Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (28 page)

Of all the rifts of Bing’s early years, none ran deeper than that which pitted the general manager against the standees. Bing made a point of confusing
standees and claqueurs. He was, of course, fully aware that although most claqueurs were standees (they were issued free tickets in exchange for cheering on cue), most standees were not claqueurs (they were fans who had paid their way). Their drill consisted of waiting on line for hours, often in the cold of New York winters, before rushing in as the doors opened to grab their favorite spots on the perimeter of the orchestra floor or at the back and sides of the family circle. The standees knew the music, the singers, and when and what to applaud—or not.

 

FIGURE 26.
The standee line at Maria Callas’s Metropolitan debut, October 29, 1956 (authors’ collection)

 

The claque was a different matter. Originating in Paris in the early nineteenth century as a concession of managements to their stars, then making its way to other parts of Europe and to the United States, its existence as an unofficial operation had been an open secret at the Met since the 1890s. At the beginning of 1906–07, a season of mishap and scandal, a flurry of references to the claque made its way into the papers. Especially piquant was the item concerning the two hundred tickets Caruso distributed to excellent effect in the wake of his Central Park monkey-house conviction. Three days later, absent a claque, his entrance onto the Met stage was received with little fanfare; from then on, he bought fifty tickets for each of his performances. Four years later, an official claque was engaged by the Met management itself. The
story goes that one day Gatti and tenor Alessandro Bonci were bemoaning the New York audience’s ignorance of the protocols of applause. Bonci mentioned that he had just the knowledgeable man, his own valet, to initiate clapping at appropriate junctures. And so it was that Max Bennett was hired to organize the claque, and remained steadfastly at his post for decades. He was succeeded by his son, John, who labored noisily until 1935, when the newly appointed Edward Johnson refused to continue to foot the bill for the chief claqueur. Johnson went further, forbidding artists from passing out tickets to fans grateful to repay the debt with well-placed bravos. The
Times
speculated (Dec. 13, 1935) that prior to the interdiction, Bennett had pocketed as much as $100 a week. His fees, higher for Saturday matinees, were based on the number of curtain calls: $25 guaranteed two bows, and for every additional bow another $5 was tacked on to the bill. There was not a set cost for “hissing a rival singer,” as was specified on a mid-nineteenth-century Parisian price list: 250 francs, 25 more than for “overwhelming applause.” And yet, some believed that “hissing a rival singer” or its equivalent was also for sale at the twentieth-century Met. By the end of 1935, the claque was back. But now, the chief claqueur was paid by the artists. Toward the end of Johnson’s tenure, Virgil Thomson weighed in on the matter. In decline during World War II, he said, the claque was reborn with the postwar importation of Italian tenors: Ferruccio Tagliavini’s debut “last fall was a brilliant occasion because claques were operating in his favor.” Giuseppe Di Stefano’s debut, less successful by far, “was defended by a single claque and a very crude one” at that (
Herald Tribune,
March 28, 1948).

On Bing’s 1950 opening night, “the activities of a claque were hardly to be noticed”
(Times)
. Bing had graciously bought coffee for the first one hundred on the line. But by his fourth year, the standees had become his bête noire, more than an occasional bother. He could not ban the standing room fans, but he did, more aggressively than Johnson, go after the claque, and thus rid the Met of a good part of the “intolerable nuisance” that the singers called “the indispensables.” Bing drafted a memorandum to solo artists requesting that they refrain from engaging a claque, and implying, with a wink at Zinka Milanov, that the agreement he had reached with them the previous year had been broken (Feb. 1954). And later that season, when the Milanov fans booed Kurt Baum, frustrated that the detested tenor was her frequent partner, often in
Aïda
and almost always in
Il Trovatore,
standing room was cut by half, from two hundred to one hundred.
²²

Bing was again on the warpath on opening night 1954–55. His glance had apparently fallen on one or two standees in the family circle who had hung
their coats over the railing. “I think the wearing of a jacket in America’s leading opera house can be considered reasonable. Is there any legal aspect to this? Can we force people to wear jackets or request them to leave?” For the second year in a row, the Met hired a detective agency to investigate the “standing room problem.” A private eye infiltrated the line on several occasions, including a Tuesday night
La Gioconda
with Milanov and Baum. He reported finding that five or so Milanov fans at the head of the line had let in forty or fifty others just as the doors opened. The sleuth had learned that Milanov cultivated her fans by inviting them backstage after performances and throwing her “children” a party at the end of the year. All this came as no particular surprise; she had long been suspected of encouraging the bad behavior of her fan club. In spring 1955, she and Bing exchanged letters on the Baum affair, Milanov insisting that her conscience was clear (April 8) and Bing responding, with another wink, that he had no doubt she was as distressed as he by the demonstrations against her (unnamed) colleague. Ten years later, there was another eruption, and for the first and last time standing room was shut down, if only for a single matinee. Leonie Rysanek and Lucine Amara had received “inciting presents,” anonymous bouquets of garlic (
Times,
Feb. 15, 1964). Although Bing claimed he had proof of the complicity of the standees, he would not call for an inquiry, fearing, he said, that he would embarrass his artists further: “Expressions of disapproval are on a level of vulgarity that cannot be tolerated. The way to express disapproval is to do without applause.” He finally prevailed with the opening of the new house. The auditorium was designed so that standees were relegated to the back of the parterre and to the stratospheric heights of the family circle, both distant from the stage. A new policy of advance sales for standing room would guarantee that there would no longer be a rowdy line outside the theater before each performance. And without a line, troops partisan to one singer or another could not be marshaled.
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The ties that bound the Metropolitan and organized labor were knotted in 1904. Unrest of greater and lesser severity first perturbed the Conried administration and continued through the decades. The year before Bing took up residence, Johnson announced the cancellation of the 1948 season, later restored, citing the prohibitive cost of introducing unemployment
and retirement benefits as demanded by musicians and stagehands. Bing got off to a promising start by helping to broker a new contract. He factored into his initial budget unemployment insurance for those laid off the many months each year the house was dark; he also backed the establishment of a retirement fund. But the imperious Bing and the ten or so Met locals, not to mention the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), would soon be at sword’s point. In 1953, there was a stagehand wildcat strike, an event that disrupted no performances but raised the frightening specter of the general manager, stationed at the ropes in place of a striker during the dress rehearsal of
Norma,
dropping a heavy curtain on Milanov’s head. Threats of season cancellations were issued in 1956, and then in 1961, and again in 1966 as the company was preparing for its Lincoln Center inauguration.

The ultimate bone of contention in 1956 was the status of Robert Herman. Herman was an assistant stage director and, as such, a member of AGMA. He was, at the same time, assistant to Max Rudolf and, in that capacity, had sat on management’s side of the negotiating table. In consequence of Herman’s conflicting allegiances, AGMA made noises of bringing charges against him. The fundamental question for the Met was whether AGMA had the right to require that holders of certain jobs be members (
Times,
July 19, 1956); the management was determined that AGMA not institute a closed shop in the ranks of directors and stage managers. The matter was debated between July 10 and July 17 when the cancellation was announced; on July 23, following a compromise, in effect a postponement of any resolution, the season was reinstated. Two years later, Herman would succeed Max Rudolf as Bing’s artistic advisor and there would no longer be ambiguity about which side of the table was properly his.
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Bing and the board again warned repeatedly of cancellation in 1961, and on August 7 made good on their threat. The orchestra had initially asked for a bold increase of 60 percent over three years, the guarantee of year-long employment, and a reduction in workload to six performances a week. As labor moderated its demands, Bing grew more intransigent, claiming that his principal artists had been released, had in fact made other commitments, and that nothing other than an unsatisfactorily “late and patched-up season” could at this point be assured. In light of the company’s precarious finances, public opinion was initially opposed to the musicians; it now turned against management. Ostensibly moved by a plea from Risë Stevens, President Kennedy intervened. Speculation went that following a spring and summer of Freedom Riders on bus trips through the South and student sit-ins across
the country, Kennedy was eager to save Leontyne Price’s opening night
Fanciulla del West
. He ordered Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate the dispute, a step AGMA welcomed and Bing dismissed with a characteristic wave of the pen: “I am deeply appreciative of efforts by Mr. Goldberg and President Kennedy, but the basic issue remains” (
Times,
August 20). The previous day, a
Times
editorial had spoken for the greater good: “Surely, with the musicians continuing to be conciliatory, the management cannot be allowed to flout public wishes so high-handedly.” It concluded, pointing directly at Bing, “Better a late and patched-up season than no season at all.” Goldberg persisted in his mission, reaching an agreement with Bliss. The musicians acceded to a 14 percent increase over three years, a deal close to that cut with the other unions. But they would not forget what they experienced as Goldberg’s betrayal. In 1964, and with even greater vehemence in 1966, the orchestra would leverage its bitterness at what for Bing and Bliss was the worst possible moment. As they struggled to open the new house, the threat of a strike hung over already daunting circumstances.
²⁵

Some months before taking over the company, Bing made it clear that in the matter of race, as with all facets of the organization, artistic and administrative, it was a new day. He wrote to a subscriber furious at Flagstad’s reprieve, “I am determined to run [the Metropolitan] without prejudice of race or politics” (Feb. 6, 1950). To another contentious missive he replied, “I am afraid I cannot agree with you that as a matter of principle, Negro singers should be excluded. This is not what America and her allies have been fighting for” (April 20, 1950). These worthy assertions were accompanied by the more concrete observation that in his first season there would likely be no “Negro singers . . . as there are no suitable parts,” leaving “suitable” indeterminate. The
Baltimore Afro
picked up on the ambiguity: “Is Rudolf Bing engaged in a little double-talking in his statement to the press and radio that colored would be welcome as artists at the Met if he could find a ‘suitable singer for a suitable part’?”(April 29, 1950). Bing countered that to his knowledge no African-American singer had “ever had operatic experience and I am afraid, in not taking this into account, you are overlooking a most important point.” His interlocutor might have reminded him that five years earlier, in 1945, Todd Duncan had made his debut with the New York City Opera, and
so had Camilla Williams in 1946, and Lawrence Winters in 1948. Bing’s covered meaning of 1950 was revealed in a later statement in which he excluded
Lohengrin
’s Elsa from the roles “suitable” for African-Americans, together with her Germanic sister, the blond Eva of
Meistersinger
(
Times,
Dec. 26, 1954). Looking back on his achievements thirteen years later, Bing prided himself on the fact that in his time Martina Arroyo had sung Elsa von Brabant (
Times,
April 22, 1968).
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By opening night of his second season, Bing had taken a step toward the integration of the 39th Street stage: he signed ballerina Janet Collins, the first African-American member of the company, and for the next four years a principal dancer. As Collins told it, Zachary Solov, the Met’s new ballet master, seeking a dancer for the triumphal scene of
Aïda,
mentioned Collins to Bing, saying, “She’s Black.” Bing asked only if she was good before telling Solov to hire her. The press seized upon the comparison of Collins and Jackie Robinson, who four years earlier had broken major league baseball’s racial barrier. The African-American
Chicago Defender
thought Collins’s engagement significant enough to count Bing among its honorees for outstanding contributions to the “forward march of American democracy” (
Herald Tribune,
Jan. 1, 1952).

As late as 1927, with Ernst Krenek’s
Jonny Spielt auf
in the offing, there had been discussion of the wisdom of featuring an African-American, even when impersonated by a white singer in blackface. Gatti wrote to Kahn: “Mr. Ziegler is especially afraid that the fact of the Negro brought on the stage of the Metropolitan might, through some misunderstanding or malignancy, prove a second
Salome
case. Although I tried to reassure him, he persists in his fears.” No challenge had ever been made to the representation of Africans, distant from New York in time and place (Aïda, Amonasro, Otello, Sélika), in blackface, of course. A contemporary American “Negro” as the hero of the piece, Ziegler worried, might be a different matter. In the end, Michael Bohnen and then Lawrence Tibbett played Jonny, the Black jazz fiddler. There was no repeat of the
Salome
debacle, in fact no outcry at all. In 1932, with
The Emperor Jones
on the horizon, Walter White, recently named head of the NAACP, suggested that an African-American, either Paul Robeson or Jules Bledsoe, be considered for the part of Brutus Jones in Louis Gruenberg’s opera. Tibbett sang the role. There was controversy nevertheless. The Met had commissioned the African-American dancer Oscar Hemsley Winfield to choreograph the work, and his troupe, the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group, to execute his dances. “It almost didn’t happen because the Met
wanted to blacken the faces of Met . . . dancers rather than use black dancers.” When Tibbett threatened to quit the show, the management backed down. The Met omitted the dance company from the playbill credits.
²⁷

The first insider to advocate for the place of African-Americans on the roster was Paul Cravath, chairman of the board from 1931 to 1940, counsel to the NAACP, and also head of the board of the historically black Fisk University (his father had been its founding president). But even he could not shake his colleagues or the timorous management. He wrote to Ziegler on January 4, 1934, suggesting Catherine Yarborough, who had made a career in Europe as Caterina Jarboro: “I have no special interest in Miss Yarborough beyond the fact that I am interested in colored people generally, and it occurred to me that if she happened to be a first class artist, it might be good policy and result in some publicity if we could give her a chance to sing
L’Africaine
.” Yarborough had been Aïda (Bledsoe was the Amonasro) with Salmaggi’s company at the Hippodrome in 1933.
Time
reported, “Dusky Harlemites, high and low, turned out to cheer her triumph and theirs.” Yarborough refused the offer of a Met audition, adamant that her European successes were credential enough. In 1944, the National Urban League approached Ziegler in the hope that the Met would “see itself clear to invite some Negro singers,” and in the certainty that “at present there would be no public resentment” (April 14). African-Americans were, in fact, auditioned beginning in the very late 1940s: Muriel Rahn tried out on several occasions, Carol Brice and Lawrence Winters once.
²⁸

A somewhat less restricted though similarly tacit ban on the integration of the audience was also in effect. We know this not from company records, but from the January 7, 1941, unwitting minutes of the Metropolitan Opera Guild: “Mrs. Tuesdale brought up the question of the colored race in the Guild box. . . . Mr. Lewis [Earle Lewis, assistant manager and head of the box office] had been consulted and he stated it was the practice of the box office to sell seats to them in the family circle. The matter was, therefore, settled in this ruling.” Also unwitting was the fleeting desegregation of the chorus. As the
Times
reported at the death of the pioneering soprano Helen Phillips, “In 1947 Ms. Phillips became the first black singer known to have appeared with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, in what she recalled as an apparently accidental breaking of an unofficial color barrier.” Her agent had been asked by the Met stage manager for his best soprano. When Phillips presented herself, the stage manager looked her over once or twice and then dispatched her backstage. “‘I just slipped in,’ she would tell friends. ‘Then after the performance
, I slipped back out again.’” Paul Robeson’s name resurfaced when Walter Winchell, who had Robeson in his crosshairs, announced that he would sing Boris Godunov, in Russian no less, in 1949–50. The Met rushed to cable Winchell its correction: Robeson was not a member of the company and “will not be signed for any forthcoming season” (Feb. 4, 1949). At the end of August of that same year, on the day Robeson was to perform in concert, agitators ignited an anti-Communist riot, laced with anti-Black and anti-Semitic vitriol, in the neighboring Peekskill, New York.
²⁹

In public memory, it is not Janet Collins, and certainly not Helen Phillips, but Marian Anderson who breached the Met’s color line at her epochal debut of January 7, 1955. The proposition that Anderson be the first African-American to sing a principal role at the Met had issued from diverse quarters for at least ten years. Before his death in 1940, Cravath had pressed the suggestion on Johnson. At that point, Anderson, born in 1897, was forty-three years old. The matter was later taken up by E.B. Ray of the Afro-American Newspapers, who inquired bluntly “whether or not the Metropolitan Opera Company has a written or unwritten law barring colored artists. If not, what would be your reaction to suggesting an alternate role as Aïda for Miss Anderson?” (March 17, 1944). As usual, it was Ziegler who responded in Johnson’s stead, and again he skirted the question of the Metropolitan “law,” preferring a high-handed evasion, aggravated by this embarrassing lapsus: “Are you, perhaps, under the impression that the character Aïda in Verdi’s opera
Aïda
is of tawny skin. She is the daughter of the King of Egypt. Amneris—a contralto role—is the daughter of the dark-skinned King Amonasro” (March 22). It is, of course, the other way around: Aïda is the daughter of the Ethiopian King and Amneris of Egypt’s Pharaoh. This would not be the last of Ziegler’s ever more feeble efforts to fend off questions of race. On April 28, 1947, just months before his death, he once again stayed on message: “Only recently have Negro artists shown interest in operatic singing and there is no doubt that eventually one will emerge who is outstanding in the field of opera alone.” By this time, Anderson, who in any case did not have the requisite profile, was fifty. Bing’s initial response to those promoting Anderson varied little from that of Johnson/Ziegler: “Nobody can admire Marian Anderson more than I do, but I am unaware that she has any operatic experience and it is indeed difficult for a concert singer even of Miss Anderson’s high level just to step onto an opera stage.”
³⁰

What finally convinced Bing? It was no doubt in large part the pressure of the times: 1954 was the year of Brown vs. Board of Education, 1955 the year
Rosa Parks would not relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. And Anderson was unquestionably the iconic African-American artist. It was also the scheduled revival of
Un Ballo in maschera,
absent since 1947, and the “suitable” role of Ulrica, the fortune teller, alternatively the “sorceress.” (By intriguing coincidence, in Verdi’s original version set in colonial Boston, Ulrica is an “indovina di razza nera” [clairvoyant of black race]). Crucial also, given the contralto’s by then nearly fifty-eight years, was the fact that Ulrica appears in only one scene, and in that scene she is the dominant, mostly static figure. As Anderson recounts it, on running into her at a party in September 1954, Bing asked her to join the Met in the coming season. She was quite rightly apprehensive; the role’s high tessitura presented difficulties this late in her career. Although the audition for Dimitri Mitropoulos did not go well (as she said, she had had to “squeeze out” the notes above the staff), the conductor assented. Bing lost no time in calling Sol Hurok, her agent, to close the deal—so long in coming and now suddenly so urgent. Her fee of $1,000 per performance was at the top of the Met scale.
³¹

 

FIGURE 27.
Marian Anderson as Ulrica in
Un Ballo in maschera
, with Rudolf Bing, January 17, 1955 (Sedge Leblang; courtesy Photofest)

 

The orchestral introduction to act 1, scene 2 of
Un Ballo in maschera
that Friday evening had to be interrupted when the curtain failed to rise on cue. Mitropoulos reprised the music, the curtain finally rose, and the ovation was such that the characteristically composed Anderson was visibly unsettled. Reviews were respectful, acutely aware of the immense emotional charge of
the occasion. Some notices, like that of Olin Downes, tiptoed around Anderson’s weaknesses. Perhaps the best summary of an objective consensus is provided by the
New Yorker:
“Miss Anderson’s voice . . . is far past its prime. . . . She showed, understandably, considerable nervousness in attacking [the role], and even when this initial nervousness had worn off, she failed to produce the brilliant result that the historic event seemed to demand . . . applause was for the principle of the thing, and not for the specific artistic contribution she made. Her voice was unexpectedly small and tremulous, and her stage personality, I regret to say, was timid and lacking in authority.”
³²

Anderson was succeeded by a remarkable string of African-American singers: Robert McFerrin, winner of the Met Auditions in 1953 (he received the training but not the contract that ordinarily accompanied the prize), whose debut as Amonasro followed Anderson’s by a scarce three weeks; Mattiwilda Dobbs, the first African-American to be cast as a romantic lead (Gilda in
Rigoletto,
Nov. 9, 1956); Gloria Davy (Aïda, Feb. 12, 1958); Leontyne Price (Leonora in
Il Trovatore,
Jan. 12, 1961); Martina Arroyo (the off-stage Celestial Voice in
Don Carlo
in 1959 and then Aïda, Feb. 6, 1965); George Shirley (Ferrando in
Così fan tutte,
Oct. 24, 1961); Grace Bumbry (Eboli in
Don Carlo,
Oct. 7, 1965); Felicia Weathers (Lisa in
The Queen of Spades,
Oct. 21, 1965); and Reri Grist (Rosina in
Il Barbiere di Siviglia,
Feb. 25, 1966). In the southern cities of its spring tour, the Met was caught up in the fight for civil rights that defined the decade. During the 1961 Atlanta run, two African-American holders of orchestra tickets were asked to sit elsewhere. They refused. Protests ensued. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined in a telegram to Bing denouncing the company’s acceptance of a discriminatory policy: “The SCLC regrets sincerely that the famed Metropolitan Opera Company has allowed itself to be dictated to by the whim and caprice of so-called ‘southern custom,’ at such a critical moment in history, particularly this community.” The text was cosigned by Martin Luther King Jr. Bing’s reply was published in the
Times
the next day. The Met, he wrote defensively, “does not allow itself to be dictated to by anyone. . . . We have nothing whatsoever to do with the local arrangements.” But the following year, officially at least, the Atlanta audience was integrated. Atlanta was again a thorn in Bing’s side in 1964. The organizers had balked at the prospect of Price in
Don Giovanni
. Bing dashed off this memorandum to Anthony Bliss, president of the Metropolitan Opera Association: “Leontyne Price at the present time is one of the most valuable properties [an unfortunate choice of words] of the
Metropolitan Opera and there is no doubt that taking her on tour next season, but skipping the whole Atlanta week would terribly upset her, would without question make her refuse the whole tour and might, indeed, jeopardize her whole relationship with the Metropolitan.” Price sang Donna Anna in Atlanta that spring.
³³