Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  The triumphalism of Johnson’s public pronouncements notwithstanding, the Met’s daily administration continued to be dogged by one crisis after another, even as the Depression was overtaken by the conversion to a wartime economy and even after the buying of the house had brought an end to dependency on the Real Estate Company. Particularly irksome were the taxes that had burdened the Association’s landlord and now weighed heavily on the Association itself. The exemption the Met requested was opposed by LaGuardia and approved only in April 1943 over the mayor’s objections by Governor Thomas E. Dewey, he too a committed operaphile. But by then, the Met had registered losses of $200,000 in each of the two previous years. The deficits of 1941–42 and 1942–43 were attributed by some to the embargo on European voices and by others to trepidations of all sorts following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The management was justified in worrying that in 1942–43 the house would be dark. Although ticket prices for the top seats were lowered from $7.70 to $6.05, single sales dropped by 11 percent. Unsold tickets were distributed to service men and women. In the end, the season went on as planned, as did the tour. In 1943–44, the season was extended, as Johnson had boasted, to twenty weeks, not because of demand, as he implied in his riposte to the German attack on America, but in anticipation that the spring tour would be canceled. The company lost $110,000 that year. Again the Guild came to the rescue; a successful appeal narrowed the shortfall.

  With the approaching end of the war, the Metropolitan was subject to the labor unrest that rocked so many sectors of the economy. The increasing strength of the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) in its negotiations with the Metropolitan management, in part the result of the dramatic rise in the number of Americans on the roster, produced a contract with this protectionist clause: that for every alien engaged, three Americans would be hired. For reasons having everything to do with the European conflagration and only marginally with Johnson’s Americanization policy or his labor accords, in 1944–45 no foreign-born singer joined the company; fourteen Americans made their debuts. The 1944–45 season ended in profit. Travel restrictions had been lifted and the tour was lengthened. Attendance in 1946–47 reached 97 percent of capacity and the tour that season was the longest ever. In the same year, the Met tapped a fresh income stream. On February 19, the company announced that it had entered into a five-year contract with the Columbia Recording Corporation for two operas annually. The first recording from the Met stage, that March, was the “Liebesnacht” from Tristan und Isolde, with Helen Traubel and Torsten Ralf, and the first complete opera, recorded that June, was Hansel and Gretel, in English, with Risë Stevens and Nadine Conner. The second was La Bohème with Bidú Sayão and Richard Tucker. In late summer 1947, a dispute with AGMA over the size of the chorus was finally settled. The management won a reduction in the number of choristers: those who were let go after twenty years or more received a year’s severance, and those that remained a substantial boost in salary. That was by no means the end of labor-management strife. Despite an income of $3 million in 1947–48, the upcoming season was repeatedly declared in doubt. In fact, ploy or not, on August 4, 1948, the Met announced its cancellation. Three weeks later, a compromise was reached: the Association agreed to fund unemployment insurance and the unions conceded on salary hikes.9

  REPERTOIRE: 1940–1950

  The company made good on Olin Downes’s 1939 prediction, “If ever we enter the conflict [it is hard to believe that] it will be necessary to take Wagner off the lists. This kind of thing can be left to Germany” (Times, Oct. 15). The Association directors accepted what their Great War predecessors had rejected: to program works in the language of the enemy. This time it would have meant banning opera in Italian as well. Between 1940 and 1945, there was little deviation in the number of scores based on German and Italian texts. Madama Butterfly was alone interdicted. At issue was the libretto that, as Virgil Thomson put it, “shows Japanese behaving more or less properly and a United States naval officer behaving (with consular benediction) improperly” (Herald Tribune, Jan. 20, 1946). Butterfly was performed for the last time on November 29, 1941, a week before Pearl Harbor, and then not again until January 14, 1946, six months after V-J Day.10

  For the rest, the Met lived, if nervously, with the threat of the injection of international politics into performance. During the numerous iterations of Aïda in the late 1930s, the general manager and his staff held their breath at the chorus’ exultant “Ritorna vincitor” (“Return a conqueror”), fearing that “somebody might yell, ‘Down with Mussolini!’ Somebody, ‘Evviva Mussolini.’ The first thing you’d know, the Metropolitan would have a riot on its hands.” As the operatic army of ancient Egyptians set off to vanquish the Ethiopians, those on opposite sides of Italy’s aggression toward that same African kingdom might well have found reason to cheer or to boo. The management took every opportunity to put patriotism on display, occasionally to stirring effect. The 1942–43 season opened with Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment. Newspapers all over the country carried the story and a photograph of the opera’s finale, in which, in place of the traditional French Tricolor, the Cross of Lorraine of General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French was waved by French-born Lily Pons. After the closing “Salut à la France,” the Met orchestra played first “La Marseillaise” and then, as the Stars and Stripes were brought to the front of the stage and the Cross of Lorraine was dipped in tribute, “The Star Spangled Banner.” In 1943, opening night went to Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, a nod to the recent alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Met declined the suggestion made by Rabbi Steven S. Wise, President of the American Jewish Congress, that it “associate itself with many other groups throughout the country and indeed throughout the world who wish to give expression to their sympathy to the Jewish people in this hour of agony” by reviving an opera that depicts the persecution of Jews, Halévy’s La Juive. Johnson replied regretfully that a new production of the work would not be feasible. In February 1944, the director general of the Pan American Union urged Johnson to consider Darius Milhaud’s Bolivar. Johnson answered that although he knew and liked the score, the cost of the production was simply prohibitive.11

  Fettered by a war economy and a conservative management, the 1940s registered the fewest novelties and new productions of any decade in Met history, none at all between 1943 and 1945 or in 1948–49. Among the seven novelties were two world premieres, one-acters presented on double bills. Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Island God, Pucciniesque in musical idiom, not in dramatic punch, got unsympathetic notices; the composer expunged it from his catalogue. Bernard Rogers’s The Warrior began life as a radio play. The composer’s modernist, dissonant orchestration, the staging, its projected scenery, and the performers were admired by some reviewers; the austere sprechstimme (halfway between speech and song) of this retelling of Samson and Delilah fell into the tuneless “modern music” category detested by Met patrons. Sir Thomas Beecham made his conducting debut in Phoebus and Pan, his own adaptation of a Bach secular cantata, also programmed on a double bill. The slight piece was out of place in a large opera house. The four remaining Met premieres fared poorly; they would find success in the future. We discuss Alceste and The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) further on in this chapter. In 1948, three years after its world premiere at London’s Sadler’s Wells, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes split the New York critics. What Thomson dismissed as adding “nothing to the history of the stage or the history of music” (Herald Tribune) would soon be counted among the landmarks of twentieth-century opera. Khovanshchina was doomed to a four-performance run even before it opened; Rudolf Bing, the incoming manager, announced that he had no intention of reprising Mussorgsky’s fresco of seventeenth-century Russia. With this balance sheet, Johnson’s regime was faulted for timidity, and rightly so.

  FIGURE 22. The conclusion of La Fille du régiment, Lily Pons as Marie waving the tricolor, 1942 (courtesy Metropoli
tan Opera Archives)

  Save for Alceste, the 1940s novelties were sung in English, in two instances the language of composition. The opera-in-English agenda of the Americanization project was beginning to take hold. The popular Ruth and Thomas Martin Magic Flute was the harbinger of English for operas with spoken dialogue, Fidelio and The Abduction from the Seraglio, both singspiels. Falstaff reverted to the language of Shakespeare. Hänsel und Gretel lost its umlaut and its “und.” Unheard at the Met in their original Czech and Russian even to this day, The Bartered Bride, which had been given in German, and Le Coq d’or, previously in French, were anglicized along with Khovanshchina. English translation was in play when the music was suspended for stretches of speech, when the opera drew a children’s audience, and when the work was composed in Czech or Russian, neither in use at the Met. For purposes of accessibility, English had become one of the company’s languages. Whether the words, uttered either by foreigners or by native speakers, could be understood was up for grabs.12

  By 1940, most productions of repertory standards had seen roughly twenty years of service. The editions of Aïda and Carmen, for example, went back to 1923–24. Lucia di Lammermoor, Rigoletto, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia had been mounted for Amelita Galli-Curci and Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde for Wagner’s return from his World War I exile. Of still older vintage were Il Trovatore and Faust. As for the sets of La Bohème, no one could remember who designed them. Some productions, particularly those of Joseph Urban, deserved their long life. But with longevity came depredations particular to the New York opera house. Space was at a premium on 39th Street. Drops, flats, and platforms had to be stored in a nearby warehouse, trucked to the Met, covered with tarpaulins, and stacked on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk against the exterior back wall of the theater to wait their turn in the daily change of program. Exposure to harsh winters took its toll on the painted scenery, too soon drab, slack, and worn.

  In the course of the 1940s, only a handful of the most popular operas strutted new trappings. The outlines of Richard Rychtarik’s castle, garden, and crypt for Lucia di Lammermoor held no surprise. Harry Horner’s towers framed and unified the narrative of Il Trovatore, all the while serving the action rapidly unfolding in the melodrama’s many separate locations, the castles, the garden, the gypsy camp, the dungeon. Lee Simonson was drubbed for a “Ring” dressed with geometric rocks and a Rhine landscape inspired by the New World vistas of the Hudson and the Palisades. Then there was the reprise of five neglected works. Mstislav Dobujinsky’s sets restored Un Ballo in maschera to its original Sweden, precincts more luxurious than the colonial Boston of the previous production. Puccini’s Manon and Des Grieux enacted their fatal attraction in the appealing, unremarkable eighteenth-century sites that M. Krehan-Crayon conceived for Manon Lescaut. Jonel Jorgulesco’s La Fille du régiment played well as a cartoon. Joseph Novak’s dockside for Il Tabarro was no more than utilitarian. Rychtarik supplied modest digs for La Serva padrona.

  TABLE 11. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1940–41 to 1949–50

  CONDUCTORS

  It was the phalanx of masterful conductors that made the difference. Bruno Walter was as demanding as any prima donna: “I cannot accept to function as a ‘vieux Routinier’ [old hack] again and again appearing in the same well-established works. I must wish to see that the management is interested to make use of my artistic capacities and there is only one way to show this interest: by inviting me to conduct, to revive operas of importance.” He took offense at the suggestion of Hänsel und Gretel, rejected the company’s version of Carmen, shrank from Norma, and turned down Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which was unsuited in his view to the Met’s auditorium. His rebuff of “Mozart specialist” was undercut by the sixty-four performances of Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte he conducted between 1941 and 1959. In the end, aside from Fidelio, which he led not only in 1941 but in 1945, 1946, and 1951, and the three Mozart works, the titles Walter directed were Orfeo ed Euridice, Un Ballo in maschera, La Forza del destino, and The Bartered Bride. The Pelléas et Mélisande he requested was assigned to Emil Cooper, the Falstaff to Beecham. Walter could dispose of what the Met proposed. But the reverse also obtained: Walter could propose the works he favored, but the power to dispose lay with the management.13

  Beecham followed Walter in early 1942 as the second of the generation of star European conductors to debut at the Metropolitan during the roiling 1940s. His brief American interlude came in the wake of the darkening of Covent Garden for the duration. The dominant force for opera in England throughout an already long career, Beecham had introduced London to Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Boris Godunov. During his three Metropolitan seasons, he took primary responsibility for the French repertoire. George Szell arrived barely a year later and stayed through the 1945–46 season, when he was named music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. He had been a principal conductor at the Berlin Staatsoper and music director of the German opera company in Prague from 1929 to 1937. At the outbreak of the war, Szell, of Jewish background and antifascist, found himself stranded in New York. At the Met, he was charged chiefly with the German repertoire and with rebuilding the orchestra. Cooper was Russian by birth. His pedigree included Diaghilev’s seasons in Paris and the 1909 first night of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or. Johnson would assign Cooper the Met premieres of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Peter Grimes, and Khovanshchina. Fritz Busch came in 1945 and Fritz Reiner in 1949. Busch, who had conducted premieres of Strauss, Hindemith, and Weill in Germany, had been removed from his Dresden post as punishment for his outspoken opposition to Nazism. As the first music director of Glyndebourne, he had spearheaded the Mozart revival of the 1930s; when Glyndebourne too suspended operations, he moved to podiums in North and South America. Famed as a Mozartean, Busch, at the Met, was heard primarily in Wagner. Reiner, who had conducted meticulously prepared, staged performances of operas with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the mid-1930s, made his Met debut in Salome. Walter, Beecham, Szell, Cooper, Busch, and Reiner molded the 1940s into a conductor’s decade. Their engagements, one after the other, can be seen as a contingency of war. They cannot be seen as accidental. In his 1942 report, Johnson announced that the practice of inviting conductors of international repute as guests, begun the previous season with Walter, would continue. At the peak of their Metropolitan activity, the 1943–44 season, Walter, Beecham, and Szell conducted more than half the performances on 39th Street.14

  FIGURE 23. George Szell rehearsing Tannhäuser, 1953 (Sedge Leblang; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  MONUMENTS

  The jubilant critics predicted that the conductor’s decade would lead to the triumph of the esteemed “conductor’s opera” over the deprecated “singer’s opera.” “Monuments of operatic art,” as Edward Johnson called them, would at last take their rightful and regular place at the Met. In Johnson’s taxonomy, “monuments” are those works of the literature “which do not enjoy (and may never have enjoyed) the following they deserve but which have been a source of inspiration to operatic composers and a delight to students of the art.” They are canonical pieces whose presence in the repertoire rests on prestige and not popularity. Revivals of the monuments, Johnson hoped, would so captivate the general public that these rarely performed works would, in time, join such favorites as Carmen and Tristan und Isolde in the second of his four categories, “perennial classics.” (Johnson’s remaining classes were “operas revived for a distinguished personality” and “contemporary opera.”) Olin Downes, for one, claiming that the future was already here, asserted that the plaudits of the public were, in this new age, dependent not on the singer but on the conductor (Times, Nov. 23, 1941).15

  Johnson defines monuments without naming them. In a similar reflection, Walter exhibits no such reticence: “Men and events stand in the glaring light of historic glory today and disappear tomorrow, and we may ask: What has remained of all this danse macabre? What has proved durable in those dust stor
ms of history? A question of problematic meaning. Certain is one thing: Survival of Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro, of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Gluck’s Orfeo.” To Walter’s list, and through the lens of the repertoire of the 1940s, we add Gluck’s Alceste, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Die Zauberflöte, and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff, and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.16

  Orfeo ed Euridice: January 20, 1940

  Along with the German repertoire, Erich Leinsdorf inherited Artur Bodanzky’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Young Leinsdorf’s Gluck of January 1940 is markedly faster than Bodanzky’s in the November 26, 1938, broadcast. Where Bodanzky’s tempos are elegiac, Leinsdorf’s, often driven and metronomic, harden the music’s serene figures. As a result, under Leinsdorf, the sky over the Elysian Fields is less clear than the composer desired, the sun less bright. New in 1938, the production was admired for Harry Horner’s sets, Herbert Graf’s direction, and especially the Orfeo of Kerstin Thorborg, who, according to Downes, “achieved the grand simplicity, and by this simplicity and grandeur deeply moved her listeners” (Times, Nov. 27, 1938). As we hear it, the same can be said of her in 1940. Thorborg’s is the ideal voice for Orfeo, solid yet not heavy through the middle of the range where so much of the role lies, deep but not cavernous, reaching the low notes of the character’s noble lamentations without resorting to an emphatic chest register. Walter conducted Orfeo ed Euridice in 1941, again with Thorborg. Oscar Thompson summed up the critical consensus: “this was the most noteworthy performance of the score at the opera house since the Toscanini performances [1909–1914]” (Sun, Nov. 27). We have no record of Walter’s way with Gluck’s work. And like Toscanini before him, not even the Met’s most prestigious and popular conductor could attract large audiences to this monument.