Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (34 page)

By the end of the first Lincoln Center season, Bing was done with American experimentation. With
Mourning Becomes Electra
he shut the door to native works. And with barely disguised satisfaction, he drove the final nail into the coffin of the Metropolitan’s two-year-old National Company, established to bring opera to communities all over North America and opportunities to young American artists. President Kennedy had announced the initiative with some fanfare in October 1963. The enterprise got off to an inauspicious start when the State Department denied a visa to Walter Felsenstein of East Berlin’s Komische Oper. Felsenstein had been engaged to do the staging. The recently retired Risë Stevens was drafted to head the operation. The first season opened in Indianapolis in September 1965 with Carlisle Floyd’s
Susannah,
one of the few American operas to have gained a measure of acceptance. Occasionally the company played in large urban centers. In New York, it took up residence at the New York State Theatre to the dismay of both the New York City Opera (it had not yet itself christened its new home) and of the Metropolitan’s general manager. Both tours were beleaguered by poor attendance, high expenses, and commensurate deficits. Bing resented the diversion of monies and energy to the fledgling troupe and, most particularly, the association of the Met’s gilt-edged brand with an undertaking of modest luster. A loan of $1 million, sufficient to keep the project aloft for another year at least, had been promised, but Bing and the board, ignoring Anthony Bliss’s remonstrations, refused the gift. Bliss resigned his presidency of eleven years and was replaced by the treasurer, George Moore. The National Company had something of an afterlife. Among the graduates who would go on to careers as Metropolitan leads were bass Paul Plishka, soprano Maralin Niska, and tenors Enrico Di Giuseppe and Harry Theyard.
¹²

Looking back on the 1966–67 season in his annual report, Bing acknowledged the failure of
Antony and Cleopatra, Lohengrin,
and
La Traviata,
and boasted of the “outstanding successes,”
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Peter Grimes, Mourning Becomes Electra, La Gioconda, Die Zauberflöte,
and
Elektra,
“not
too bad an average.” Beni Montresor conjured a fantastical Venice for
La Gioconda
(Sept. 22) with Renata Tebaldi as the street-singer. Anna Moffo’s Violetta wore Cecil Beaton’s extravagant costumes as she traversed his long, winding staircases in Alfred Lunt’s staging of
La Traviata
(Sept. 24). It was with the Met premiere of Strauss’s
Die Frau ohne Schatten
that the brilliance of the company and of the resources of the new opera house came together. The audience had never seen anything like it. The Merrill-O’Hearn production made smart use of stage elevators, seven in all, to move the action from the netherworld of Keikobad and the Nurse upward to the Earth of Barak and his wife and into the beyond, the ethereal kingdom of the Emperor and Empress. With Straussian Karl Böhm leading Leonie Rysanek, Christa Ludwig, and Walter Berry, the Met made the strongest possible case for the work. Strauss was again well served by the House of Atreus erected by Rudolf Heinrich for the new
Elektra
(Oct. 28), and by the titanic portrayals of Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, and Regina Resnik (Oct. 28). Wieland Wagner, the master’s grandson, died two months before he was scheduled to stage
Lohengrin
(Dec. 8). Peter Lehmann, his assistant and replacement, based the show on Wieland’s prior productions for Bayreuth and Hamburg. Oratorio-like, with the chorus stationed on risers or slowly marching in hypnotic formation, the opera took most of its urgency from Christa Ludwig’s Ortrud. “On the whole . . . this is an inoffensive
Lohengrin
. . . not as imaginative (for better or worse) as the best work that comes from Bayreuth.”
Peter Grimes
(Jan. 20) returned after a hiatus of nearly two decades; at the center of the gritty production was Jon Vickers, who found a voice to challenge the force of the sea, the community, and the hero’s own demons. Although Chagall’s décor did little to support the dramatic values of
Die Zauberflöte
(Feb. 19), the painter’s iconography delighted most spectators and would continue to do so through eight revivals.
¹³

The cost of inhabiting and maintaining the Met’s grand precincts had been grossly underestimated: operating expenses had run over by $796,000; the year’s new productions cost $856,000 more than had been budgeted; the settlement reached with the musicians added $280,000 to the burgeoning deficit; and remedying the most pressing defects of the new building added $307,000 more. Ticket prices were raised by 20 percent in November, an
unprecedented midseason hike, desperately needed despite near-capacity attendance. At the April 10, 1967, meeting of the Metropolitan Opera Association, chairman Lauder Greenway offered this explanation: “The delay in the delivery of the new house [five months after it was promised], mechanical difficulties with the new equipment, difficult labor negotiations involving work stoppages during the vital rehearsal period, and the problems of launching
nine
new productions in one season (four in the opening two weeks) put unprecedented and almost unmanageable technical and administrative burdens on our staff. We temporarily lost control of our costs, for reasons which we might have partly anticipated, but which, when they arrived, proved beyond our control. We are happy to report that things are now back on track.” Greenway’s upbeat conclusion notwithstanding, the financial turbulence of 1966–67 would plague the Met for years to come. A sobering caveat was appended to the invitation from Bing to Attilio Colonnello for the design of a new
Luisa Miller:
“I should tell you right now that we cannot again approach anything as heavy and bulky as
Lucia
was. We have neither the money for it, the space for it, nor the manpower to handle these enormous productions any more” (Nov. 9, 1966).
¹⁴

Meanwhile, New York had entered one of the most treacherous periods of its history. On January 25, 1965, after six months of digging by four of its reporters, the
Herald Tribune
published a hard-hitting piece titled “City in Crisis,” an indictment of New York under the mayoralties of Democrat Robert Wagner and his Democratic predecessors. The
Tribune
’s jeremiad covered topics from poverty to traffic, business to welfare, housing, hospitals, finances, the elites, the press, the police, and many more. The litany of urban disaster spawned a four-month series that took a deeper look into the most intractable problems of the city. The 1960s saw crime, racial unrest, “Burn, baby, burn,” flight to the suburbs by business and the middle class, assassinations, antiwar protests, student takeovers, and strikes. The Metropolitan, like other cultural institutions, suffered the effects of the social and economic turmoil. Of passing consequence was the cancellation of
Il Trovatore
during the blackout of 1965; far more lasting was the drop in ticket sales caused by anxiety over dark streets.

But nowhere was the intersection of the Metropolitan’s troubles with those of the city more evident than in the arena of labor relations. In 1966, the year the orchestra threatened to disrupt the Met’s first Lincoln Center season, the transit workers took to the picket lines for twelve days. In 1968, the sanitation workers walked off the job; that same year, the firing of white,
mostly Jewish teachers and administrators of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district led to a three-month strike over decentralization and race. In 1969, the Met musicians made good on their threat. As
New York Magazine
put it, “ ‘They’d Never Strike the Met,’ say the same people who said last year that they’d never strike the schools. But opera isn’t life.” Unlike the teachers, the musicians had not actually struck. As contract talks stalled and opening night approached, Bing was unwilling to schedule costly rehearsals until an uninterrupted season was guaranteed. In effect, he preempted the work stoppage and in doing so gained what he perceived to be a strategic advantage. The standoff lasted three months. Bing was cast as the villain, which was not surprising, given his open hostility toward unions in general and, in particular, his fully reciprocated antipathy for Herman Gray, the musicians’ representative. He had no trouble playing hardball: he withheld summer pay and attempted, unsuccessfully, to delay the distribution of unemployment checks. By the time the two sides came to terms on salary and benefits and performances could begin, it was not September 15 (as originally announced), but December 29. The Metropolitan Opera Association had to return $2.3 million of the $2.85 million it had collected in subscriptions; the total box-office take was $7.5 million, down drastically from the $11.2 million of the previous season. Average capacity tumbled from 96 percent to 89 percent.
¹⁵

Bing was not alone responsible for the failed salary talks of spring and summer 1969. He was under instructions from George Moore, since 1967 president of the Metropolitan Opera Association. The directors had elected Moore, chairman of Citigroup, with the expectation that a banker would succeed in checking the runaway expenditures of the first Lincoln Center season. Bing soon learned to regret the change of the guard, particularly when it came to programming. His infuriating clashes with Moore were reminiscent of early struggles with then board president George Sloan “to get authorization for new productions.” Nonetheless, Bing managed to pull off twenty-one restagings, nearly all conferred on the “perennial classics,” as Edward Johnson had defined them, or, at the very least, on titles that had enjoyed multiple revivals. Fully nine of the twenty-one were underwritten by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the others by a small coterie of Maecenases, foundations, and corporations. Novelties were all but absent. Bing’s final
half-decade as general manager has the dubious distinction of constituting the longest spell in Met history without a premiere, let alone a world premiere. As for the dramatic and visual dimensions of opera, he came to rely, more and more, on the tried and true. Only five stage directors and three designers made debuts.
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Far too many of the new productions were misbegotten. On the second night of the 1967–68 season, austerity was depressingly obvious in the skeletal
Roméo et Juliette
(Sept. 19). Franco Corelli and Mirella Freni were thrilling as the lovers of Verona—and oblivious to the requisite French style. “In terms of linguistic authenticity, it often bordered on the atrocious, especially where the two protagonists were concerned.” In fact, the French repertoire was poorly served in the twilight of Bing’s regime. There was the ugly
Carmen
(Dec. 15, 1967) that penned the hapless principals in variations on the Plaza de Toros (“ridiculous . . . awkward. . . . It is disheartening to contemplate the fact that the Met will probably be stuck with this conception of
Carmen
for the next decade”); the first
Werther
(Feb. 19, 1971) in sixty years, staged on dreary sets for a miscast Corelli. Appraisals of
Der Freischütz
(Sept. 28, 1971), withdrawn after a single season, ranged from “entirely conventional” to “full of dated notions of movement and groupings” to “hideous.”
Luisa Miller
(Feb. 8, 1968), returning to the Met after nearly forty years, was an aural feast in which Montserrat Caballé and Sherrill Milnes honored Verdi and bel canto; Colonnello framed them and the rest of the excellent cast with one of his tired theatrical conceits, onstage spectators in period costume seated in ersatz boxes within the proscenium, a device scratched in later runs of this production. “[The onstage spectators] waved fans, they moved, they stole more scenes than Shirley Temple used to do in her heyday. The trouble was that anyone in the audience with normal peripheral vision picked up their movement and suddenly was watching them rather than the Verdi opera.” The unfortunate 1959
Trovatore
was exchanged for Colonnello’s confused and lugubrious 1969 décors (March 6), “a cave-like collection of stalactites and stalagmites” unworthy of Price, Milnes, Grace Bumbry, and Plácido Domingo. The recurrence of Colonnello betrayed the management’s flagging vitality. That critics and audiences had hated his 1964
Lucia
mattered little; he was invited back for the grating
Luisa Miller,
and then awarded the
Trovatore
to boot.
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A few shows did the Met proud. O’Hearn and Merrill were in top form in a witty
Hänsel und Gretel
(Nov. 6, 1967), in an opulent
Rosenkavalier
(Jan. 23, 1969) that would flatter fortunate Marschallins, Octavians, and Sophies
for decades, and in a
Parsifal
(Nov. 14, 1970) whose serene meadow was an affecting analogue for the mellifluous Gurnemanz of Cesare Siepi. In Gunther Schneider-Siemssen’s iconic
Tristan und Isolde
(Nov. 18, 1971), the wizardry of the Met’s machinery wrought an ideal stage picture for the “liebesnacht”: the act 2 garden faded into darkness as the lovers, singing of ecstasy and death, were borne aloft and then suspended in the night sky. Zeffirelli atoned for
Antony and Cleopatra
with
Cavalleria rusticana
and
Pagliacci
(Jan. 18, 1970). The Beethoven bicentenary
Fidelio
(Dec. 16, 1970), designed by Aronson and directed by Otto Schenk, animated a piece often thought static. In fact, as one reviewer put it, “The sets [were] a drama in themselves”
(Post)
. A rough-hewn, layered, slightly irregular platform focused the action beneath dank prison walls that turned transparent to admit the light of day at the joyous finale. Rysanek and Jon Vickers, arguably the greatest Florestan in modern Met history, led the cast. In this long-lived edition,
Fidelio
earned a currency it had not before enjoyed—over one hundred performances between 1970 and 1994.
¹⁸

The big ticket of the late 1960s was to be Herbert von Karajan’s “Ring,” courtesy of Eastern Airlines, the first corporate sponsor of a Met production. Karajan began to record the tetralogy in August 1966, and then staged and conducted it, starting in March 1967, at the Salzburg Easter Festival, an annual happening created expressly by and for him. That fall there was no mistaking that the de facto
Generalmusikdirektor
of Europe’s major orchestras and lyric theaters had come to town. In a matter of little more than a month, he bracketed his Met debut by marshaling the La Scala forces for the Verdi “Requiem” and those of the Berlin Philharmonic for Bach, both in Carnegie Hall. He had the chutzpah to demand that the New York production be promoted as the “Karajan Ring.” He insisted that the pit be raised, the better to release a shimmering transparency from his instrumentalists—and the better himself to be seen.
Die Walküre
(Nov. 21, 1967), the first installment of the “Karajan Ring,” was, for some, although not all, a revelation. The Siegmund and Sieglinde, Vickers and Gundula Janowitz, seemed for once to sing to each other. Even so, there was disappointment: Schneider-Siemssen’s sets, conceived for the wide stage of the Salzburg Festspielhaus, lost a measure of their impact once rebuilt to fit the proportions of the Manhattan proscenium; the smaller seating capacity of the Salzburg auditorium fostered an intimacy all but impossible at the Met; many key scenes played at the rear of the stage put the singers at an aural and visual disadvantage; the pervasive darkness, a Karajan trademark, and the ever-present front scrim shrouded
faces and action.
Das Rheingold
(Nov. 22, 1968) was received with enthusiasm: “ominously magnificent throughout . . . a triumph of subtlety.” No one knew that with this run Karajan’s days at the Met would be over.
¹⁹

Nilsson was as crucial a factor as Karajan in Bing’s Wagner equation. The encounter of the two was sure to set off sparks. Earlier and elsewhere, a Stygian environment had made trouble between the conductor and the soprano. She had responded to his cherished penumbra by donning a miner’s helmet during rehearsal, a not-so-friendly prank. Following a series of tortured mediations, Nilsson finally agreed to appear in the 1967
Walküre
. No one would sing Brünnhilde in 1969–70;
Siegfried
fell victim to the strike. When Karajan announced the cast of the upcoming
Götterdämmerung,
he took the insulting step of replacing the world’s leading Wagnerian soprano with his current favorite, Helga Dernesch. The Met paid the price. Nilsson canceled half of her performances for 1970–71, including the Ariadnes she would never sing in New York. When Bing offered to drop Dernesch, it was too late. The resumption of the “Ring” was put off until 1972–73, the
Siegfried
in which Nilsson was conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.
²⁰

By the time the imperial Karajan departed the Met for good, the die had been cast for the imperious general manager. Bing’s future had, in fact, “been in doubt for some time” (
Times,
June 28, 1969). The renewal of his contract for 1969–1972 carried the understanding that the expiration of the agreement would end Bing’s incumbency; he would be past seventy and would have served twenty-two years, five short of Gatti-Casazza’s record. Some months later, Bing was pilloried for the crippled 1969–70 season.
New York Magazine
had its say in an article titled “The Metropolitan Opera versus the Public.” Under a picture of Bing in forbidding profile, the caption read, “Anachronism within an Anachronism?” There had been no public accountability, no disclosure of the balance sheet since he had taken over in 1950. The blame, according to the writer, lay also with the board that had given Bing carte blanche.
²¹

The announcement of Bing’s impending retirement did nothing to quell the attacks, and Bing, true to his nature and reputation, shot back: “Nine out of ten reviews that we read—if not all ten—are based on ignorance, and on unfair venom of little people who have an axe to grind, and consider themselves important if they can write badly about someone else.” And then, the final volley: “Fortunately, the public shares my views and the critics have not the slightest effect on our public or on our boxoffice.” Particularly galling to the press corps was that Bing “operated on the principle that he and he alone is in a position to judge how well he has been doing his job.” So when Bing
cited as one of his achievements the lifting of racial barriers, Alan Rich saw to it that even this permissible bit of self-promotion was debunked: the Met’s chief was simply in the right place at the right time. “It would be unthinkable for the Met not to have broken the color line some time during the past twenty years.” Rich went about setting the record straight on several other presumptive accomplishments: “It would have been absurd not to assume that the season would be lengthened [from sixteen to thirty-one weeks] and the range of activities broadened. A new house was ordained partly by the magnetism of the Lincoln Center idea-in-the-sky and partly because of the building realities in the Times Square area. You or I, in charge of the Met from 1950 to 1972, could not possibly have acted otherwise.” This time, a caricature of Bing getting the hook accompanied the piece.
²²

With respect to another achievement Bing took as a particular point of pride, his restagings of the core repertoire, assessments were mixed at best. The worst were encapsulated in
Newsweek
’s devastating summary: “What the Met has lacked above all is taste. In place of taste it has gotten by on lavishly expensive spectacle and glamor. Its repertory has been top-heavy in cumbersome productions that squandered money on costumes and sets.” Critics were willing to concede that a dozen or so of the eighty-eight new productions stood out. There was only partial consensus on the titles of these happy few. The triage seems to us unfairly severe. Our discussions in this and the preceding chapter profess that we would double the number of successes to include many absent from contemporary lists. But we would agree that Bing sanctioned too many clinkers, productions in which misguided décors undercut the score, the libretto, and the artists.
²³

Bing fared no better in the matter of repertoire, where, again, he claimed complete authority: “I am solely responsible for the repertory. Naturally I take advice. I listen to some of my colleagues—on both the musical and artistic staffs. And I have to consider innumerable questions. But the final decision on repertory, as indeed on everything else in this house—including casting—is mine. So all the blame for whatever is blameworthy should come to me.” And it did. Conventional programming was laid at the feet of the general manager. If the Metropolitan was called “a museum,” as it disparagingly often was, Bing made lemonade out of the lemons tossed in his direction: “I don’t see it as an insult at all. I think it is one of the Metropolitan’s functions to do the masterpieces of the past as seen through contemporary eyes, and therefore acquaint succeeding generations with these masterpieces.” Of course. But another cardinal function, the propagation of new and unfamiliar works, was
slighted. His circumspection was all the more conspicuous in contrast to the much applauded and often successful daring of the neighboring New York City Opera. By way of example, in 1971–72 City Opera scheduled eleven rarities, nearly all of which had recently or would soon become titles closely associated with the company:
Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, Giulio Cesare, The Makropoulos Case, Louise, Mefistofele, Le Coq d’or, Susannah,
and
The Turn of the Screw
. That same year, the sole Met offerings outside the core were
Der Freischütz
(a flop) and
La Fille du régiment
(a hit).
²⁴

Bing also did poorly when it came to conductors. Reviewing the roll of exceptional guest maestros, Martin Bernheimer felt it his “unpleasant duty to point out that most of these admitted giants [Pierre Monteux, Georg Solti, Ernest Ansermet, Bernstein, Colin Davis, Josef Krips, Karajan, and Claudio Abbado] graced the Met podium for only a season or two, some only for a single production.” Kurt Adler, Jean Morel, Nino Verchi, Joseph Rosenstock, Silvio Varviso, Nello Santi, Richard Bonynge, Carlo Franci, Leopold Ludwig, Gabor Ötvös, and Michelangelo Veltri were “the far less imposing rule” (
Los Angeles Times,
May 7, 1972). Ubiquitous were the uninspiring Fritz Stiedry, who conducted more than two hundred performances between 1950 and 1958, and the routine Fausto Cleva, who led more than nine hundred between 1950 and 1971.
Stereo Review
distilled the consensus: that the house conducting staff was the weakest link in the general manager’s armor, and that the reason for the weakness was his reluctance to suffer the irritant of a competing personality on the podium. “Strong-minded conductors and Mr. Bing do not seem to get along.”
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