we lived in a wonderland of opera, of interminable conversations with fellow enthusiasts in the queue, of glimpses at and sometimes even snatches of conversation with the stars, and of a dozen other delights.
Oh, the friendships and enmities of that queue! What book of this kind could be complete without mentioning some of the familiar figures?
Francis had attended every performance of every single opera at Covent Garden since the early nineteen-twenties, usually accompanied by Jenny. Francis had some wonderful turns of phrase from time to time and once uttered the pearl of succinct criticism when we were all recalling a singer we had deplored. “She had an enormous voice,” he agreed thoughtfully, “and all of it came from her nose.”
George was three when he first queued with his mother, though he didn’t actually come into performances until later. He adored Pinza and was the first person the amused basso used to ask for when he passed the queue.
Arthur was attending a finishing school in Switzerland when he received word that Ponselle was to make her Covent Garden debut. Unable to contemplate missing such an event, he wrote immediately to his father. He said he had been seriously considering the future and felt strongly that, instead of wasting money abroad, the time had come for him to assist his father in business. So admirably did he state the case to his unsuspecting parent that, somewhat touched, his father brought him home—just in time for Ponselle’s debut. “But, by God, it was a near thing!” was Arthur’s invariable comment when he told the tale later.
Dennis cycled up every morning from Forest Gate and once fell asleep on his bicycle, worn out by a series of late operatic nights. He always declared that he remembered seeing the Law Courts, and that the next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, fifty yards farther on.
Colin was afterwards to found perhaps the most famous record collectors’ centre in England. I have always thought he owed the phenomenal success of his venture partly to his uncompromising statement of views. They carried such shattering conviction.
There was the famous occasion when a customer dared to speak disparagingly of Dame Nellie Melba. “Sir,” said Colin, rising in his wrath from behind the counter, “Sir, I would have you know that here we worship at the shrine of Melba. Kindly go out of my shop and never come in again.” And if anyone can say “sir” more insultingly than Colin can, I have yet to meet him.
There was Mrs. Price who, with her family, headed the queue for many a long day. She always lingers in my memory as one of the few women who had the gift of dignity and repose. It was she who once consoled me when I was seething with rage over what I considered an unjust musical criticism and encouraged me to judge a performance for myself. “No critic is infallible,” she said. “He may be wrong and you may be right.”
Then there were Douglas, Jenny, Ray, Noel and Freda—who did most of their courting in the queue and subsequently chose a foreign opera festival as the scene of their honeymoon—Anne, Norwood, Phyllis, Harold—who had written a fan letter to Geraldine Farrar in 1919 and started a regular and entertaining correspondence with that great woman, that lasted until her death forty-seven years later—Mollie—one of my friends and colleagues from the Law Courts days—Reg—whom Mollie afterwards married. There were dozens of them! Chance acquaintances, old friends, part of one’s life. Bobby, who was later shot down over the Mediterranean, Peter who died in the North African campaign. Impossible to name them all, but every one represented part of the scene that belongs to those golden days before 1934, when we were young and the world was ours.
And what was the operatic fare offered to us when we handed in our camp stools and scrambled up the stairs to our wooden seats in the gallery?
Well, of course, there is a great deal of nonsense talked about those days, mostly by people who never experienced them. The times I have had people say naïvely, “They didn’t act much in those days, did they?” or “Of course it was the star system then, wasn’t it?” or “There were no real productions, I imagine.”
No one, least of all myself, is going to pretend that there were no poor, dull or even uninspired performances at Covent Garden during the Grand Season of the “old days.” There were occasionally perfectly frightful performances, often very good ones, and sometimes truly great and memorable performances, which stand out still as milestones in our memories.
It was, I freely admit, a considerable disadvantage that the opera house inevitably lacked a permanent orchestra and chorus. But this deficiency was usually surmounted with amazing success, first by the wholesale importation of one of the standing London orchestras—as is done today, in the case of Glyndebourne, for instance—and secondly by the natural British genius for choral singing. It was easier than it would have been in most other countries to assemble a chorus of high standard, because the chorus members probably were accustomed to singing together, either in oratorio or as members of some choral society.
Against this background appeared artists—and in some cases whole casts—who were perfectly used to performing together in other parts of the world.
And now for my favourite comment, “They didn’t act much then, did they?”
Act! Why a man like Chaliapin could act everyone off the stage today with the exception of Callas and Gobbi. It must be forty years or more since I last heard Chaliapin’s Boris, but my spine still chills enjoyably as I recall his Clock Scene, where the Czar, who has murdered his way to the throne, sees the ghost of the child he has murdered. And he did the whole thing with a chair and a handkerchief: a monumental and solitary figure in a splendid costume of brocade and fur, he scarcely made a movement at first, only the agitation of the red handkerchief in his hand showing his growing uneasiness and his incredulous horror. Then, at the moment when he actually saw the child, he would take the chair on which he had been sitting and try to hold off the figure, unseen to all but him. And we, sweating with heat and terror in the gallery, could have sworn in the end that we saw the child too. That was acting!
Of course, in a singer, the first essential is the voice. But it is useful to put the record straight for those who imagine that the stars of those days stood stolidly at the footlights and sang.
When people ask, “Are there not just as many great vocal artists today?” I am afraid the simple, if unpopular, answer is: No. This is not because God has stopped giving out good voices. It is because the full development of a great singing talent is a near-impossibility in a world where everything from coffee to soup to philosophy and art must be “instant.” Presently someone is going to discover how to grow an instant tree. It won’t be much like the tree that has taken years and years to mature, but it will satisfy quite a number of people who will, incidentally, be rather huffy if you talk about the superiority of the real thing.
The development of a complete musical artist differed a little from country to country, but in every case it took time. In Austria, for instance, anyone lucky enough to be accepted into one of the famous musical conservatoria faced six years of study. No agent or talent scout was allowed to approach the singer during the first five years.—Nor, of course, was there any chance of preening and twittering on television to a chorus of uninformed praise.—At the end of the fifth year, the conservatory would organize a students’ concert, to which agents and talent scouts would be invited. An interested agent or scout would approach the teacher, not the student, with the request that, in a year’s time, he or she might hear the singer again. An engagement—probably in a provincial opera house, where immensely varied professional experience would be available—might result.
The greatly gifted artist might find a few short cuts, and there was always the occasional phenomenon who conformed to few of these rules. But, generally speaking, any artist who succeeded in the international scene—in parts great or small—had this wealth of understanding and experience
