Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Despite the crash and ensuing crisis, 1929–30 recorded the highest revenues in company history. Attendance was off, although not dramatically. For the most part, subscriptions had been nailed down before the start of the season. By great, if temporary, good fortune, non-box-office income had risen to a dazzling $350,000 from rights to engage Metropolitan artists for recordings and broadcasts, rights to publish Met programs and to advertise in their pages, rentals to outside producing agents, commercial endorsements, and food and drink concessions. Gatti’s stash remained untouched. The general manager’s contract was renewed through 1934–35.4

  Signs of the Times: 1930–1931

  The ever so delicate balance that obtained through 1929–30 was undone by the more than 10 percent decline in 1930–31 subscriptions. Income dropped by $308,000; another $100,000 was lost with the cancellation of tours to Atlanta and Richmond when local operators balked at the required guar-antees.

  Opening night belonged once again to Aïda. Mediocre reviews kicked off what was sure to be a troubled season. The companion feature article in the Times was peculiarly upbeat. The message? All was well at the Metropolitan—and beyond: “Regarded always as the acme of luxury by the man in the street, the opening of the opera was watched with especial interest this year. It was felt to be an index to prosperity. And Broadway hailed with satisfaction its solidly maintained subscriptions, backed by leaders in world finance, as an indication of better times to come in the theatres and trade of the metropolis.” The front page of the Telegram carried the headline “The Opera Opening Is Still the Opera Opening, Depression or No Depression, and Kahn or No Kahn.” That may have been the case for this particular night. But otherwise, the conversation was all about a break with the past, about a new and modern theater within the perimeter of the projected “Rockefeller City” between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 48th and 51st Streets. John D. Rockefeller Jr. brought his voice to bear in acquiring the site from Columbia University in early 1929. His intention was to have as the centerpiece of this ambitious development a “Place de l’Opéra for New York City.” The clinching argument for the “uptown” location was its contiguity to Radio City, a proximity that would further Rockefeller’s grand communications design while freeing the Met from its physical confines, allowing it to reach millions across the nation, indeed across the world. The prospect was dizzying: “It [radio] has captured the opera stars and brought them to the microphone so that the people of the land might hear their wondrous voices. . . . The broadcasters look forward to the day when the Metropolitan will cast away from the Victorian environs at Fortieth Street and Broadway and smile on the microphone.” The future for opera was not only rosy, it was transcendent. But by December 6, 1929, little more than a month after the stock market crash, prospects for an alliance between the Metropolitan and Rockefeller were dead. Ironically, no sooner had Kahn sold his 57th Street plot in September 1930 than the Real Estate Company came around to the view that a new house was artistically and fiscally imperative.5

  Broadcasting would not wait. It took on a life of its own, impervious to the sparring over the pros and cons of a new house. In spring 1931, NBC agreed to transmit twenty-four complete or partial performances from the 39th Street stage each season for the two upcoming, at the substantial fee of $120,000 per year. It was Kahn who closed the deal. Up to that point, Gatti had vetoed broadcasts, blaming poor sound quality, and no doubt harboring the fear that attendance would suffer. NBC paid $30,000 annually for the exclusive right to negotiate with Met stars for other programing.6

  “The Deluge”: 1931–1932

  As summer and early fall wore on, omens for the coming season grew darker. Subscriptions would shrink by another 10 percent, and despite swelling non-box-office income, revenues would drop by another $506,000. With expenses projected to outpace receipts by nearly 23 percent, the last dregs of the $1 million reserve would be gone by the end of the season. On October 26, Kahn resigned as president and chairman, keeping his seat on the opera board. The weight of the Depression, a widely publicized suit brought by a Swedish soprano with whom he had had an affair, and surely bitterness at the quashing of his ambitions for a house on 57th Street had contributed to his decision. He was also painfully aware that the leadership of a Jew (he had joined the Fifth Avenue Episcopal parish church of St. Thomas in the vain hope that greater acceptance would follow) had been tolerated only as long as the company was profitable. He bequeathed the presidency and chairmanship to his lawyer, Paul D. Cravath. Son of a minister, the Ohio-born Cravath was an early architect of corporate structures retained as attorney and consultant by Westinghouse, RCA, and Kahn’s own firm. His long record of public and international service had begun with the Armistice. At the time of the transition, he was seventy years old. Knowing little of opera, he “charmingly . . . undertook music appreciation lessons.” He quickly made organizational and policy changes aimed, he said, at preserving ‘our last Victorian tradition’” (Times, Nov. 3, 1931).

  The Times gave its usual airbrushed account of opening night, November 2. The headline, echoing that of the previous year, proclaimed in fanciful denial that there was “No Sign of Depression in Brilliant Opening,” and suggested that subscriptions had held up. It was at this point precisely, as Gatti wrote in his memoirs, that “the deluge” was upon the house. “The gossip that broke loose did not help us,” he continued. “Rumor and tales concerning the Metropolitan were rife on every hand. . . . There were tales of rivalry and dissension in the company. There was talk of Radio City, Roxy, bankruptcy, and I don’t know what other far-fetched ideas.” In fact, not so far-fetched. Minutes of a November 18, 1931, meeting read, “It was . . . proposed that Mr. Gatti-Casazza . . . be authorized to accept the cooperation of all artists, musicians and other employees of the Company who might volunteer to accept reductions in their respective salaries, and to enter into such arrangements . . . as he might think expedient to assure completion of the season.” Only days later, the general manager “voluntarily” reduced his own salary by 10 percent “and the administrative and executive staff, together with the principal singers and conductors, ‘spontaneously followed his example’” (Times, Nov. 22, 1931). Not all the principal singers, it soon turned out.7

  There was one bright note: the Christmas Day broadcast of Hänsel und Gretel, the first nationwide transmission of the Metropolitan Opera. It was carried by more than one hundred stations on both the Red and Blue (later ABC) networks of NBC and by shortwave around the world. The announcer of the occasion, and for the next forty years, was Milton Cross. Deems Taylor narrated the action over the score, to the distress of many listeners. All but one of the twenty-three subsequent broadcasts that season were limited to one hour. The only available recordings of the first two broadcast years are extracts of Manon with Grace Moore and Gigli and of Tristan und Isolde with Frida Leider and Lauritz Melchior.8

  FIGURE 16. Backstage after the first matinee broadcast, Hänsel und Gretel, Deems Taylor, the announcer, second from left, and Giulio Gatti-Casazza, far right, December 25, 1931 (Carlo Edwards; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  In the frenetic spring of 1932, events followed furiously one after the other. In March, the Rockefeller alternative was back on the table, revived by the astonishing success of the radio programs. But again there was a snag, an apparent deal breaker: Rockefeller insisted that every component of his development be self-sustaining. The market rate he would exact would far exceed the meager rent charged by the Real Estate Company. For a time, arguments in favor of the move seemed to prevail: that broadcast fees would take up the slack, and that “as soon as opera [became] a common radio experience, especially with television, the native American composers and their librettists [would] begin to use it as their medium of expression and truly modern opera [would] result” (Times, March 16, 1932), a variation on the perennial, deluded refrain. The outcome of years of negotiation, of rising and falling hopes, was again in the hands of the old moneyed crowd, keenly aware that it wo
uld be left holding the bag, the white elephant of an opera house on Broadway, should the company relocate (Times, March 25, 1932). By April 18, Cravath was said to be ready to vote “yes”; he was not, however, in a position to speak for the stockholders of the Real Estate Company. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller were seen more frequently in their box at the Met.

  Also in March came the game-changing announcement that the Metropolitan Opera Company would be replaced by the Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc. The nascent venture would follow not the old shareholder plan, but a membership model. Everyone was welcome to join by contributing either to the operating fund or to the endowment, or simply by volunteering services. What had been since Gatti’s appointment in 1908 an enterprise unhitched from the profit motive as a matter of policy would become a not-for-profit corporation, “organized for educational purposes” as a matter of law. Tickets would no longer be subject to federal entertainment taxes; their prices could be lowered without strain on an already constrained budget. The purpose of the conversion, it was explained somewhat disingenuously, was to streamline operations. In effect, the new producing entity would be freed from many of the obligations of its predecessor. By June, the Association was official. Each member of the board would have one vote; no longer would power be weighted in favor of those owning the larger block of shares, in the case of Kahn, now 84 percent. And no longer would the Real Estate Company be responsible for shortfalls. The financial crisis and the reluctance of the old families to foot bill after bill had opened the door to the public. The larger middle class, through its support, would take ownership: “It is this new public now forming, and assuming more and more power, which must, and undoubtedly will, determine the future of opera in America. The days of the Maecenases and of gifts of millions to opera companies are flown. . . . The men of finance who ‘could,’ to say nothing of ‘would,’ come to the rescue are growing fewer every day. Our suffering millionaires! They are no longer to be waited upon which on the whole is a good thing.” But for the moment, the elites, “the bankers and the backers,” who conductor Artur Bodanzky disparaged as quitters, had won. Free of liability for production debts, they still sat pretty in their very own boxes in the theater that showed them off to best effect.9

  The day after the restructuring was announced, March 25, Gatti outlined the austerity measures anticipated for the 1932–33 season. He called for shared sacrifice so that the Metropolitan might “continue to live.” “In such a critical and decisive moment,” he wrote, “it would be petty and without a realization of this grave situation, to raise questions of contracts and rights. When a house is on fire one does not send for lawyers or notaries.” If necessary, he himself would serve without pay; others, whether American-born or foreign, would be subject to lowered compensation. By mid-April, as 1932–33 began to take shape, and more than one-tenth of the city’s population was on public or private assistance, it was understood that the season would be shortened from twenty-four to sixteen weeks, and that subscription costs would be halved and individual ticket prices reduced in order to generate more robust sales (Times, April 16, 1932). Twenty-eight singers were let go, most for reasons of financial exigency. All those retained, together with their administrative colleagues, accepted the news of a salary cut with resignation. All, that is, except Beniamino Gigli, who had previously rejected the reduction of fall 1931. In spring 1932, he stuck to his guns, to the disgust of many of his colleagues, thirty-two of whom were willing, some said encouraged or even coerced by the management, to sign an open letter of condemnation dated April 12 and published on May 2. Among the signatories were conductors Artur Bodanzky and Tullio Serafin, and singers Lucrezia Bori, Grace Moore, Lily Pons, Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Rethberg, Giovanni Martinelli, Lauritz Melchior, and Ezio Pinza. Aware that the letter was about to be released, on May 1 Gigli took the offensive: “My sincere offers were met with conditions and impositions which would have diminished my dignity as a man and as an artist” (Times). In any case, it had already been announced that he would not return for the 1932–33 season. Nor would Maria Jeritza. The press hinted that she too had refused the salary cut. Correspondence between the soprano, Gatti, and Ziegler leads to a different conclusion: that her departure was their choice, not hers. Their excuse was the reduced length of the season to come and the too great number of guaranteed performances in her contract. In July, Ziegler wrote to Gatti that, moved by the desire to bid farewell to her fans, Jeritza was willing “to sing guest performances for little or no money.” Just the month before, on June 8, the Dow had bottomed out at 41.82; on September 3, 1929, it had stood at 381.17.10

  Repertoire: 1929–1932

  In each of the first three Depression years, Gatti introduced six new productions, divided between premieres and familiar operas. The same quotient had prevailed in the three prosperous seasons prior. The complexion of the repertoire remained similarly constant. The general manager’s policy held steady: to present Met premieres of works of popular composers and to revive those long neglected, to add Russian and Czech titles, to import the latest European successes, to showcase the specific talents of box-office stars, and to introduce American works. This last was underscored by Kahn in his 1925 “Statement” in defense of Gatti against the charge of Italian bias: “Under the management of the Italian Gatti-Casazza, the Metropolitan Opera has produced thus far nine operas and one ballet by American composers, whilst not a single work composed by an American was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House under any of the preceding managements.” Renewed interest in Verdi brought the long overdue Luisa Miller and Simon Boccanegra. Don Giovanni, absent since 1908, returned in 1929 to stay. Der Fliegende Holländer made port once again after a like hiatus. The new Russian entries produced a short-lived hit, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opulent Sadko, and a miss, Mussorgsky’s The Fair at Sorochintzy. Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper, despite its success in Prague and elsewhere and good press in New York, ran for only one season. Montemezzi’s La Notte di Zoraima and Lattuada’s Le Preziose ridicole suffered the same fate. Of only passing interest, two of Franz von Suppé’s operettas, Boccaccio and Donna Juanita, were there to indulge Jeritza’s comic bent.11

  Gatti’s ongoing American wager had paid off with the seventeen performances in three consecutive seasons of The King’s Henchman (1927) of Deems Taylor, music critic for the World and editor of Musical America. The libretto of Edna St. Vincent Millay on a comfortably familiar Tristanesque subject, the leadership of the Met’s preeminent conductor Tullio Serafin, and a cast of principals equipped to project the text intelligibly had impressed reviewers and attracted the public. The world premiere of Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson brought le tout New York-Hollywood out in force: novelist Edna Ferber, columnist Alexander Woollcott, conductors Walter Damrosch (to whom the score was dedicated) and Leopold Stokowski, Irving Berlin, Ruth Chatterton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harpo Marx. The composer was on hand to acknowledge the applause that elicited thirty-six curtain calls. Enthusiasm for Peter Ibbetson persisted through twenty-two performances in four seasons, records for an American premiere that stand to this day. Edward Johnson later boasted, “Peter Ibbetson made more money than any other single opera during the past twenty years.” Its subject is the thwarted love of childhood soul mates who meet again as adults, are once more parted by tragic circumstance, and finally achieve perfect understanding in shared dreams and then in the afterlife. Reviewers were taken with Taylor’s expert setting of the text: “a tremendous argument for opera in English, as all the essential parts of the story could be clearly understood.” At the same time, they found the score “rather negligible,” “oddly featureless.” The plot (“Strong men [were said to have] actually wept”) and the quality of the performances carried the piece to the top of the season’s box office. Through the execrable sonics of the March 17, 1934, broadcast, we hear the original principals. As Peter, the soon-to-retire Johnson is still comfortable on high, still capable of translucent diction. Tibbett luxuriates in Colonel Ibbetson�
�s act 1 love song, as close as the opera comes to a hummable aria. Bori sings Mary, her English accented but thoroughly intelligible, her voice fresh, her manner unaffected. The transcription is both a precious document of the Spanish soprano’s refined art and a bridge to early Met history. Bori had made her company debut opposite Caruso during the 1910 Paris tour.12

  TABLE 8. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1929–30 to 1931–32

  The previous month, January 1931, had seen the nick-of-time debut of Lily Pons. Galli-Curci had recently retired, her final seasons plagued by a long-standing goiter condition that compromised her intonation and, as serious, the brilliant upper register required by her repertoire. The company was desperate for a star coloratura, a virtuoso singer whose name would sell out the house. Pons filled the bill. Chic, petite, vivacious, she was ubiquitous in concerts, on records, on the radio, in the movies. And she managed her career shrewdly, marketing her persona through a handful of showcase arias. The staccati of her “Bell Song” triggered a long run for Delibes’s Lakmé; she sang the Hindu priestess fifty times over a fifteen-year span. She owned Lucia in particular, assuming the character for a role-record ninety-three performances, an astounding fourteen of which were broadcast between 1932 and 1956, the year of her retirement. The French soprano’s stunning high notes, often sweet tone, and glamour held the audience hostage for nearly three decades.