did any other sort of entertainment which offered employment for their houses. The manager in question was Mr. E. R. Fry, who came from the counting house to a position of which he can have known nothing more than what he could acquire from attendance upon opera, of which he was fond, and association with his brother, W. H. Fry, who was a journalist by profession (long the musical critic of The Tribune) and an amateur composer of more than respectable attainments. Mr. Maretzek, in his "Crotchets and Quavers"—a book generally marked by characteristic good humor, but not free from malevolence—tries to make it appear that Mr. Edward Fry went into operatic management for the express purpose of performing his brother's operas; but while the animus of the statement is enough to cause it to be looked upon with suspicion, the fact that none of William Henry Fry's operas was performed at the Astor Place Opera House during the incumbency of Edward Fry is a complete refutation. "Leonora," the only grand opera by a professional critic ever performed in New York, so far as I know, was brought forward at the Academy of Music a good nine years later. Apropos of this admirable and respected predecessor of mine, a good story was disclosed by Charles A. Dana some fifteen or twenty years ago in his reminiscences of Horace Greeley. Mr. Dana published a large number of letters sent to him at various times while he was managing editor of The Tribune and Mr. Greeley editor-in-chief. It was in the days just before the War of the Rebellion. A political question of large importance had arisen in Congress, and Mr. Greeley was so concerned in it that he went to Washington to look after it in person and act as a special correspondent of his own newspaper. Thence one day he sent two letters to The Tribune on the subject, but in the issue of the day in which he expected them to appear in The Tribune he sought in vain for his communication. Thereupon he indited an epistle to Mr. Dana in these wingèd words:
Friend Dana: What would it cost to burn the Opera House? If the price is reasonable have it done and send me the bill. … I wrote my two letters under the presumption (there being no paper on Wednesday) that the solid work of exposing their (Pierce and Gushing) perversion of history had of course been done by Hildreth. I should have dwelt with it even more gravely but for that. And now I see (the Saturday paper only got through last night) that you crowded out what little I did say to make room for Fry's eleven columns of arguments as to the feasibility of sustaining the opera in N. Y. if they would only play his compositions. I don't believe three hundred people who take the Tribune care one chew of Tobacco for the matter.
The "eleven columns" was an amiable exaggeration quite in consonance with the remainder of the letter; but I can testify from a consultation of the files of the newspaper which I have served as one of Mr. Fry's successors for more than a quarter of a century that on the date in question The Tribune's critic did occupy three and a half columns with a discussion of the Lagrange season just ended at the Academy of Music and a most strenuous plea for the permanent substitution of English for Italian opera! Also, that most of what Mr. Fry said would sound just as apposite to-day as it did then, and be backed by just as much reason. But a taste for the elegant exotic and reason do not seem to go hand in hand, and managers are still strangely averse to placing themselves for guidance