A nine-station hookup reached four million television sets and many more viewers, a substantial increase over transmissions of the two previous Met opening nights. Twelve cameras, one in the pit dedicated to close-ups of the singers, enhanced the telecast. The home audience had access to scene changes and intermission interviews, much as telespectators and Live in HD viewers have had since. Although recording technology was available, no kinescope copy of the November 6 telecast is known to exist; the extant audio portions of the evening are of poor quality. Happily, the very same musical forces were on hand for the Saturday, November 11 broadcast; it conveys the strengths and the few weaknesses that likely obtained at the Monday premiere. Communications from Alberto Erede to Bing, friends since their prewar Glyndebourne days, uncover the alternatives weighed in the Don Carlo casting. For Elisabetta, Erede preferred Renata Tebaldi to Delia Rigal; but, as bad luck would have it, Tebaldi was busy at the San Francisco Opera. Erede thought Boris Christoff the best King Philip of the day and Cesare Siepi a close second. But the McCarran Act, effective on September 23, 1950, held up permits for both the Bulgarian Christoff and the Italian Siepi. Christoff had been told that his appearance in a 1947 Rome concert sponsored by the Italian-Soviet Society was to blame (Times, June 7, 1951). In the end, it was the twenty-seven-year-old Siepi who was allowed entry. The splendid voice and artistry he displays in the broadcast earned him the berth of the Met’s principal bass for twenty-two years. For Eboli, Erede rejected Ebe Stignani, the dominant Italian mezzo-soprano of her generation, because of her age and her girth, although he thought her “still very good”; he nominated Fedora Barbieri, not attractive either, in his estimation, but younger than Stignani, brimming with “personality,” and “really first class.” The broadcast preserves Barbieri’s plush sound and authoritative manner. Occasionally rough but always ready, she is memorable as Eboli, as she would later be as Verdi’s Azucena and Amneris, precarious high As and B-flats notwithstanding. Lucine Amara, as the off-stage Celestial Voice, launched her four-decade-long career. Two stalwarts of Johnson’s time, Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill, played Carlo and Rodrigo, the tenor more engaged in the drama than was sometimes his wont, the baritone in gorgeous voice as always in this period, but here also sensitive to the musical line and the libretto’s meanings. As for the newly minted general manager, he pronounced unabashedly that he had set “a new standard for operatic productions in America.”10
Bing waited patiently for the public to catch on to Verdi’s magisterial work. It did, and in 1956–57, its fifth reprise, Don Carlo finally exceeded the box-office average. Scheduled in more than half of the seasons between 1950 and 1966, and mounted in two new productions since, Don Carlo remains one of Bing’s enduring legacies.
Der Fliegende Holländer: November 9
For the second performance of the season, the Met unveiled its new Der Fliegende Holländer. The general manager went to the dean of Broadway scenic artists, Robert Edmond Jones, for the décors. Best known for his collaboration with Eugene O’Neill, Jones was credited, by his colleague Mordecai Gorelik, with founding “the whole present-day tradition of scene design in the United States.” He fell ill and Charles Elson took over the construction and lighting of the sets. Sea cloth, scrim, and cloud projections conjured the pervasive force of nature so deeply embedded in Wagner’s score. “When the curtain rose, the audience burst into applause, for it was clear that the reforms in staging revealed in the [first] night performance of Verdi’s Don Carlo were being continued in the Wagner opera.” Ljuba Welitsch, without whom, as Bing confessed, he would not have revived this “unpopular work,” was absent in the end. With his approval, the Bulgarian soprano, in ill health and no longer what she had been just the season before, relinquished all her Sentas to Astrid Varnay. Varnay’s concentration and musical probity, as heard in the December 30 broadcast, together with a rich middle register, are a match for Hans Hotter’s Dutchman. His dark timbre becomes the vehicle of despair and longing, his attention to text the mark of a great lieder singer. The Met orchestra is as alert to Reiner’s light manner for the folk rhythms as it is to his expansive phrasing of the opera’s Sturm und Drang. And yet the box-office average for Der Fliegende Holländer was the lowest of the season. Downes and Thomson tempered their enthusiasm for the November 9 performance with, “[Hotter’s] interpretation was greater than the music that Wagner could give him in this early romantic score” (Times), and “It is an intimate subject and perhaps not properly a grand opera at all” (Herald Tribune). It would be nine years before the Dutchman again dropped anchor at the Met.11
Fledermaus: December 20
Bing made no mystery of the profit motive behind his third new production. He banked on the wide and lasting appeal of Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus, gussied up with new English lyrics by Hollywood’s Howard Dietz and an adapted libretto staged by its author, Broadway’s Garson Kanin. Fledermaus was the story of the season. It all began in spring 1950 when Johnson, smarting at the preemptive announcements of his successor’s grand plans and other offenses, took aim at the scheduling of so many “Fleder-Mice,” and more generally, at the decision to present an operetta, particularly one that had recently had a Broadway run. Bing’s penchant for publicity raised other eyebrows. How real were the overtures to Danny Kaye for the speaking role of Frosch when it was obvious that the high-priced comedian would not, or could not, commit to twenty or so performances scattered over an opera season? And then there were the well-placed rumors of famous runners-up: Bobby Clark, Fred Allen, and Buster Keaton. The part would go to the lesser-known Jack Gilford.12
Of more consequence to the Fledermaus saga was the jockeying for position of the foremost classical music labels, Columbia and RCA Victor. No sooner had Columbia agreed to issue complete operas under the Met’s imprint, and with its soloists, chorus, and orchestra, than RCA announced that it, too, would produce opera recordings featuring Met artists with whom it had exclusive contracts. The division of the talent pool generated atypical casts: Eleanor Steber, for example, is Columbia’s 1949 Madama Butterfly, a role she never sang (more’s the pity!) on 39th Street; Risë Stevens’s Don José in RCA’s 1951 Carmen is Jan Peerce, who never set foot in the company’s dilapidated Seville. Fritz Reiner, the conductor designated for the Met’s Fledermaus, left Columbia for RCA in summer 1950 and did not see why “Mr. Bing should be unhappy because this [RCA] recording does not concern the Metropolitan.” By September, RCA had beaten Columbia to the punch; Fledermaus excerpts, led by Reiner, in the Ruth and Thomas Martin translation, were ready for editing. Just after the start of rehearsals late that fall, Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was summoned to replace the rebellious Reiner in the Met’s Fledermaus; Beecham, Bing’s first choice, was unavailable. RCA took out space in the Met’s playbills to advertise “Hilarious hit of the ‘Met’ season . . . sung (in English) by a cast of great Metropolitan opera voices, Fritz Reiner of the ‘Met’ conducting.” Not to be bested in the corporate tug-of-war, two months later, Columbia emblazoned the names of Lily Pons, the Adele, and Martha Lipton, the Orlofsky, on its album, along with those of “other members of the Original Cast.” Neither Pons nor Lipton ever appeared in Fledermaus at the Met. Both recordings are hybrids, both feature singers associated with their Met roles, and others recruited for the purpose from the Met roster and elsewhere.13
The December 20 first night of Fledermaus convinced even jaded observers that all the ado had been about something. Gérard’s bright-yellow drawing room for the Eisensteins, a crimson tent for Orlofsky’s ballroom, a cheerful blue jail for the final act, and a stageful of bustles, feathers, opera capes, and top hats evoked pleasure-loving Austria in the 1870s. Dietz’s lyrics were modern, sometimes clever, and, by 1950 standards, just a tad naughty: “It’s nice to have a wife ’round the house, as long as she’s not your own”; “the gesture that seems to arouse the ubiquitous male is the swing of my tail.” The Met’s Fledermaus was dubbed a big Broadway hit, just a
s Bing had intended: “If it could be put on for eight performances a week it would be serious competition for Guys and Dolls and South Pacific”; “With it Rudolf Bing reestablishes the fact that the Metropolitan Opera has a Broadway address.” That first night can be reconstructed by meshing the Columbia recording cut a week later and the January 20 broadcast. Risë Stevens and Richard Tucker sang on both the recording and the broadcast, Ljuba Welitsch on the recording and not the broadcast, and Patrice Munsel on the broadcast and not the recording. The principals are up to the task, Tucker at once plangent and hilarious in his send-up of the vain tenor, Welitsch virtually unintelligible in English yet a glamorous Rosalinde at home in the style of her adopted Vienna. Patrice Munsel deserves the consensus that she stole the show; she transforms the insufferable soubrette into an amiable character.14
Fledermaus continued to sell out the following season. Bing was eager to capitalize on the craze, once heartlessly by plucking the sixty-three-year-old Maria Jeritza out of semiretirement for Rosalinde in a benefit performance (Feb. 22, 1951). Munsel recalled the discomfiture of the soprano, absent from the Met since 1932 and at sea in the unfamiliar translation and staging. She also recalled the sardonic general manager standing in the wings, “laughing hysterically and eating his usual banana.” Confident of the marketability of the Strauss operetta, Bing encouraged the North American tour of a Fledermaus troupe. For the first and last time, the Met was on the road with a single work, bankrolled through an interest-free loan from Columbia Records, cast for the most part with singers not on the regular roster. The caravan was scheduled to travel for thirty weeks. Its bumpy trek would come to a premature end. For one thing, a month after its September 1951 Philadelphia opening, a rival troupe, performing the Ruth and Thomas Martin translation, managed by Sol Hurok and the National Concert and Artists Corporation, began its own itinerary in Hartford. Then there was the patriotic wrath of an American Legion post that objected to the presence of alleged Communist sympathizer Jack Gilford. The Met stood up for its Frosch and the show went on, despite the picketing protesters. Misfortune persisted: tenor Donald Dame, one of the Eisensteins, died suddenly in his Lincoln, Nebraska hotel room just before a performance. The coup de grâce was the box office. The eagerly awaited turnaround in Chicago failed to materialize and the misadventure came to a merciful halt in Minneapolis in February 1952. Columbia Records had overestimated America’s appetite for Viennese operetta. The New York public remained loyal to Bing’s Fledermaus for ten of his sixteen seasons at the old Met.15
Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci: January 17
On December 6, a month after opening night, the company announced that Don Carlo and Der Fliegende Holländer had come in under budget; the savings would underwrite a new Cav/Pag for later that season. Bing tapped Fritz Busch’s son Hans, on the faculty of Indiana University, for Cavalleria rusticana, Max Leavitt, the director of Greenwich Village’s intimate Lemonade Opera, for Pagliacci, and Horace Armistead, who had designed the “Broadway operas” of Gian-Carlo Menotti and Marc Blitzstein, for both. Busch set Mascagni’s one-acter in the present to, as he put it, strip it of “meaningless routine.” For Pagliacci, Armistead adopted a more radical scheme. He leeched the surrealism of his oil paintings onto a Calabrian village reduced to a bare central platform and tracings of withered trees flanked by crumbling buildings. In retrospect, Cavalleria rusticana’s contemporary southern hill town reflects only a timid departure from tradition. By contrast, Pagliacci’s minimalist platform and flats define an authentically experimental playing space. But audiences were accustomed neither to experimental stagings nor to marginal productions, and many agreed with Bruno Walter that these reinterpretations betrayed their penny-pinching allocations. Belatedly, Bing himself called Cav/Pag “a bargain-basement, inadequate production.” The two together had cost a paltry $22,401. In his near-Brechtian construct, Leavitt sought to “find symbols to express [the opera’s] vitality in terms of our own day.” As for his principals, Ramon Vinay (Canio), Rigal (Nedda), and Warren (Tonio), the baritone alone delivered Leoncavallo’s vocal goods, no surprise to those who owned recordings of Warren’s “Prologo.” Zinka Milanov, the Santuzza, was, and would always be, imperturbably of the stand-and-sing school of operatic plastique; Tucker responded to the director’s cues, projecting a Turiddu variously callous and moving. The March 31, 1951, broadcast of Cavalleria rusticana preserves Milanov and Tucker in peak form, their duet a marvel of technical security, refulgent tone, and passionate expression.16
FIGURE 25. Cavalleria rusticana, Zinka Milanov as Santuzza in foreground, 1950 (Sedge Leblang; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)
The invectives hurled at the sets and stagings by Olin Downes in the Times and Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune drowned out the raves of the Journal-American and Daily News and the mixed notices of the Post and the Brooklyn Eagle. But more significant than the critical response was the controversy that ensued, as alive today as then. The rereadings of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci called into question for the first time in Met history the legitimacy of altering the temporal, spatial, or cultural framework of pillars of the repertory. Ironically, the counterattacks on Downes and Thomson were invited by the reviewers themselves. In trashing Armistead et al., the two powerful journalists positioned themselves as conservatives, Downes in appropriating the label of “poor old moss-back,” and Thomson by moving from the particular of this Cav/Pag to the general issue of reinterpretation: “Modernizing operas like these is not a rewarding effort. They are rigid; they have a style of their own; they do not lend themselves to indirection, to added poetry, and intellectual embellishment.” To his credit, Downes engaged with those who disagreed with him. He devoted three columns to the question, first countering a young operagoer who complained that “Rudolf Bing’s slightest variation from any time-honored methods of dramatizing these operas has been belabored by the traditionalists as heresy” (Jan. 28), then quoting reader responses, pro and con (Feb. 4), and finally quarreling over the distinction between “tradition” and “routine” with playwright Robert E. Sherwood (Feb. 11).
The debate surrounding Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci touched off what would become a perpetual state of war between Bing and the critics. According to Martin Mayer, who worked closely with Bing on 5000 Nights at the Opera, “The aftermath of this brief squall would plague Bing through the entire twenty-two years of his administration, for the violent defense of the new Cav and Pag cast doubt both on his taste and on his judgment.” That defense took the form of an assault on the critics themselves. One of his more moderate refutations of what one writer called the “critical wrath” aimed at Cav/Pag went as follows: “Critics have the right to disapprove of single experiments, and I will not argue with them, since taste and judgment are involved, and these are personal. I will, however, argue vigorously their right to voice blanket disapproval of a general policy which is intended to vitalize opera production in New York.” What the reviewers came most to resent was, as Mayer characterized it, Bing’s misplaced sense of “cultural superiority to the press . . . shallowly rooted in his own personality and in traditional European attitudes toward America.” The polemic on rereadings would pick up steam under Joseph Volpe and come to a head under Peter Gelb. Despite his early principled defense of deviations from past practice, with the possible exception of the Faust of 1953, Bing would not again tamper with beloved titles. And under his watch, this particular wrangle with the critics would not recur.17
“VISUAL ASPECTS AND DRAMATIC INTERPRETATIONS”
When the books were closed on 1950–51, the company showed a loss of $462,000; the next year, despite increases in box-office receipts and donations, and the lifting of the admissions tax, the loss was $369,000. Board members vented their irritation at Bing’s pricey new productions. The general manager went on the offensive, writing to Lowell Wadmond, the president of the board who had replaced Charles Spofford, “The Metropolitan Opera has had great conductors before my time, it ha
s had great singers before my time, and in spite of all that it had fallen to a level when it ceased to be a theatre of great artistic interest and when, indeed, in the field of visual aspects and dramatic interpretations it had become rather obsolete” (March 24, 1952). In this same letter, Bing complained that he had requested five new productions each year, had been promised four, and was now left with the prospect of only three. He argued that the Metropolitan was in dire scenic disrepair “due to the war and perhaps for other reasons,” that it had “now . . . to pay for the sins of the past.” If the Met was to return to its former glory as “the world’s leading opera house,” it would have to operate at an “expensive level,” although economically within that parameter. The “cheap level,” whether economical or extravagant, was out of the question.18
Bing won the round with the support of Wadmond and Mrs. Belmont. He was not the first general manager, nor would he be the last, to champion the theatrical dimensions of opera. In one form or another, his precursors had done the same early in their own tenures. In 1883, Abbey’s opulent new décors showed up Mapleson’s tired sets. In 1884, Damrosch’s German troupe was predicated on the primacy of the dramatic ensemble. In 1903, Conried staked his reputation on a spectacular production of Parsifal. Gatti-Casazza hired Broadway designers, Joseph Urban, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, and Robert Edmond Jones. Grau and Johnson were the exceptions. In Johnson’s last five years, new productions numbered only ten, six excluding the 1947–48 “Ring,” a record that made Bing’s case. In his first five years, Bing would mount sixteen new productions.
Grand Opera: The Story of the Met Page 23
