Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (38 page)

The second triumvirate, Chapin-Levine-Dexter, had been met with a rush of optimism. Dexter wrote in his diary, “The company situation at the Met is one of the many aspects of the job that appeals. Every opera house should be run by a triumvirate: a musical director, a theatre director and a general manager or intendant. James Levine, who has taken over the musical side after Kubelik’s resignation, and I will be spending a great deal of next season just
sitting in the theatre, listening and observing. Then we’ll be in a position to tell Schuyler Chapin precisely what we think we can achieve over the next few years.” For his part, Levine spun this billet-doux: “John and I communicate almost by telepathy. . . . We see eye to eye on almost everything” (
Times,
Feb. 1, 1976). In fact, Levine had signed on as music director with the stipulation that control of the artistic administration would be his alone. On the installation of the third triumvirate, the music director spoke for Bliss in ways that misfired when Chapin tried it. “Mr. Bliss does not plan to have anything to do with artistic decisions, except as they might affect economic matters” (
Times,
June 24, 1975). He would go on to trace the key policies of the regime: “to have every night a performance which is as close as the practicalities allow to what we feel is the composer’s intention,” to broaden the repertoire, and to adopt a modified
stagione
system (
Times,
Oct. 10, 1976). The first of these ambitions, to keep faith with the score, went without saying. The second, to expand the repertoire, was professed by all incoming general managers, with the exception of Bing. Levine forecast that his diversified repertoire would take these directions: twentieth-century works, “acknowledged masterpieces that haven’t been seen at the Met in many years,” and “less-played works by important composers” (
Times,
March 2, 1976). As for a
stagione
-leaning calendar—that is, a schedule in which a production is given a first night and numerous subsequent performances within a relatively tight time frame (as contrasted to the repertory system, in which performances of the same production are scattered over much of the season)—Levine’s hope was “to work out a balance” between the Metropolitan and, say, the La Scala tradition. The purpose of this modification was to respond to the legitimate complaint that after a handful of performances, the original ensemble moved on, to be replaced by generally lesser and certainly less-well-rehearsed second and then third casts.
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The optimism of fresh starts was tempered by the circumstances in which each member of the troika found himself in fall 1975. Bliss was haunted by the fear that the Association would be broke by spring. He knew the company was mired in the deepest hole since the Depression, aside from the ruinous first Lincoln Center season. The infusion of the $2.6 million insurance payment in compensation for the losses suffered in the Bronx warehouse fire, the $5 million legacy of Martha Baird Rockefeller, and the $3.9 million in proceeds from the sale of the 39th Street property would be gone. The operational deficit was chronic and growing. Dexter found an administrative technical staff in which “not a single member . . . could read a blueprint or
had practical experience in judging what time, manpower, and space would be needed for any given stage design.” Master carpenter Joe Volpe was the exception. As for Levine, he estimated that it would take five to ten years to “bring [the orchestra] up to his standards,” a project he was prepared to undertake without firing a single musician.
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That fall and winter, one moving event appeared to signal the passing of an era, and another a new beginning. On October 15, 1975, a memorial mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Richard Tucker, who had died early in the year of a heart attack while on a concert stop in Kalamazoo. Tucker’s final Met performance as Canio in the December 3, 1974,
Pagliacci
reminded listeners that three decades after his Met debut, the tenor was still one of the company’s treasures. Tucker had been a friend of New York’s Cardinal Cooke, had sung at Alfred E. Smith dinners, and had often aided Catholic charities. The mass is believed to be the first such tribute bestowed on a Jew. Before Tucker, only Leopold Damrosch, Anton Seidl, and Heinrich Conried had been honored with a funeral service on the Met stage. In January 1976, Sarah Caldwell was the first woman to conduct an opera at the Met. Her
La Traviata
was received with respect: “She led a sober, carefully paced performance . . . that was free from idiosyncracy, but replete with ideas and spirit”; “Her conducting . . . was brisk but not pell-mell in tempo, it was accurate in rhythm. . . . Above all, Miss Caldwell stressed clarity.”
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On the labor front, it was more of the same. Management proposed reducing the players’ contracted weeks from fifty-one to forty-three a year. Bliss issued the threat the orchestra had heard before: “If we don’t open on schedule, we may never open again” (
Times,
Oct. 9, 1975). A strike was deferred until December 31. The two-year agreement was announced during an intermission of the New Year’s Eve
Tosca
. The musicians were guaranteed forty-four weeks of work and supplemental unemployment benefits that compensated for half their salary losses. Eighteen months later, it was back to the tired old dance. In summer 1977, management warned that the season would not begin until an agreement was reached. To labor, this was tantamount to a lockout. The union countered with demands for a pay increase, eight weeks of vacation, and a required maximum of four performances a week (just over a decade earlier it had been seven). By early September, the musicians had agreed to a three-year contract that provided for a 7 percent salary increase, without adjusting the number of weekly performances.

While nervous members of the board clamored for downsizing—elimination of the tour, shortening of the season, reversal of contractual guarantees—Bliss
was convinced that the way out was through growth, and that growth would require the modernization of structures and protocols. He established a marketing department, where, surprisingly for the mid-1970s, there had been none. He swelled the advertising budget from $30,000 to $400,000 in one year. A full-page ad in the
Times
lead with, “You are cordially invited to strike a blow for civilization. Subscribe to the Metropolitan Opera!” It divulged the season calendar, casts included, information never before available to the public. The company added three thousand subscriptions; attendance rose 10 percent to 95 percent of capacity. The new marketing broom met with opposition. Culture, asserted the detractors, was one thing, commerce another, and the balance was tilting to the commercial side. The development office and its increasingly countrywide donor list grew apace with its marketing counterpart. In time, marketing and development spread to the point that they drove the scene shops across the river to Weehawken. With the help of the Opera Guild, a direct-mail campaign designed to multiply giving was launched. The Met board underwent a profound reorganization, concentrating power in fewer hands and lending the directorship a more national profile.
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The policy planning committee met on March 17, 1977, to discuss the “Survival of the Company,” as the minutes later put it. Voices of doom predicted bankruptcy down a relatively short road if cutbacks, specifically curtailed seasons, were not immediately factored into artistic decisions and contract talks. In May, Frank E. Taplin, lawyer and accomplished amateur pianist, replaced William Rockefeller as president of the Association. He would soon report that thanks to support amounting to $12.7 million from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, foundations, and individuals—a significant increase over the $8.7 million of the previous year—“operating expenses had been met without invading capital for the first time in eight years” (Aug. 26, 1977).

The stunning innovation of the 1976–77 season, and the one with the longest and most profitable legs, was the March 15 telecast of
La Bohème,
the first of the “Live from the Met” series, and the first such transmission beamed into American homes since Rudolf Bing’s 1950 opening night
Don Carlo
. It was not the Met alone that reaped the rewards of the telecast: four million viewers donated nearly $1 million to the Public Broadcasting System. PBS scheduled three “Live from the Met” telecasts for 1977–78,
Rigoletto, Don Giovanni,
and
Cav/Pag,
to be carried by 260 stations. Two years later,
Austria, France, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and West Germany would receive one live performance per year. As evidence of the impact of the media project, in 1979, subsequent to the opening night telecast, the Guild was swamped with thirty thousand requests for the
Opera News
issue devoted to
Otello
. The magnitude of that number made a deep impression. Bliss observed, “In the long range television will become important to our survival” (
Time,
Oct. 8, 1979). Vastly improved technology enhanced video definition; the availability of FM simulcast bypassed the inadequate audio components of standard television sets and offered listeners a sound image comparable to the one they heard on the Saturday matinee broadcasts. Radio had served the fund-raising needs of the Depression. The Met now had an even more powerful tool with which to penetrate the opera consciousness of a new generation and loosen its purse strings. The viewership of opera telecasts was estimated at eight to nine million, twice that of average PBS programming. And two years later, a spanking new media department, the first of its kind for a performing arts organization, joined the fledgling marketing and older development departments. Levine articulated his stand on “Live from the Met” on the occasion of the RCA release of a concert featuring Leontyne Price and Marilyn Horne: “This recording embodies the entire concert of March 28, 1982, exactly as it occurred on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. No material was taken from rehearsals; no remake recording sessions took place. As with all of the ‘Live from the Met’ presentations, the principle of documenting the truly live performance guided us, and in our view ultimately carried a more sincere and significant artistic statement to our audience.”
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In 1978, New York was in a position to sell bond notes for the first time since the meltdown of 1975. The Met too was breathing easier. The company would soon be in the black for the third year in a row. Meanwhile, Levine was coming up against the fifth anniversary of his music directorship. To his mind, only 40 percent of 1976–77 could be fairly ascribed to the new triumvirate, and 80 percent of 1977–78. The first season planned entirely by Levine-Dexter under Bliss was 1978–79. By 1980, it was time to gauge how Levine’s promise of an expanded repertoire was faring. In the final three years of the Bing administration, operas outside the core accounted for little more than 10 percent of the repertoire; in the three Chapin years, for little more than 20 percent; from 1977 to 1980, for 28 percent. And looking ahead to the whole of the decade, 1975–1985, to 33 percent. As for the modified
stagione
policy, in early 1977, the music director reported to the board that
“the management has been successful in getting artists for longer periods of time by putting more performances closer together” (Feb. 17, 1977). By 1983, the Metropolitan was presenting only four to five titles per week.
Stagione
scheduling had become the norm: twenty of the season’s twenty-four productions were on the
stagione
plan.

A point of contention dating back to his earliest days as principal conductor, and that would persist long into the future, was Levine’s monopoly of the pit, not the quality of his presence, but the quantity that left little room for others. In 1975, Levine explained, “I’ve offered productions to lots of leading conductors, but everyone is terribly busy, including myself. What I’d like is to get a better level of sound on a night-to-night basis, and hope that periodically a Solti or a Davis or a Mehta will come” (
Times,
July 29). The Met boasted no debut of a top-flight international conductor between 1975 and 1980, not Carlo Maria Giulini’s nor Riccardo Muti’s. On January 17, 1980, the issue was before the board. Levine’s refrain was essentially unchanged. Conductors in high demand were reluctant to commit to a minimum of seven weeks for a new Met production when a lucrative Philharmonic gig had them in and out of New York in five days. Some maestros would come only for a new production, others were exquisitely selective in their choice of repertoire. Whatever the reason, New York missed out not only on a broad spectrum of conductors but on the value added of the star singers they would bring along. As the evenhanded Martin Mayer points out, “There is an argument to be made that other major conductors shun a house where the music director appears to have first choice of artists, works, and rehearsal time.” From 1975 to 2010, Levine would preside over all but seven opening nights and three-quarters of the nearly one hundred telecasts. The other side of the coin, to Mayer’s thinking, was that “conductors and singers are drawn to work with companies disciplined by a resident leader.” Irving Kolodin’s acerbic contribution to the debate in “Is James Levine Wrecking the Met?” concludes that Levine “has allowed his ambition to cloud his judgment.” Kolodin contends that, in his first five years, Levine used the Met to try out operas he planned to conduct elsewhere,
Parsifal
at Bayreuth, for example. Maybe. But then again, Levine’s first
Parsifal,
in 1979, is said to have left Leonard Bernstein in tears.
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