Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (30 page)

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
spinto
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

 

 

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.