Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (25 page)

On January 26, 1944, after a brief hiatus,
Pelléas et Mélisande
returned to the repertoire with the debut of conductor Emil Cooper. Cooper’s unorthodox treatment, where overpowering emotions were given their due, prompted Thomson to declare, “The whole musical fabric, vocal as well as instrumental, becomes . . . as straightforward and sincere an expression as anyone can well imagine, and far more so than we are accustomed to hear in the theater” (
Herald Tribune,
Jan. 4, 1945). The broadcast of January 13 bears out Thomson’s judgment. Cooper frees the work from the mist in which it had been shrouded. And although Sayão dwells, of necessity, in her weak lower octave, and Tibbett struggles against high notes and dull tone, and Kipnis drenches the French text in Russian phonemes, all three extract vivid characters from Maeterlinck’s murky symbolism. Martial Singher, having wrested the role for the first time in Met history from the tenors for whom it was scored, is largely successful in negotiating passages outside his range. He makes a compelling case for a baritone Pelléas. But Debussy’s opera remained a difficult sell.

With the success of
Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro,
and
Die Zauberflöte,
Johnson set about increasing Mozart’s share of the repertoire even further.
He next programmed
Die Entführung aus dem Serail,
again in a Ruth and Thomas Martin translation. Cooper was the conductor of the November 29, 1946, premiere. Designer Donald Oenslager and director Herbert Graf sought to shore up the opera’s appeal by adding “variety and movement” to the spectacle with scene changes of their own invention. Inspired by Persian miniatures, Oenslager filled the stage with intricately decorated structural elements in flattened perspective. Most reviewers were well disposed to the décor and far less to the singing and acting. Five poorly attended shows following on mixed notices would banish the title for more than thirty years. Eleanor Steber, the Constanze, may well have been underpowered in the house, as first-night critics commented. As heard in the January 1947 broadcast, she invests “Deepest sorrow [Traurigkeit]” and “Tortures unabating [Martern aller Arten]”—tests of legato singing and coloratura dexterity, often at the extremes of the range—with delicacy, accuracy, and, when needed, thrust.
¹⁹

All split-second changes of rhythm and dynamics and intricate ensembles,
Falstaff
cries out for a virtuoso conductor. It found one in Beecham, who led the 1944 revival. Reviewers were critical of the English translation, cited both Tibbett’s impoverished vocal resources and his theatrical savvy, and above all cheered the “brilliantly paced” leadership of Beecham (Thomson,
Herald Tribune,
Jan. 15) and “the playing of the orchestra, which was crisp, full of color, or jocular allusion and lyrical warmth” (Downes,
Times
). Three years later, there was serious, ultimately futile talk of inveigling Toscanini back to the Met for Verdi’s comic masterpiece. But in 1949, it was Reiner’s turn. Leonard Warren in the title role is only one of the treasures of the broadcast. Cloe Elmo thunders Dame Quickly’s hilarious repetitions of “reverenza,” Giuseppe Valdengo plumbs the depth of Ford’s bitter jealousy, Giuseppe Di Stefano lends his freshest tenor to Fenton’s puppy love, and Regina Resnik animates the proceedings with her fleet, funny, and luminous Alice. Only Licia Albanese, unable to float high pianissimos at less than mezzo forte, is mismatched as Nannetta. Reiner’s baton forges a precise yet playful
Falstaff
. Referring back to the conductor’s triumphant Met debut just weeks before in
Salome,
Cecil Smith wrote that “his transfiguration of the
Falstaff
music demonstrated almost more strikingly how much we miss when we do not hear great operatic music conducted by a great craftsman.” Still reluctant to succumb to the mercurial Verdi of his final opera, audiences hovered just
below the box-office average for the three-performance run of this exceptional edition, confirming again that the operatic monuments superlatively conducted do not necessarily make for capacity houses.
²⁰

In 1945, Johnson signed a two-year renewal of his contract; at its expiration, he was continued for two more seasons and then for another. The last extension was accompanied by the announcement that the general manager would be leaving at the end of 1949–50. He may have talked of resigning once too often. The board had been distressed at the red ink on the 1947–48 ledger and had grown increasingly weary of his labor troubles and bad humor. Fifteen years was decidedly enough. Johnson’s gala farewell, February 28, 1950, featured two of the company’s biggest postwar stars, Ljuba Welitsch as a tempestuous Tosca and Ferruccio Tagliavini as a lyric Mario. In the pageant that crowned the evening, a review of the Johnson era, Bori paraded as Violetta and De Luca as Germont, Martinelli as Otello and Tibbett as Iago, Steber as the Marschallin, Frederick Jagel as Peter Grimes, Blanche Thebom as Ortrud, Schorr as Hans Sachs, and Set Svanholm as Lohengrin, decked out in the very costume Johnson had worn in Italy more than thirty years earlier.
²¹

The next month, during an intermission of the final Saturday broadcast of the season, the outgoing head spoke directly to the audiences sitting in the hall and by their radios: “You know how often I have told you that my greatest pride in my tenure in office here has been to give the American singer, the American artist, his chance in opera.” If Americanization was axiomatic to Johnson’s regime beginning in 1935, by 1939 it was as much a matter of necessity as of principle. In May 1942, he told his board, “The day is gone for an operatic manager to have any such surprise [as the withdrawal of so many performers who had been contracted] in store. His function is undergoing an inevitable transition from the purveyance of established foreign success to the discovery and development of native talent.” The company’s future would depend on a gifted and well-trained cadre of national singers. Two years later, with “reconversion . . . in the air,” Johnson wrote that the curtain would rise on “what is predominantly an American opera company,” the goal toward which the Met had tended since his appointment under the Juilliard standard. That fall, “nearly two-thirds of the singing personnel [had] been actually born in this country.” America would soon move from “importer of talent”
to “producer of talent” and ultimately to “exporter of talent” (
Times,
Nov. 26, 1944).
²²

Johnson had gotten ahead of himself. In his Met of the 1940s, new American stars, however lustrous, were insufficiently numerous to compensate for the European deficit. Veterans were kept on when their best days were clearly behind them: Schorr was drafted for Wotans he no longer wished to sing, Rethberg for the
Siegfried
Brünnhilde, a role she should no longer have assumed. Martin Mayer argues another point, that “the frequency with which light-voiced people sang heavy roles—and heavy-voiced people lumbered through light ones—became distressing, quite apart from more subtle questions of whether artists and roles fitted together in temperament or style.” Risë Stevens’s high mezzo was pressed into service for the contralto pronouncements of Erda. Astrid Varnay’s dramatic soprano was mismatched with Eva’s lyric lines in
Die Meistersinger
. And then there were those who made debuts with little or no experience. Irving Kolodin, in his epilogue to the Johnson era, questions “the wisdom of allowing young singers with no more than a textbook knowledge of their subject the freedom of a stage traditionally the object of a lifetime’s progress. . . . What should have been the tolerable exception became numbingly regular in a flighty, planless, artistically arbitrary shuffling about of personnel.” Seventeen years old in 1943, Patrice Munsel was too green for the full battery of coloratura trials to which she was subjected. If Varnay and Regina Resnik, both in their very early twenties, passed their Met initiations with flying colors, there was a price to pay. In her debut season, 1941–42, four Wagnerian roles she had never before sung on any stage drained the bloom from Varnay’s voice; she nevertheless prevailed magnificently as Isolde and Brünnhilde through much of her lengthy career. On December 6, 1944, Resnik bowed as the
Trovatore
Leonora, and in less than two weeks added Santuzza and Aïda; the breakneck schedule may have shortened her days as a dramatic soprano but it did not inhibit her subsequent evolution into the dramatic mezzo she would inevitably become.
²³

In his 1949 critique, Virgil Thomson had taken a tack different from the later Kolodin and Mayer analyses. Thomson charged that the Johnson administration had pandered to the low common denominator of audience preference, and that it had tolerated poorly staged and unevenly sung variations of the tried and true. What most galled Thomson was that the management had shunned “experienced musicians and opera lovers” on the one hand, and the critical establishment on the other. His fusillade aimed directly
at what he termed “a pure box-office credo,” a “renunciation of the education function” for which, he added spitefully, the hard-won tax exemption should be revoked (
Herald Tribune,
Jan. 30, 1949).

If, in this period of intense financial pressures and labor conflicts, the eye of the management was fixed on the bottom line, and too much of the programming was consigned to the chestnuts—Johnson’s “perennial favorites”—and too little to new works, it was also an era in which monuments flourished, and Mozart, in particular, took his rightful place. As Johnson had prognosticated in late 1940, the war would present the Metropolitan with both opportunity and challenge. The fundamental challenge was to keep the operation afloat, a precarious feat even with the expert assistance of Edward Ziegler, and more difficult still once Ziegler withdrew for reasons of health in 1946. Kolodin, Mayer, and Thomson focus on the challenges. We have sought to stress the opportunities Johnson seized: the engagement of eminent European conductors and the presentation of neglected masterworks.

VERDI

RUDOLF BING TELLS THE STORY
of his appointment as the new general manager in the first of two autobiographies,
5000
Nights at the Opera
. In spring 1949, then head at Glyndebourne, he was in New York to pitch a season for his company at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre. He asked Fritz Stiedry, a Met conductor he had known in Germany in the early 1930s, to introduce him to Edward Johnson, whose retirement at the end of the 1949–50 season had been announced. The conversation with Johnson turned to the running of an opera house in difficult times. As Bing recounts it, Johnson suddenly asked, “How would you like to be my successor?” Bing responded that he would like it very much indeed, upon which Johnson, a supporter of his righthand man Frank St. Leger, Edward Ziegler’s replacement, proceeded to mention Bing to George Sloan, chairman of the Metropolitan Opera board. Satisfied that Bing was “socially acceptable,” Sloan introduced him to Charles M. Spofford, who certified that Bing was “sufficiently art-minded,” and to David Sarnoff, who vouched for his business creds. Meanwhile, visiting in England, Eleanor Belmont made inquiries about Bing’s management of Glyndebourne and of the Edinburgh Festival. Her glowing report was read aloud to the executive committee and Bing returned to Europe to await word from New York.
¹

Only weeks after his chat with Johnson, on June 2, 1949, Bing was named general manager at an annual salary of $35,000, raised from $30,000 when the negotiated three-year contract was cut back to a single year in compliance with immigration rules. Bing was asked (it may have been he who asked) to
spend the 1949–50 season at the Met as a paid observer. With his wife and dog, he moved into the Essex House on Central Park South, and there took up residence for the twenty-two years he was at the Met, and then until his wife’s death in 1983. The fly in the ointment was John Erskine, once again an aggressive advocate for an American at the top. Erskine held Mrs. Belmont responsible for the anointment of the European intendant: “For the first time in Metropolitan history the general manager has now been chosen not by the men of the Opera board but by the ladies of the Opera Guild.” He doubted that Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Otto Kahn “are competent to choose, or are even willing to choose, an American for a general manager if such a person exists.” Belmont pushed back. She protested that those charged with the search had done their due diligence with respect to both American and European candidates, and that in any case it was Johnson who had brought Bing to the attention of the directors. She was particularly incensed at the suggestion that the “ladies” had violated the Guild’s policy of noninterference in the affairs of the company.
²

The new general manager was born Rudolph Franz Joseph Bing in Vienna in 1902 to a prosperous Jewish family. He was not a particularly promising student, and did not go to university. He had had English governesses, had studied voice, and had a year of training in history, the arts, and literature under the guidance of a tutor who introduced him into Vienna’s artistic circles. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Bing’s industrialist father, chairman of the Austro-Hungarian Steel and Iron Trust, lost his position and fortune. Bing took modest jobs in bookstores, one of which had a sideline in concert management; there he organized the opera division. In 1928, he married a Russian ballet dancer, Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, and moved to Berlin, where he booked singers for provincial theaters. His break came that same year when he was made assistant to Carl Ebert, a stage director then head of opera in Darmstadt. Ebert left much of the programming to Bing. It was in Darmstadt that he met conductors Karl Böhm and Max Rudolf, later his Met artistic administrator. In 1931, Bing moved with Ebert to Berlin’s Charlottenburg Opera and was there exposed to avant-garde production.
³

In 1933, after the expulsion of anti-Nazis from German theaters, Bing left for Vienna and then for Teplitz in the Sudetenland, where the National
Socialists had embarked on the misbegotten promotion of German culture. In a matter of months, the enterprise, bizarrely staffed by numerous Jews and Social Democrats, folded. In 1934, Bing joined Ebert and Fritz Busch at Glyndebourne. By 1935, he was the festival’s general manager. Five years later, the war shut Glyndebourne’s doors. Bing took a job as sales manager in a London department store; by night, he volunteered as a fire warden. The war over, he returned to Glyndebourne for its 1946 reopening. In the interim, Bing was active in founding the Edinburgh Festival and, from 1946 until 1949, served as artistic director, the first time he held that title.

“You don’t need wit to run an opera house, you need style,” Bing quipped in
A Knight at the Opera,
the second of his autobiographies. In fact, he had great gobs of both. The “men of the Opera board” were quick to take in his elegance, his worldly manner, his polished speech. But the style that won them over was as much managerial as it was personal. They were seeking a much needed antidote to the Johnson regime. Where Johnson was indulgent, particularly toward singers, Bing would demand discipline; where Johnson had little patience with planning, Bing was unremittingly farsighted; where Johnson oversaw the day-to-day operation of the house from a distance, Bing was an unapologetic micromanager. His words and deeds during the 1949–50 preparatory season seemed to vindicate those who had engineered the unorthodox search. They had hired a character tough enough for what Joe Volpe would later call “the toughest job on Earth.” The trains would once again, as not since Gatti-Casazza, run on time.

From his office at the other end of the building, a sign of the ever widening divide between the sitting general manager and the general manager–elect, Bing was nevertheless able to witness operations at close hand, scrutinize contracts and other documents, and plan obsessively. Johnson’s last season barely at midpoint, he insisted on putting his frank analysis of current practice before the board, securing the go-ahead for his agenda, and then making it as public as possible. In his report to the directors of January 27, 1950, Bing proposed the rehabilitation of the house, of course, and nodded vaguely toward the prospect of a new theater. He suggested revised strategies for fundraising and a crusade for the retraction of the 20 percent admissions tax reinstated during the war. He recommended that the Saturday subscription be pegged not at popular but at regular prices and modifications to the
Philadelphia schedule. Most intriguing was the idea of splitting each subscription series into two, doubling their number from six to twelve and thereby attracting a fresh cohort of subscribers. The same opera could be scheduled twice as often, reducing the twenty-six productions on the calendar each season to eighteen or nineteen, effecting considerable savings, and allowing more rehearsal time. He also put on the table the reengagement of Kirsten Flagstad; the motion passed with one dissension.

 

FIGURE 24.
Bust of Giulio Gatti-Casazza between Edward Johnson, on left, and Rudolf Bing, 1950 (Louis Mélançon; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

The press conference of February 1, 1950, was called over Johnson’s objections. Bing began by reviewing the actions approved a few days earlier. There would be changes in the upper management. He would be assisted by Reginald Allen, the executive secretary who would handle business matters; by Max Rudolf, who would replace St. Leger, his former boss, and hold the title of artistic administrator; by Francis Robinson, currently tour director, who would reorganize the box office and subscriptions; and by John Gutman,
who would join the team as general artistic assistant. Bing knew full well that uppermost in the minds of reporters was word on the artists he was inclined to retain and, of more interest still, on those he would not bring back. He released a list of fifteen singers he had thus far signed. Melchior was not among them. The tenor had had the bad form to demand that the Met decide within forty minutes whether he would be kept on. Bing declared himself “not prepared to submit to ultimatums. I don’t care from whom.” Melchior did not return. Bing went on to assure the press that he would “go all out to find more American singers” and to further their careers. Of course, he hedged, this “must be a cosmopolitan opera house.” Finally, he broke the news of Flagstad’s reengagement, adding, “if there is any shooting, shoot at me.” He reported further that Helen Traubel, who had threatened to quit when by January she had not been signed, and who had complained loudly that she had been ignored in favor of Flagstad, would share the Wagnerian roles with her Norwegian rival. They would sing one “Ring” each. As for himself, “Apart from murder, there is hardly any crime I am not suspected of. I can assure you I will attempt to run this house—unmoved by promises or threats—on the principle of quality alone.”
⁴

That was just the beginning. Bing’s brushes with singers continued through the winter, spring, and summer of 1950 and well beyond. On February 8, he received a letter from the Brazilian ambassador pleading on behalf of Bidú Sayão; she was granted two performances for the diplomat’s trouble. Bing told Lawrence Tibbett that he would not be re-signed, citing the curtailed repertory. In fact, Bing considered Tibbett over the hill, as he did Sayão and Melchior. The problem with Leonard Warren was not his merits as a singer, but Bing’s fixation on “loyalty.” “We want an ensemble, an ensemble of stars—not of comets.” Bing had discovered that Warren was accorded an annual midseason hiatus of several weeks to accommodate lucrative concert gigs. When Warren balked at the repeal of this concession, Bing put out the word that the baritone had been let go. Max Rudolf intervened and Warren capitulated, but too late for opening night. A year or so later, Robert Merrill, Warren’s replacement as Rodrigo in the inaugural
Don Carlo,
found himself writing a letter of apology to the general manager for skipping out on the 1951 spring tour; he had decamped for Hollywood to shoot the better-forgotten
Aaron Slick from Punkin Creek
. Bing replied that all was forgiven. Still, the 1951–52 season was essentially lost to Merrill. Where Met stars were concerned, Bing had no more use for cabarets than he had for the movies. He wrote to the irrepressible Traubel on September 25,
1953, that the Met and night clubs “do not really seem to mix very well. Perhaps you would prefer to give the Metropolitan a ‘miss’ for a single year or so until you may possibly feel that you want again to change back to the more serious aspects of your art.” Traubel published Bing’s letter and her response, along with a shot across the bow accusing Bing of “rank snobbery” (Sept. 28, 1953). Bing’s counterattack no doubt dissuaded others from crossing the line: “Miss Traubel used this affair for cheap and vulgar publicity purposes playing on the chauvinistic instincts of the mob by emphasizing over and over in her letter her admiration for the great American folk music, for the great American composers. . . . [Miss Traubel’s outburst in the press] has everything to do with an artist who is clearly declining in her art and is looking for other and more lucrative fields and, therefore, needs any amount of publicity. . . . For the last two or three years high parts, both in
Tristan
and
Walküre
had to be transposed and the management of the Metropolitan had difficulty in persuading responsible conductors to accept this arrangement which is unworthy of one of the world’s leading opera houses.” Traubel never again sang at the Met.
⁵

When it came to conductors, Bing set about cleaning house even more thoroughly. Only Reiner and Stiedry were held over from 1949–50. He brought in Kurt Adler, Fausto Cleva, Alberto Erede, and Tibor Kozma, a crew generally thought no stronger than the one he had unloaded. Still, with one key variant, he took up the cause of the illustrious conductor. But where Johnson sought to enlist notable guests for star turns, Bing was intent on a celebrated maestro whose primary commitment of energy—and loyalty, naturally,—would be to the Metropolitan. At the same time, he was opposed to ceding authority to a music director and quick to call on tradition in support of his position. The company had had official and de facto principal conductors—Seidl, Mahler, Toscanini, Bodanzky, Serafin, and Panizza—but never a music director. Bing tried first to recruit Erich Kleiber with assurances that the absence of the coveted title would not prevent his input from counting in all important matters. Kleiber declined and, through his wife, suggested that either Georges Sébastian, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, or Robert Denzler be approached, recommendations that Bing dismissed with what was even for him unusual bite. Of Denzler, in particular, he remarked that “he is a mediocre conductor but was an outstanding Nazi. I am only prepared to consider the opposite: a mediocre Nazi who is an outstanding conductor.”
⁶