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In an apartment in Manhattan's highceilinged, eminently respectable Hotel Ansonia, 20-odd massive, military-looking Danes sat one evening last fortnight around a barrel of Danish beer. The warriors were at ease. They toasted King Christian X, and many another, in glass after glass of clear, burning aqvavit.* After every glass of aqvavit, they downed a chaser of beer.
At one point in the evening someone produced a rifle, suggested that they celebrate the good old days with a good old-fashioned shooting match. Carried by acclamation. The hotel corridor made a fine shooting gallery, with a homemade target set at one end of it. It was all carried out in military style. One Dane stood sentinel at the elevator door, warning back passengers with a white flag. As the rifle banged, horrified hotel guests cowered in their rooms, bellhops scurried for cover. Several bullets hit the target. Nobody got shot. It was one of the most successful meetings the Manhattan chapter of the Royal Danish Guard had ever had.
Next morning, the jovial host, a 225-lb. onetime Danish Guardsman named Lauritz Melchior, felt that things had perhaps been carried a little too far. His wife took pieces of cake and candy to the neighbors, assuring them that such a thing would never happen again. The neighbors allowed themselves to be placated. For Mrs. Melchior is very persuasive. And Lauritz Melchior is the world's No. 1 Wagnerian tenor.
Tenor Melchior is not averse to wassailing, but he takes his Wagner straight. After dinner on Wagner nights he calls for his roomy Cadillac and is driven with his wife, Kleinchen (Little One), to the stage door of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. He climbs the creaky stairs to the primo tenore's dusty dressing room,* fumbles around among the costumes of Tenors Richard Crooks and Giovanni Martinelli for his own raiment of deer skins and knightly robes. He washes himself in an antiquated, marble-topped washstand, glowers at the dead flies in the basin-shaped chandeliers, and applies his grease paint. In exactly 20 minutes he is dressed as the young Siegfried, his noble paunch encased in a deer skin, his stubby grey hair covered with a luxuriant blond wig. Thus accoutred, he lights a big black cigar and trundles down to the wings, where the waiting Kleinchen inspects him from top to toe, sees that his massive legs are properly powdered and that his hunting horn is in place. At the murmuring strains of Wagner's prelude, Melchior throws away his cigar and clears his throat. Kleinchen smiles and murmurs her parting salute: "Hals—und Beinbruch" (an old German good-luck greeting meaning "May you break your neck and your legs"), and the great Lauritz Melchior bounds youthfully on to the Metropolitan's aged stage.