Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (58 page)

1
. “Calvary”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza to Bruno Zirato, cited in Martin Mayer,
The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 185.

2
. Ironically, on the day of Olin Downes’s review of opening night, a front-page story led off with this headline: “Architects Picked to Plan Rockefeller Centre Which May Have Opera House as a Nucleus.”

3
. Kahn,
The Metropolitan Opera,
statement, 20–21. “A considerable number”: Kahn to Real Estate Board, Jan. 5, 1926, attached to the Minutes of the Metropolitan Opera Company, Jan. 4, 1926. Real Estate Board response to Kahn on April 12, 1927 and Dec. 21, 1927, cited in Mayer,
The Met,
163. The Parc Vendome apartments built on Kahn’s site are extant. Kahn’s architect for the opera house, Joseph Urban,
designed the International Magazine Building commissioned by Hearst in 1926, completed in 1928, to house the twelve magazines Hearst owned. The Hearst Building, reconceived by Norman Foster, was completed in 2006.

4
. For finances during the Depression, see Mayer,
The Met,
170–79.

5
. The opera house was to be positioned where the RCA building now stands. It, too, was to face an ice skating rink.

6
. When the Met signed its contract with NBC in 1931, live classical music was already heard regularly on nationwide radio: the Chicago Civic Opera, retransmissions from Dresden, Covent Garden, and Salzburg, and NBC’s own National Grand Opera Company, as well as the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. For the NBC/Metropolitan agreement relative to negotiating with Metropolitan artists for performances outside the Met, see Paul Jackson,
Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts,
1931–1950
(Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1992), 14.

7
. “the deluge”: Giulio Gatti-Casazza,
Memories of the Opera
(New York: Scribner, 1941), 313.

8
. For the early history of opera on the radio, see C. J. Luten, “Golden Age of Opera,”
Opera News
(Dec. 18, 1976): 54–58. For the Met broadcasts in 1931–32 and 1932–33, see Jackson,
Saturday Afternoons,
23.

9
. For the formation of the Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc., see Mayer,
The Met,
175. “organized for educational”: minutes, May 14, 1932. “It is this”: Downes,
Times,
May 22, 1932.

10
. For Gatti’s salary, see Irving Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
1883–1966: A Candid History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 24. Even with reductions, Gatti was well compensated during the Depression seasons. His salary had risen to $67,057 in 1930–31, fell to $59,169 in 1931–32, $57,736 in 1932–33, and $43,108 in 1933–34. For management’s role in the open letter censuring Gigli, see ibid., 24. Correspondence regarding the termination of Jeritza’s contract, April 30, May 9, July 14, 1932. Jeritza returned to the Met stage on November 8, 1932, under the aegis of the Musicians’ Symphony Orchestra. Led by Fritz Reiner, she sang excerpts from
Salome
in a concert version prepared by Strauss.

11
. “Under the management”: Kahn,
The Metropolitan Opera,
statement, 7–8.

12
. “
Peter Ibbetson
made”: Ruby Mercer,
The Tenor of His Time: Edward Johnson of the Met
[discography by J. B. McPherson, W. R. Moran] (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1976), 148.
Peter Ibbetson
is based on George Du Maurier’s eponymous novel published in 1891 and its dramatization in 1917 by Constance Collier as a vehicle for herself, John Barrymore, and Lionel Barrymore. The apotheosis of Peter and Mary echoed Broadway’s spectral romances of the late 1920s:
Outward Bound, The Dybbuk, Berkeley Square,
and
Death Takes a Holiday
. “a tremendous argument”: Leonard Liebling,
American
. “rather negligible”: Oscar Thompson,
Post
. “oddly featureless”: Edward Cushing,
Brooklyn Eagle
. “Strong men actually”: Downes,
Times
.

13
. “Our present form”: cited in Jackson,
Saturday Afternoons,
29–30.

14
. August Belmont Sr. né Schönberg, born Jewish, curator of the Rothschild interests, married the daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry.

15
. For the radio appeals, see Mayer,
The Met,
179. For the position taken by Cornelius Vanderbilt, IV, see Quaintance Eaton,
The Miracle of the Met
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 249.

16
. Individual salaries are listed in the Metropolitan paybooks. For Depression salaries, see Mayer,
The Met,
186.

17
. “cultivation of vocal”:
www.Operaclub.org
. “that the people”: cited in Mayer,
The Met,
193, from the
American,
Jan. 8, 1934. “the democratization of”: Eleanor Robson Belmont,
The Fabric of Memory
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 266.

18
. “could assemble a”: Witherspoon to Stephens, March 12, 1933. “if an appeal”: Stephens to Cravath, March 16, 1933. “Shifting the opera”: Cravath to Stephens, March 17, 1933. “The Juilliard backing”: Stephens to Witherspoon, March 21, 1933. Witherspoon to Erskine, see Mayer,
The Met,
202.

19
. “I’ve just dumped”: cited in Eaton,
The Miracle of the Met,
252–53. Two years before the Juilliard agreement, in a letter of Dec. 5, 1933, Cravath had urged Gatti to introduce a popularly priced supplementary spring season.

20
. “in a desperate”:
Time
(March 18, 1935): 58. Two Juilliard trustees were already Metropolitan directors, Frederick A. Juilliard, the nephew of Augustus, and Allen Wardwell, lawyer for the Real Estate Company.

21
. Five years later, Gatti died in Ferrara at the age of seventy.

22
. “responsible for the”:
Chord and Discord
(Dec. 1935), cited in Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
361.

23
. The Met should have had doubts about Konetzni. Reviewing her in Vienna, the
Times
found her “superb” voice “imperfectly schooled . . . while to the temperamental, dramatic and intellectual demands of Isolde the singer is woefully unequal” (Herbert F. Peyser, May 20, 1934). The
Herald Tribune
was even more cutting after her December 26, 1934, New York debut as Brünnhilde: “Of dramatic illusion there was little, while the voice itself was pale and tones none too steady.” Ziegler wrote his brutal assessment to agent Erich Simon: “The press were almost uniformly severe. . . . We are convinced that the New York public, with its memories of the great Isoldes, would scarcely have found Konetzni to their liking. Her face is singularly without expression, and is unfortunately, very round” (Jan. 4, 1935).

24
. For Flagstad’s audition and rehearsal, see Mayer,
The Met,
195. “Today we are”: cited in Howard Vogt,
Flagstad: Singer of the Century
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), 111–12.

25
. For Gatti’s losses, see Mayer,
The Met,
185–86. Witherspoon’s 1935–36 repertoire included
Pelléas et Melisande, Martha, L’Africaine, Boris Godunov, Les Contes d’Hoffmann, La Gioconda,
and
Il Barbiere di Siviglia;
Johnson added
Gianni Schicchi, La Juive,
and
La Rondine
.

26
. “has lost a”: Witherspoon to Cravath, April 1, 1935. “the outstanding success”: Cravath to Witherspoon, April 12, 1935.

27
. “Beneath the surface”: Mercer,
The Tenor of His Time,
64.

28
. “vocal gold”: James Huneker,
Times
.

29
. Talley’s concert fees were estimated by her former agent, F. C. Coppicus.

30
. For an exhaustive account of Tibbett’s career, see Hertzel Weinstat and Bert Wechsler,
Dear Rogue: A Biography of the American Baritone Lawrence Tibbett
(Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1966), 65–70.

31
. “has as yet”: Eleanor Steber, with Marcia Slota,
Eleanor Steber: An Autobiography
(Ridgewood, NJ: Wordsworth, 1992), 77.

32
. The broadcast of a singing competition had been successfully tested by the Atwater Kent Foundation radio auditions beginning in 1930.

33
. Beginning in the 1940s and through the 1970s, a vigorous regional opera movement spread from coast to coast. By 1980, each of the cities cited in the
Variety
article, and many more not mentioned, could claim their own opera company. The Connecticut Opera and the Greater Miami Opera were founded in 1942; in 1945, it was the turn of the Fort Lauderdale Opera Guild Incorporated. The 1950s saw the birth of the Dallas Opera and the Omaha Civic Opera Society; the 1960s, of the Seattle Opera, the Minneapolis Opera, and the New Jersey State Opera; the 1970s, of the Atlanta Opera, the Michigan Opera Theatre, the Cleveland Opera, and the Des Moines Metro Opera. “to mean it”: Texaco to Johnson, April 18, 1941.

34
. “to avert unemployment”: Belmont,
The Fabric of Memory,
265. “to develop and”: document of incorporation.

35
. For the Opera Guild’s activities, see annual report, 1936–37, in
Opera News
(March 22, 1937).

36
. Rudolf Bing had his troubles with the unruly behavior of young audiences. He complained that BB shots had rained down on the orchestra and its instruments and that students had spent their time smoking in the lounges during the student performance of
Rigoletto
on March 2, 1956.

37
. “big stars”: Earle R. Lewis survey, May 21, 1937.

38
. Ziegler pitched
Gianni Schicchi
in English in a June 6, 1933, letter to Gatti; Gatti replied on June 28, 1933. The English-language versions of
The Bartered Bride
and
Mârouf
were introduced during the spring seasons.
The Bartered Bride
proved popular enough for inclusion in the regular season.

39
. For contributions to the Metropolitan Opera Fund, see Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
37.

40
. For Tibbett’s veto of Warren for the role of Ford, see Weinstat and Wechsler,
Dear Rogue,
64.

41
. “a great triumph”: Ziegler to Flagstad, May 22, 1935. Flagstad sang Handel’s
Rodelinda
in Göteborg in 1932. We have no way of knowing how much fioritura was retained in this performance. For Flagstad’s preparations for
Norma,
see Vogt,
Flagstad, Singer of the Century,
124–26..

42
. A snippet of Flagstad’s warrior-maid is preserved in the movie
The Big Broadcast
of 1938. Paul Jackson counts twenty-seven preserved broadcasts of Wagner operas between 1933 and 1940. Since the publication of his
Saturday Afternoons at the Met,
other performances have surfaced. “the enormous range”: Jackson,
Saturday Afternoons at the Met,
105.

43
. Flagstad’s other Tristans were Carl Hartmann (twice) and Paul Althouse (once).

44
. In a memorandum of February 25, 1940, Ziegler lays out Flagstad’s maneuvers against Leinsdorf. “Since Mr. Leinsdorf”:
Time
(Feb. 5, 1940): 57.

45
. The first two of Wagner’s thirteen operas,
Die Feen
and
Das Liebesverbot,
are not likely ever to play the Met, and the third,
Rienzi,
was presented only by Stanton.

1
. “was practically trembling”: cited in Ruby Mercer,
The Tenor of His Time: Edward Johnson of the Met
[discography by J. B. McPherson, W. R. Moran] (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited 1976), 202.

2
. “in the first”: “Bruno Walter Talks of Liberty,”
Opera News
(Feb. 17, 1941): 21.

3
. “At the end”: Astrid Varnay, with Donald Arthur,
Fifty-Five years in Five Acts: My Life in Opera
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 160.

4
. “after terrible times”: Simon to Villa, May 27, 1933.

5
. The contractual obligations of Italian artists at the Metropolitan is the subject of communications from Gaetano Vecchioti to Johnson, May 2, 1940, and from Johnson to Bori, February 7, 1940. For Schipa and Fascism, see Tito Schipa Jr.,
Tito Schipa
(1993; Dallas: Baskerville Publishers, 1996), 137–41.

6
. “I should indeed”: Johnson deposition in support of Pinza, March 1942.

7
. “aliens who are”: Public Law 831, 81st Congress.

8
. For Belmont on Flagstad, see Eleanor Robson Belmont,
The Fabric of Memory
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 275. For the story of Flagstad’s return to the United States, see Robert Tuggle, “Clouds of War,”
Opera News
(July 1995): 17; and Martin Mayer,
The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 227–28. Flagstad sang in opera in Chicago in 1947 and in San Francisco in 1949 and 1950.

9
. For detailed accounts of the Met’s fiscal operations during the decade of the 1940s, see Irving Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
1883–1966: A Candid History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1966), 436, 442, 448–49, 454, 461–62, 468, 476–77, 483; and Mayer,
The Met,
219, 223–25.

10
. The minutes of December 11, 1941, reflect the language policy at the Met during World War II: “It was felt that until the public served by the association indicated its dissatisfaction with the management policy with respect to opera that no change should be made.” In a twist of narrative fate, between 1943 and 1945, while
Butterfly
was banished from the Metropolitan, the Puccini work was unusually popular in Italy. As reported in the
Herald Tribune
of January 20, 1946, worried Italian parents saw it as a cautionary tale for daughters susceptible to the attractions of the US forces.

11
. “somebody might yell”: Howard Taubman, “Boss of the Opera,”
Collier’s
(Dec. 6, 1941), cited in Mercer,
The Tenor of His Time,
226. “associate itself with”: Wise to Johnson, Dec. 18, 1942.

12
. Feodor Chaliapin (1921–29) and Alexander Kipnis (1943) sang in Russian in the Italian performances of
Boris Godunov
.

13
. “I cannot accept”: Walter to Zirato, Aug. 27, 1942. Walter made known his refusal of
Carmen
in a September 22, 1941, letter to Johnson. In a memorandum of January 25, 1944, Johnson records a luncheon conversation with Walter in which the conductor refused
Norma
and
Entführung
and expressed his reluctance to be known exclusively for Mozart.

14
. For Szell and the Met orchestra, see Mayer,
The Met,
220.

15
. “conductor’s opera”: Oscar Thompson,
Sun,
August 30, 1941. “monuments of operatic”: Johnson’s report to board after 1941–42 season.

16
. “Men and events”: notes from Walter to Belmont on the occasion of Marjorie Lawrence’s return to the Metropolitan, cited in Belmont,
Fabric of Memory,
278.

17
.
Otello
fell below the box-office average in 1939–40, 1941–42, and 1946–47.

18
. “the Baroque atmosphere”:
Opera News
(Nov. 20, 1950): 22.

19
. “variety and movement”:
Opera News
(Jan. 13, 1947): 22.

20
. Minutes of February 20, 1947, reflect the decision to engage Toscanini for
Falstaff
. “his transfiguration of”:
Musical America
(March 1949): 5.

21
. For Johnson’s troubles with the board in the late 1940s, see Mayer,
The Met,
237.

22
. “The day is”: Report of general manager to board for fiscal year ending May 31, 1942. The long-anticipated postwar arrival of European artists proved to be not a new wave but a passing ripple. Renée Mazella, Hjördis Schymberg, Elen Dosia, and Erna Schlüter ran up a grand total of sixteen Met appearances and were promptly forgotten. The phenomenal Tagliavini, Elmo, and Welitsch came and made memorable impressions, only to leave after a handful of seasons. A decade later, Rudolf Bing, Johnson’s successor, would publish an article titled “American Export: Opera Stars” (
Times,
Dec. 26, 1954) in which he names Met American artists appearing in European theaters at roughly the moment of his writing: Astrid Varnay, Eleanor Steber, and Regina Resnik at Bayreuth; Risë Stevens at La Scala; Lucine Amara at Glyndebourne; and Blanche Thebom, Leonard Warren, George London, Martha Lipton, and Jerome Hines elsewhere. Americans based in Europe in the postwar era were Maria Callas, Teresa Stich-Randall, Lucille Udovich, Dorothy Dow, Keith Engen, Jess Walters, Nan Merriman, and Claire Watson.

23
. “the frequency with”: Mayer,
The Met,
225. “the wisdom of”: Kolodin,
The Metropolitan Opera,
495.