Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (41 page)

In early 1983, a year to the day after his sunny “we have the right structure now” comment, Levine pressed ahead once again: “While he never criticizes Bliss,”
Time
reported, “it is clear that he wants more control. In renegotiating his contract, which expires in 1986, Levine is demanding complete artistic authority over the Met, including a lump-sum budget to spend as he sees fit” (Jan. 17, 1983). “More control” likely meant freedom from the denial of production overdrafts, and likely also freedom from scrutiny of his expense account. What moved Levine to raise the issue of renewal three years before the expiration of his contract? Bliss’s retirement at the end of 1984–85 would be announced on March 21, 1983. Levine wanted to be certain that the terms of his future bargain were widely circulated, particularly to potential candidates, well before the onset of the search. The conditions of his agreement would mark out the limits of the new general manager’s purview. As ultimately defined, the position required “knowledge of opera, singing and staging, strong administrative ability, fund-raising, union negotiations, the care and upkeep of the house, working with public and Federal agencies, a knowledge of several languages, a strong personality, close relationship with opera guilds and other opera houses” (
Times,
June 15). Nothing was said of artistic responsibility, let alone vision. For their part, the directors were eager to ensure that Levine, ever more sought after by European orchestras and festivals, would stay close to home. He signed his 1986 contract on September 16, 1983; the centennial season opened three days later.
²¹

No one was of a mind to quibble that, in fact, 1983–84 was the Met’s ninety-eighth season: 1892–93 was canceled after the fire of the previous summer, 1897–98 erased when Maurice Grau refused to lease the house without his principal stars, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Emma Calvé, and Nellie Melba. At the dowager age of one hundred, give or take that year or two, the Met was solvent. The 1976–77 season was the first of four consecutive years in the black. The lockout season of 1980–81 had resulted in losses approaching $6 million. Happily, recovery had followed swiftly, and just prior to the centennial there was again a surplus, however small. Capacity was at 90.1 percent. Sybil Harrington, widow of a Texas oilman, cultivated masterfully by Shapiro, had contributed the astounding sum of $20 million in 1980 alone. (Her giving to the Metropolitan over her lifetime is estimated at $30 million.) As its birthday drew near, the Met was 80 percent of the way to the $100 million goal set by the centennial fund, 20 percent of which ultimately sprang from corporate founts. At the start of the campaign, the endowment had been a trifling $2 million.

The season opened with the five-hour marathon of
Les Troyens
. The production, though revised, was no better liked than it had been at its premiere ten years earlier. Domingo had trepidations over the high tessitura of Énée. Only a week or two before showtime, it was still not certain that he would tackle the heroic role. He did, though without his usual confidence, despite some judicious transpositions. He sang only the first four performances, including the telecast. The Cassandre was Jessye Norman, making her long-awaited debut. A star in Europe since 1969, Norman was already well known in the United States through recordings and concert appearances. In the February matinée, she replicated Shirley Verrett’s feat by playing both Cassandre and Didon.

The two-part October 22 Centennial Gala was telecast live throughout the United States. When Bliss welcomed the audience that afternoon, he made two upbeat announcements: that the Met had formed a partnership with Pioneer Electronics for laser discs and videocassettes, and that, nine months before the deadline, agreement had been reached with the orchestra and others of the Met’s unionized workers. The musicians had won a 6 percent annual increase, improved pensions, and the retraction of the four free rehearsal hours conceded in 1980. Kudos went to Volpe in his now official capacity as labor liaison; he had had the foresight to open talks eighteen months before the old contract expired, and the skill to avoid the bitter wrangles of the past.
²²

In the course of the eight-hour extravaganza, nearly ninety soloists sang arias and joined in duets, trios, and larger ensembles. Levine began the musical proceedings by showing off the high polish of his orchestra in the overture to
The Bartered Bride
. Eva Marton sustained this rush of energy, pulling out all the stops for Turandot’s thunderous “In questa reggia.” The backdrop to this first segment was Hockney’s décor for
Les Mamelles de Tirésias,
oddly mated to the standard rep it framed. Sutherland navigated the fioritura of “Bel raggio,” Catherine Malfitano and Alfredo Kraus interlaced their elegant phrasing as Roméo and Juliette, and Anna Tomowa-Sintow gave expansive shape to “Ernani, involami.” But unbalanced couplings and haphazard assignments too often compromised the fare. Norman, a formidable Sieglinde, had to put up with the feeble Siegmund of Jess Thomas, pulled out of retirement when Jon Vickers would not participate. Thomas Stewart and Evelyn Lear had neither the style nor the voice for Porgy and Bess. And so it went. Some performances offered irrefutable proof of the company’s eminence; far too many ran from good enough to inadequate. The best years of the still-active Crespin, Gedda, and Cornell MacNeil were clearly behind them; those of Moffo and Merrill, no longer with the company, embarrassingly so. The return of sixty-five-year-old Nilsson was a bittersweet reminder that time had marched on even for the seemingly indestructible soprano. After Isolde’s “Narrative and Curse,” ill-tuned and unfocused, she spun a modest Swedish song with lovely tone and surprising lightness and agility.

For the final segment, a phalanx of former Met stars was seated on the stage. They had been in the audience observing others in roles they themselves had sung with distinction. Erstwhile Otello Ramon Vinay could only have been impressed with McCracken, back after a five-year absence, crushing in the Moor’s despair, and Domingo, sweetly lyrical in duet with Mirella Freni. Dorothy Kirsten must have cringed at Leona Mitchell’s coarsely phrased Cio-Cio-San. And what could Eleanor Steber have thought as she heard Kiri Te Kanawa’s “Dove sono,” impeccable until she lost her way toward the end? Steber, Risë Stevens, and Erna Berger, the Marschallin, Octavian, and Sophie of the 1949 opening night telecast, would no doubt have admired the rapturous
Rosenkavalier
trio of von Stade, Battle, and Elisabeth Söderström. Without a doubt, loyal fans of Zinka Milanov would have given their eye teeth to read her mind as she sat just feet away from Price and Pavarotti, at their absolute best in the act 2 duet of
Un Ballo in maschera
. When the curtain rose for the last time, the dozens and dozens of artists cramming the stage struck an emotional tableau of the Met past and present.
The old-time stars in the chorus of “Happy Birthday” validated the company’s reputation, and then some. By contrast, the ranks of the neophytes seemed thin. Complaints about the paucity of great voices would surface with growing frequency in the years to come.

 

FIGURE 36
.
Centennial Gala, Leontyne Price and Luciano Pavarotti in foreground; seated in first row, Risë Stevens fourth from left, Ramon Vinay sixth, Dorothy Kirsten seventh, Zinka Milanov eighth, Erna Berger tenth, Eleanor Steber eleventh, October 22, 1983 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

Two of the three new productions of the centennial season subscribed to the grandiloquent Zeffirelli manner. For
Ernani
(Nov. 18), director and designer Pier Luigi Samaritani, a former Zeffirelli assistant, filled the stage with an enormous curving staircase that impeded the movement of the principals. And more importantly, Samaritani’s concept suggested that he had not “ ‘seen’ the music at all—either its large structures or its action-linked details.” In the December 17 performance, preserved on video, Levine allows too few opportunities for expressivity in tempos; Pavarotti is in thrilling form as Ernani, for him a new role; Milnes applies his acumen and formidable experience to Carlo; the bass Ruggero Raimondi lacks the absolute control Silva’s great
aria demands; and Mitchell is unremarkable as Elvira.
Francesca da Rimini
(March 9), returning to the Met after nearly seven decades, would be the sole installment in Levine’s exhumation of Italian verismo and postverismo. Riccardo Zandonai’s opera was mounted by Ezio Frigerio and staged by Piero Faggioni in their company debuts. The
Times
(“the evening stretched out endlessly”) and the
New Yorker
(“third-rate music”) questioned the effort and money expended on an opera unlikely to enter the repertoire. Harrington had paid for exactly the kind of production she adored. The pitched battle of act 2 unleashed a catapult, crossbows, and “Greek fire.” Frigerio’s ravishing pre-Raphaelite treatment of the interiors lent Scotto a flattering framework that may have diverted attention from her colorless tone. Domingo’s ardent Paolo responded to Levine’s love for a score that, he allowed, had fascinated him since the age of sixteen. Despite negative reviews for the opera, the stars drew excellent audiences; in 1985–86, with Ermanno Mauro in place of Domingo and Nello Santi in place of Levine, the box office for
Francesca da Rimini
was the season’s poorest. The company gave it another chance in 2012–13.
²³

Far more consequential was the premiere of Handel’s
Rinaldo,
the first baroque opera ever mounted by the company, a benchmark in the diversification of the repertoire. In Marilyn Horne, Samuel Ramey, and Benita Valente, the Met had singers unfazed by the challenges of Baroque ornamentation. The trio had combined forces earlier in Ottawa in essentially the same witty production, conducted by Mario Bernardi. In his Met debut, Ramey made his entrance on an airborne, dragon-shaped chariot and unfurled his mighty voice with an agility unparalleled among his peers. True Handelians decried this impure, heavily rearranged version of the original score. Nonetheless, this production served to introduce an enthusiastic audience to the Baroque that, in time, and in far more authentic guise, would make the Metropolitan home.
²⁴

The busy centennial was the year of the search for a new general manager, thereby granting the incoming chief a full season, Bliss’s last, 1984–85, to learn the ropes and plan the future. Word was out that Levine had tired of Bliss’s “reluctance or inability to help effectively with the nitty gritty details of putting together—and holding together—an operatic season” (
Times,
Sept. 22, 1985). Only one candidate, as far as we know, actually made the pilgrimage to Lincoln Center, the intendant of the Munich Opera and Met stage director August Everding. Two other names found their way into the news, Ardis Krainik, head of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Ernest Fleishmann, manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The committee was undoubtedly aware that individuals presenting Everding’s credentials, or Krainik’s or Fleishmann’s for that matter, would expect much of the artistic control that had already been signed away in Levine’s 1986 contract. Nonetheless, according to Volpe’s later account, the board did offer Everding the position. He declined “because Jimmy Levine’s agent, Ronald Wilford, had, in effect, blackmailed the Met into naming Jimmy artistic director. Wilford’s threat that Jimmy would walk unless given the title was an empty one, but it worked.” By early summer, Bruce Crawford, the new president of the Association replacing Frank Taplin, confided somewhat disingenuously, “All the favorite candidates have disappeared. I still would hope that we can get somebody who is more than an administrative type” (
Times,
June 9, 1984). Crawford himself had been discussed earlier in the process; he had withdrawn from consideration, citing business obligations. Whether or not his vacillation ultimately short-circuited the search, by October Crawford, an advertising executive and the board chair of BBDO Worldwide, a dyed-in-the-wool “administrative type” who knew opera well, was general manager–elect. He reported that “the search committee came to the conclusion that what we didn’t need was two artistic directors” (
Times,
Oct. 5, 1984). By then, the winds had shifted. In Volpe’s words, “the Met was deeper in red ink than at any time in its history, with a deficit of $8 million. . . . The culprits were uncontrolled expenses, a falloff at the box office, and a huge diversion of donations to the endowment drive. . . . The trustees [were] blind to the effect [the drive] would have on the annual giving that was essential to cover operating expenses.”
²⁵

With Crawford in the wings came other changes. To Levine’s chagrin, Joan Ingpen retired at the end of 1984–85. Bliss and his successor saw her depart without regret. To their minds, Ingpen’s insistence on nailing down casts at a distance of five years had kept the Met from bringing in rising stars at their ascendancy. This intransigence also put the company at risk of fielding artists past their prime. Her detractors complained that “she’d rather have a mediocre singer than a hole to fill later.” Levine was rewarded with the sweeping title of artistic director effective the next year, 1986, blotting out “the separation of musical and dramatic [that had] become to [him]
intolerable.” He had been candid with the board: “Either engage me as a guest conductor or put me in charge.” The new title also celebrated his tenth anniversary with an orchestra that had gone from good to fabulous under his utterly devoted leadership, just as he had promised in 1975. Players and singers loved working with him: “He is one of the few, perhaps the only one, among active big-league opera conductors today, who conducts ‘the performance that is actually taking place’ [Sherrill Milnes’s phrase], responding to the singers instead of leading an ideal performance he hears in his head and leaving the singers to fit into it willy-nilly” (
Times,
Sept. 22, 1985).
²⁶

Crawford found a sluggish hierarchy “infected” with Levine’s penchant for indecision. “My job,” he said artfully, “is to keep [Levine] from getting swamped.” Stretched by an exhausting schedule of rehearsals and performances, the artistic director–designate was both unwilling to cede control and unable to wield it expeditiously. Crawford’s portfolio obviously extended well beyond the modest supporting role he had ascribed to himself for public consumption. Not only would he hold the reins of the complex operation, but he would see to it that Levine himself was reined in. The message he delivered on taking office echoed Bliss’s injunction of two years earlier: “We must . . . follow a policy of working much more closely with the marketing department and making certain that the repertoire is chosen with projected box office return to be no less than 90%-91%.” In fact, since 1977, essentially the Levine years, capacity had trended downward from 96.3 percent to 85 percent. The revivals of the Dexter productions were partially to blame; once their novelty had worn off, they averaged only 76 percent. Crawford called for a “conservative swing” as the only alternative, with “continued or even increasing reliance on such lavish spectacles as the Franco Zeffirelli
Tosca
” due to open the season. Patrons that evening were treated to a Grand Tier postperformance supper punctuated by a show of Chanel’s latest line. That night, the company brought in a total of $1.2 million, of which $750,000 was donated by the celebrity fashion house (
Times,
Sept. 29, 1985). The outrage provoked by the mercantile incursion derailed this particular experiment. Other brainchildren of Crawford appointee Cecile Zilkha, most notably a program of corporate giving, rang up $5 million annually.
²⁷

Faced with plummeting ticket sales and mounting deficits, Crawford put the brakes on Levine’s expansion of the repertoire. Met audiences had been reticent
to explore uncharted terrain. The scheduling of
Wozzeck
and
Lulu
in the same season contributed to the depressed 1984–85 average of 84.9 percent. The next year, capacity fell to 82.9 percent, attributable, to some extent, to three hard sells,
Idomeneo, Jenufa,
and
Khovanshchina
. Then there was the challenge of casting familiar operas with principals worthy of their roles, and the still-higher hurdles of signing those few with unquestioned marquee value and keeping stellar casts intact. Absent Pavarotti,
Ernani
lost its draw; without Domingo,
Francesca da Rimini
flopped. Between 1984 and 1986, audiences too often had no choice but to put up with Ermanno Mauro and Carol Neblett in
Manon Lescaut,
Vasile Moldoveanu in
Simon Boccanegra,
and Franz-Ferdinand Nentwig, Mari-Anne Häggander, and Edward Sooter in
Die Meistersinger,
all of whom were engaged under Ingpen’s policy of better safe than sorry. In its roundup of 1985–86, the
Christian Science Monitor
called the season “a shambles.” The
Wall Street Journal
found it “so depressing that even long-in the-tooth operagoers can’t remember its like.” The consensus was that the Met was awash in mediocrity. Adding to the gloom were the defections, some in management’s control, some not. Sutherland and McCracken withdrew for several years beginning in 1978, she until 1982 over
The Merry Widow
she had been denied, he until 1983 over a
Tannhäuser
telecast he thought was coming to him. Nilsson ran afoul of the IRS in 1975 and stayed away until 1979. For these and other desertions, and for the too-rare appearances of major artists, the leadership took the heat, “not in most instances because the Met had failed to ask—but sometimes because it did not ask persuasively, insistently, invitingly, imaginatively, or accommodatingly enough.”
²⁸

Like it or not, with or without stars, Zeffirelli’s formula, the deluxe investiture of a popular opera, was a winner. In the wake of his
La Bohème,
his
Tosca
(March 11, 1985) would fill the house season after season, indifferent to singers or conductors. The opening of act 3 was by any measure an example of scenic gesture meant principally to astound. Puccini’s evocation of dawn breaking over the Castel Sant’Angelo fell victim to the razzle-dazzle of stage machinery as the terrace rose to reveal Cavaradossi’s dungeon and then sank back into place for the opera’s denouement. The management had attracted a major conductor, Giuseppe Sinopoli; the orchestra was unhappy with him, he with the rate of exchange, and he never again played at the Met. Of the first-night cast, only Domingo had sufficient sweetness and brilliance. Hildegard Behrens, exciting as always, though handicapped by her increasingly weak bottom and thin middle registers, was a curiously unaffecting
Tosca; for Scarpia, MacNeil, his voice nearly drained of vibrato, had to lean heavily on experience.
²⁹

The Peter Hall/John Bury
Carmen
(March 10, 1986), substantially grown since its birth on the small stage of Glyndebourne, would have been easily forgotten had it not been for Maria Ewing. Her gypsy was pouting, rude, roughly sung, and erotic despite her refusal of the trappings of eroticism. She made Andrew Porter’s “short list of those who have left an indelible impression” in the role; she was trounced by many other reviewers (“only a little short of complete travesty,” “a manic-depressive urchin who has fits,” “an object lesson in how not to do the role”).
Porgy and Bess
had its much belated house premiere at last (Feb. 6, 1985). In the mid-1930s, Otto Kahn had wanted the Met to be the first to mount George Gershwin’s opera. The composer rebuffed the company’s chintzy guarantee of only two performances and turned to Broadway instead. A world tour of the often revived Broadway format with spoken dialogue, kicked off in 1952, was an early triumph for Leontyne Price. The Met’s Bess and Porgy were Grace Bumbry and Simon Estes. Not the “less than convincing” principals, but the large ensemble, Levine in the pit, and Florence Quivar’s definitive Serena argued persuasively for Gershwin as grand opera.
Porgy and Bess
played to packed houses through its four-season run.
³⁰

Among the other new productions of 1984–86, a revival and two premieres added to the company’s prestige if not to its profits.
Khovanshchina
(Oct. 14, 1985), sung in Russian, was embraced as a masterpiece. August Everding and Ming-Cho Lee took a spare approach to Mussorgsky’s posthumous work, the better to tell the convoluted story as clearly as possible. The final scene made expressive use of the revolving stage as the “Old Believers” advanced from the forest to the interior of the hermitage for their mass immolation.
La Clemenza di Tito
was the last of the three neglected Mozart operas Levine added to the repertoire. Ponnelle’s architectonic set, wide steps, porticos, and balconies suited the composer’s late masterpiece. As for Handel’s
Samson,
Moshinsky and his designer, Timothy O’Brien, attempted to counter the oratorio’s endemic stasis by varying the arrangement of chorus and props. Conductor Julius Rudel played fast and loose with the score’s length and its Baroque embellishments. Vickers’s Miltonic hero, blind at the gate of his Gaza prison, was the lynchpin of the production.
Samson
was a parting gift to the tenor who had touched New York audiences so deeply since 1960. He would make his farewell to the Met the following season as Samson again, this time in Saint-Saëns’s opera.

Bliss was barely out the door when Crawford scuttled the annual national tour, a tradition as old as the Met itself. The growing strength of regional opera, coast-to-coast access to the Metropolitan via television, the increasing difficulty of drafting prominent singers, and, above all, significant losses were reasons to call it quits. In 1883–84, Henry Abbey, an inveterate tour manager, had taken his Grand Italian Opera on the road. At different points in the season, the company visited Boston, where it presented the Met premieres of
Carmen
and
Martha,
Cincinnati for its first
Le Prophète
and
Hamlet,
and Philadelphia for
Roméo et Juliette
. Abbey’s troupe traveled as far west as Chicago and St. Louis and south to Washington. The Grand Italian Opera played more performances away that season than on 39th Street. The German ensembles of 1884–1891 were homebound by comparison: for three seasons they did not budge. Under the management of Abbey, Grau, and Schoeffel in 1891, the tour reclaimed its share of the schedule. The De Reszke brothers and Emma Eames made their Met debuts not in New York, but in Chicago during a five-week engagement that featured the premieres of
Otello
and
Cavalleria rusticana
. Just before and after the turn of the century, the company journeyed for long stretches, adding to its itinerary numerous stops, including two in Canada, en route to the Pacific. On November 9, 1900, Los Angeles heard Melba as the Met’s first Mimì; on April 17, 1906, Fremstad and Caruso sang
Carmen
in San Francisco only hours before the earthquake. Beginning in 1903, tours were confined to the spring, with rare exception. In the climactic months of the 1910 competition with Hammerstein, not one but two brigades were dispatched from Broadway, the first to Chicago for a month, the second to the midwest and then across the Atlantic to Paris.

With Hammerstein out of the way, Gatti, no friend of long excursions, could afford to keep his stars in his backyard, Brooklyn or Philadelphia. The sole far-flung destination was Atlanta, where opera week was the height of the social season, the occasion for masked balls and lavish parties honoring fun-loving singers wont to reciprocate with musical antics. It was in 1910 that the first citizens’ committee was organized to sponsor a Met visit: the Atlanta Festival Association headed by “Colonel” Peel. A prize attraction was the alluring and sometimes shocking Geraldine Farrar; the press took special note of her offstage “peek-a-boo” blouse and her onstage
Zazà
panties. Atlanta knew what it wanted. Mrs. Peel warned Edward Ziegler, Gatti’s assistant, that the patrons would not put up with “a bargain counter affair,”
that the roster had to include “Hell Cats” (if not Farrar, then Frieda Hempel), that Maria Barrientos was “very unpopular here” and Ponselle “an unknown quantity,” and that
Il Trittico,
whose New York world premiere she had attended that very evening, was “an awful conglomeration” and “a perfect mess” (Dec. 14, 1918). Although Atlantans did not get their favorite “Hell Cats” and had to suffer the unpopular Barrientos, they had little cause for complaint: the “awful”
Trittico
did not venture below the Mason-Dixon line, the young Ponselle was a hit in Atlanta as she had been in New York, and Caruso was all theirs in three of the seven performances. The circuit grew again in the 1920s with the inclusion of Cleveland, Rochester, Baltimore, and Washington. When one port of call dropped out during the Depression, another close by, Newark, Hartford, or suburban White Plains, took its place. By the end of the 1930s, a truly national tour struck out for New Orleans, Dallas, and points between. Local papers had lots to say about gowns and jewels on display for opening night. And lucky the city favored with Lily Pons or Risë Stevens, who exuded not only the chichi of high culture, but the chic of mass media, radio, movies, and the ubiquitous cigarette advertisement, particularly apt for Stevens’s smoldering Carmen.
³¹