Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  GELB’S “NEW MET”: 2006–2007

  “What fuels me,” Gelb told CNN Money in 2011, “is the fear of the art form not surviving. To think that an art form or an institution like this is immune to the possibility of extinction would be a big mistake. . . . How can we possibly keep this thing going when the audience at the Met was literally dying of old age?”—a question driven by the findings of the 2005–06 survey that put the average age of regular patrons at sixty-six. Gelb was convinced that behind the alarming number lay a failing endemic to the classical music business. Prophesying its consequences had been his mission for more than a decade and a half: “There is a danger whether you are running a record label or an orchestra or an opera house, of not understanding who the public is. It doesn’t mean you should pander to the public, but you should understand that there is a public. You can’t operate an opera house in a vacuum, and I think more often than not that is how opera houses operate.” Each of the seven points of Gelb’s agenda spoke to this “vacuum”; all were designed to appeal to the sensibilities of a more demographically diverse clientele. Thanks to an expanded, increasingly heterogeneous pool, the Met’s share of the cultural market of New York and beyond would grow, saving the company from stagnation, even “extinction,” and securing a vigorous artistic and financial future. The trick would be to hold on to the largely conservative converted while proselytizing among the flock in thrall to contemporary media.6

  However modestly, publicizing the Met began with its founding. In 1883, Abbey joined other New York impresarios in listing his weekly programs and casts in small inserts in the theater sections of the city’s newspapers. It was not until the mid-1970s that the company began taking out sizable independent ads splashed with blurbs and photos, a practice neighboring playhouses had adopted decades earlier. Anthony Bliss had had to press hard for this break with discretion, arguing that the path to financial stability on the heels of the debilitating 1969 strike and the mid-1970s fiscal crisis was through growth, and that growth depended on publicity. On his watch, the Met chanced the full-page “You are invited to strike a blow for civilization” ad some found impossibly déclassé, set up a marketing department, and multiplied the advertising budget more than tenfold to $400,000 in one year. All the same, the perception persisted into the twenty-first century that “the Metropolitan Opera has wrinkled its elegant nose at advertising campaigns, preferring discreet sales tactics like direct mail and phone solicitations.” By early 2006, big changes were on the way. On January 16, months before Gelb was to take official charge, Thomas Michel, the new director of marketing, was ready to report to the board on a sweeping campaign: his office would produce brochures targeted at distinctly different audiences, and it would place ads not only in New York Magazine, in Time Out New York, in the New York Observer, and in the New York Sun, but also, in an effort to reach a younger crowd, through e-mail services such as TheaterMania, Playbill, and DailyCandy and, for tourists, on Expedia and Travelocity. The Met would no longer be identified by its imposing façade and opulent chandeliers; it would be branded instead through signs of theatricality and stardom. In April, Gelb gave the directors a preview of a fall Saks Fifth Avenue window dressed in Cio-Cio-San’s wedding kimono for the new opening night Madama Butterfly. By early September, the Met’s $500,000 campaign burst onto New York streets; posters were plastered everywhere, on telephone booths, at subway stations and bus stops, on the sides of the buses themselves, and on the roofs of taxi cabs. Business woman and Met managing director Agnes Varis picked up the tab.7

  Radio

  No sooner was Gelb installed than the stately Saturday afternoon radio ritual mushroomed into a 24/7 groaning board for opera lovers. Since 2006, via satellite radio, he has offered SiriusXM subscribers broadcasts culled from an archive fifteen hundred recordings strong and, in season, three live performances weekly. In addition, the Internet has provided streaming audio and, for a fee, a library of sound and video transcriptions accessible on computer, smartphone, and other receiving devices. What has lately become available can be counted a giant step in the long journey begun in defeat on January 12, 1910, when, alas, the first two transmissions from 39th Street were doomed by an inadequate apparatus. Fremstad’s Tosca, Destinn’s Santuzza, and Caruso’s Canio were barely audible to the handful of listeners who held telephone receivers to their ears. Two decades would elapse before general manager Gatti-Casazza could be persuaded that microphones and amplifiers had met the fidelity demands of grand opera. In 1931, the Met began inveigling its way into millions of homes across the country, advancing the elusive ambition of naturalizing the stubbornly European art form. Almost from the start, announcer Milton Cross was the unmistakable voice of the Met. In orotund tones and purple prose, he told the stories of the operas, described the sets and costumes, and added his own enthusiastic observations to the applause. Regular intermission features were “Opera News on the Air,” often devoted to the musical analyses of conductor-educator-impresario Boris Goldovsky, and “Opera Quiz,” a jocular precursor of Trivial Pursuit (in which opera does the mezzo-soprano sing an aria about her cat?) and questions that called for longer answers from the knowledgeable contestants. Later came singers’ roundtables and reminiscences about the stars of the past. In 1940, Texaco took over the prestigious sponsorship; its sixty-three years remain the longest run in radio history. Cross’s more than four-decade streak ended with his death in 1975. He was succeeded by Peter Allen and, on Allen’s retirement in 2004, by the current host, Margaret Juntwait. For more than eighty years, Met broadcasts have generated a pool of opera consumers readily and repeatedly tapped for often sorely needed revenue. Radio was key to the Depression “Save the Met” campaign as it was in 1940 to acquiring the house from the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company.

  Recorded Sound

  The opera house and the technology of sound reproduction first found each other at the dawn of the twentieth century; without commercial intent, Lionel Mapleson, the company’s librarian, captured excerpts from performances between 1901 and 1903. At that very moment, Caruso cut his first records, launching his phenomenal career as a phonograph artist. The fame and prestige of the Metropolitan spread with the sound of the tenor’s voice and of those of his colleagues, acoustically recorded on Victor, Columbia, and other labels. Beginning in the mid-1920s, opera singers benefited from the higher fidelity achieved through electronic recording processes. But it was not until 1947 that the Met produced its own albums with Columbia Records. In the mid-1950s, there was a flurry of twenty titles, most abridged, the result of a collaboration with the Book-of-the-Month Club. Transcriptions of historic broadcasts were offered as premiums to contributors to the Metropolitan Opera Fund beginning in the 1970s. And in 1990, the company began recording for CBS, Sony, Philips, and Deutsche Grammophon, an arrangement that flourished until DVD spelled the end of opera produced expressly for the audio format of the compact disc. In 2011, and in partnership with Sony Classical, the Metropolitan began to release CDs of its vast archive of broadcasts. Among these are some of the company’s most cherished portrayals—Melchior and Flagstad as Tristan and Isolde, Björling and Sayão as Roméo and Juliette, Caballé as Luisa Miller, Vickers as Florestan, Price and Corelli in Il Trovatore.

  Television

  Of Gelb’s multiple electronic incursions—from satellite radio to ring tones—“The Met: Live in HD” has left the deepest and broadest imprint on the cultural atlas. The potential of pay TV was tested twice by Bing through closed-circuit transmissions to movie theaters, and then by Volpe with the cable transmission of the 1991 opening night gala. But the story of the Metropolitan Opera on television, free to anyone within broadcast radius, began with the birth of commercial TV just before the entry of the United States into the Second World War.

  In 1940, W2XBS, the New York NBC channel, was on the air for a few hours a day from Wednesday through Sunday, mostly for sports, news, and movies. On March 10, the several thousand equipped households were
invited to watch an hour-long program of arias and an abridged act 1 of Pagliacci emanating from a studio in Rockefeller Center, simulcast on radio station WJZ. Among the artists featured were Licia Albanese, just a month after her New York debut, and the young Leonard Warren. Edward Johnson seized on the occasion to solicit contributions to the Metropolitan Opera Fund. Soon after the lifting of the World War II suspension of commercial television, the company was back in the game: Otello, opening night, November 29, 1948, was the first live telecast of a complete stage production in the history of the medium. Ramon Vinay and veteran TV hands Albanese and Warren led the cast. The auditorium had been wired for DC; alternating current had to be brought in to power cameras cooled by dry ice. The image was compromised by stage lighting often far dimmer than that specified for the lenses, by scenes too crowded for the small screens then current, by decrepit scenery, and by sweeping gestures calibrated to the expanse of the house. Although Variety screeched, “preem fizzles,” the broad critical consensus was positive: “The view . . . that came into one’s living room frequently was more detailed and more revealing than that obtained from a seat ‘down front’ in the Metropolitan auditorium”; “a stirring experience, about five times as stirring, I should say off-hand, as Otello by radio alone.” Live opera had taken to the medium. Two successive opening nights followed, Der Rosenkavalier and Bing’s inaugural Don Carlo, before Texaco, balking at the cost, withdrew its support.8

  Failing to secure commercial sponsorship, Bing tried closed-circuit theater television, the home of championship prize fights. The December 11, 1952, Carmen made its way to movie screens in twenty-seven cities. Despite uneven aural and visual quality, the results were encouraging enough to schedule a closed-circuit presentation of opening night 1954, acts from three operas chosen to show off the company. Sound and image had made notable strides, staging better accommodated the camera. Warren, in mufti, wearing television’s obligatory blue shirt, sang the Pagliacci “prologo” to an estimated sixty thousand to seventy thousand spectators, some in formal dress, at giant movie palaces and small art cinemas, again across twenty-seven cities. But neither the artistic nor the financial rewards justified the continuation of the project. Bing would not give up. Capitalizing on the high profile opera enjoyed in the press, a gift from Maria Callas, he again turned to commercial network television and this time secured a contract for a series of spots on Ed Sullivan’s popular “Toast of the Town,” starting in November 1956. The variety show allotted an astonishingly generous sixteen minutes to Callas and George London for the act 2 duel-to-the-death of Tosca and Scarpia. Despite unflattering closeups and wretched sound, the video preserves the crackling encounter of these two singing-actors, as compelling today as they were more than a half-century ago. Yet the majority of Sullivan’s immense audience, accustomed to a hodgepodge vaudeville lineup of acrobats, comics, and pop singers, reported switching to Steve Allen to hear Gene Autry instead, or to the tail end of Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour. The Met’s spots were cut back from five to four; on March 10, 1957, Sullivan reassured his public that the final segment, Tebaldi and Tucker in the act 4 Andrea Chénier duet, would last only four minutes. As it turned out, their splendid voices took up five minutes of Sullivan’s airtime, just a bit longer than the ventriloquist Señor Wences and his dummy.9

  On March 15, 1977, public television carried a performance of La Bohème, the first in the “Live from the Met” series. PBS was the right network; the medium was now capable of transmitting satisfactory images to large home screens; the sonics, particularly in FM stereo simulcast, did justice to Luciano Pavarotti, in peak form, as Rodolfo, and to the subtle inflections of Renata Scotto’s Mimì. Starting in the mid-1980s, as a consequence of a long-sought agreement with its unions, the company could market these performances, first as videocassettes and Laserdiscs, and then as DVDs. Soon after, Peter Gelb, as the company’s executive producer, had his first hands-on experience in filming the Met. The offerings, generally three a season, sometimes five or six, included Carmen, Il Trovatore, and Don Giovanni, but also rarities such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Lulu, Idomeneo, and Francesca da Rimini. PBS surrendered to falling ratings by scheduling only two telecasts between December 2001 and Volpe’s farewell gala of May 2006. The times and technologies were ripe for reinvention.

  In short order, Gelb sold “The Met: Live in HD” to a spectrum of stakeholders—board members, labor unions, and artists. His formula was this: transmissions would be “live,” that is, simulcast in high-definition image and sound from the Met stage on Saturday afternoons via satellite to movie theaters and art centers across the United States and beyond. Ticket prices would be kept affordable; the series would be sustained through aggressive publicity. Exhibitors took some convincing:“From the start we told the theatres that we were not looking to attract movie audiences but opera audiences. . . . We urged them to think of it more as a live sporting event or a reality show, as a reality operatic show.” On December 30, 2006, the first of six simulcasts, Die Zauberflöte, went out to ninety-eight screens and to an aggregate audience of twenty-one thousand; the second, I Puritani, to 123 screens; The First Emperor to 176; Eugene Onegin to 208. Il Barbiere di Siviglia was on view in 275 locations, and grossed $850,000, an average of more than $3,000 per screen; the average capacity reached 77 percent; Rossini would have been eighteenth in Billboard’s weekly movie rankings. Each telecast cost between $850,000 and $1 million; at 50 percent of the receipts, the Met was due about $3 million from the 2006–07 series. Sponsors, donations, and $1 million from the company’s coffers made up the difference. Despite the loss, by spring 2007, the existence of a significant niche audience for HD performances was indisputable. Opera would be a force in “alternative content,” cheek by jowl with athletes and rock bands. Variety concluded, “After years on the ropes, high art is battling back. And it’s the august Metropolitan Opera leading the way, cribbing moves from the pop culture playbook by wooing talent from other fields, adopting hip marketing strategies, exploiting ancillary revenue streams and otherwise throwing off elitist mantles.” High art had met high tech in the person of the general manager moonlighting as executive producer. On simulcast Saturdays, Gelb could be found in the satellite truck whose controls monitor the thirteen cameras that capture the more than one thousand shots of each telecast.10

  FIGURE 41. Madama Butterfly simulcast on screen outside the Met, September 25, 2006 (courtesy Corbis)

  Seven countries, the United States aside, constituted the 2006–07 “The Met: Live in HD” network: Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The next year saw the inclusion of Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Venues at home and abroad grew each season until screens in spring 2013 numbered nineteen hundred spread over sixty-four countries on six continents; from the Homer Theatre in Homer, Alaska, to the Shanghai Grand in Shanghai, China, the Walter Reade only spitting distance from the Metropolitan itself, the Cairo Opera House, the Icaria in Barcelona, Spain, the CMAX in Devonport, Tasmania, the Teatro Nescafe de las Artes, Santiago, Chile, and the Roxy in Missoula, Montana. Gelb had signed exclusivity agreements with optimal venues everywhere, “preventing other opera companies from relaying their work on the same screens—hardly a collegiate move,” the Guardian observed wryly. Gelb’s response? “We don’t force movie theatres to take our movies; we don’t hold a gun to their heads. They could take the Royal Opera if they wanted to.” David Gockley was philosophical: “I think Peter, with his media background with Sony and some of the colleagues he worked with saw the light before any of the rest of us did.” Rival top-tier opera houses and festivals that attempted to get into the telecast act—La Scala, Covent Garden, and Salzburg, among others—settled principally for the transmission of previously recorded performances. Together with fellow newcomers to alternative content, ballet and theater, their product, often edgier than that of the Met, proved profitable to exhibitors on days and times otherwise fa
llow. And such became the popularity of the Met Saturday afternoon transmissions that many movie houses began to repeat the Met simulcasts as weekday “Encores.”