Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  In time, it became clear that if Lincoln Center was to receive what amounted to a significant subsidy from the State of New York, the theater meant for ballet alone would have to make room for the New York City Opera, also resident at City Center. The Metropolitan board met on February 11, 1960, to consider the question. The opinion of the Met had not been solicited, but Anthony Bliss, the Association president, thought it politic to make public the board consensus nonetheless. He acknowledged that proximity might affect the box office adversely and create confusion in fund-raising. He preempted Bing’s case that City Opera’s presence in the complex would “represent a lowering of the standard of perfection which Lincoln Center had set for itself.” Bliss recommended all the same that the Association not object to the invitation to City Opera. Mrs. Belmont’s conciliatory view was that there was a place for a “moderate size theatre where ballet, intimate operas, and new American works and new American artists may be presented.” Spofford drove the decisive point: that funding would be available to Lincoln Center only if the “poor man’s opera” were included. Opposition would gain the Met nothing but bad publicity. Bing spoke against what he called a “capitulation to considerations which in the long run have nothing to do with the best interests of the Metropolitan and were, in fact, basically inimical to those interests.” He compared City Opera to the “provincial opera houses of Europe rather than those in the first rank such as Vienna, La Scala and Covent Garden in which category the Metropolitan was a peer.” He warned that a positive decision might well prove “catastrophic” to the Met and to the standing of Lincoln Center. The Met directors voted unanimously for capitulation.

  “Save the Met”

  Sol Hurok sparked the movement to save the theater on 39th Street, hoping to repeat the miracle performed by Isaac Stern in saving Carnegie Hall six years earlier. The “Save the Met” campaign ran counter to the postures of Lincoln Center, of the Met board, and of the company management. The Metropolitan Opera Association had leased its land to Keystone Associates; Keystone was itching to clear the site and begin construction of a commercial skyscraper. The Metropolitan was counting on the desperately needed $200,000 annual income (rising gradually to $600,000) to offset its higher Lincoln Center operating costs. Then there was the gnawing fear of competition. If the theater remained standing, it might well be booked by visiting opera companies. The official line was that as long as the Old Met lived, its magic would deflect allegiance from the New Met (Post, Jan. 14, 1967). Lawyers and publicists contested the terrain for nearly a year. The press, and then the courts, and then the New York State legislature, and then the courts again got into the act. So did the politicians when public pressure on the side of preservation mounted: Senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits, Mayor John Lindsay (who waffled in the end), and Governor Nelson Rockefeller (who was caught between his early pro–Old Met stance and the push-back from the family’s promotion of Lincoln Center). Even the office of President Lyndon Johnson was heard from. Socialites were joined in last-ditch efforts by Leonard Bernstein, Marian Anderson, Vladimir Horowitz, Agnes De Mille, and Isaac Stern. When it appeared the tide was turning in favor of the old house the unsentimental Bing had no problem playing the heavy: “Stupidity has triumphed. The combination of irresponsible amateurs and frightened politicians has done it again; an old conductor [surely Stokowski] and an aging choreographer [Agnes De Mille] among others can proudly look at the wreck. Now let them save the real Met and then show us how to run the old one. I cannot wait. New Yorkers will thank their distinguished Governor and Mayor when the real Met will face financial ruin and the old one will run its first shoddy movie. Well done.” Bing and his troops prevailed. To the chagrin of devotees from all classes, on January 17, 1967, the wrecking ball began its assault on the “Yellow Brick Brewery.” The Old Met suffered the fate of the recently demolished Pennsylvania Station.3

  The New House

  As early as 1955, Bing had instructed his closest advisors to set down their desiderata for the “actual physical plant and building.” Max Rudolf responded with an approximation of the number of rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms, and offices, and with reflections on the size of the stage. The pit, he wrote, “must be radically different from our present pit which is too long and not sufficiently deep.” He stressed the importance of a hydraulic lift, a television monitor, and a speaker system to connect the stage to the dressing rooms. John Gutman took up the issue of the auditorium. He liked neither the modern squared-off solution with one or two overhanging balconies, nor the traditional horseshoe of the current Met with its awful sight lines. Could there be something in between? Like Bing, he sought four thousand places, no more than the old house and certainly not the forty-five hundred advocated by some. Bing argued that it would be a trial to sell that many tickets, and, besides, that the acoustics would be compromised by the greater volume of the hall. He brought up the matter of boxes, the source of the schism between elitists and populists in the early days of opera in New York; they remained, he knew, dear to status-conscious subscribers: “Personally, I am very much for retaining boxes but how it can be done with the modern shape and without impairing sightlines I would not know.” Then there was the question of orchestra floor aisles. In March 1960, the board debated two seating arrangements, one, preferred by Bing, with aisles, the other without. A sense of the meeting registered eight votes for aisles, three against, and five abstaining.4

  The architects found a middle ground between the traditional horseshoe and the contemporary rectangle. They kept the conventional color scheme: seats and carpeting red, ceiling, proscenium, and balcony faces gold. They specified twenty-nine boxes, six fewer than their seniors had carved out, and eliminated the floor-to-ceiling dividers that impeded visibility. With the exception of those at the extreme sides of the balconies, all spectators would have virtually unobstructed views of the stage, a marked improvement over the one-in-six blighted seats of the Old Met. Final drawings showed an orchestra floor with two aisles. The auditorium had 3,824 seats, with 253 additional standing room spots, for a total of 4,077, very near the 3,625 seats of the old house and its 224 standing spots. Still, the capacity at Lincoln Center would outstrip that of all other opera theaters. Six rapid elevators with stops on each floor would take the place of the creaky lifts that toggled from the street to the family circle and back. Latecomers would no longer be allowed to disturb their neighbors; they would be welcome to view the action on closed-circuit television until the first intermission. There would be not one but three dining facilities. The theater would offer parking under Lincoln Center Plaza. Air conditioning would permit a longer season, thirty-one weeks compared to twenty-five, and 192 subscription performances rather than 146.5

  The new theater, seven stories above ground and three below, clad in travertine marble and glass, was to have a footprint much greater than the old. The central stage would have the approximate dimensions of its predecessor, as would the proscenium opening, among the smallest of the world’s major opera venues, thereby allowing the reuse of the many sets sized to 39th Street. But, and here was the important point, one rear and two side stages would multiply the playing area many fold. While one décor was on the main stage, another could be at the ready on an adjacent platform, permitting far shorter scene changes. The rear and side stages could be rolled to the center; the center stage could be elevated and replaced by another rising from below. Sets would no longer be trucked back and forth to the warehouse or, worse, parked in all weathers on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk. Costumes would no longer be transported off-site or subjected to punishing heat under the roof. The carpenter shop would accommodate the assembly of an entire set; the floor of the scenic studio would be large enough to handle the painting of prodigious drops. And, standing at the privileged focal point of an island of culture, flanked by the New York State Theatre to the south and Philharmonic Hall to the north, the Metropolitan would be the leading partner of a coordinated arts community.

  In the
months and years of design and construction, tempers flared most heatedly over acoustics. And it was the acoustics consultant working with the architectural firm of Harrison and Abramovitz who bore the brunt of the pervasive anxiety. Wisely, the management refused to pronounce itself on acoustical strategies, never deviating from this mantra: “The new Metropolitan Opera House should have the same acoustics as the old one with a little more brilliance.” It was not until April 11, 1966, five months before opening night, that a sound test could be trusted. The terrifying occasion was the final student performance of the season, La Fanciulla del West, relocated at the last minute to the new house. The press corps was invited to join thirty-two hundred teenagers as they alighted from a convoy of yellow buses. Sound checks included gunshots and thunderous chords while measurements were taken throughout the theater. Journalists, sworn to secrecy, found ways of letting the cat out of the bag without altogether breaking their word. It was happy news. One reviewer reported that Harrison, who had been seen walking about the theater pale and stern during act 1, a noise meter in hand, had come into the lobby at intermission, “his face wreathed in smiles” (Times, April 12, 1966). At that moment, the management might have been grateful to have been last in line behind Philharmonic Hall and the State Theatre. The symphony’s new home, drawn by Max Abramovitz, Harrison’s partner, and Philip Johnson’s digs for the ballet and the City Opera had been panned for their disastrous acoustics. As Harrison recognized, “In an opera house everything has to be designed in terms of sound. Because sound is the main reason to go to the opera. But after the Philharmonic experience the whole science of acoustics was washed away.” Among the many lessons learned were these: that the carpeting could be no more than an inch and a quarter deep lest it dampen the sound, and that sheathing the walls with red Congolese wood (all harvested from a single tree!) would cause them to reverberate “just like a violin.” In the final reckoning, the invoice for the Metropolitan came to $45 million, startlingly high when contrasted with the $23 million initial estimate and the $55 million projected for the entire Lincoln Center complex. The cost of the whole would be a whopping $190 million.6

  OPENING NIGHT

  Everyone agreed: the sight lines and especially the acoustics had left the Old Met in the dust. The other shoe, admittedly less weighty, dropped with the art and architecture reviews. Ada Louise Huxtable, the distinguished architecture critic of the Times, and John Canaday, its art critic, were in sync. The edifice, outside and in, was in Huxtable’s words “a throwback” and in Canaday’s “retardatory avant-gardism.” Huxtable began her column with a description of what might have been, still not a modern masterpiece, but significantly better than what actually was. The original design had called for “structurally independent stage and seating enclosed within an arcaded shell, the two separated by an insulating cushion of space.” Services, administrative offices, and work areas were to have been consigned to a tower west of the stage. The nearly ninety-foot-tall arcaded windows of the façade (an element that recalled the architect’s by now yellowed plans for the aborted Rockefeller Center opera house) were to have been continuous north and south. What emerged were essentially unadorned sidewalls. Many services were relocated to the spaces between the outer and inner shells. As to the interior, Harrison had pressed for a more modern design, but his client had insisted on middle-of-the-road solutions at every juncture. Huxtable recorded a “strong temptation to close [her] eyes.” Conceding, as all did, that hearing and seeing the opera came first, she concluded, “it is secondary but no less disappointing, to have a monument manqué.”

  FIGURE 29. Model with side arcades and tower for the new house at Lincoln Center (K. Thomas; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  In his notice, Canaday checked off the art works chosen to embellish the building’s interior: three bronze statues by Aristide Maillol stood in immensely tall lobby niches; a bronze cast of Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s “Kneeling Woman” capped the double staircase. On the walls of one of the restaurants, “The Top of the Met” (nicknamed “Dufy’s Tavern,” or, alternately, “Bing’s Bistro”), hung murals by Raoul Dufy. They had belonged to the sets he designed for the New York run of Jean Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon in 1951. But what attracted the most attention were the Marc Chagall murals “Les Sources de la Musique” and “Le Triomphe de la Musique,” which, incidentally, bore the semblances of Rudolf Bing and ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. These giant murals were an afterthought, a $300,000 attempt to cover the bare walls where the north and south arcades were to have been. Canaday thought them “hardly daring.” They might just as easily have been painted “forty years ago, or [by] any person with a nimble wrist and access to a set of color reproductions of Chagall’s recent (i.e., since 1930) work.” The object that drew the greatest fire was Mary Callery’s sculpture above the proscenium. Canaday had this to say: “nominally the most modern work in the place, but its weaknesses are such that only its placement, pinned up like a piece of junk jewelry, atop a proscenium arch that seems to have been built of gilded Nabisco Wafers, could lend it any illusion of weight and strength.” He concluded, “The Dufy murals may, in the long run, prove to be the most successful decorations in the place, simply because they are the least assuming in a complex that, over-all, suffers from gassy inflation.”

  FIGURE 30. Interior of Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 1966 (courtesy Photofest)

  Be that as it may, many who entered the opera house for the first time or gaped from the plaza through the glass walls were bowled over by its size, its glitter, and the glamour of the event. Ticket holders had been mailed a large silk-screen program that reproduced the red and gold color scheme of the house. They had contributed $400,000 to the Met coffers on this gala night, twelve times the take of an ordinary sold-out performance. The banquet list included Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Mrs. Imelda Marcos, various other foreign dignitaries, Ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Governor Rockefeller, and Mayor Lindsay. Also present was John D. Rockefeller III, chairman of the Lincoln Center board, as were several Whitney and Vanderbilt descendants of the original founders. In attendance as well was the daughter of Otto Kahn; no one had fought longer or harder than he to see this moment. On the plaza, cheering as the VIPs trod the red carpet, were hundreds of New Yorkers. Twenty-five protestors carried signs that read, “End the War in Vietnam.” They were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

  The joy of the occasion was dampened by worry over the strike called for the day after opening night. That the continuation of the season was in jeopardy had been well publicized. When the 1964 contract was up for renewal, rather than press for a new agreement the orchestra opted for a two-year extension to 1966. The union strategy was to defer the 1964 battle in favor of an all-out offensive timed to coincide with the Lincoln Center opening. Bing would then presumably find it impossible to hold the sword of cancellation over the heads of the musicians. The orchestra would have the upper hand. Its demands included a reduction in obligatory weekly performances from seven to five, improved health insurance and pension benefits, and five weeks of annual vacation. The cloud that hovered over September 16 was lifted during the second intermission of the world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra when Bing took the stage to announce that the strike had been averted. This real-life coup de théâtre was met with the longest ovation of the evening.

  AMERICAN OPERA

  Antony and Cleopatra, September 16, 1966; Mourning Becomes Electra, March 17, 1967

  Bing and his artistic team had concocted a stupendous opening season replete with nine new productions, an astounding four in the first eight days. The plan proved to be madness. Antony and Cleopatra and Die Frau ohne Schatten were company premieres; their novelty was the least of the leaps into the unknown. Each of their designers wanted to put the exciting new stage machinery through its paces. Particularly irresistible was the vaunted turntable, built by an outfit that produ
ced platforms for revolving rooftop restaurants. In Antony and Cleopatra, the disk was to carry a huge sphinx surrounded by three hundred marching Egyptians. It was to move forward while rotating. But when the switch was finally thrown during rehearsal, the turntable refused to budge; someone had miscalculated the maximum load by a factor of ten. The overtaxed crew was put to work retrofitting the sphinx so that it could be turned by stagehands hidden within. The repair of the turntable would take nearly four years. Then there was the matter of the schedule, regularly disrupted as one director worked to solve an unanticipated problem and another, along with cast, orchestra, and chorus, waited, sometimes for hours. The principal culprits were the sixteen complex scene changes of Antony and Cleopatra. An anxious management piled rehearsal on rehearsal at the expense of the other productions. The company was exhausted, as was Bing’s purse, by the unbudgeted overtime. The first week’s calendar had to be adjusted, to the great annoyance of ticket holders. Antony and Cleopatra opened as promised. La Gioconda was delayed by three days, La Traviata by two, and Die Frau ohne Schatten by more than a week. Bing took the blame: “The fault was mine. I had overplanned the season.”7