Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Warren was the irreplaceable baritone in the new productions of Il Trovatore (Oct. 26, 1959) and Simon Boccanegra (March 1, 1960). The Trovatore cast included Antonietta Stella and Carlo Bergonzi, but it was Giulietta Simionato, in her debut as Azucena, who brought down the house. Simon Boccanegra returned that same season after more than a decade. The reviewers admired the neglected masterpiece, Frederick Fox’s décor, and Webster for sorting out the convoluted plot. Tebaldi was unavailable for the premiere, utility soprano Mary Curtis-Verna made for a mediocre Amelia, and Warren, as it turned out, sang his last complete performance. Three days later, during act 2 of La Forza del destino, he collapsed at the start of the cabaletta to “Urna fatale [Fatal urn],” a poignant epitaph for this consummate Verdian. Earlier that evening, relevant or not, Warren had been told to brace himself for catcalls from a pro-Italian cabal. Frank Guarrera, Warren’s cover, soldiered on for most of the remaining Boccanegra performances.40

  After Warren’s death, Nabucco went to Cornell MacNeil. In the December 3 broadcast, he thunders majestically as the King of Babylon in defiance of God and unfolds a pure legato as the contrite, fallen ruler. Rysanek, on the other hand, fails in what is surely one of the most difficult roles for soprano. Abigaille’s fearsome intervals and coloratura passages demand a technique she simply lacked. Sharing vocal honors with MacNeil are Siepi as Zaccaria and Rosalind Elias as Fenena. Winthrop Sargeant disliked the sets (“fussily arty and completely devoid of atmosphere”) and accused Gunther Rennert of resorting to “a repetition of all the formulas for desultory spear-carrying that have beset productions of spectacular opera from time immemorial.” Time has vindicated Bing: Nabucco vanished at the end of the 1960–61 season only to make a triumphant return in 2001.41

  Next came reinvestitures of Un Ballo in maschera (Jan. 25, 1962), Otello (March 10, 1963), and Aïda (Oct. 14, 1963). Bergonzi, as Ballo’s mercurial King of Sweden, juggled playfulness, passion, and benevolent authority with his characteristic finesse; Rysanek was again hollow in Amelia’s middle and low registers; Merrill blustered his way through Renato’s despair. Sargeant found the intricate sets “rather self-conscious and arty.” Otello had a better reception. Eugene Berman drew his ornate décors after Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini. Herbert Graf, who had staged a new Otello in 1937 and had given James McCracken starring opportunities in Zurich, directed the tenor in his widely acclaimed return to the Met. Gabriella Tucci filled in as Desdemona when Tebaldi left to repair a vocal breakdown. Not since Szell and Busch in the 1940s had the Met seen an Otello conductor of Georg Solti’s caliber. A few months later, on opening night 1963, Solti presided over Aïda, rescuing the score and the orchestra from the routine in which it was mired. Birgit Nilsson’s Ethiopian slave dominated the ensemble in the Triumphal Scene. Nathaniel Merrill and Robert O’Hearn, who had demonstrated their talent for mounting big shows with their 1962–63 Meistersinger, served up a colossal Egypt. Harold Schonberg thought that “like so many recent Metropolitan productions, it falls between two schools. It is neither conservative nor modern” (Times).42

  FIGURE 28. Falstaff, act 1, scene 2, right to left, Luigi Alva as Fenton, Judith Raskin as Nannetta, Regina Resnik as Dame Quickly, Rosalind Elias as Meg Page, Gabriella Tucci as Alice Ford, Paul Franke as Dr. Cajus, Mario Sereni as Ford, Andrea Velis as Bardolfo, Norman Scott as Pistola, 1964 (Louis Mélançon; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  Falstaff (March 21, 1964) was the last new production of Verdi staged at the old Met. And as it must be for this comic final bow of the seventy-nine-year-old composer, it was the ensemble that counted. The principals, among them Anselmo Colzani (Falstaff), Tucci (Alice), Judith Raskin (Nanetta), and Regina Resnik (an incomparable Dame Quickly), played as a community of artists delighted to inhabit the Elizabethan world created for them by director-designer Franco Zeffirelli: the murky Garter Inn, Ford’s sunlit garden, the solid half-timbered interior of his house, the moonlit Windsor forest. The integration of music and drama rested with Leonard Bernstein, making his Met debut along with Zeffirelli. With the opening chords, the orchestra’s responsiveness fairly leapt at the audience, and so it continued to the great fugue that closes this conductor’s opera. Falstaff finally escaped from the gilded cage of the succès d’estime to register high among the season’s box-office leaders, a fitting capstone to Bing’s ongoing celebration of Verdi. For Alan Rich, the production was “a milestone in the history of operatic production in this city, an artistic forward step in the conception of opera, and a challenge that will be met only with the utmost difficulty” (Herald Tribune).

  Premieres

  Bing proved a cautious gambler. He would bet on novelties only nine times in his first sixteen seasons; with the exception of La Périchole and The Last Savage, he held the winning hand. Johnson had taken chances more frequently—eleven times in fifteen seasons—and this despite his many fewer new productions. None of the composers of the Bing premieres, from Verdi to Samuel Barber, needed introduction. Nor were the selections particularly adventurous. Wozzeck and Ariadne auf Naxos were regularly performed in Europe; The Rake’s Progress had made the rounds following its 1951 Venice first night.43

  The general manager had promised Wozzeck from the start; it was one of the ten titles of his personal hit parade. He finally took the plunge in 1959. Under the banner of the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, Leopold Stokowski had conducted the first US run of Wozzeck in Philadelphia and New York in 1931; since then, concern had persisted that Berg’s heavy dose of atonality would alienate Met subscribers. In 1941, Ziegler “deemed it not of the type to warrant its inclusion in our repertoire.” The programming of the opera had become an act of courage, a noble cause, as John Gutman saw it: “I would like to start a campaign for Wozzeck. . . . I think that it would be well-justified to let artistic reasons for once take precedence over commercial considerations, and do something for the intellectual prestige of this opera house.” The Met’s product lived up to the high purpose. The company accorded Karl Böhm an unprecedented twenty-four orchestra rehearsals. In excellent English, German baritone Hermann Uhde made palpable Wozzeck’s anguish; Steber, whose versatility encompassed the most challenging roles, undertook Marie when Dorothy Kirsten declined. Bing had seen Neher’s first designs for the Berg opera in Essen in 1929; Neher had signed five more editions after that. Kolodin thought this seventh “blandly representational and stylistically nondescript.” Still, he and his fellow critics shouted unanimous huzzahs for the enterprise. Contrary to dire box-office estimates, Wozzeck did reasonably well in 1958–59. Since then, and despite some poorly attended revivals, the Met has kept faith with Berg’s master-work.44

  The remaining German novelties, Arabella and Ariadne auf Naxos, filled two Strauss lacunae. Discounting a single season for Die Ägyptische Helena in 1928–29, the composer was represented solely by Der Rosenkavalier on a regular basis, and intermittently by Salome and Elektra. Many thought Strauss’s post–World War I scores, however skillfully crafted, largely retreads of the musical gestures that had once seemed so modern. At the time of its US Met premiere, Arabella was taken to exemplify the late Strauss, who, “at sixty-nine, was a tired man, largely bereft of original inventiveness, and who had fallen back on a lavender-scented romanticism”; his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, was tarred with the brush of preciosity and decadence. Ariadne auf Naxos, their more familiar, much earlier work, escaped these blanket reproaches; it had had staged performances at the New York City Opera in the 1940s and a 1958 concert reading at Carnegie Hall.45

  The Arabella project nearly foundered on a dispute over its English translation. Strauss’s British publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, insisted on a version that Bing, true to Gutman, his friend and advisor, refused to accept. Bing prevailed and New York heard Gutman’s text. The February 26, 1955, transmission is a treasurable broadcast. Güden glows in the act 1 duet. Steber’s voice, “Immensely supple, . . . retains its delicate sheen but, with mid-career ease, expands to full-throated, tremolo-free s
pinto tone of equal loveliness.” George London, just as openhearted as Steber, “projects an almost holy mood.” It all comes together under the fine hand of Rudolf Kempe in his debut season. In a revision of the production that Ebert and designer Oliver Messel had devised for Glyndebourne, Ariadne auf Naxos was not nearly so well performed. The title role, originally offered to Nilsson, became the property of Rysanek. On the first night, some passages taxed her lower octave and her erratic top. Gianna D’Angelo navigated the coloratura pitfalls of Zerbinetta with excessive care, Jess Thomas stayed Bacchus’s ungrateful course without particular élan, and Kerstin Meyer, who never found a tonal center for the Composer, cracked on her aria’s high note. Only Böhm, an inveterate Straussian conductor, gave the score its due. But despite critical resistance to Arabella and the shaky premiere of Ariadne auf Naxos, both titles would prosper. Met audiences would come to cherish the idealistic young woman of the Vienna of the 1860s and the forlorn Cretan princess abandoned on an ancient island, each destined to be united at the final curtain with “der Richtige,” the right man.46

  For material suited to the annual New Year’s Eve gala, Bing selected an opéra-bouffe (French comic opera), hoping Offenbach would pull off the box-office miracle wrought by Johann Strauss. He cast La Périchole with Patrice Munsel, reneging on the understanding he had with Risë Stevens, whose voice, he decided, was too dark and presence too mature for the Peruvian street singer. Despite the low tessitura of Périchole, Bing opted for the higher, younger voice of Munsel, the irresistible Adele of Fledermaus. Paquillo’s tenor lines were assigned to the baritone Theodore Uppman. Even more contrary was the engagement of Cyril Ritchard, who sang the Viceroy in a voice barely adequate to musical comedy. Ritchard also staged the piece. Offenbach’s frothy confection, with major alterations to the score, revised orchestration, and an interpolated ballet, was pronounced “one of the happiest examples of musical theatre New York has had in our time.” Fresh from rapturous reviews, La Périchole was included in the subscription series cosponsored by the Met and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Nineteen moderately priced recordings were eventually issued. Many of the casts were led by covers and comprimarios, some of whom had never or hardly ever sung their roles at the Met; others flaunted experienced stars in favored parts, Tucker as Andrea Chénier and Lenski, Kirsten as Tosca and Cio-Cio-San. Jean Morel conducted the abridged La Périchole. Gérard’s witty sets served four revivals through 1970–71. But unlike the Viennese operetta, the Parisian opéra-bouffe fell well short of miraculous at the box office.47

  The Last Savage, Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera buffa vintage 1963, was the third and last of his works to be staged at the Met; it was preceded by the minor success of Amelia Goes to the Ball (1938) and the fiasco of The Island God (1942). Menotti’s popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, unrivaled among contemporary opera composers, had been fueled by Broadway, television, and the movies. He admitted freely that he had “run the risk of sounding unfashionable with The Last Savage”; he had hoped to “appeal to open minds and untutored hearts.” The Met gave the piece an expert cast: Roberta Peters, George London, Nicolai Gedda, and Teresa Stratas. Beni Montresor’s sets mirrored the illustrations of his children’s books and received deserved attention. The Met opening on January 23, 1964, was trashed nonetheless, as had been the Paris premiere in October 1963. Alan Rich could not have been more outspoken: “Just about everything that could possibly be wrong with a modern opera—or one of any period, for that matter—is wrong with Mr. Menotti’s latest effort. The score is embarrassingly derivative, almost shockingly so. The libretto is a silly piece of fluff, and full of cheap cornball, gag-writing below the level of a backwoods college varsity show” (Herald Tribune). Menotti’s “Broadway musical masquerading as an opera” disappeared after a second season.48

  Horace Armistead designed handsome facsimiles of eighteenth-century London for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, George Balanchine directed, and Fritz Reiner conducted a cast headed by Hilde Güden (Anne), Blanche Thebom, (Baba the Turk), Eugene Conley (Tom), and Mack Harrell (Nick). To Stravinsky’s request for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who had created the role of Anne in Venice, Bing responded, “that for reasons I would rather not discuss in writing [undoubtedly her Third Reich connections], the lady you mention cannot be considered for the Metropolitan Opera.” (As with Karajan, Bing relented some years later.) There had been some joking conjecture that Thebom, famous for her floor-length tresses, would conscript her own hair for Baba’s beard. The radio audience heard the American premiere on Saturday afternoon, February 14, 1953. Among the standees, the buzz was all about the breathtaking high C that capped Güden’s virtuoso act 1 aria. Reviewers were unanimous in lauding the production, performance, and, excepting Downes, the score. There was little enthusiasm for the libretto of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Attendance dwindled rapidly through the short New York run; The Rake was scrapped after two undersubscribed repetitions the following season. It took the Met more than four decades to catch up with The Rake’s Progress.49

  Samuel Barber’s Vanessa was the single world premiere the wary general manager sponsored at the old house. That his was a felicitous choice was immediately apparent: “Mr. Barber’s mastery of the operatic language is remarkable and second to none now active on the Salzburg-Milan axis”; “American masterpiece”; “capable of holding a respectable place beside the great operatic masterpieces of the past . . . one of the most impressive things of its sort to appear anywhere since Richard Strauss’s more vigorous days.” A nephew of the legendary contralto Louise Homer and himself a voice student, Barber had already established himself as a composer of vocal music with Dover Beach for baritone and string quartet (he sings in its first recording) and Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for soprano and orchestra. His partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, brought vast experience to the libretto and the staging. Cecil Beaton’s affinity for early-twentieth-century style found expression in his elegant sets and costumes. Sena Jurinac was to have created the title role; she suffered a nervous breakdown and canceled just six weeks before the premiere. Eleanor Steber, who had commissioned Knoxville and whose recording ensured its popularity, must have felt a twinge of satisfaction when she was called to learn the difficult title role. Gedda as Anatol, Rosalind Elias as the pivotal Erika, Giorgio Tozzi as the Old Doctor, and Regina Resnik as the Old Baroness were the other principals; Mitropoulos conducted. Vanessa did little better than most other American novelties—two consecutive seasons and a revival in 1965. Yet Barber’s neo-Romantic score lives on, if not at the Met, in productions elsewhere and in two subsequent complete recordings. And Erika’s haunting “Must the winter come so soon?” has become a standard competition aria for generations of mezzo-sopranos.50

  TABLE 12. Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1950–51 to 1965–66

  Staging the Revivals

  At the end of the “yellow brick” epoch, sixteen years into his tenure, the hard question was the degree to which Bing had raised the bar of staging and direction, as he had promised. By 1966, he could certainly claim a far more polished look, consistent blocking from performance to performance, and the retirement of dilapidated shows. If, in 1951, Lily Pons created a mild furor by sneaking into act 4 of Rigoletto in see-through tights, the day when artists would wear their own regalia was over. In planning the closing season, Bing did his own accounting. He included those he considered his best productions, he discarded most of his “biggest flops,” by which he meant the box-office busts: Eugene Onegin, Ernani, Don Pasquale, and Così fan tutte. As far back as 1959, Gutman put it on the record that the final 39th Street season, then projected for 1961–62, would be built around “the pearls of the Bing regime.” The concept survived the maddening four-year delay, and 1965–66 did indeed feature many of Bing’s hits.

  How real was the impact of the directors who crossed from the legitimate to the lyric theater? How real could it be? Margaret Webster was reduced to bemoaning the conditions that sabotaged dramatic purpose. In the three weeks prio
r to the first performance of Don Carlo, a sprawling work unfamiliar to the chorus and to many of the soloists, she had to vie for rehearsal space with four other operas in preparation and was allowed only twelve hours on the main stage. She repaired to the “roof” stage high in the building, Sherry’s Bar, the lobby, the restrooms, and whatever other nook or cranny she could commandeer. Her hard-won results were compromised as soon as there was a cast change, sometimes by the second or third performance. Not only did directors play second fiddle to the music staff, they were inevitably overwhelmed by the force of tradition. Joseph Mankiewicz, so inventive in the movies, could do little more than freshen La Bohème (Dec. 27, 1952). When, early in the run, bits of his staging began to melt away, he asked, as had Webster, that his name be removed from the program. He never returned to the Met. Cyril Ritchard had tightened up Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Feb. 19, 1954) and had thrown out its most tired jokes. His subsequent productions, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Nov. 14, 1955), La Périchole, Le Nozze di Figaro (Oct. 30, 1959), and The Gypsy Baron (Nov. 25, 1959), were even less intrepid. Those who hoped Cav/Pag (Nov. 7, 1958) would be invigorated by José Quintero, renowned for staging Eugene O’Neill, could only have been disap-pointed.51