Article on Maretzek and General Hooker

           Two brief but eventful and important campaigns have just been concluded. Hooker has finished up his nine days’ campaign upon the Rappahannock, and is again in quiet at his old camp. Maretzek ended his nine days’ campaign at the Academy of Music on Monday evening, and now rests for a while upon his laurels. Both these great campaigns are now matters of history and criticism. That they resulted so differently is due, we presume, to the different abilities of the leaders. Maretzek, the operatic Napoleon, vindicated his past fame by giving us a most brilliant season. Hooker, the radical Napoleon, has gained very little credit with his radical friends, and has not lost the confidence of the people simply because he never had it to lose. According to the ‘Little Villain’ of the Times, Hooker crossed the Rappahannock with one hundred and fifty thousand men. Upon the same authority we learn that the rebels had only forty-eight thousand seven hundred troops. The Tribune states that our loss was seventeen thousand, and the rebel loss twenty-five thousand. As the Times and Tribune are the paid organs of the War Department, and have access to official information, we are bound to believe these figures. But what do the figures show? Why, that the rebels, with forty-nine thousand men, held one hundred and fifty thousand Union troops in check, and that, admitting the loss on both sides to be correctly states, Hooker withdrew his one hundred and thirty-three thousand soldiers across the river rather than fight Lee’s twenty-three thousand seventh hundred rebels. As Squeers would remark, ‘Here’s generalship!’ Maretzek never would have been guilty of such a move as that.

            In reviewing the two campaigns, therefore we find it impossible to institute any comparison between the two commanders. Maretzek and Hooker are as dissimilar as Solomon and Greeley, Washington and Wendell Phillips, William Pitt and Secretary Chase, Admiral Farragut and Rip Van Winkle Welles, an honest man and a contract jobber, or a sunshiny day and a plutonian night. The two campaigns are only alike in this: that Hooker’s lasted nine days and was a failure, and Maretzek’s lasted nine days and was a great success. Both Hooker and Maretzek, however, had splendid armies. Hooker’s soldiers were veterans, and in physique and discipline were unsurpassed by any troops in the world. The fault was that Hooker did not know how to use this magnificent material. Like a silly child playing with a locomotive, he only succeeded in damaging himself and smashing things generally. Maretzek, on the contrary, was perfectly master of himself, his troupe and the situation. His fine artists needed only a competent general to manage them, and Maretzek supplied this want. Consequently the fashionable and musical worlds of New York were taken by storm, as the Heights of Fredericksburg were taken by Sedgwick. In Signor Mazzoleni, a tenor whose singing and acting are equally incomparable, Maretzek found his Major General Sickles. If there had been a panic or stampede in the Eleventh corps of the operatic army, Mazzoleni would have thrown himself into the breach and stemmed the torrent, as General Sickles did at Chancellorsville. But, as no such misfortune occurred, Mazzoleni led on the musical host to victory and triumph, a General Sickles would have led his corps had Fate and Hooker allowed.

            In Madame Guerrabella, as her very expresses, Maretzek had his beautiful goddess of war. Hooker had no such protecting divinity. In fact, none but Guerrabella’s self can be her parallel. The ladies whom Hooker had previously feted with champagne and liqueurs deserted him when the forward movement began, and fortune fled with their smiles. During the past season, on the other hand, Guerrabella has especially distinguished herself. She has never sung so well as in ‘Ernani’ and ‘Ione.’ The announcement that the latter opera is to be repeated on Saturday next for Bellini’s benefit will therefore be gladly received. Indeed, we see no reason why Maretzek cannot resume his season and give ‘Ione’ for at least two weeks more. The crowd on Monday evening assures the success of the enterprise. The people are not yet ready to emigrate to the watering places, nor are the summer hotels yet ready for their reception. A few old houses have been put in some sort of order at Saratoga, and here and there a hotel advertises itself prepared for visitors; but in most cases the necessary house cleaning is still neglected, and the bedbugs are not cleared out of the couches upon which fair and manly forms will recline during the warm nights of July and August. The coming season is to be the most brilliant on record, and we are not unwilling to second the weather and give the landlords a little extra time for preparation. Let them beware how they misuse this indulgence, however; for we shall have a correspondent incognito at every fashionable resort. But in the interval, while these arrangements are being perfected, Maretzek might give us more opera. His notes are never too high nor too low, but always right. Unlike Hooker, he issues no advertising bulletins promising what he does not perform. If the President can invite Hooker to retrain command of the Army of the Potomac, after all his recent failures, so may we invite Maretzek to still keep his baton in hand, after all his recent successes. Maretzek starts again on Saturday next, and the President should put our favorite army in motion by the same day. Then our one hundred and thirty-three thousand remaining soldiers will soon crush out the twenty three thousand seven hundred remaining rebels, according to the estimates of the Times and Tribune; and, while we are enjoying the sweet voices of Guerrabella and Mazzoleni, our army may be marching into Richmond. Thus Mars and Melody, Hooker and Maretzek, will be in unison, and the Star Spangled Banner will wave as gloriously over the revel capital as it does in our national song.”