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chapter four “How I Should Like to Hear It All Over Again & Again” Loving Music, 1850–1885 jJ The Passion of Lucy Lowell On 14 April 1884, twenty-four-year-old Lucy Lowell attended the opening of a Wagner festival at Boston’s Mechanics Hall, sponsored by famed conductor Theodore Thomas and his Orchestra. The festival was opening its national tour in Boston, and it featured some of the greatest Wagnerian opera singers of the time, several of whom were performers in the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. While Lowell had heard Wagner’s music before and was able to recognize some of the excerpts from Tannh äuser and Die Walküre, the five concerts of the festival would give her the opportunity to hear his operas in a full and intense dose. Her reaction to the first night’s concert was close to awe. “I never imagined anything so beautiful,” she rhapsodized in her diary. “Altogether it was the most interesting & delightful performance I ever heard. Crowds of people. I should like to hear just the same thing over again every week for months, so as to get familiar with it, & then perhaps I might”—she wrote “get” but then crossed the word out—“somewhere nearly appreciate it.”1 The following night, she witnessed the same solo singers, as well as several choral pieces from Die Meistersinger, which she found “lively, jolly, and beautiful.” However, Lowell was most taken with tenor Walter Winkelmann , and spent much of her diary recollection of the concert contemplating his explosive style, which she found bewitching: Then Walter sings his prize song, & never in my life was I so perfectly carried away, excited, overcome as by Winkelmann’s singing of that song, it was perfectly superb, listening and longing / 108 people can criticize his way of singing if they like, but I say they might as well keep still when a man gets up and sings like an inspired creature as he did. Winkelmann sits all the time perfectly unmoved & as tho’ in a dream (almost) & then sings— well, it would be worth going to Germany just to hear him sing that song. He is fascinating, I think, & the only thing that reconciles me to not going to the Festival tomorrow p.m. is that he’s not going to sing.2 Even though she couldn’t attend the third afternoon of the Festival, she met with her friend Edith in the early evening, and they “talked Wagner.” As she wrote, “She’d been last night & this p.m. & was as wild as I, so we just raved & enjoyed it tremendously.” That night she returned to Mechanics Hall with her cousin Lewis to witness the third concert of performances. She described the trip in her diary in unusually clipped phrases, as if impatiently trying to get to her seat: “In at 5, to Cousin Lewis,’ he & I to Wagner, it rained hard on the way up.” Perhaps the excitement of the previous two days had raised her expectations too high, however, for halfway into the program of Tristan und Isolde, she found that “it didn’t excite me at all” and, with some regret, she wrote that she was “terribly disappointed.”3 Working through the experience, she never once doubted the abilities of the performers in whom she had invested so much enthusiasm but instead suspected Mechanics Hall itself. It was not, after all, the first time she’d had a bad listening experience there. Two years before, in 1882, after seeing Adelina Patti perform in La Traviata at the Hall, she had complained, “it is so vast a place that the whole thing was vague and unsatisfactory.” Soon after, on 13 May 1882, she marveled that singer Etelka Gerster, appearing in La Sonnambula, was actually able to reach her entire audience: “I never heard such enthusiasm (in Boston) in my life. And this in that barn where I thought it was impossible to get an audience excited.”4 In fact, learning afterward that her mother and sister, seated closer to the stage, “were perfectly wild,” her suspicions were confirmed. She wrote, “I was disgusted for it must have been cousin L’s seats wh’ [which] were in [section] M., our own in F. The orchestra magnificent from M., but the solos seemed far away.”5 On the fourth day of the Wagner festival, Thursday, 17 May 1884, Lowell attended the 2 p.m. matinee performance, this time sitting with her mother in section F and finding the performances “perfectly overwhelming...

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