Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (23 page)

With the approaching end of the war, the Metropolitan was subject to the labor unrest that rocked so many sectors of the economy. The increasing strength of the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) in its negotiations with the Metropolitan management, in part the result of the dramatic rise in the number of Americans on the roster, produced a contract with this protectionist clause: that for every alien engaged, three Americans would be hired. For reasons having everything to do with the European conflagration and only marginally with Johnson’s Americanization policy or his labor accords, in 1944–45 no foreign-born singer joined the company; fourteen Americans made their debuts. The 1944–45 season ended in profit. Travel restrictions had been lifted and the tour was lengthened. Attendance in 1946–47 reached 97 percent of capacity and the tour that season was the longest ever. In the same year, the Met tapped a fresh income stream. On February 19, the company announced that it had entered into a five-year contract with the Columbia Recording Corporation for two operas annually. The first recording from the Met stage, that March, was the “Liebesnacht” from
Tristan und Isolde,
with Helen Traubel and Torsten Ralf, and the first complete opera, recorded that June, was
Hansel and Gretel,
in English, with Risë Stevens and Nadine Conner. The second was
La Bohème
with Bidú Sayão and Richard Tucker. In late summer 1947, a dispute with AGMA over the size of the chorus was finally settled. The management won a reduction in the number of choristers: those who were let go after twenty years or more received a year’s severance, and those that remained a substantial boost in salary. That was by no means the end of labor-management strife. Despite an income of $3 million in 1947–48, the upcoming season was repeatedly declared in doubt. In fact, ploy or not, on August 4, 1948, the Met announced its cancellation. Three weeks later, a compromise was reached: the Association agreed to fund unemployment insurance and the unions conceded on salary hikes.
⁹

The company made good on Olin Downes’s 1939 prediction, “If ever we enter the conflict [it is hard to believe that] it will be necessary to take Wagner off the lists. This kind of thing can be left to Germany” (
Times,
Oct. 15). The Association directors accepted what their Great War predecessors had rejected: to program works in the language of the enemy. This time it would have meant banning opera in Italian as well. Between 1940 and 1945, there
was little deviation in the number of scores based on German and Italian texts.
Madama Butterfly
was alone interdicted. At issue was the libretto that, as Virgil Thomson put it, “shows Japanese behaving more or less properly and a United States naval officer behaving (with consular benediction) improperly” (
Herald Tribune,
Jan. 20, 1946).
Butterfly
was performed for the last time on November 29, 1941, a week before Pearl Harbor, and then not again until January 14, 1946, six months after V-J Day.
¹⁰

For the rest, the Met lived, if nervously, with the threat of the injection of international politics into performance. During the numerous iterations of
Aïda
in the late 1930s, the general manager and his staff held their breath at the chorus’ exultant “Ritorna vincitor” (“Return a conqueror”), fearing that “somebody might yell, ‘Down with Mussolini!’ Somebody, ‘Evviva Mussolini.’ The first thing you’d know, the Metropolitan would have a riot on its hands.” As the operatic army of ancient Egyptians set off to vanquish the Ethiopians, those on opposite sides of Italy’s aggression toward that same African kingdom might well have found reason to cheer or to boo. The management took every opportunity to put patriotism on display, occasionally to stirring effect. The 1942–43 season opened with Donizetti’s
La Fille du régiment
. Newspapers all over the country carried the story and a photograph of the opera’s finale, in which, in place of the traditional French Tricolor, the Cross of Lorraine of General Charles De Gaulle’s Free French was waved by French-born Lily Pons. After the closing “Salut à la France,” the Met orchestra played first “La Marseillaise” and then, as the Stars and Stripes were brought to the front of the stage and the Cross of Lorraine was dipped in tribute, “The Star Spangled Banner.” In 1943, opening night went to Modest Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov,
a nod to the recent alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Met declined the suggestion made by Rabbi Steven S. Wise, President of the American Jewish Congress, that it “associate itself with many other groups throughout the country and indeed throughout the world who wish to give expression to their sympathy to the Jewish people in this hour of agony” by reviving an opera that depicts the persecution of Jews, Halévy’s
La Juive
. Johnson replied regretfully that a new production of the work would not be feasible. In February 1944, the director general of the Pan American Union urged Johnson to consider Darius Milhaud’s
Bolivar
. Johnson answered that although he knew and liked the score, the cost of the production was simply prohibitive.
¹¹

Fettered by a war economy and a conservative management, the 1940s registered the fewest novelties and new productions of any decade in Met
history, none at all between 1943 and 1945 or in 1948–49. Among the seven novelties were two world premieres, one-acters presented on double bills. Gian-Carlo Menotti’s
The Island God,
Pucciniesque in musical idiom, not in dramatic punch, got unsympathetic notices; the composer expunged it from his catalogue. Bernard Rogers’s
The Warrior
began life as a radio play. The composer’s modernist, dissonant orchestration, the staging, its projected scenery, and the performers were admired by some reviewers; the austere
sprechstimme
(halfway between speech and song) of this retelling of Samson and Delilah fell into the tuneless “modern music” category detested by Met patrons. Sir Thomas Beecham made his conducting debut in
Phoebus and Pan,
his own adaptation of a Bach secular cantata, also programmed on a double bill. The slight piece was out of place in a large opera house. The four remaining Met premieres fared poorly; they would find success in the future. We discuss
Alceste
and
The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail)
further on in this chapter. In 1948, three years after its world premiere at London’s Sadler’s Wells, Benjamin Britten’s
Peter Grimes
split the New York critics. What Thomson dismissed as adding
“nothing to the history of the stage or the history of music”
(Herald Tribune)
would soon be counted among the landmarks of twentieth-century opera.
Khovanshchina
was doomed to a four-performance run even before it opened; Rudolf Bing, the incoming manager, announced that he had no intention of reprising Mussorgsky’s fresco of seventeenth-century Russia. With this balance sheet, Johnson’s regime was faulted for timidity, and rightly so.

 

FIGURE 22.
The conclusion of
La Fille du régiment
, Lily Pons as Marie waving the tricolor, 1942 (courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Save for
Alceste,
the 1940s novelties were sung in English, in two instances the language of composition. The opera-in-English agenda of the Americanization project was beginning to take hold. The popular Ruth and Thomas Martin
Magic Flute
was the harbinger of English for operas with spoken dialogue,
Fidelio
and
The Abduction from the Seraglio,
both singspiels.
Falstaff
reverted to the language of Shakespeare.
Hänsel und Gretel
lost its umlaut and its “und.” Unheard at the Met in their original Czech and Russian even to this day,
The Bartered Bride,
which had been given in German, and
Le Coq d’or,
previously in French, were anglicized along with
Khovanshchina
. English translation was in play when the music was suspended for stretches of speech, when the opera drew a children’s audience, and when the work was composed in Czech or Russian, neither in use at the Met. For purposes of accessibility, English had become one of the company’s languages. Whether the words, uttered either by foreigners or by native speakers, could be understood was up for grabs.
¹²

By 1940, most productions of repertory standards had seen roughly twenty years of service. The editions of
Aïda
and
Carmen,
for example, went back to 1923–24.
Lucia di Lammermoor, Rigoletto,
and
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
had been mounted for Amelita Galli-Curci and
Lohengrin
and
Tristan und Isolde
for Wagner’s return from his World War I exile. Of still older vintage were
Il Trovatore
and
Faust
. As for the sets of
La Bohème,
no one could remember who designed them. Some productions, particularly those of Joseph Urban, deserved their long life. But with longevity came depredations particular to the New York opera house. Space was at a premium on 39th Street. Drops, flats, and platforms had to be stored in a nearby warehouse, trucked to the Met, covered with tarpaulins, and stacked on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk against the exterior back wall of the theater to wait their turn in the daily change of program. Exposure to harsh winters took its toll on the painted scenery, too soon drab, slack, and worn.

In the course of the 1940s, only a handful of the most popular operas strutted new trappings. The outlines of Richard Rychtarik’s castle, garden,
and crypt for
Lucia di Lammermoor
held no surprise. Harry Horner’s towers framed and unified the narrative of
Il Trovatore,
all the while serving the action rapidly unfolding in the melodrama’s many separate locations, the castles, the garden, the gypsy camp, the dungeon. Lee Simonson was drubbed for a “Ring” dressed with geometric rocks and a Rhine landscape inspired by the New World vistas of the Hudson and the Palisades. Then there was the reprise of five neglected works. Mstislav Dobujinsky’s sets restored
Un Ballo in maschera
to its original Sweden, precincts more luxurious than the colonial Boston of the previous production. Puccini’s Manon and Des Grieux enacted their fatal attraction in the appealing, unremarkable eighteenth-century sites that M. Krehan-Crayon conceived for
Manon Lescaut
. Jonel Jorgulesco’s
La Fille du régiment
played well as a cartoon. Joseph Novak’s dockside for
Il Tabarro
was no more than utilitarian. Rychtarik supplied modest digs for
La Serva padrona
.

TABLE 11.
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1940–41 to 1949–50

 

 

It was the phalanx of masterful conductors that made the difference. Bruno Walter was as demanding as any prima donna: “I cannot accept to function as a ‘vieux Routinier’ [old hack] again and again appearing in the same well-established works. I must wish to see that the management is interested to make use of my artistic capacities and there is only one way to show this interest: by inviting me to conduct, to revive operas of importance.” He took offense at the suggestion of
Hänsel und Gretel,
rejected the company’s version of
Carmen,
shrank from
Norma,
and turned down
Die Entführung aus dem Serail,
which was unsuited in his view to the Met’s auditorium. His rebuff of “Mozart specialist” was undercut by the sixty-four performances of
Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni,
and
Die Zauberflöte
he conducted between 1941 and 1959. In the end, aside from
Fidelio,
which he led not only in 1941 but in 1945, 1946, and 1951, and the three Mozart works, the titles Walter directed were
Orfeo ed Euridice, Un Ballo in maschera, La Forza del destino,
and
The Bartered Bride
. The
Pelléas et Mélisande
he requested was assigned to Emil Cooper, the
Falstaff
to Beecham. Walter could dispose of what the Met proposed. But the reverse also obtained: Walter could propose the works he favored, but the power to dispose lay with the management.
¹³

Beecham followed Walter in early 1942 as the second of the generation of star European conductors to debut at the Metropolitan during the roiling
1940s. His brief American interlude came in the wake of the darkening of Covent Garden for the duration. The dominant force for opera in England throughout an already long career, Beecham had introduced London to
Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier,
and
Boris Godunov
. During his three Metropolitan seasons, he took primary responsibility for the French repertoire. George Szell arrived barely a year later and stayed through the 1945–46 season, when he was named music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. He had been a principal conductor at the Berlin Staatsoper and music director of the German opera company in Prague from 1929 to 1937. At the outbreak of the war, Szell, of Jewish background and antifascist, found himself stranded in New York. At the Met, he was charged chiefly with the German repertoire and with rebuilding the orchestra. Cooper was Russian by birth. His pedigree included Diaghilev’s seasons in Paris and the 1909 first night of Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Le Coq d’or
. Johnson would assign Cooper the Met premieres of
Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Peter Grimes,
and
Khovanshchina
. Fritz Busch came in 1945 and Fritz Reiner in 1949. Busch, who had conducted premieres of Strauss, Hindemith, and Weill in Germany, had been removed from his Dresden post as punishment for his outspoken opposition to Nazism. As the first music director of Glyndebourne, he had spearheaded the Mozart revival of the 1930s; when Glyndebourne too suspended operations, he moved to podiums in North and South America. Famed as a Mozartean, Busch, at
the Met, was heard primarily in Wagner. Reiner, who had conducted meticulously prepared, staged performances of operas with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the mid-1930s, made his Met debut in
Salome
. Walter, Beecham, Szell, Cooper, Busch, and Reiner molded the 1940s into a conductor’s decade. Their engagements, one after the other, can be seen as a contingency of war. They cannot be seen as accidental. In his 1942 report, Johnson announced that the practice of inviting conductors of international repute as guests, begun the previous season with Walter, would continue. At the peak of their Metropolitan activity, the 1943–44 season, Walter, Beecham, and Szell conducted more than half the performances on 39th Street.
¹⁴

 

FIGURE 23.
George Szell rehearsing
Tannhäuser
, 1953 (Sedge Leblang; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)