Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (27 page)

On December 6, a month after opening night, the company announced that
Don Carlo
and
Der Fliegende Holländer
had come in under budget; the savings would underwrite a new
Cav/Pag
for later that season. Bing tapped Fritz Busch’s son Hans, on the faculty of Indiana University, for
Cavalleria rusticana,
Max Leavitt, the director of Greenwich Village’s intimate Lemonade Opera, for
Pagliacci,
and Horace Armistead, who had designed the “Broadway operas” of Gian-Carlo Menotti and Marc Blitzstein, for both. Busch set Mascagni’s one-acter in the present to, as he put it, strip it of “meaningless routine.” For
Pagliacci,
Armistead adopted a more radical scheme. He leeched the surrealism of his oil paintings onto a Calabrian village reduced to a bare central platform and tracings of withered trees flanked by crumbling buildings. In retrospect,
Cavalleria rusticana
’s contemporary southern hill town reflects only a timid departure from tradition. By contrast,
Pagliacci
’s minimalist platform and flats define an authentically experimental playing space. But audiences were accustomed neither to experimental stagings nor to marginal productions, and many agreed with Bruno Walter that these reinterpretations betrayed their penny-pinching allocations. Belatedly, Bing himself called
Cav/Pag
“a bargain-basement, inadequate production.” The two together had cost a paltry $22,401. In his near-Brechtian construct, Leavitt sought to “find symbols to express [the opera’s] vitality in terms of our own day.” As for his principals, Ramon Vinay (Canio), Rigal (Nedda), and Warren (Tonio), the baritone alone delivered Leoncavallo’s vocal goods, no surprise to those who owned recordings of Warren’s “Prologo.” Zinka Milanov, the Santuzza, was, and would always be, imperturbably of the stand-and-sing school of operatic plastique; Tucker responded to the director’s cues, projecting a Turiddu variously callous and moving. The March 31, 1951, broadcast of
Cavalleria rusticana
preserves
Milanov and Tucker in peak form, their duet a marvel of technical security, refulgent tone, and passionate expression.
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FIGURE 25.
Cavalleria rusticana
, Zinka Milanov as Santuzza in foreground, 1950 (Sedge Leblang; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

The invectives hurled at the sets and stagings by Olin Downes in the
Times
and Virgil Thomson in the
Herald Tribune
drowned out the raves of the
Journal-American
and
Daily News
and the mixed notices of the
Post
and the
Brooklyn Eagle
. But more significant than the critical response was the controversy that ensued, as alive today as then. The rereadings of
Cavalleria rusticana
and
Pagliacci
called into question for the first time in Met history the legitimacy of altering the temporal, spatial, or cultural framework of pillars of the repertory. Ironically, the counterattacks on Downes and Thomson were invited by the reviewers themselves. In trashing Armistead et al., the two powerful journalists positioned themselves as conservatives, Downes in appropriating the label of “poor old moss-back,” and Thomson by moving from the particular of this
Cav/Pag
to the general issue of reinterpretation: “Modernizing operas like these is not a rewarding effort. They are rigid; they have a style of their own; they do not lend themselves to indirection, to added
poetry, and intellectual embellishment.” To his credit, Downes engaged with those who disagreed with him. He devoted three columns to the question, first countering a young operagoer who complained that “Rudolf Bing’s slightest variation from any time-honored methods of dramatizing these operas has been belabored by the traditionalists as heresy” (Jan. 28), then quoting reader responses, pro and con (Feb. 4), and finally quarreling over the distinction between “tradition” and “routine” with playwright Robert E. Sherwood (Feb. 11).

The debate surrounding
Cavalleria rusticana
and
Pagliacci
touched off what would become a perpetual state of war between Bing and the critics. According to Martin Mayer, who worked closely with Bing on
5000
Nights at the Opera,
“The aftermath of this brief squall would plague Bing through the entire twenty-two years of his administration, for the violent defense of the new
Cav
and
Pag
cast doubt both on his taste and on his judgment.” That defense took the form of an assault on the critics themselves. One of his more moderate refutations of what one writer called the “critical wrath” aimed at
Cav/Pag
went as follows: “Critics have the right to disapprove of single experiments, and I will not argue with them, since taste and judgment are involved, and these are personal. I will, however, argue vigorously their right to voice blanket disapproval of a general policy which is intended to vitalize opera production in New York.” What the reviewers came most to resent was, as Mayer characterized it, Bing’s misplaced sense of “cultural superiority to the press . . . shallowly rooted in his own personality and in traditional European attitudes toward America.” The polemic on rereadings would pick up steam under Joseph Volpe and come to a head under Peter Gelb. Despite his early principled defense of deviations from past practice, with the possible exception of the
Faust
of 1953, Bing would not again tamper with beloved titles. And under his watch, this particular wrangle with the critics would not recur.
¹⁷

When the books were closed on 1950–51, the company showed a loss of $462,000; the next year, despite increases in box-office receipts and donations, and the lifting of the admissions tax, the loss was $369,000. Board members vented their irritation at Bing’s pricey new productions. The general manager went on the offensive, writing to Lowell Wadmond, the president
of the board who had replaced Charles Spofford, “The Metropolitan Opera has had great conductors before my time, it has had great singers before my time, and in spite of all that it had fallen to a level when it ceased to be a theatre of great artistic interest and when, indeed, in the field of visual aspects and dramatic interpretations it had become rather obsolete” (March 24, 1952). In this same letter, Bing complained that he had requested five new productions each year, had been promised four, and was now left with the prospect of only three. He argued that the Metropolitan was in dire scenic disrepair “due to the war and perhaps for other reasons,” that it had “now . . . to pay for the sins of the past.” If the Met was to return to its former glory as “the world’s leading opera house,” it would have to operate at an “expensive level,” although economically within that parameter. The “cheap level,” whether economical or extravagant, was out of the question.
¹⁸

Bing won the round with the support of Wadmond and Mrs. Belmont. He was not the first general manager, nor would he be the last, to champion the theatrical dimensions of opera. In one form or another, his precursors had done the same early in their own tenures. In 1883, Abbey’s opulent new décors showed up Mapleson’s tired sets. In 1884, Damrosch’s German troupe was predicated on the primacy of the dramatic ensemble. In 1903, Conried staked his reputation on a spectacular production of
Parsifal
. Gatti-Casazza hired Broadway designers, Joseph Urban, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, and Robert Edmond Jones. Grau and Johnson were the exceptions. In Johnson’s last five years, new productions numbered only ten, six excluding the 1947–48 “Ring,” a record that made Bing’s case. In his first five years, Bing would mount sixteen new productions.

By 1952, having stood up to three centers of power—stars, board members, and reviewers—Bing was ready to take on other comers. It was the turn of competitors, starting with the New York City Opera, rumored to be considering
Boris Godunov
(it did not happen) and
Der Rosenkavalier,
both on the Met bill for the season. Since its founding in 1943, City Opera had made its home at the former Shriner-built Mecca Temple a mile or so north of the Met at 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Bing evidently thought this incomparably more modest company dangerous enough to charge it with unfriendly, if not unfair, competition. The next year, City Opera requested
that Richard Tucker be released to sing during its fall tour. Bing made this typical response: “It is just wrong in principle that the City Center should go out of New York and suddenly appear with the Metropolitan’s leading artist. It does not seem to me dignified for the City Center and it certainly is not good for the Metropolitan.” In 1954, Bing had a bone to pick with the equally “unfriendly” and moreover “uncommunicative” Chicago Lyric Opera. Chicago had invited top Met singers without consulting New York. Yet another grievance was voiced to officials as highly placed as the ambassador to Italy, Claire Booth Luce: La Scala’s government subsidies, he wrote on April 2, 1953, and its tax-free cachets stacked the deck against the Met. Earlier that spring, he had written to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “Not very long ago I had a meeting with Dott. Ghiringhelli [general manager of La Scala] at which I proposed that the leading opera houses of the world should collaborate and that the managements should . . . form a united front against artists who play one management against another.” The tables had turned since 1908 when Gatti and Kahn had foiled an Italian–South American plot to keep artists away from New York and London. In 1921, strapped European intendants had pleaded that the Met refrain from luring already contracted singers with its much higher fees. These maneuvers, like Bing’s, had come to naught.
¹⁹

Bing found more cause to grumble. On January 21, 1953, he wrote indignantly to Wadmond that broadcast intermission features presented savants hostile to the Met, namely, the quizmaster Robert Lawrence, Deems Taylor, Boris Goldovsky, and George Marek. Marek was an executive at RCA Victor, rival of the Met’s partner, Columbia Records, and therefore necessarily biased. Bing enclosed with his letter a clipping of a “stupid and uninformed” interview with Goldovsky (
Herald Tribune,
Jan. 18). In point of fact, the broadcast features were nothing if not benign. Bing was exercised not by on-air antagonism but by negative comments panelists had made elsewhere, the sort of reaction that led observers then and later to evoke “the familiar Bing paranoia.” Enmities, eccentricities, and troubled waters notwithstanding, by the spring of 1953, Bing’s reputation as a brilliant administrator had brought him the tempting offer to oversee opera in Berlin.
²⁰

Later that year, his beef was with
Opera News
. In correspondence with Eleanor Belmont (May 15), Bing rehearsed an argument he had brought against the intermission features: that the audience would not know that
Opera News
was independent of the Metropolitan and did not speak for its management. He assured her that no one more than he held dear the freedom
of the press. However, a recent article in praise of Fritz Reiner, about to leave for the Chicago Symphony, had fomented discord in the orchestra. Tibor Kozma, Reiner’s assistant and author of the piece, had written that the Metropolitan staff included both “professional” conductors, in the tradition of his mentor and, alas, “amateurs” too. Bing also objected to unflattering reviews in
Opera News
of books by Olin Downes and Irving Kolodin. Such critiques, he insisted, damaged the relationship between the management and the two journalists, friction the company could ill afford. The review of Kolodin’s
The Story of the Metropolitan Opera,
1883–1950
was especially irksome. It railed in part, “No smallest item that might suggest intrigue, pettiness or personal self-seeking is omitted from the text. It is only necessary for an opera patron to show signs of wealth for Mr. Kolodin to assume that his generosity is either niggardly or bifarious. . . . Even in the accounts of the performances the author seems to relish failures more than successes.” True, Kolodin’s history is often cranky, and his contempt for wealth and social prominence undisguised. In his accounts of performances, he is prone to dwell on weaknesses. That he would offend some of the Met’s oldest and best-heeled benefactors and their progeny was inevitable, and a matter of indifference neither to Bing nor to Belmont—but for different reasons. In her reply to Bing’s complaint (May 18, 1953), Belmont asked (and answered) a question to which we will return in the last chapter: “When is
Opera News
a Metropolitan ‘house organ’ and when is it not a ‘house organ’?” She was clear that in intramural matters the magazine should function as a house organ. And, in fact,
Opera News
had, for the most part, avoided “criticism” or “opposition,” risking “dullness” and “whitewash.” The Kozma article was “an error,” she granted. But when it came to “extramural matters,” such as book reviews, “more latitude [was] justified.” In any case, both Downes and Kolodin understood fully the separation between the Guild, the sponsor of
Opera News,
and the company. They would certainly not, as Bing had asserted, place the blame on him. As to the Kolodin volume, she thought it full of “mistakes in fact, in judgment and in taste.” The implication was that, given half a chance, she would have written the scathing review herself.
²¹