Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (32 page)

Not long after the gala, in late May-June 1966, the Met made its second trip to Paris. Fifty-five years had passed since Gatti-Casazza, Toscanini, and the New York troupe had played the Théâtre du Châtelet. If in 1910 the French public and critics had been unfairly harsh, even antagonistic toward the American company, the negative reaction this time to the stint at the Odéon was largely justified. The unevenly cast, limp productions of
Le Nozze di Figaro
and
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
were only passable at best. Bing reported to the executive committee on June 3, 1966: “I think it is wise to face up to the fact that the Paris visit was not a success. All sorts of reasons have been advanced—anti-American feelings etc., etc. some of which may or may not be true. The fact remains that our first
Barber
performance was not very good, particularly Roberta Peters was tired and not in good voice. The
Figaro
in my view was an excellent performance but it appears that the majority of the Paris public and press expected the Metropolitan to come with Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, Franco Corelli, etc. . . . When the invitation for this particular visit in this lovely little theater was made and it became quite clear that we could not possibly do anything but our two smallest works,
Barber
and
Figaro,
I did not have the strength to resist the temptation of a Paris visit.”

AMERICAN OPERA

ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1962
, more than four years before the farewell to the old house, the Met made its Lincoln Center debut at the newly completed Philharmonic Hall, renamed Avery Fisher Hall in 1973. The Manuel De Falla program opened with
El Amor Brujo,
followed by a badly truncated version of his unfinished dramatic cantata
Atlantida
. The
Times
congratulated the Metropolitan on daring to be represented by the Western hemisphere premiere of Falla’s composition, all the while deploring the deep cuts inflicted on his magnum opus: twenty-two soloists were reduced to just three, Eileen Farrell (Leontyne Price had first been asked), George London, and Jean Madeira. Meanwhile, the company’s future home next door was nothing more than an immense water hole, dubbed “Lake Bing.” And to the general manager’s fury, construction had been bumped by the New York State Theater, whose priority was dictated by the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows.
¹

The long last lap of the Met’s journey northward began in the late 1930s. Otto Kahn’s recurrent dream of a new house, born with the promise he made to Giulio Gatti-Casazza in 1908, had died in the late 1920s with the sale of his 57th Street property. The protagonist of the 1929 and early 1930s chapter of the story was John D. Rockefeller Jr. and its setting his pharaonic Depression-era “Radio City” on Fifth Avenue at 50th Street. Both Kahn and Rockefeller came up empty. We pick up the trail we left off in chapter 5 in the late 1930s with talks between board member Charles Spofford and Fiorello La Guardia. New York’s mayor wanted to repurpose the Shriners’ Mecca
Temple for both the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan. Spofford was considering a site in Central Park at Columbus Circle.

Another decade elapsed before two external events finally triggered the realization of the long-deferred ambition. In 1949, Congress voted authorization of Title I, granting subsidies for land costs associated with urban renewal and allowing cultural and educational facilities to be included in the package. The act was destined to mediate the encounter of Robert Moses with the Metropolitan. As chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he was enticed by the prospect of federal funds and the value added the Met would lend neighborhood restoration. Moses first proposed a block south of Washington Square, which was rejected as out of the way and too costly. He then suggested Columbus Circle, just west of Central Park, but thought better of it when a convention center, later the Coliseum, struck him as ideally suited to that particular spot. The majority of Met directors continued to argue for staying put. Late in 1953, Moses attempted yet another overture: he offered a large blighted tract at Lincoln Square, bounded by 61st and 65th Streets and Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, that could be had for very little. Again, the board stalled; Moses threatened to call off the deal. At this point, the directors grudgingly asked architect Wallace K. Harrison to draft a design with which to initiate a fund-raising campaign. Harrison, married to the daughter of John D. Rockefeller Jr., Abigail, had drawn up the plans for the proposed Rockefeller Center opera house in the early 1930s, and had been a principal architect on such mammoth projects as the United Nations and the Albany State Plaza.

A second event intervened, unrelated to the tangle of Metropolitan and governmental agendas: the purchase of Carnegie Hall by a developer out to demolish the grand old landmark and erect an office tower in its place. The Philharmonic was on notice that in three years it would be homeless. Its board looked to the same Harrison for help. He found himself brokering the partnership of the opera and the symphony. In 1955, the two organizations agreed to approach John D. Rockefeller III. An exploratory committee was formed with Rockefeller as chair. By spring 1956, the committee had morphed into Lincoln Center, Inc., and the game was officially on. It was not until February 21, 1957, that the Met made a formal commitment to Lincoln Center. And it was Rockefeller who added George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, unhappy at City Center, to the mix that would later include a repertory theatre, a library and museum, and finally an educational institution, ultimately the Juilliard School. The many holders of block after block of real estate had to be brought around to the demolition of their buildings. As it happened, Joseph P. Kennedy
owned a large warehouse on the site. Hostile to all Rockefellers and indifferent to the arts, Kennedy kept matters tied up in the courts for almost two years. At long last, on May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, before a crowd of two thousand onlookers, turned over the first shovel of dirt for what would become the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and then served as master of ceremonies for a concert in which, representing the Metropolitan, Risë Stevens sang the “Habanera,” Leonard Warren the “Prologo” from
Pagliacci
.
²

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.

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

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