The optimism of fresh starts was tempered by the circumstances in which each member of the troika found himself in fall 1975. Bliss was haunted by the fear that the Association would be broke by spring. He knew the company was mired in the deepest hole since the Depression, aside from the ruinous first Lincoln Center season. The infusion of the $2.6 million insurance payment in compensation for the losses suffered in the Bronx warehouse fire, the $5 million legacy of Martha Baird Rockefeller, and the $3.9 million in proceeds from the sale of the 39th Street property would be gone. The operational deficit was chronic and growing. Dexter found an administrative technical staff in which “not a single member . . . could read a blueprint or had practical experience in judging what time, manpower, and space would be needed for any given stage design.” Master carpenter Joe Volpe was the exception. As for Levine, he estimated that it would take five to ten years to “bring [the orchestra] up to his standards,” a project he was prepared to undertake without firing a single musician.3
That fall and winter, one moving event appeared to signal the passing of an era, and another a new beginning. On October 15, 1975, a memorial mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Richard Tucker, who had died early in the year of a heart attack while on a concert stop in Kalamazoo. Tucker’s final Met performance as Canio in the December 3, 1974, Pagliacci reminded listeners that three decades after his Met debut, the tenor was still one of the company’s treasures. Tucker had been a friend of New York’s Cardinal Cooke, had sung at Alfred E. Smith dinners, and had often aided Catholic charities. The mass is believed to be the first such tribute bestowed on a Jew. Before Tucker, only Leopold Damrosch, Anton Seidl, and Heinrich Conried had been honored with a funeral service on the Met stage. In January 1976, Sarah Caldwell was the first woman to conduct an opera at the Met. Her La Traviata was received with respect: “She led a sober, carefully paced performance . . . that was free from idiosyncracy, but replete with ideas and spirit”; “Her conducting . . . was brisk but not pell-mell in tempo, it was accurate in rhythm. . . . Above all, Miss Caldwell stressed clarity.” 4
On the labor front, it was more of the same. Management proposed reducing the players’ contracted weeks from fifty-one to forty-three a year. Bliss issued the threat the orchestra had heard before: “If we don’t open on schedule, we may never open again” (Times, Oct. 9, 1975). A strike was deferred until December 31. The two-year agreement was announced during an intermission of the New Year’s Eve Tosca. The musicians were guaranteed forty-four weeks of work and supplemental unemployment benefits that compensated for half their salary losses. Eighteen months later, it was back to the tired old dance. In summer 1977, management warned that the season would not begin until an agreement was reached. To labor, this was tantamount to a lockout. The union countered with demands for a pay increase, eight weeks of vacation, and a required maximum of four performances a week (just over a decade earlier it had been seven). By early September, the musicians had agreed to a three-year contract that provided for a 7 percent salary increase, without adjusting the number of weekly performances.
While nervous members of the board clamored for downsizing—elimination of the tour, shortening of the season, reversal of contractual guarantees—Bliss was convinced that the way out was through growth, and that growth would require the modernization of structures and protocols. He established a marketing department, where, surprisingly for the mid-1970s, there had been none. He swelled the advertising budget from $30,000 to $400,000 in one year. A full-page ad in the Times lead with, “You are cordially invited to strike a blow for civilization. Subscribe to the Metropolitan Opera!” It divulged the season calendar, casts included, information never before available to the public. The company added three thousand subscriptions; attendance rose 10 percent to 95 percent of capacity. The new marketing broom met with opposition. Culture, asserted the detractors, was one thing, commerce another, and the balance was tilting to the commercial side. The development office and its increasingly countrywide donor list grew apace with its marketing counterpart. In time, marketing and development spread to the point that they drove the scene shops across the river to Weehawken. With the help of the Opera Guild, a direct-mail campaign designed to multiply giving was launched. The Met board underwent a profound reorganization, concentrating power in fewer hands and lending the directorship a more national profile.5
The policy planning committee met on March 17, 1977, to discuss the “Survival of the Company,” as the minutes later put it. Voices of doom predicted bankruptcy down a relatively short road if cutbacks, specifically curtailed seasons, were not immediately factored into artistic decisions and contract talks. In May, Frank E. Taplin, lawyer and accomplished amateur pianist, replaced William Rockefeller as president of the Association. He would soon report that thanks to support amounting to $12.7 million from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, foundations, and individuals—a significant increase over the $8.7 million of the previous year—“operating expenses had been met without invading capital for the first time in eight years” (Aug. 26, 1977).
The stunning innovation of the 1976–77 season, and the one with the longest and most profitable legs, was the March 15 telecast of La Bohème, the first of the “Live from the Met” series, and the first such transmission beamed into American homes since Rudolf Bing’s 1950 opening night Don Carlo. It was not the Met alone that reaped the rewards of the telecast: four million viewers donated nearly $1 million to the Public Broadcasting System. PBS scheduled three “Live from the Met” telecasts for 1977–78, Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, and Cav/Pag, to be carried by 260 stations. Two years later, Austria, France, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and West Germany would receive one live performance per year. As evidence of the impact of the media project, in 1979, subsequent to the opening night telecast, the Guild was swamped with thirty thousand requests for the Opera News issue devoted to Otello. The magnitude of that number made a deep impression. Bliss observed, “In the long range television will become important to our survival” (Time, Oct. 8, 1979). Vastly improved technology enhanced video definition; the availability of FM simulcast bypassed the inadequate audio components of standard television sets and offered listeners a sound image comparable to the one they heard on the Saturday matinee broadcasts. Radio had served the fund-raising needs of the Depression. The Met now had an even more powerful tool with which to penetrate the opera consciousness of a new generation and loosen its purse strings. The viewership of opera telecasts was estimated at eight to nine million, twice that of average PBS programming. And two years later, a spanking new media department, the first of its kind for a performing arts organization, joined the fledgling marketing and older development departments. Levine articulated his stand on “Live from the Met” on the occasion of the RCA release of a concert featuring Leontyne Price and Marilyn Horne: “This recording embodies the entire concert of March 28, 1982, exactly as it occurred on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. No material was taken from rehearsals; no remake recording sessions took place. As with all of the ‘Live from the Met’ presentations, the principle of documenting the truly live performance guided us, and in our view ultimately carried a more sincere and significant artistic statement to our audience.”6
In 1978, New York was in a position to sell bond notes for the first time since the meltdown of 1975. The Met too was breathing easier. The company would soon be in the black for the third year in a row. Meanwhile, Levine was coming up against the fifth anniversary of his music directorship. To his mind, only 40 percent of 1976–77 could be fairly ascribed to the new triumvirate, and 80 percent of 1977–78. The first season planned entirely by Levine-Dexter under Bliss was 1978–79. By 1980, it was time to gauge how Levine’s promise of an expanded repertoire was faring. In the final three years of the Bing administration, operas outside the core accounted for little more than 10 percent of the repertoire; in the three Chapin y
ears, for little more than 20 percent; from 1977 to 1980, for 28 percent. And looking ahead to the whole of the decade, 1975–1985, to 33 percent. As for the modified stagione policy, in early 1977, the music director reported to the board that “the management has been successful in getting artists for longer periods of time by putting more performances closer together” (Feb. 17, 1977). By 1983, the Metropolitan was presenting only four to five titles per week. Stagione scheduling had become the norm: twenty of the season’s twenty-four productions were on the stagione plan.
A point of contention dating back to his earliest days as principal conductor, and that would persist long into the future, was Levine’s monopoly of the pit, not the quality of his presence, but the quantity that left little room for others. In 1975, Levine explained, “I’ve offered productions to lots of leading conductors, but everyone is terribly busy, including myself. What I’d like is to get a better level of sound on a night-to-night basis, and hope that periodically a Solti or a Davis or a Mehta will come” (Times, July 29). The Met boasted no debut of a top-flight international conductor between 1975 and 1980, not Carlo Maria Giulini’s nor Riccardo Muti’s. On January 17, 1980, the issue was before the board. Levine’s refrain was essentially unchanged. Conductors in high demand were reluctant to commit to a minimum of seven weeks for a new Met production when a lucrative Philharmonic gig had them in and out of New York in five days. Some maestros would come only for a new production, others were exquisitely selective in their choice of repertoire. Whatever the reason, New York missed out not only on a broad spectrum of conductors but on the value added of the star singers they would bring along. As the evenhanded Martin Mayer points out, “There is an argument to be made that other major conductors shun a house where the music director appears to have first choice of artists, works, and rehearsal time.” From 1975 to 2010, Levine would preside over all but seven opening nights and three-quarters of the nearly one hundred telecasts. The other side of the coin, to Mayer’s thinking, was that “conductors and singers are drawn to work with companies disciplined by a resident leader.” Irving Kolodin’s acerbic contribution to the debate in “Is James Levine Wrecking the Met?” concludes that Levine “has allowed his ambition to cloud his judgment.” Kolodin contends that, in his first five years, Levine used the Met to try out operas he planned to conduct elsewhere, Parsifal at Bayreuth, for example. Maybe. But then again, Levine’s first Parsifal, in 1979, is said to have left Leonard Bernstein in tears.7
Dexter’s Stage
By the end of the 1979–80 season, it was no secret that Dexter’s authority had been circumvented, if not subverted, by his partners. At a January 1980 meeting of the executive committee, Bliss characterized Dexter as “a troublesome colleague. . . . His temper tantrums and abuse of colleagues have proved intolerable.” Bliss and Levine tried hard to persuade the press that the triumvirate had never been intended to last, that once Dexter had brought the technical operation up to snuff, the position of director of production would have outlived its usefulness (Times, July 16, 1980). In a long memorandum to Levine and Bliss dated September 24, 1980, Dexter complained of “being under some kind of attack, more or less day by day,” of being ignored, contradicted, undermined. By then, the British director could take satisfaction in having left his imprint on the company. Rarely had the likes of his spare, conceptual schemes been seen in a theater identified with opulent décors and literal stagings. Dexter’s aesthetic politics were known to the many New Yorkers who remembered the pantomime he devised for Pizarro’s crossing of the Andes in the 1965 Broadway run of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun. At the Met, his calling card had been the 1974 I Vespri Siciliani, stripped of picturesque signs of thirteenth-century Palermo. For a time, the claims of frugality trumped those of tradition, and cost-conscious trustees were happy enough to acquiesce to Dexter’s subversive stage. In a 1977 letter to a patron, the director of production decried the grandiosity that the gilded opera house invited, and the clutter: “If there is not too much on the stage you can see any detail, you can see every face and movement. If you concentrate and if you are shown where to look. It’s a question of angle, of stage relationship with the audience, and volume. . . . The audience should be looking for faces, not windmills.” But Dexter’s dazzling originality came at a price: having to put up with the man himself. As Volpe described it, “When Dexter entered a room, he altered the atmosphere. Everything about him was dark—his gaze, his temper, a beard that came and went.” With varying degrees of austerity—and success—the twelve new productions he staged through 1979–80, nearly half the total for the period, hewed to his program of reform. He articulated its tenets repeatedly in interviews, and in the letters, memoranda, and diary entries assembled for his posthumous, incomplete autobiography, The Honourable Beast. Under Dexter’s irascible ways, acid tongue, and relentless quest for excellence, the cash-strapped Met became a cutting-edge theatre.8
Dexter first imposed his vision on two of the very grandest operas, Aïda and Le Prophète. His Spartan credo served neither Verdi nor Meyerbeer. By purging Aïda (Feb. 3, 1976) of what he considered gratuitous spectacle, Dexter sought to disclose the racial, political, and cultural chasm that separated the repressive Egyptians (read white) from the subjugated Ethiopians (read black). The languishing princess lost her couch, the victorious hero lost his horse, the large scale ballet of the Triumphal Scene was reduced to a pas de deux to the death between two male dancers, a haughty pharaonic warrior and a defiant Ethiopian captive. Standing sideways, hands pronated, Radamès, Amneris, the King, Ramfis, and the populace of Memphis and Thebes were constricted by the hieratic attitudes of Egyptian iconography, whereas the Ethiopians were free to move naturally. But in banishing the Hollywood colossal, Dexter unleashed the B-movie gestures of The Mummy. As for the principals, Leontyne Price, although still glorying in her upper register, was beginning to exert her will over Verdi’s rhythms; Marilyn Horne’s Amneris was underpowered at those moments that want the punch of an authentic Italian dramatic mezzo. Le Prophète (January 18, 1977) had been forgotten by the Met for fifty years. Elsewhere, Meyerbeer was making something of a comeback. Dexter staged the opera on a unit set representing a half-finished Gothic cathedral into which were dragged wagons suggestive of the various locales: a castle, an inn, a war camp, a city square. As the director saw it, “While not explicitly stated, the opera will appear to be acted out by . . . the craftsmen who are building the cathedral, as a kind of morality play that attempts to explain the relationship of man to God” (Times, Jan. 16, 1977). The misbegotten stratagem was dressed in Peter Wexler’s drab décor. “What Mr. Dexter has dismissed . . . is the scenic power of Meyerbeer’s opera, based on carefully planned contrasts of moods, colors, decors, depths and densities of setting. He has achieved the visual monotony the composer sought to avoid.” It was left to Meyerbeer and the singers to supply the grandeur of le grand opéra. The stentorian James McCracken found an elegant, unearthly falsetto and voix mixte (the melding of chest voice and head voice) for the prophet’s divine visions. Renata Scotto charged the ungrateful part of Berthe with a manic intensity that compensated for her strident top notes. Marilyn Horne, the astonishing Fidès, had the plangent timbre, the agility, the two-and-a-half-octave range, and the manner for what is arguably the most demanding role written for her voice type. She sang “with the virtuosity that among mezzos is hers alone these days.” In fact, no Met contralto/mezzo-soprano in the five decades since Margarete Matzenauer, the previous Fidès, could have risen to her performance.9
Dexter was in his element in twentieth-century opera. The Met premiere of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, in English, took place on February 5, 1977. The director came to consider this production the exemplum of his method. By cannibalizing costumes and sets from the warehouse, he kept the cost at an absurdly low $65,000. The décor consisted of a sloping cruciform platform and a few props—a chandelier, a gate, an altar. Dexter’s memoirs impart his relief at Callas’s r
efusal of the role of the Old Prioress and his joy at Régine Crespin’s acceptance; she had been the New Prioress in the opera’s 1957 Paris premiere. The remarkable cast was headed by Maria Ewing as the tormented Blanche and Shirley Verrett as the sublime Madame Lidoine. Jessye Norman and other interpreters have faced the guillotine in Dexter’s staging and David Reppa’s minimalist bricolage in seven subsequent revivals, the most recent in 2012–13. The director of production was riding high. Later that season, he would again affirm the viability of twentieth-century opera with another house premiere, Alban Berg’s Lulu, in the unfinished two-act version. The production, “sensitively directed, lovingly conducted, and intelligently and aptly designed,” struck a balance between expressionism and naturalism in the fin-de-siècle/art moderne sets of Jocelyn Herbert. Donald Gramm and Tatiana Troyanos were luxury casting in the roles of Dr. Schön and Countess Geschwitz. The title role was intended for Teresa Stratas; she withdrew a month before the first night in a dispute over rehearsal conditions. Her cover, Carole Farley, an experienced Lulu, had little of the magnetism Stratas would radiate when three years later the Met put on the full version of Berg’s opera with its third act, edited by Friedrich Cerha. Dexter and his team had made the case for Lulu: the box office in 1977 was strong and in the curtailed 1980 season more than respectable. In 2009–10, Fabio Luisi led the work, still fresh in the Dexter-Herbert edition.10
Grand Opera: The Story of the Met Page 33
