Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (2 page)

Three decades have passed since Martin Mayer recalled the response of Oscar Hammerstein I to a casual, “How’s business?” “Opera’s no business,” Hammerstein shot back. “It’s a disease.” His quip resonated with Mayer, as it does with us and, we suspect, with many of our readers. Mayer’s
The Met
(1983) is the most recent comprehensive history of the company prior to this volume. And like
Grand Opera: The Story of the Met,
it is both an institutional and performance history of the premier opera company in the United States, one of the world’s most prestigious and influential cultural organizations. Thirty years and a changed universe later, an updated reconsideration is due.

Each of our eleven chronologically sequenced chapters focuses on an area of the repertoire: a national canon (French opera, for example, as in chapter 2) or a composer, (for example, Giacomo Puccini, the central figure of chapter 4). The history of the company is in large part the history of the fortunes of bel canto and verismo, of Verdi and Wagner, and eventually of Adams and Glass. We trace the evolving profile of the repertoire as it responds to the push of reinvention and the pull of tradition, as it conforms to the talents of the stars, the interests of the board and of the management, the will of conductors, the taste of the critics, the predilections of the public. Through 1949–50, we are concerned primarily with premieres; to that point, new productions of revivals were generally staged as they had always been, simple refittings with fresh scenery and costumes. Beginning in 1950 with the advent of Rudolf Bing, and the attention he gave to direction and design, we take note of many revivals as well.

And each chapter engages numerous remarkable performances in the context of the issues that informed the times. The inaugural 1883
Faust
affirmed the compatibility of an aristocratic European entertainment with the temper of the still young New World republic. In 1907, the Met’s first performance of
Salome
erupted into a scandal that pitted the board of directors against the management; Richard Strauss’s opera spent the next twenty-seven years in exile from the Met. The 1910 world premiere of Puccini’s
La Fanciulla del West
was a vehicle for Enrico Caruso whose fame in live performance ballooned through the diffusion of opera via the phonograph at the dawn of sound reproduction. The very survival of the Metropolitan during the Great Depression depended in large measure on the Tristan and Isolde of Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad, the two mighty pillars of a brilliant Wagnerian epoch. Bruno Walter’s Met conducting debut in
Fidelio,
less than a year before the US entry into World War II, speaks to the myriad positive and negative consequences of international conflict on an international company. In 1966, the choice of Leontyne Price to head the cast of Samuel Barber’s
Antony and Cleopatra
as it opened the new house at Lincoln Center joined the politics of labor and race relations to the politics of opera as an American idiom. With John Dexter’s mise-en-scène for Francis Poulenc’s
Dialogues des Carmélites
in 1977, the Met sought to address its straitened budget while embracing cutting-edge stage practice. The 2002 company premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s
War and Peace
kept the promise that perestroika would bring a notable expansion of the Slavic wing of the repertoire together with an influx of East European artists. The clamorous success of Peter Gelb’s ongoing initiative that between 2006–07 and 2012–13 beamed Robert Lepage’s contested “Ring” and more than sixty other Metropolitan productions onto screens that now number nearly two thousand drew millions of global spectators into animated debates over opera and its performance, staging in particular. However different the issues that pertained to the first
Faust
from those that surrounded the Barber premiere or the Wagner tetralogy, these extraordinary occasions, and so many others memorable and not, and invariably their reception, are products of multiple factors: the status of the work in the repertoire, the musical and dramatic values of the performance, the weight of institutional pressures, the broader political, social, and economic context. They call for the layered approach that underpins this history.

A word about our sources. The Metropolitan Opera Archives house a rich lode of primary documents that shed light on the 290 different operas that the company has presented in nearly twenty-eight thousand performances between 1883 and spring 2013. The decisions that shape seasons and careers
emerge in the day-to-day memoranda and correspondence of the board and its committees, of the general managers and their assistants, of artists and agents, in minutes of meetings, in contracts and paybooks, in box-office records, in audition notes. We have made extensive use of the archives through the 2005–06 season, Joseph Volpe’s last, and the last for which documents have been accessible to us. All primary sources we cite without attribution are holdings of the Met Archives.

Along with Mayer’s
The Met,
we draw upon Henry Krehbiel’s two-volume chronicle,
Chapters of Opera
(1908) and
More Chapters of Opera
(1919), erudite and eloquent firsthand recitals of Met premieres and of the singers of the Golden Age. Irving Kolodin’s
The Metropolitan Opera,
1883–1966
(1966) is the last of the author’s several editions (1936, 1940, 1953). Kolodin takes into account shifts in the relationship of the company to its patrons and organizational restructurings. He also makes note of every premiere, revival, new production, debut, and cast change. We have chosen instead to provide tables that constitute an inventory of all the operas produced by the company. These tables record the name of the composer, the date of the company premiere, the date of the most recent performance as of this writing, the number of seasons in the repertoire, the number of productions and performances, the date and place of the world premiere, and the names of the director and designer. Titles that made negligible impressions may be referenced only in these tables. Two other histories timed to coincide with the close of the Old Met, Quaintance Eaton’s
The Miracle of the Met
(1968) and John Briggs’s
Requiem for a Yellow Brick Brewery
(1969), are less systematic, more anecdotal than Kolodin’s. John Dizikes’s
Opera in America
(1993) locates the Met within the orbit defined in its title. Johanna Fiedler’s
Molto Agitato
(2001) is a spirited survey centered on the 1980s and 1990s, when the author was the company’s general press representative.
Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met
(1992),
Sign-Off for the Old Met
(1997), and
Start-Up at the New Met
(2006), Paul Jackson’s three-volume history and analysis of Metropolitan broadcasts, have been a valued companion to our own listening.

Well before 1883, New York’s music journalism was a going concern. The city’s numerous dailies, the
Times,
the
Tribune,
the
Herald,
along with the
World,
the
Sun,
the
Evening Post,
the
Morning Journal,
the
Commercial Advertiser,
the
Mail and Express,
the
Evening Telegram,
and the German-language
Staats-Zeitung,
routinely devoted many inches to opera. New works earned the lengthiest columns: the 1883
La Gioconda
racked up an astonishing three thousand words in the
New York Times
. Such extensive coverage
continued through the 1930s. Singing, acting, playing, and dramaturgy came under expert, detailed scrutiny, not infrequently laced with vitriol. Today, for a Met premiere, the
Times
rations its music critics to half the ink allotted to their predecessors seventy-five years ago. Many dailies and weeklies have ceased publication altogether, and of those that remain, pitifully few have a regular opera beat. We have turned principally to the
Times,
the
New Yorker,
the
Wall Street Journal,
and to the out-of-town press, the
Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor,
and
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Until the 1950s, reviews appeared on the day following the performance, since then on the day after that; we date only the exceptions to this rule. After 1950, we add our voices to published accounts of live performances. Mindful of the balance between the register of the historian and that of the critic, we lodge our views, whenever possible, among those of a sampling of the musical press.

Grand Opera
is the first history of the Metropolitan to exploit the audio, visual, and Internet technologies that have lengthened the reach of opera studies. We are especially indebted to the Metopera database at
www.metoperafamily.org
, the company’s online portal that opens onto the casts of all Met performances, the careers of artists, a wealth of photographs, reviews, essays, and other materials. We have also relied on audio resources, commercial recordings of singers from the early periods, transcriptions of Met broadcasts from the mid-1930s on, and videos of Met performances since 1977. Unattributed evaluations of recordings, broadcasts, and videos are ours. We urge readers to make their own judgments by tuning into “Met on Demand” and SiriusXM. “Met on Demand” is a vast online subscription library of audio and video transcriptions of performances from the late 1930s to the present; SiriusXM is a satellite radio station that broadcasts historic performances along with live transmissions. Artists active since the beginning of the twentieth century, and a handful even before, can also be heard on “Sounds of the Met,” accessed through the Metopera database, as well as on
www.archive.org
and
www.youtube.com
. “National Jukebox,” on the Library of Congress website
www.loc.gov
, makes available recordings that predate 1926. The “Un bel dì” of Farrar and Destinn, Rethberg and Albanese, de los Angeles, Tebaldi, and Racette are just a few clicks away.

We acknowledge with gratitude our debt to Mary C. Francis, executive editor at University of California Press, for taking on our project and providing informed counsel and friendly support all along the way. We are also grateful to our agent, Ellen Geiger, vice-president at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, who arranged the happy encounter between us and Mary.

A special thank you is due the Metropolitan Opera Archives. Its resources were indispensable to our research. That the Archives are a model repository of print and visual documents is, in large measure, a testament to the stewardship of Robert Tuggle. Bob has been a remarkable fount of knowledge and encouragement. Archivist John Pennino’s deep acquaintance with the company’s history has been critical to the search for pertinent documents. We also thank Met archivists Jeff McMillan and John Tomasicchio. Other archivists and librarians have facilitated our work: Alexa B. Antopol, Reference and Research Librarian,
Opera America;
Wilma Jones, Chief Librarian, College of Staten Island-CUNY; Devin Nix, Academic Technology Specialist, NYU Digital Studio; Jane L. Poole, Metropolitan Opera Guild.

We are especially beholden to friends who gave so generously of their time to read our manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions for its improvement: Rachel Brownstein, Phebe Chao, Miguel Lerin, Bridget Lyons, Robert Lyons, Stephen J. Mudge, Daniel Schlosky, Roger Sorkin. Beatrice Jona Affron lent her expertise in matters of musicology. Si Affron, Zoë Affron, and Miranda Scripp assisted in the preparation of the manuscript. Ralph Tarica and Suzanne Tarica supplied translations from German. Elaine Bowden, David Dik, Russell Frost, Bob Madison, and David Podell were forthcoming with aid and advice. The Metropolitan Opera Press Office made
press passes available; Brent Ness of the Press Office cleared permissions for the illustrations of chapter 11.

Finally, we wish to remember here those who have been part of our operagoing over the years. They have shared our enthusiasm and engaged with us in debates that often continued long into the night: John Albert, Cecilia Bartoli, Jacqueline Carter, Olivier Ferrer, John Haskell, Claudia Lindsey, Allan Novick, Tamar Schneider, François Scott, Michel Slama, Elizabeth Seder, Gilles Venhard.

Cragsmoor and New York City, November 12, 2013

BEL CANTO

THE CONFUSION OUTSIDE THE NEW OPERA HOUSE
on opening night October 22, 1883, and the commotion within, delayed the prelude to Charles Gounod’s
Faust
. As one wag put it, no one seemed to mind except “a few ultra musical people in the gallery.” On the sidewalk out front, scalpers hawked parquet seats at $12 and $15 each and places in the balcony at $8. Overeager takers apparently failed to notice that as late as 7:30, $5 balcony tickets were still on sale at the box office. “It comes high but we must have it,” read the caption under
Puck
’s lampoon of the rush for pricey tickets. Ushers in evening dress escorted patrons to their seats. The three tiers of boxes and the parquet were filled, the balcony nearly sold out. Only the $3-a-pop uppermost section, the “family circle,” so renamed to repel roués accustomed to calling it their turf, showed empty seats. When the prelude was over and the curtain rose on the old philosopher’s study, the audience finally fell silent.
¹

Before the show was over, the most affluent, the least, and all those in between had cause for complaint. The carriage trade had had to cope with long lines at the three entrances, north on 40th Street, east on Broadway, south on 39th. Many of their seats, despite prime locations, had poor sight lines and equally dismal acoustics. Nonetheless, seventy boxes offered what a set of prominent New Yorkers had demanded and ultimately resorted to buying for themselves: a house that would accommodate the spectacle of their power and riches. The press paid particular attention to the movements of William Henry Vanderbilt, whose two boxes held, among other distinguished guests, the Lord Chief Justice of England. In the course of the
evening, Vanderbilt sat by turn in each of his boxes and was seen stopping in at those of friends and relations. His valet was posted at the door to pass on the calling cards of visitors—unfailingly male, women rarely left their seats—who sought an audience with the son of the Commodore. The cumulative wealth of the several Vanderbilts and of the others of their crowd was estimated at upward of $500 million.
²

The building’s design guarded class distinctions most jealously through a feature modeled on European examples: a staircase at street level that segregated the upper galleries from the select precincts of the house, barring holders of cheap tickets from mingling with their betters below. In the family circle, the stage was visible only to those willing to crane their necks. And to these least privileged patrons, the high notes alone were audible. From the overheated rear of the balcony, one tier closer to the stage, the single “animated thing visible to the occupants of a seat was the expanse of [conductor] Signor [Auguste] Vianesi’s cranium. At first the audience knit their brows and cocked their heads, and there was a disposition to lay the blame upon their own ears, which many imagined had suddenly become defective, but during the entr’acte, on comparing notes, it was discovered that persons in each of the various tiers and in all parts of the house—near as well as at a distance from the stage—experienced the same inability to catch the notes of the artists clearly”
(Times)
.
³

Vanderbilt made show of his satisfaction with the occasion: “[He] loomed up against a pallid background and appeared to enjoy the music, though his soul, probably, was filled with a different sort of harmony.” Savvy subscribers would have picked up
Life
’s wink at the widely circulating story of the birth of the Metropolitan. They would have translated “a different sort of harmony” as the particular gratification the glittering evening promised Vanderbilt, erasing as it did the slight to his name suffered three years earlier when his wife was denied a box at the Academy of Music, since 1854 the dominant venue for opera in New York. His offer of $30,000 had been turned down; there were no suitable boxes to be had. Overflowing the already full Vanderbilt cup may have also been the memory of the ball seven months earlier at which Knickerbocker society, “the Nobs” or “the Old Families,” turned out in numbers at the invitation of his daughter-in-law, Alva. That night had trumpeted the acceptance by the Colonial and Revolutionary gentry of the far wealthier parvenus, “the Tens” (the upper ten thousand fashionable nouveaux riches) or “the Newcomers,” moneyed during and after the Civil War. The process had taken four decades.
⁴