Richard Hageman

Illustrations

Illustration 1.1 Richard Hageman’s birthplace, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands 1906

Illustration 1.2 Richard Hageman and Rosina Van Dyck, New York 1909

Illustration 2.1 Francis MacMillen and Richard Hageman, circa 1907

Illustration 2.2 Rosina Van Dyck in Die Walküre, Metropolitan Opera 1909

Illustration 2.3 Sketch of Richard Hageman by Hy Mayer, New York 1909

Illustration 2.4 The Operatic Society Golf Tournament, Los Angeles 1926

Illustration 2.5 Richard Hageman with friends, Ravinia Festival 1917

Illustration 3.1 Richard Hageman and Renée Thornton, New York 1922

Illustration 4.1 Richard Hageman and the Tragödie in Arezzo production team, Freiburg, Germany 1932

Illustration 5.1 Richard and Eleanore Hageman at home, Beverly Hills 1937

Illustration 5.2 Richard and Eleanore Hageman entertaining, Beverly Hills 1938

Illustration 8.1 Richard Hageman with Louis Armstrong in New Orleans (1947)

Illustration 8.2 The émigré community at Alma Mahler’s 80th birthday, Beverly Hills 1948

Illustration 9.1 Richard Hageman in 3 Godfathers (1949)

Illustration 9.2 Richard Hageman with Kathryn Grayson and Mario Lanza in The Toast of New Orleans (1950)

Illustration 10.1 Richard Hageman publicity photo, Hollywood 1940

Note on Sources

Frequently used newspapers, magazines, and journals are cited in the notes as follows: AH (Algemeen Handelsblad [General Trade Magazine], Amsterdam); AC (Atlanta Constitution); BDE (Brooklyn Daily Eagle); BG (Boston Globe); Caecilia (Caecilia: Algemeen muzikaal tijdschrift van Nederland [Caecilia, General Musical Magazine of the Netherlands], Amsterdam); CT (Chicago Tribune); DT (USC Daily Trojan); Telegraaf (De Telegraaf, Amsterdam); DS (Desert Sun, Palm Springs); DSP (De Sumatra Post); FD (Film Daily); HCN (Hollywood Citizen-News); HEN (Harrisburg Evening News); HR (Hollywood Reporter); LC (Leeuwarder Courant); LADN (Los Angeles Daily News); LAT (Los Angeles Times); MA (Musical America); MC (Musical Courier); MPD (Motion Picture Daily); MST (Minneapolis Star Tribune); NvdD (Nieuws van de Dag [News of the day], Amsterdam); NYDN (New York Daily News); NYHT (New York Herald Tribune); NYT (New York Times); NYTribune (New York Tribune); PCM (Pacific Coast Musician); PPG (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); RN (Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad [Rotterdam News Magazine]); SFE (San Francisco Examiner); Standard (The Standard, London); Variety (Daily and Weekly).

Frequently used databases are cited as follows: AHNAO (Ancestry Historical Newspaper Archive Online); ANNO (Historische österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften [Historical Austrian Newspapers and Magazines]); CDNC (California Digital Newspaper Collection, University of California, Riverside); CHOA ←xi | xii→(Carnegie Hall Online Archive); DAHR (Discography of American Historical Recordings, UC Santa Barbara); Delpher (Delpher Digital Library, Koninklijke Bibliotheek [Royal Library], The Hague); EIMA (Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive); Gallica (Gallica Digital Library, Bibliothèque National de France [National Library of France], Paris); HT (HathiTrust Digital Library); JSTOR (JSTOR Online Library); Lantern (Lantern Digital Media History Project, University of Wisconsin, Madison); Met Online (Metropolitan Opera Archives Online); NAO (Newspaperarchive Online); NYTOA (New York Times Online Archive); Proquest (Proquest Historical Newspapers); Trojan (Daily Trojan Online Archive, USC).

Acknowledgements

Ours was a collaboration across three countries, three native languages, two continents, and three time zones. This shouldn’t have worked but somehow it did. Thanks here to the many people who helped us in our quest to find Richard Hageman.

Edward (Ned) Comstock, USC Cinema Television Library; Yuriy Shcherbin, USC Digital Library; Linda Showalter, Marietta College Legacy Library; and the staffs of Adams Library, Rhode Island College; Music Library, USC; Los Angeles Public Library, Pacific Palisades; Beverly Hills Public Library; Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Rosa Mason, Los Angeles Philharmonic Association; Carolyn Friedrich, Pittsburgh Symphony Archive; John Pennino, Metropolitan Opera Archive; Mark Duijnstee, Opera Nederland, Rotterdam; Rainer Schubert, Volksoper Wien [People’s Opera], Vienna; Katrin Böhnisch, Sächsische Stadttheater [Saxon City Theaters], Dresden; Frans Damman, Castrum Peregrini Foundation, Amsterdam; Lisa D. Roush, New Milford (Connecticut) Historical Society; Andrea Ladwig, Bundesarchiv [Federal Archive], Berlin; Gertrude Weel-De Raad, Koninklijk Huisarchief [Archives of the Royal Family], The Hague; Klaas Zandberg, Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden [Leeuwarden Historical Center]; and Paola Barzan, Università degli Studi di Padova. And Kathrin Korngold Hubbard, Elizabeth Renton Miller, Dan ←xiii | xiv→Ford, Stefanie Walzinger, Penny Johnson, Johann de Graaf, Caryl Flinn, Thomas Hampson, Kitty Chibnik, and the Faculty Research and Development Fund at Rhode Island College.

Introduction

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its awards ceremony for 1939 on the night of February 29, 1940. Typical of the Academy in this era, the ceremony was held at a hotel preceded by a dinner, this year at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Bob Hope served as the emcee, the first of 18 times the actor would fill that role, raising it to iconic status. The festivities were supposed to begin at 10:00 pm but it was closer to 11:00 pm before Frank Capra, the Academy’s president, made his opening remarks. The night belonged to Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick’s blockbuster adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War novel, winning the top awards. The film’s charismatic star, Clark Gable, however, lost the Actor award to Robert Donat for Goodbye Mr. Chips and Max Steiner lost Original Score to Herbert Stothart for The Wizard of Oz. A bigger disappointment was the fact that the Los Angeles Times, given the winners’ names on condition that they remain secret, leaked the news in their evening edition at 8:45 pm. The next year the Academy instituted the practice of sealed envelopes for the winners.

The technical awards came first, not unlike today’s telecasts. There were three Music Awards—Song, Score, and Original Score.¹ The Academy Award for Song went to Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, for “Over the Rainbow.” The Score category was especially competitive with 12 nominations including two of the most celebrated composers in the studio system, Alfred Newman and Erich Wolfgang ←1 | 2→Korngold, as well as an acclaimed composer from the concert world, Aaron Copland. It must have been quite a surprise when four composers took the prize for Stagecoach (1939): Richard Hageman, Frank Harling, John Leipold, and Leo Shuken. Hageman did not come to the podium. He was in Pasadena, California, accompanying a young tenor, Arthur Renton, in his debut recital, a previous commitment Hageman chose to keep. Thus, there are no photos or film of Hageman receiving his award.

Hedda Hopper, the entertainment columnist for the Los Angeles Times, known as the gargoyle of gossip, got the scoop. “I believe in passing on the good with the bad, and here’s one of the sweetest stories I’ve heard in ages.”² Hageman told Hopper that he was notified of his win the day before the ceremony.³ When the Academy made it clear that Hageman must attend in order to accept the award, he told them, “I’m sorry but I have promised a rising young tenor I’d play for him, and I wouldn’t let him down for all the Academy Awards in the world.”⁴ It was unheard of for winners to ignore the Academy much less forego the publicity generated by a win. Even Hopper was impressed.

Hageman was born in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands and raised in Amsterdam in Holland. He ended in Hollywood with an Oscar on his mantel. And in between he conducted operas and symphony orchestras, accompanied famed soloists, composed art songs and an opera, and taught a generation of singers and accompanists.

As a child, Hageman was a prodigy on the piano. As a young man he accompanied the famed French cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert on two concert tours of the United States. By 1908 he had secured an appointment as a conductor and coach at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, known as the Met, a post he held until 1921. For his debut, he conducted Enrico Caruso in Gounod’s Faust. He helped found opera companies in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto, and was part of the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He was an acclaimed accompanist and vocal coach. He conducted symphony orchestras across the country and was a regular at the Hollywood Bowl, the large outdoor concert venue in the Hollywood Hills that is the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He worked with some of the greatest soloists of the twentieth century: violinists Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, and Efrem Zimbalist, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, soprano Nellie Melba, and bass-baritone Paul Robeson. Hageman composed 69 art songs, many of which were regularly sung on concert stages during his lifetime. His opera Caponsacchi was broadcast live to the United States from Germany where it was described as “the most auspicious premiere of any American opera thus far offered in Europe”⁵; it was the first American opera ←2 | 3→to be produced in Vienna. Its U.S. premiere at the Met featured choreography by George Balanchine.

Hageman’s career was empowered and shaped by his European background and émigré status although he spent nearly his entire adult life in the United States. Hageman first emigrated in 1906 at a time in the musical life of the United States when artists with European credentials were thought superior to homegrown talent. As part of the first wave of European artists, Hageman came for the opportunities, economic and career-wise, that America offered. Within two years, he parlayed his experience as an opera conductor in the Netherlands into a contract at the Met. Seeking to establish itself as an opera house on a par with the reigning companies of Europe, the Met hired European personnel. Hageman benefited from this phenomenon not only at the Met but later in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto where his status as a European combined with his talent opened doors for him. The same thing happened in Hollywood. In the 1930s, studios began actively courting composers with European credentials and experience in opera and the concert hall. Again, Hageman fit the bill. Hageman’s European background, however, provided not only traction for his career but friction as well. During World War I when Hageman was not yet a citizen, his European status made him suspect in some quarters and he found the need to defend himself as a loyal American in print. During World War II, Hageman, by then a ←3 | 4→longtime citizen, was protected against the discrimination European composers faced especially in Hollywood but he was singled out as European just the same.