Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  If, in this period of intense financial pressures and labor conflicts, the eye of the management was fixed on the bottom line, and too much of the programming was consigned to the chestnuts—Johnson’s “perennial favorites”—and too little to new works, it was also an era in which monuments flourished, and Mozart, in particular, took his rightful place. As Johnson had prognosticated in late 1940, the war would present the Metropolitan with both opportunity and challenge. The fundamental challenge was to keep the operation afloat, a precarious feat even with the expert assistance of Edward Ziegler, and more difficult still once Ziegler withdrew for reasons of health in 1946. Kolodin, Mayer, and Thomson focus on the challenges. We have sought to stress the opportunities Johnson seized: the engagement of eminent European conductors and the presentation of neglected masterworks.

  SEVEN

  Stage Business, 1950–1966

  VERDI

  RUDOLF BING

  Advent

  RUDOLF BING TELLS THE STORY of his appointment as the new general manager in the first of two autobiographies, 5000 Nights at the Opera. In spring 1949, then head at Glyndebourne, he was in New York to pitch a season for his company at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre. He asked Fritz Stiedry, a Met conductor he had known in Germany in the early 1930s, to introduce him to Edward Johnson, whose retirement at the end of the 1949–50 season had been announced. The conversation with Johnson turned to the running of an opera house in difficult times. As Bing recounts it, Johnson suddenly asked, “How would you like to be my successor?” Bing responded that he would like it very much indeed, upon which Johnson, a supporter of his righthand man Frank St. Leger, Edward Ziegler’s replacement, proceeded to mention Bing to George Sloan, chairman of the Metropolitan Opera board. Satisfied that Bing was “socially acceptable,” Sloan introduced him to Charles M. Spofford, who certified that Bing was “sufficiently art-minded,” and to David Sarnoff, who vouched for his business creds. Meanwhile, visiting in England, Eleanor Belmont made inquiries about Bing’s management of Glyndebourne and of the Edinburgh Festival. Her glowing report was read aloud to the executive committee and Bing returned to Europe to await word from New York.1

  Only weeks after his chat with Johnson, on June 2, 1949, Bing was named general manager at an annual salary of $35,000, raised from $30,000 when the negotiated three-year contract was cut back to a single year in compliance with immigration rules. Bing was asked (it may have been he who asked) to spend the 1949–50 season at the Met as a paid observer. With his wife and dog, he moved into the Essex House on Central Park South, and there took up residence for the twenty-two years he was at the Met, and then until his wife’s death in 1983. The fly in the ointment was John Erskine, once again an aggressive advocate for an American at the top. Erskine held Mrs. Belmont responsible for the anointment of the European intendant: “For the first time in Metropolitan history the general manager has now been chosen not by the men of the Opera board but by the ladies of the Opera Guild.” He doubted that Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Otto Kahn “are competent to choose, or are even willing to choose, an American for a general manager if such a person exists.” Belmont pushed back. She protested that those charged with the search had done their due diligence with respect to both American and European candidates, and that in any case it was Johnson who had brought Bing to the attention of the directors. She was particularly incensed at the suggestion that the “ladies” had violated the Guild’s policy of noninterference in the affairs of the company.2

  Vienna to Edinburgh

  The new general manager was born Rudolph Franz Joseph Bing in Vienna in 1902 to a prosperous Jewish family. He was not a particularly promising student, and did not go to university. He had had English governesses, had studied voice, and had a year of training in history, the arts, and literature under the guidance of a tutor who introduced him into Vienna’s artistic circles. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Bing’s industrialist father, chairman of the Austro-Hungarian Steel and Iron Trust, lost his position and fortune. Bing took modest jobs in bookstores, one of which had a sideline in concert management; there he organized the opera division. In 1928, he married a Russian ballet dancer, Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, and moved to Berlin, where he booked singers for provincial theaters. His break came that same year when he was made assistant to Carl Ebert, a stage director then head of opera in Darmstadt. Ebert left much of the programming to Bing. It was in Darmstadt that he met conductors Karl Böhm and Max Rudolf, later his Met artistic administrator. In 1931, Bing moved with Ebert to Berlin’s Charlottenburg Opera and was there exposed to avant-garde production.3

  In 1933, after the expulsion of anti-Nazis from German theaters, Bing left for Vienna and then for Teplitz in the Sudetenland, where the National Socialists had embarked on the misbegotten promotion of German culture. In a matter of months, the enterprise, bizarrely staffed by numerous Jews and Social Democrats, folded. In 1934, Bing joined Ebert and Fritz Busch at Glyndebourne. By 1935, he was the festival’s general manager. Five years later, the war shut Glyndebourne’s doors. Bing took a job as sales manager in a London department store; by night, he volunteered as a fire warden. The war over, he returned to Glyndebourne for its 1946 reopening. In the interim, Bing was active in founding the Edinburgh Festival and, from 1946 until 1949, served as artistic director, the first time he held that title.

  “You don’t need wit to run an opera house, you need style,” Bing quipped in A Knight at the Opera, the second of his autobiographies. In fact, he had great gobs of both. The “men of the Opera board” were quick to take in his elegance, his worldly manner, his polished speech. But the style that won them over was as much managerial as it was personal. They were seeking a much needed antidote to the Johnson regime. Where Johnson was indulgent, particularly toward singers, Bing would demand discipline; where Johnson had little patience with planning, Bing was unremittingly farsighted; where Johnson oversaw the day-to-day operation of the house from a distance, Bing was an unapologetic micromanager. His words and deeds during the 1949–50 preparatory season seemed to vindicate those who had engineered the unorthodox search. They had hired a character tough enough for what Joe Volpe would later call “the toughest job on Earth.” The trains would once again, as not since Gatti-Casazza, run on time.

  Preparatory Season, 1949–1950

  From his office at the other end of the building, a sign of the ever widening divide between the sitting general manager and the general manager–elect, Bing was nevertheless able to witness operations at close hand, scrutinize contracts and other documents, and plan obsessively. Johnson’s last season barely at midpoint, he insisted on putting his frank analysis of current practice before the board, securing the go-ahead for his agenda, and then making it as public as possible. In his report to the directors of January 27, 1950, Bing proposed the rehabilitation of the house, of course, and nodded vaguely toward the prospect of a new theater. He suggested revised strategies for fundraising and a crusade for the retraction of the 20 percent admissions tax reinstated during the war. He recommended that the Saturday subscription be pegged not at popular but at regular prices and modifications to the Philadelphia schedule. Most intriguing was the idea of splitting each subscription series into two, doubling their number from six to twelve and thereby attracting a fresh cohort of subscribers. The same opera could be scheduled twice as often, reducing the twenty-six productions on the calendar each season to eighteen or nineteen, effecting considerable savings, and allowing more rehearsal time. He also put on the table the reengagement of Kirsten Flagstad; the motion passed with one dissension.

  FIGURE 24. Bust of Giulio Gatti-Casazza between Edward Johnson, on left, and Rudolf Bing, 1950 (Louis Mélançon; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The press conference of February 1, 1950, was called over Johnson’s objections. Bing began by reviewing the actions approved a few days earlier. There would be changes in the upper management. He would be assisted by Reginald Allen, the
executive secretary who would handle business matters; by Max Rudolf, who would replace St. Leger, his former boss, and hold the title of artistic administrator; by Francis Robinson, currently tour director, who would reorganize the box office and subscriptions; and by John Gutman, who would join the team as general artistic assistant. Bing knew full well that uppermost in the minds of reporters was word on the artists he was inclined to retain and, of more interest still, on those he would not bring back. He released a list of fifteen singers he had thus far signed. Melchior was not among them. The tenor had had the bad form to demand that the Met decide within forty minutes whether he would be kept on. Bing declared himself “not prepared to submit to ultimatums. I don’t care from whom.” Melchior did not return. Bing went on to assure the press that he would “go all out to find more American singers” and to further their careers. Of course, he hedged, this “must be a cosmopolitan opera house.” Finally, he broke the news of Flagstad’s reengagement, adding, “if there is any shooting, shoot at me.” He reported further that Helen Traubel, who had threatened to quit when by January she had not been signed, and who had complained loudly that she had been ignored in favor of Flagstad, would share the Wagnerian roles with her Norwegian rival. They would sing one “Ring” each. As for himself, “Apart from murder, there is hardly any crime I am not suspected of. I can assure you I will attempt to run this house—unmoved by promises or threats—on the principle of quality alone.”4

  That was just the beginning. Bing’s brushes with singers continued through the winter, spring, and summer of 1950 and well beyond. On February 8, he received a letter from the Brazilian ambassador pleading on behalf of Bidú Sayão; she was granted two performances for the diplomat’s trouble. Bing told Lawrence Tibbett that he would not be re-signed, citing the curtailed repertory. In fact, Bing considered Tibbett over the hill, as he did Sayão and Melchior. The problem with Leonard Warren was not his merits as a singer, but Bing’s fixation on “loyalty.” “We want an ensemble, an ensemble of stars—not of comets.” Bing had discovered that Warren was accorded an annual midseason hiatus of several weeks to accommodate lucrative concert gigs. When Warren balked at the repeal of this concession, Bing put out the word that the baritone had been let go. Max Rudolf intervened and Warren capitulated, but too late for opening night. A year or so later, Robert Merrill, Warren’s replacement as Rodrigo in the inaugural Don Carlo, found himself writing a letter of apology to the general manager for skipping out on the 1951 spring tour; he had decamped for Hollywood to shoot the better-forgotten Aaron Slick from Punkin Creek. Bing replied that all was forgiven. Still, the 1951–52 season was essentially lost to Merrill. Where Met stars were concerned, Bing had no more use for cabarets than he had for the movies. He wrote to the irrepressible Traubel on September 25, 1953, that the Met and night clubs “do not really seem to mix very well. Perhaps you would prefer to give the Metropolitan a ‘miss’ for a single year or so until you may possibly feel that you want again to change back to the more serious aspects of your art.” Traubel published Bing’s letter and her response, along with a shot across the bow accusing Bing of “rank snobbery” (Sept. 28, 1953). Bing’s counterattack no doubt dissuaded others from crossing the line: “Miss Traubel used this affair for cheap and vulgar publicity purposes playing on the chauvinistic instincts of the mob by emphasizing over and over in her letter her admiration for the great American folk music, for the great American composers. . . . [Miss Traubel’s outburst in the press] has everything to do with an artist who is clearly declining in her art and is looking for other and more lucrative fields and, therefore, needs any amount of publicity. . . . For the last two or three years high parts, both in Tristan and Walküre had to be transposed and the management of the Metropolitan had difficulty in persuading responsible conductors to accept this arrangement which is unworthy of one of the world’s leading opera houses.” Traubel never again sang at the Met.5

  When it came to conductors, Bing set about cleaning house even more thoroughly. Only Reiner and Stiedry were held over from 1949–50. He brought in Kurt Adler, Fausto Cleva, Alberto Erede, and Tibor Kozma, a crew generally thought no stronger than the one he had unloaded. Still, with one key variant, he took up the cause of the illustrious conductor. But where Johnson sought to enlist notable guests for star turns, Bing was intent on a celebrated maestro whose primary commitment of energy—and loyalty, naturally,—would be to the Metropolitan. At the same time, he was opposed to ceding authority to a music director and quick to call on tradition in support of his position. The company had had official and de facto principal conductors—Seidl, Mahler, Toscanini, Bodanzky, Serafin, and Panizza—but never a music director. Bing tried first to recruit Erich Kleiber with assurances that the absence of the coveted title would not prevent his input from counting in all important matters. Kleiber declined and, through his wife, suggested that either Georges Sébastian, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, or Robert Denzler be approached, recommendations that Bing dismissed with what was even for him unusual bite. Of Denzler, in particular, he remarked that “he is a mediocre conductor but was an outstanding Nazi. I am only prepared to consider the opposite: a mediocre Nazi who is an outstanding conductor.”6

  The next year, Bing surveyed the field for what he termed a “conductor-personality of an even higher rank than we have now.” Bruno Walter was ideal but too old, Erich Kleiber, to whom he returned in spite of the earlier rejection, “personally a highly undesirable gentleman, although a brilliant conductor,” and in any case out of the running since he had thrown in his lot with the Soviets. Victor De Sabata was brilliant but difficult and unreliable. “Of the younger set there is Herbert von Karajan who was a real Nazi and whom I, personally, would not propose to invite mainly for that reason.” (Bing would relent and invite Karajan for 1967–68.) That left Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had held a high position under the Third Reich as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. It may have been he Bing had in mind as the outstanding maestro who had been a mediocre Nazi. “After all we did get away with Flagstad without any real difficulty” was the way Bing phrased it. At an October 25, 1951, confidential meeting of the production committee, Bing proposed Furtwängler for the 1952–53 season. The executive committee turned him down two weeks later. Bing made a second attempt for the 1954–55 season. But Furtwängler eluded Bing; he died in December 1954. That same year, Dimitri Mitropoulos joined the company as the “conductor-personality” for whom Bing had been hoping. With his appointment, the conductor’s era inaugurated with Bruno Walter’s 1941 Fidelio was perpetuated. Before his tenure was over, in addition to Mitropoulos and Karajan, Bing had brought to the Metropolitan, most for short stints to be sure, Pierre Monteux, Georg Solti, Ernest Ansermet, Leonard Bernstein, Colin Davis, Josef Krips, and Claudio Abbado.7

  1950–1951

  Don Carlo: November 6

  Between 1903 and 1949, Verdi had provided the music for nineteen of forty-seven Metropolitan opening nights. The familiar tunes of Rigoletto, Aïda, and La Traviata had rung in the regimes of Bing’s three immediate predecessors, Conried, Gatti, and Johnson. Bing made the courageous choice of Verdi’s Don Carlo, somber, uncommon fare for an audience out for a brilliant social occasion and expecting to face only modest musical demands. In its first round at the Met in the early 1920s, the opera had left the public cold. It had had just fourteen performances, despite the best efforts of Rosa Ponselle, Giovanni Martinelli, Giuseppe De Luca, and Adamo Didur. This earlier Don Carlo sold out only when the hugely popular Fyodor Chaliapin took on the role of King Philip. In the intervening decades, esteem for the lesser-known Verdi had risen markedly in Europe, primarily in Germany. The Met itself offered up the stern beauties of Simon Boccanegra in seven seasons starting in 1932, including the year Bing had spent as observer.

  The new general manager fitted Don Carlo with flourishes that signaled a break with the conservative bent of the previous administration. Opening night was detached from its hallowed place at the head of the chic Monday night
subscription and sold at raised prices with the upcoming Fledermaus and the Flagstad-Walter Fidelio as one of a trio of special events. He chose as stage director Margaret Webster, whose revivals of Shakespeare in the 1940s were hits on Broadway: the Othello starring Paul Robeson is remembered to this day. Webster was the first woman to stage a Met production, and she had had no experience with opera. The press latched on to the story that the monumental sets were financed by Otto Kahn’s children through the sale of a Rembrandt; Rolf Gérard’s décor was the tallest ever built for the Metropolitan, designed “to open the proscenium frame vertically, contradicting its usual flat picture-postcard look.” And there was more to report: opposition to the current separatist ferment in Belgium was angered by the libretto’s sympathy for Flemish independence; Catholic groups objected to the graphic depiction of the Spanish Inquisition. An ongoing dispute between management and stagehands kept Bing’s already newsworthy first night in the public eye.8

  Some reviewers expressed reservations about the opera itself (“not the best work of the Italian master,” “singularly powerful if uneven”). Others deplored the edition adopted by the Met, a reduced version of Verdi’s 1884 revision of the five-act grand opéra he had composed for Paris in 1867. They were, however, unanimous in praise of the production, Webster’s adroit handling of the demanding dramaturgy, and Gérard’s moody depiction of sixteenth-century Spain. Bing had made clear that direction and design would distinguish his priorities from those of his predecessors. Virgil Thomson confirmed that with Don Carlo Bing had made good on that promise: “Attention to the visual aspect has long been the Met’s most pressing need. With this put in order, the musical powers of the company are shown off to advantage. Let us be thankful” (Herald Tribune). Rudolf Bing emerged as the star of the occasion.9