Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (26 page)

The next year, Bing surveyed the field for what he termed a “conductor-personality of an even higher rank than we have now.” Bruno Walter was
ideal but too old, Erich Kleiber, to whom he returned in spite of the earlier rejection, “personally a highly undesirable gentleman, although a brilliant conductor,” and in any case out of the running since he had thrown in his lot with the Soviets. Victor De Sabata was brilliant but difficult and unreliable. “Of the younger set there is Herbert von Karajan who was a real Nazi and whom I, personally, would not propose to invite mainly for that reason.” (Bing would relent and invite Karajan for 1967–68.) That left Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had held a high position under the Third Reich as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. It may have been he Bing had in mind as the outstanding maestro who had been a mediocre Nazi. “After all we did get away with Flagstad without any real difficulty” was the way Bing phrased it. At an October 25, 1951, confidential meeting of the production committee, Bing proposed Furtwängler for the 1952–53 season. The executive committee turned him down two weeks later. Bing made a second attempt for the 1954–55 season. But Furtwängler eluded Bing; he died in December 1954. That same year, Dimitri Mitropoulos joined the company as the “conductor-personality” for whom Bing had been hoping. With his appointment, the conductor’s era inaugurated with Bruno Walter’s 1941
Fidelio
was perpetuated. Before his tenure was over, in addition to Mitropoulos and Karajan, Bing had brought to the Metropolitan, most for short stints to be sure, Pierre Monteux, Georg Solti, Ernest Ansermet, Leonard Bernstein, Colin Davis, Josef Krips, and Claudio Abbado.
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Between 1903 and 1949, Verdi had provided the music for nineteen of forty-seven Metropolitan opening nights. The familiar tunes of
Rigoletto, Aïda,
and
La Traviata
had rung in the regimes of Bing’s three immediate predecessors, Conried, Gatti, and Johnson. Bing made the courageous choice of Verdi’s
Don Carlo,
somber, uncommon fare for an audience out for a brilliant social occasion and expecting to face only modest musical demands. In its first round at the Met in the early 1920s, the opera had left the public cold. It had had just fourteen performances, despite the best efforts of Rosa Ponselle, Giovanni Martinelli, Giuseppe De Luca, and Adamo Didur. This earlier
Don Carlo
sold out only when the hugely popular Fyodor Chaliapin took on the role of King Philip. In the intervening decades, esteem for the lesser-known
Verdi had risen markedly in Europe, primarily in Germany. The Met itself offered up the stern beauties of
Simon Boccanegra
in seven seasons starting in 1932, including the year Bing had spent as observer.

The new general manager fitted
Don Carlo
with flourishes that signaled a break with the conservative bent of the previous administration. Opening night was detached from its hallowed place at the head of the chic Monday night subscription and sold at raised prices with the upcoming
Fledermaus
and the Flagstad-Walter
Fidelio
as one of a trio of special events. He chose as stage director Margaret Webster, whose revivals of Shakespeare in the 1940s were hits on Broadway: the
Othello
starring Paul Robeson is remembered to this day. Webster was the first woman to stage a Met production, and she had had no experience with opera. The press latched on to the story that the monumental sets were financed by Otto Kahn’s children through the sale of a Rembrandt; Rolf Gérard’s décor was the tallest ever built for the Metropolitan, designed “to open the proscenium frame vertically, contradicting its usual flat picture-postcard look.” And there was more to report: opposition to the current separatist ferment in Belgium was angered by the libretto’s sympathy for Flemish independence; Catholic groups objected to the graphic depiction of the Spanish Inquisition. An ongoing dispute between management and stagehands kept Bing’s already newsworthy first night in the public eye.
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Some reviewers expressed reservations about the opera itself (“not the best work of the Italian master,” “singularly powerful if uneven”). Others deplored the edition adopted by the Met, a reduced version of Verdi’s 1884 revision of the five-act grand opéra he had composed for Paris in 1867. They were, however, unanimous in praise of the production, Webster’s adroit handling of the demanding dramaturgy, and Gérard’s moody depiction of sixteenth-century Spain. Bing had made clear that direction and design would distinguish his priorities from those of his predecessors. Virgil Thomson confirmed that with
Don Carlo
Bing had made good on that promise: “Attention to the visual aspect has long been the Met’s most pressing need. With this put in order, the musical powers of the company are shown off to advantage. Let us be thankful”
(Herald Tribune)
. Rudolf Bing emerged as the star of the occasion.
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A nine-station hookup reached four million television sets and many more viewers, a substantial increase over transmissions of the two previous Met opening nights. Twelve cameras, one in the pit dedicated to close-ups of the singers, enhanced the telecast. The home audience had access to scene
changes and intermission interviews, much as telespectators and Live in HD viewers have had since. Although recording technology was available, no kinescope copy of the November 6 telecast is known to exist; the extant audio portions of the evening are of poor quality. Happily, the very same musical forces were on hand for the Saturday, November 11 broadcast; it conveys the strengths and the few weaknesses that likely obtained at the Monday premiere. Communications from Alberto Erede to Bing, friends since their prewar Glyndebourne days, uncover the alternatives weighed in the
Don Carlo
casting. For Elisabetta, Erede preferred Renata Tebaldi to Delia Rigal; but, as bad luck would have it, Tebaldi was busy at the San Francisco Opera. Erede thought Boris Christoff the best King Philip of the day and Cesare Siepi a close second. But the McCarran Act, effective on September 23, 1950, held up permits for both the Bulgarian Christoff and the Italian Siepi. Christoff had been told that his appearance in a 1947 Rome concert sponsored by the Italian-Soviet Society was to blame (
Times,
June 7, 1951). In the end, it was the twenty-seven-year-old Siepi who was allowed entry. The splendid voice and artistry he displays in the broadcast earned him the berth of the Met’s principal bass for twenty-two years. For Eboli, Erede rejected Ebe Stignani, the dominant Italian mezzo-soprano of her generation, because of her age and her girth, although he thought her “still
very good
”; he nominated Fedora Barbieri, not attractive either, in his estimation, but younger than Stignani, brimming with “personality,” and “really first class.” The broadcast preserves Barbieri’s plush sound and authoritative manner. Occasionally rough but always ready, she is memorable as Eboli, as she would later be as Verdi’s Azucena and Amneris, precarious high As and B-flats notwithstanding. Lucine Amara, as the off-stage Celestial Voice, launched her four-decade-long career. Two stalwarts of Johnson’s time, Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill, played Carlo and Rodrigo, the tenor more engaged in the drama than was sometimes his wont, the baritone in gorgeous voice as always in this period, but here also sensitive to the musical line and the libretto’s meanings. As for the newly minted general manager, he pronounced unabashedly that he had set “a new standard for operatic productions in America.”
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Bing waited patiently for the public to catch on to Verdi’s magisterial work. It did, and in 1956–57, its fifth reprise,
Don Carlo
finally exceeded the box-office average. Scheduled in more than half of the seasons between 1950 and 1966, and mounted in two new productions since,
Don Carlo
remains one of Bing’s enduring legacies.

For the second performance of the season, the Met unveiled its new
Der Fliegende Holländer
. The general manager went to the dean of Broadway scenic artists, Robert Edmond Jones, for the décors. Best known for his collaboration with Eugene O’Neill, Jones was credited, by his colleague Mordecai Gorelik, with founding “the whole present-day tradition of scene design in the United States.” He fell ill and Charles Elson took over the construction and lighting of the sets. Sea cloth, scrim, and cloud projections conjured the pervasive force of nature so deeply embedded in Wagner’s score. “When the curtain rose, the audience burst into applause, for it was clear that the reforms in staging revealed in the [first] night performance of Verdi’s
Don Carlo
were being continued in the Wagner opera.” Ljuba Welitsch, without whom, as Bing confessed, he would not have revived this “unpopular work,” was absent in the end. With his approval, the Bulgarian soprano, in ill health and no longer what she had been just the season before, relinquished all her Sentas to Astrid Varnay. Varnay’s concentration and musical probity, as heard in the December 30 broadcast, together with a rich middle register, are a match for Hans Hotter’s Dutchman. His dark timbre becomes the vehicle of despair and longing, his attention to text the mark of a great lieder singer. The Met orchestra is as alert to Reiner’s light manner for the folk rhythms as it is to his expansive phrasing of the opera’s Sturm und Drang. And yet the box-office average for
Der Fliegende Holländer
was the lowest of the season. Downes and Thomson tempered their enthusiasm for the November 9 performance with, “[Hotter’s] interpretation was greater than the music that Wagner could give him in this early romantic score”
(Times),
and “It is an intimate subject and perhaps not properly a grand opera at all”
(Herald Tribune)
. It would be nine years before the Dutchman again dropped anchor at the Met.
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Bing made no mystery of the profit motive behind his third new production. He banked on the wide and lasting appeal of Johann Strauss’s
Fledermaus,
gussied up with new English lyrics by Hollywood’s Howard Dietz and an adapted libretto staged by its author, Broadway’s Garson Kanin.
Fledermaus
was the story of the season. It all began in spring 1950 when Johnson, smarting at the preemptive announcements of his successor’s grand plans and other
offenses, took aim at the scheduling of so many “Fleder-Mice,” and more generally, at the decision to present an operetta, particularly one that had recently had a Broadway run. Bing’s penchant for publicity raised other eyebrows. How real were the overtures to Danny Kaye for the speaking role of Frosch when it was obvious that the high-priced comedian would not, or could not, commit to twenty or so performances scattered over an opera season? And then there were the well-placed rumors of famous runners-up: Bobby Clark, Fred Allen, and Buster Keaton. The part would go to the lesser-known Jack Gilford.
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Of more consequence to the
Fledermaus
saga was the jockeying for position of the foremost classical music labels, Columbia and RCA Victor. No sooner had Columbia agreed to issue complete operas under the Met’s imprint, and with its soloists, chorus, and orchestra, than RCA announced that it, too, would produce opera recordings featuring Met artists with whom it had exclusive contracts. The division of the talent pool generated atypical casts: Eleanor Steber, for example, is Columbia’s 1949 Madama Butterfly, a role she never sang (more’s the pity!) on 39th Street; Risë Stevens’s Don José in RCA’s 1951
Carmen
is Jan Peerce, who never set foot in the company’s dilapidated Seville. Fritz Reiner, the conductor designated for the Met’s
Fledermaus,
left Columbia for RCA in summer 1950 and did not see why “Mr. Bing should be unhappy because this [RCA] recording does not concern the Metropolitan.” By September, RCA had beaten Columbia to the punch;
Fledermaus
excerpts, led by Reiner, in the Ruth and Thomas Martin translation, were ready for editing. Just after the start of rehearsals late that fall, Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was summoned to replace the rebellious Reiner in the Met’s
Fledermaus;
Beecham, Bing’s first choice, was unavailable. RCA took out space in the Met’s playbills to advertise “Hilarious hit of the ‘Met’ season . . . sung (in English) by a cast of great Metropolitan opera voices, Fritz Reiner of the ‘Met’ conducting.” Not to be bested in the corporate tug-of-war, two months later, Columbia emblazoned the names of Lily Pons, the Adele, and Martha Lipton, the Orlofsky, on its album, along with those of “other members of the Original Cast.” Neither Pons nor Lipton ever appeared in
Fledermaus
at the Met. Both recordings are hybrids, both feature singers associated with their Met roles, and others recruited for the purpose from the Met roster and elsewhere.
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The December 20 first night of
Fledermaus
convinced even jaded observers that all the ado had been about something. Gérard’s bright-yellow drawing
room for the Eisensteins, a crimson tent for Orlofsky’s ballroom, a cheerful blue jail for the final act, and a stageful of bustles, feathers, opera capes, and top hats evoked pleasure-loving Austria in the 1870s. Dietz’s lyrics were modern, sometimes clever, and, by 1950 standards, just a tad naughty: “It’s nice to have a wife ’round the house, as long as she’s not your own”; “the gesture that seems to arouse the ubiquitous male is the swing of my tail.” The Met’s
Fledermaus
was dubbed a big Broadway hit, just as Bing had intended: “If it could be put on for eight performances a week it would be serious competition for
Guys and Dolls
and
South Pacific
”; “With it Rudolf Bing reestablishes the fact that the Metropolitan Opera has a Broadway address.” That first night can be reconstructed by meshing the Columbia recording cut a week later and the January 20 broadcast. Risë Stevens and Richard Tucker sang on both the recording and the broadcast, Ljuba Welitsch on the recording and not the broadcast, and Patrice Munsel on the broadcast and not the recording. The principals are up to the task, Tucker at once plangent and hilarious in his send-up of the vain tenor, Welitsch virtually unintelligible in English yet a glamorous Rosalinde at home in the style of her adopted Vienna. Patrice Munsel deserves the consensus that she stole the show; she transforms the insufferable soubrette into an amiable character.
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Fledermaus
continued to sell out the following season. Bing was eager to capitalize on the craze, once heartlessly by plucking the sixty-three-year-old Maria Jeritza out of semiretirement for Rosalinde in a benefit performance (Feb. 22, 1951). Munsel recalled the discomfiture of the soprano, absent from the Met since 1932 and at sea in the unfamiliar translation and staging. She also recalled the sardonic general manager standing in the wings, “laughing hysterically and eating his usual banana.” Confident of the marketability of the Strauss operetta, Bing encouraged the North American tour of a
Fledermaus
troupe. For the first and last time, the Met was on the road with a single work, bankrolled through an interest-free loan from Columbia Records, cast for the most part with singers not on the regular roster. The caravan was scheduled to travel for thirty weeks. Its bumpy trek would come to a premature end. For one thing, a month after its September 1951 Philadelphia opening, a rival troupe, performing the Ruth and Thomas Martin translation, managed by Sol Hurok and the National Concert and Artists Corporation, began its own itinerary in Hartford. Then there was the patriotic wrath of an American Legion post that objected to the presence of alleged Communist sympathizer Jack Gilford. The Met stood up for its
Frosch and the show went on, despite the picketing protesters. Misfortune persisted: tenor Donald Dame, one of the Eisensteins, died suddenly in his Lincoln, Nebraska hotel room just before a performance. The coup de grâce was the box office. The eagerly awaited turnaround in Chicago failed to materialize and the misadventure came to a merciful halt in Minneapolis in February 1952. Columbia Records had overestimated America’s appetite for Viennese operetta. The New York public remained loyal to Bing’s
Fledermaus
for ten of his sixteen seasons at the old Met.
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