Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  By opening night of his second season, Bing had taken a step toward the integration of the 39th Street stage: he signed ballerina Janet Collins, the first African-American member of the company, and for the next four years a principal dancer. As Collins told it, Zachary Solov, the Met’s new ballet master, seeking a dancer for the triumphal scene of Aïda, mentioned Collins to Bing, saying, “She’s Black.” Bing asked only if she was good before telling Solov to hire her. The press seized upon the comparison of Collins and Jackie Robinson, who four years earlier had broken major league baseball’s racial barrier. The African-American Chicago Defender thought Collins’s engagement significant enough to count Bing among its honorees for outstanding contributions to the “forward march of American democracy” (Herald Tribune, Jan. 1, 1952).

  As late as 1927, with Ernst Krenek’s Jonny Spielt auf in the offing, there had been discussion of the wisdom of featuring an African-American, even when impersonated by a white singer in blackface. Gatti wrote to Kahn: “Mr. Ziegler is especially afraid that the fact of the Negro brought on the stage of the Metropolitan might, through some misunderstanding or malignancy, prove a second Salome case. Although I tried to reassure him, he persists in his fears.” No challenge had ever been made to the representation of Africans, distant from New York in time and place (Aïda, Amonasro, Otello, Sélika), in blackface, of course. A contemporary American “Negro” as the hero of the piece, Ziegler worried, might be a different matter. In the end, Michael Bohnen and then Lawrence Tibbett played Jonny, the Black jazz fiddler. There was no repeat of the Salome debacle, in fact no outcry at all. In 1932, with The Emperor Jones on the horizon, Walter White, recently named head of the NAACP, suggested that an African-American, either Paul Robeson or Jules Bledsoe, be considered for the part of Brutus Jones in Louis Gruenberg’s opera. Tibbett sang the role. There was controversy nevertheless. The Met had commissioned the African-American dancer Oscar Hemsley Winfield to choreograph the work, and his troupe, the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group, to execute his dances. “It almost didn’t happen because the Met wanted to blacken the faces of Met . . . dancers rather than use black dancers.” When Tibbett threatened to quit the show, the management backed down. The Met omitted the dance company from the playbill credits.27

  The first insider to advocate for the place of African-Americans on the roster was Paul Cravath, chairman of the board from 1931 to 1940, counsel to the NAACP, and also head of the board of the historically black Fisk University (his father had been its founding president). But even he could not shake his colleagues or the timorous management. He wrote to Ziegler on January 4, 1934, suggesting Catherine Yarborough, who had made a career in Europe as Caterina Jarboro: “I have no special interest in Miss Yarborough beyond the fact that I am interested in colored people generally, and it occurred to me that if she happened to be a first class artist, it might be good policy and result in some publicity if we could give her a chance to sing L’Africaine.” Yarborough had been Aïda (Bledsoe was the Amonasro) with Salmaggi’s company at the Hippodrome in 1933. Time reported, “Dusky Harlemites, high and low, turned out to cheer her triumph and theirs.” Yarborough refused the offer of a Met audition, adamant that her European successes were credential enough. In 1944, the National Urban League approached Ziegler in the hope that the Met would “see itself clear to invite some Negro singers,” and in the certainty that “at present there would be no public resentment” (April 14). African-Americans were, in fact, auditioned beginning in the very late 1940s: Muriel Rahn tried out on several occasions, Carol Brice and Lawrence Winters once.28

  A somewhat less restricted though similarly tacit ban on the integration of the audience was also in effect. We know this not from company records, but from the January 7, 1941, unwitting minutes of the Metropolitan Opera Guild: “Mrs. Tuesdale brought up the question of the colored race in the Guild box. . . . Mr. Lewis [Earle Lewis, assistant manager and head of the box office] had been consulted and he stated it was the practice of the box office to sell seats to them in the family circle. The matter was, therefore, settled in this ruling.” Also unwitting was the fleeting desegregation of the chorus. As the Times reported at the death of the pioneering soprano Helen Phillips, “In 1947 Ms. Phillips became the first black singer known to have appeared with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, in what she recalled as an apparently accidental breaking of an unofficial color barrier.” Her agent had been asked by the Met stage manager for his best soprano. When Phillips presented herself, the stage manager looked her over once or twice and then dispatched her backstage. “‘I just slipped in,’ she would tell friends. ‘Then after the performance, I slipped back out again.’” Paul Robeson’s name resurfaced when Walter Winchell, who had Robeson in his crosshairs, announced that he would sing Boris Godunov, in Russian no less, in 1949–50. The Met rushed to cable Winchell its correction: Robeson was not a member of the company and “will not be signed for any forthcoming season” (Feb. 4, 1949). At the end of August of that same year, on the day Robeson was to perform in concert, agitators ignited an anti-Communist riot, laced with anti-Black and anti-Semitic vitriol, in the neighboring Peekskill, New York.29

  In public memory, it is not Janet Collins, and certainly not Helen Phillips, but Marian Anderson who breached the Met’s color line at her epochal debut of January 7, 1955. The proposition that Anderson be the first African-American to sing a principal role at the Met had issued from diverse quarters for at least ten years. Before his death in 1940, Cravath had pressed the suggestion on Johnson. At that point, Anderson, born in 1897, was forty-three years old. The matter was later taken up by E.B. Ray of the Afro-American Newspapers, who inquired bluntly “whether or not the Metropolitan Opera Company has a written or unwritten law barring colored artists. If not, what would be your reaction to suggesting an alternate role as Aïda for Miss Anderson?” (March 17, 1944). As usual, it was Ziegler who responded in Johnson’s stead, and again he skirted the question of the Metropolitan “law,” preferring a high-handed evasion, aggravated by this embarrassing lapsus: “Are you, perhaps, under the impression that the character Aïda in Verdi’s opera Aïda is of tawny skin. She is the daughter of the King of Egypt. Amneris—a contralto role—is the daughter of the dark-skinned King Amonasro” (March 22). It is, of course, the other way around: Aïda is the daughter of the Ethiopian King and Amneris of Egypt’s Pharaoh. This would not be the last of Ziegler’s ever more feeble efforts to fend off questions of race. On April 28, 1947, just months before his death, he once again stayed on message: “Only recently have Negro artists shown interest in operatic singing and there is no doubt that eventually one will emerge who is outstanding in the field of opera alone.” By this time, Anderson, who in any case did not have the requisite profile, was fifty. Bing’s initial response to those promoting Anderson varied little from that of Johnson/Ziegler: “Nobody can admire Marian Anderson more than I do, but I am unaware that she has any operatic experience and it is indeed difficult for a concert singer even of Miss Anderson’s high level just to step onto an opera stage.”30

  What finally convinced Bing? It was no doubt in large part the pressure of the times: 1954 was the year of Brown vs. Board of Education, 1955 the year Rosa Parks would not relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. And Anderson was unquestionably the iconic African-American artist. It was also the scheduled revival of Un Ballo in maschera, absent since 1947, and the “suitable” role of Ulrica, the fortune teller, alternatively the “sorceress.” (By intriguing coincidence, in Verdi’s original version set in colonial Boston, Ulrica is an “indovina di razza nera” [clairvoyant of black race]). Crucial also, given the contralto’s by then nearly fifty-eight years, was the fact that Ulrica appears in only one scene, and in that scene she is the dominant, mostly static figure. As Anderson recounts it, on running into her at a party in September 1954, Bing asked her to join the Met in the coming season. She was quite rightly apprehensive; the role’s high tessitura presented difficulties this late in her career. Al
though the audition for Dimitri Mitropoulos did not go well (as she said, she had had to “squeeze out” the notes above the staff), the conductor assented. Bing lost no time in calling Sol Hurok, her agent, to close the deal—so long in coming and now suddenly so urgent. Her fee of $1,000 per performance was at the top of the Met scale.31

  FIGURE 27. Marian Anderson as Ulrica in Un Ballo in maschera, with Rudolf Bing, January 17, 1955 (Sedge Leblang; courtesy Photofest)

  The orchestral introduction to act 1, scene 2 of Un Ballo in maschera that Friday evening had to be interrupted when the curtain failed to rise on cue. Mitropoulos reprised the music, the curtain finally rose, and the ovation was such that the characteristically composed Anderson was visibly unsettled. Reviews were respectful, acutely aware of the immense emotional charge of the occasion. Some notices, like that of Olin Downes, tiptoed around Anderson’s weaknesses. Perhaps the best summary of an objective consensus is provided by the New Yorker: “Miss Anderson’s voice . . . is far past its prime. . . . She showed, understandably, considerable nervousness in attacking [the role], and even when this initial nervousness had worn off, she failed to produce the brilliant result that the historic event seemed to demand . . . applause was for the principle of the thing, and not for the specific artistic contribution she made. Her voice was unexpectedly small and tremulous, and her stage personality, I regret to say, was timid and lacking in authority.”32

  Anderson was succeeded by a remarkable string of African-American singers: Robert McFerrin, winner of the Met Auditions in 1953 (he received the training but not the contract that ordinarily accompanied the prize), whose debut as Amonasro followed Anderson’s by a scarce three weeks; Mattiwilda Dobbs, the first African-American to be cast as a romantic lead (Gilda in Rigoletto, Nov. 9, 1956); Gloria Davy (Aïda, Feb. 12, 1958); Leontyne Price (Leonora in Il Trovatore, Jan. 12, 1961); Martina Arroyo (the off-stage Celestial Voice in Don Carlo in 1959 and then Aïda, Feb. 6, 1965); George Shirley (Ferrando in Così fan tutte, Oct. 24, 1961); Grace Bumbry (Eboli in Don Carlo, Oct. 7, 1965); Felicia Weathers (Lisa in The Queen of Spades, Oct. 21, 1965); and Reri Grist (Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Feb. 25, 1966). In the southern cities of its spring tour, the Met was caught up in the fight for civil rights that defined the decade. During the 1961 Atlanta run, two African-American holders of orchestra tickets were asked to sit elsewhere. They refused. Protests ensued. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined in a telegram to Bing denouncing the company’s acceptance of a discriminatory policy: “The SCLC regrets sincerely that the famed Metropolitan Opera Company has allowed itself to be dictated to by the whim and caprice of so-called ‘southern custom,’ at such a critical moment in history, particularly this community.” The text was cosigned by Martin Luther King Jr. Bing’s reply was published in the Times the next day. The Met, he wrote defensively, “does not allow itself to be dictated to by anyone. . . . We have nothing whatsoever to do with the local arrangements.” But the following year, officially at least, the Atlanta audience was integrated. Atlanta was again a thorn in Bing’s side in 1964. The organizers had balked at the prospect of Price in Don Giovanni. Bing dashed off this memorandum to Anthony Bliss, president of the Metropolitan Opera Association: “Leontyne Price at the present time is one of the most valuable properties [an unfortunate choice of words] of the Metropolitan Opera and there is no doubt that taking her on tour next season, but skipping the whole Atlanta week would terribly upset her, would without question make her refuse the whole tour and might, indeed, jeopardize her whole relationship with the Metropolitan.” Price sang Donna Anna in Atlanta that spring.33

  REPERTOIRE: 1950–1966

  Verdi

  Bing ushered in what would be an extraordinary Verdi era with Don Carlo. Verdi ruled again on the opening nights in 1951 and 1952 with Aïda and then La Forza del destino. All this was to be expected. Asked to name his favorite operas, the general manager–designate had ticked off three Verdi titles, and then just one work by each of seven other composers. Between 1950 and 1966, Verdi accounted for 25 percent of Metropolitan performances, significantly more than the 14 percent of Gatti’s years and the 19 percent of Johnson’s. Under Bing, Verdi pulled far ahead of Wagner, the previous front-runner. He also led the pack in the percentage of new productions, fourteen of fifty-nine. Bing’s predilection would have mattered little had the company not had, year after year, a cohort of phenomenal singers capable of doing honor to the master’s melos. Casts that included Milanov, Price, Del Monaco, Tucker, Bergonzi, Corelli, Merrill, and Siepi were arguably the best in the world.34

  Margaret Webster found herself with far less pliable charges for the 1951 Aïda (Nov. 13) than she had had for Don Carlo. Borrowing from her experience in the theater, she came up with the improbable notion of calling Milanov, Del Monaco, and the other principals together for a reading of the libretto. Neither the Aïda nor the Radamès would play along. Her leading lady in particular could not be persuaded into meaningful movement. “La donn’è immobile,” Webster joked. The press appreciated her handling of the Egyptian legions and Ethiopian slaves in Gérard’s streamlined Memphis and Thebes. But soon into the run, with new principals and the increasingly shoddy execution of her blueprint for the action, Webster asked that her name be removed from the program. It stayed.35

  Two days after the Aïda opening, the Met put on Rigoletto as a frame for the exceptional gifts of Leonard Warren, Bing’s Verdi baritone of choice. Warren was cast in seven of the ten new Verdi productions mounted prior to his death in 1960; he had been scheduled for an eighth. In the December 8 broadcast, he navigates this test role with a finesse that bespeaks the practice of the part at the Met since 1943 and the freshness of restudy for the new production that the Times called “one of the most interesting and exciting interpretations of this work that we have seen.” Tucker’s Duke of Mantua is no less seasoned with individual touches and is as stunning in its technical assurance and vocal radiance. The spinning tone of new soprano Hilde Güden comes as a relief after the too often chirpy Gildas, adequate to “Caro nome” but underpowered for the third act duet with the enraged father. Only Erede’s uninspired conducting mars the afternoon.36

  Eugene Berman’s striking décor for La Forza del destino (Nov. 10, 1952) was so “special” that one critic “found it difficult to wrest [his] attention from the scenery and give it back to the characters.” Exceptionally well-matched singers wove the opera’s tangled web. The December 6 broadcast catches Milanov in what was her last peak year, solid and centered, soaring at the top, floating her trademark pianissimos. Tucker and Warren fill the arching phrases of their duets. Fritz Stiedry plays the overture after the first scene (as had Bruno Walter before him) so as to accommodate latecomers. Stiedry performed further surgery on the score, boasting that his version “as it now stands is absolutely first class.” The conductor excised the inn scene, holding that it “only confuses the audience,” when in fact it provides narrative matter essential to the understanding of a complex plot, and he deleted many other pages from one of Verdi’s most original compositions. Stiedry might be forgiven these desecrations had he generated a fraction of the frisson of Walter’s 1943 Forza broadcast.37

  The two new Verdi productions of 1956–57 were bouquets for Milanov and Tebaldi in the extraordinary season that opened with the debut of Maria Callas. Milanov should not have taken on Ernani (Nov. 23) so late in her career. The December 29broadcast documents her receding range and flexibility. Del Monaco’s tenor rings out all too brazenly. The performance is crowned by Warren’s legato in his long act 3 scene. Alas, in Ernani as in La Forza del destino, the composer’s intentions were violated. Reviewers praised the energy of Mitropoulos’s leadership but failed to mention the numerous cuts that altered the score’s proportions, the interpolated act 4 ballet, and the particularly wrongheaded idea of detaching “Infelice” (beautifully sung by Siepi) from its cabaletta and moving it to act 2. The well-received La
Traviata opened on February 21. In the April 6 broadcast, Fausto Cleva indulges the slow tempos favored by Warren (“magnificent,” “stole the show”) and Tebaldi (“sends sparks across the footlights,” “reached the highest dramatic peaks”). Tebaldi lowers the act 1 aria and cabaletta to the advantage of the florid passages; the highest notes remain hard. The consumptive Violetta, a difficult negotiation for a huge voice with a short top, would be dropped from her repertoire. Still, the soprano sings much of the role with command, and her most dulcet piano lingers in memory. Oliver Smith’s enormous staircases in acts 1 and 3 constricted the flow of the action; the tiny terrace of a tiny summerhouse plunked downstage in act 2 was even more confining.38

  Macbeth, again a vehicle for Warren, was one of two Verdi premieres Bing presented at the old Met. In November 1958, the general manager had fired Maria Callas, the Lady Macbeth-to-be, when she demanded that he adjust her schedule to accommodate the arduous role. We retell the oft-told episode later in this chapter. And when in January 1959, Mitropoulos suffered a heart attack, Shakespeare’s unlucky “Scottish play” lived up to its reputation once more. Leonie Rysanek, in her debut, took over for Callas, Erich Leinsdorf for Mitropoulos. As the Viennese soprano made her entrance, there came the shout of “Brava Callas.” Bing later confessed that it was he who had arranged for the offensive outcry; he had wanted to win sympathy for his substitute. Despite uncertain lower and middle registers, and a frequently ill-tuned though often resplendent top as heard in the February 21 broadcast, the charismatic Rysanek notched a great success. Warren and Bergonzi (in the essentially one-aria role of Macduff) acknowledge the belcantist traces of Verdi’s 1847 score. This was the third Macbeth with which Bing was intimately involved, all three directed by Carl Ebert and designed by Caspar Neher: the first was produced in Berlin in 1931 while he was Ebert’s assistant; the second at Glyndebourne in 1938. The Met’s Macbeth, hung with the trappings of horror, skulls and the like, was modeled on its two predecessors. But by 1959, the expressionistic concept had had its day.39