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A curious fellowship, that with Harriman: suave diplomacy and Harriman's sledgehammering; an appreciator of art and thunderous Harriman, who knew railroads and wanted to know nothing else. It was an alliance of race antagonisms: the reserved and brilliant Jew; the bristling, aggressive, fiery-hearted Yankee. He did not have much time for patronage of art in those days. He was too busy to hear as much music as he wanted to; in fact, he nearly forgot how to play the violin—an accomplishment he learned when a schoolboy in the Duchy of Baden. Those schooldays were some 40 years ago, but he remembers "the feeling of lordly superiority" that exalted him when he went to a performance of Tristan und Isolde and sat next an elderly man who nodded, put his head down, and then actually snored. More and more, as a rich man, he has experienced the feeling that the public should certainly be helped to a better appreciation of music.
No reflection could cheat him of the satisfaction of doing his duty in that cause. He has poured out innumerable pamphlets, composed in long and eloquent sentences; he has made speeches whenever he was asked, contributed to many orchestras, operas, schools, movements. "I look for high achievements," he has said; in the Metropolitan, largely through the efforts of a onetime naval cadet, he has found them.
Giulio Gatti-Casazza rose from his desk to receive the reporters. His face was stern; he sat down again like a judge. Notebooks snapped out. He began to read in rolling Italian from a long docket that lay on his blotter. The stiffness of his large burly body, of his voice, of his Risorgimento mustachio, reaffirmed that touch of the military that had been so evident in his written summons. Possibly this martial rigor is an inheritance, for Manager Gatti-Casazza's father, Senator Stefano Gatti-Casazza, wore a red shirt with Garibaldi; more probably it is the consequence of the years he spent learning the art of navigation in the Naval College at Genoa. He might have grown up to the glory of gold braid; instead he cut classes to go to the Carlo Felice and the Politeanna.*
Verdi was his idol. When he had left the Naval College and gone to study opera in Bologna, he took an apartment in the palazzo where the composer lived. He would sit in his rooms and peer at Verdi's windows with a pair of field glasses. The servants, thinking him a rude person, pulled down the blinds. Once he met Verdi in the hall, took off his hat, opened the door for him. Angered by this innocent mummery. Verdi pushed past and strode off, muttering. . . . "Long afterward," said Gatti, "he told me that at my age I should have been following a pretty woman instead of a grey-haired musician."
His father made him director of a musical theatre in Ferrara; after five years there he went to La Scala. He brought Caruso to fame, discovered Chaliapin in Russia. When the Metropolitan Opera House was built to supplant the tottering Academy of Music ("The Old Yellow Brewery on Broadway"), he came to the U. S. to be its Manager.