Covent Garden – the performance of 9 June 1900

‘Get the strongest possible cast and let them sing.’ During his tenure as manager of the Metropolitan Opera House in the 1890s, Maurice Grau's recipe for presenting opera to the New York public was remarkably successful, especially in his vocally spectacular staging of Wagner's music dramas. The parade of talent was such that over half a century later the Met's historian judged that ‘in no other period have so many of the greatest singers of the day been systematically presented to the New York public’. A Tristan with Lillian Nordica and Jean de Reszke was but one highlight; other Wagnerian stars included Emma Eames, Milka Ternina, even Nellie Melba as Brünnhilde with, on the spear side, such famed exponents as Jean's brother Edouard, Ernest Van Dyck and Anton Van Rooy.

The excellence of Grau's reputation led the Grand Opera Syndicate at Covent Garden to engage him in 1896 to manage its long-established annual summer opera seasons at the Royal Opera House. For four seasons the world's two major international opera houses ran in tandem under Grau's artistic direction; what London heard in the summer, New York often heard in the winter. Grau's immediate imprint on his Covent Garden seasons was a sharp increase in the number of Wagner performances: during his tenure they doubled from a previous average of one dozen to two, rising in 1898 to no fewer than thirty-two performances (out of a total of sixty-seven).