Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  Conductor Thomas Schippers had urged Barber to base his next opera on Antony and Cleopatra, the composer’s “favorite” play. Franco Zeffirelli agreed to adapt the text and design and stage the production. Bing would assemble a brilliant, (nearly) all-American cast led by Puerto Rican Justino Díaz and Mississipian Leontyne Price. The stage and its machinery would be shown to spectacular advantage. Everything seemed right. Nearly all of it went wrong. There was the glitch of the turntable and, again during rehearsal, the entrapment of Price inside the pyramid, not to mention her imprisonment in grotesquely outsized costumes. Crowds of choristers and supers engulfed her and the other principals. Zeffirelli framed it all—the sphinx, a barge that moved forward from the stage’s distant back wall, and his signature menagerie, here a camel, goats, and horses—in shifting patterns defined by metallic rods. The melding of abstraction and realism resulted in a gaudy hybrid that overwhelmed the music and the drama. The critics outdid one another in bashing Zeffirelli’s production: “Almost everything about the evening, artistically speaking, failed in total impact . . . a lavish, but completely unoriginal concept that smothered in its own production”; “Appallingly pretentious, appallingly arty, and, in most respects, destructive”; “a disaster.” As for the music, one reviewer went so far as to accuse Barber of dealing “a severe blow to the hopes of American opera by denying it the prestige it might have had. Antony and Cleopatra is a slick, chic, fashionable opening-night opera, when what was really needed was an opera for all seasons. It could have been both.” Little wonder that Barber’s composition breathed its last at the Met after only nine performances.8

  Price was no less an inspiration for the score than Shakespeare for the libretto. The soprano had been Barber’s interpreter and friend since the 1950s, when she sang the premiere of his “Hermit Songs.” In the words of the composer, “Every vowel was placed with Leontyne’s voice in mind. She is all impassioned lyricism. I had a problem just keeping her off stage.” Far too often, however, he called upon her “ ‘Carmen’ voice” (Times, Aug. 28, 1966), her harsh low register to express Cleopatra’s rage. But when given the chance to carve a soaring line in the upper octave, and then to perch on a high note, Price was at her resplendent best.

  FIGURE 31. Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 4, center left to right, Justino Diaz as Antony, Leontyne Price as Cleopatra, Ezio Flagello as Enobarbus, 1966 (Louis Mélançon; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  Antony and Cleopatra had broken the bank and the promise of a triumphant opening night. To add insult to injury, the New York City Opera put on Handel’s Giulio Cesare a little more than a week after the Barber premiere. The acclaimed production and Beverly Sills’s wondrously sung Cleopatra made a mockery of Bing’s dismissal of the troupe next door as “provincial.” The poor relation on Lincoln Center Plaza had let it be known that it would give the Met a run for its money.

  For the final new production of his showcase 1966–67 season, Bing offered the world premiere of another American opera. Agamemnon’s family imploded in Martin David Levy’s expressionistic Mourning Becomes Electra as it had six months earlier in the Elektra of Richard Strauss. Henry Butler’s skillful adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s gargantuan play, Boris Aronson’s remarkable ruin of the Mannon mansion, the entire cast, the staging of film director Michael Cacoyannis, and the conducting of Zubin Mehta gave the work its best shot at success. Reviewers agreed that Levy’s suppression of his bent for melody was all too obvious. Thirty years later, when the Lyric Opera of Chicago put on his revised version, the composer confessed that in 1967 he had “felt intimidated” by the fashionable “hard-liners” (Times, Oct. 13, 1998). But despite its flaws, Mourning Becomes Electra had made great theater even way back then.

  Made in USA

  Two weeks before his first night, Giulio Gatti-Casaza announced that the Met would at last present an American opera, Frederick S. Converse’s The Pipe of Desire. Soon after, the impresario persuaded the board to fund a $10,000 prize for a new work by an American-born composer. “I am convinced,” he declared, “that there is enough musical talent in this country to justify a movement in favor of an American grand opera, and I am sure that if the movement is properly organized we shall be able to have operas worthy of the name” (Times, Nov. 21, 1908). In his 1925 “Statement,” Otto Kahn thought it politic to recognize the Italian intendant’s Americanization of the company; Gatti had introduced nine American operas in seventeen years. Kahn neglected to mention the anemic total of thirty-nine performances they had registered; and only two productions had survived into a second season. He elided also the point later made by Frances Alda in her witty account of a rehearsal of Walter Damrosch’s Cyrano: “I had just finished my first duet with [Pasquale] Amato. The pencil marks on my score were misleading. ‘Where do we go from here?’ I asked Amato. Before he could reply, [Richard] Hageman, the assistant conductor, who was rehearsing us, spoke up: ‘From Gounod to Meyerbeer.’ ” At its 1937 Met premiere, Hageman’s own Caponsacchi would be savaged for its borrowings. Gatti let six years elapse between Henry Hadley’s 1920 Cleopatra’s Night (starring Alda) and 1927 when Deems Taylor’s The King’s Henchman became the first American opera to reach double-digit iterations. Before Gatti left in 1935, there were only two more.9

  As time went by, the stubborn hope that America would find its operatic voice was repeatedly dashed. On October 15, 1935, Edward Johnson informed the board that he had obliged the Juilliard mandate by examining twenty-nine American scores; only Vittorio Giannini’s The Scarlet Letter and David Tamkin’s The Dybbuk, one saddled with a poor libretto, the other too costly, got as far as a second look. Like Krehbiel and Henderson before him, Olin Downes was an advocate for American opera in the abstract and a feared critic in the particular. Still, as director of music for the World’s Fair, he pitched revivals of Cyrano, The Emperor Jones, and Amelia Goes to the Ball for the Met’s special 1939 spring season. An all-Wagner program won the day. In 1941, the Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded grants-in-aid to composer William Schuman and librettist Christopher LaFarge so that they might learn the workings of the opera house from within. Their residency produced no tangible result. Johnson managed only six indigenous entries. Newsweek summed it up: “As far as American opera at the Metropolitan is concerned, the years have shown it to be a case of damned when it does, and damned again when it doesn’t” (Jan. 20, 1947).10

  As for Bing, neglect of American titles (he trotted out a pathetic four in twenty-two seasons) was just one aspect of the hidebound programming of which he was justly accused. When confronted with the choice of Vanessa or Louise Talma’s twelve-tone score for Thornton Wilder’s The Alcestiad, he opted for the less-taxing Barber-Menotti collaboration. Bait came in the form of a Ford Foundation grant: Ford pledged to commission three operas of composers selected by the company, any one of which could be rejected by the Met whatever the stage of its development. If chosen for production, the Foundation would cover the difference between the box-office receipts of the new opera and those of a popular title. The financial risk was negligible. But there was a downside, as Gutman noted: “If it finally should turn out that none of them is considered worthy of a Metropolitan production, it would not only be a very bad position in terms of our public relations but would also be an outspoken disservice to the cause of American Opera, which of course we ought to avoid at all cost.” The projects of a number of proven composers were considered, among them those of Sergius Kagen, Norman Dello Joio, Nicholas Flagello, William Grant Still, Douglas Moore, Roger Sessions, Marc Blitzstein, and Barber and Levy. Moore gave The Wings of the Dove to the New York City Opera in exchange for assurances of production. Sessions’s work was “not sufficiently advanced for him to show any part of it.” Bliss authorized an additional sum for Blitzstein’s Sacco and Vanzetti; at the composer’s death in 1964, the score was still incomplete. In the end, Ford underwrote Antony and Cleopatra and Mourning Becomes Electra. Bing never again ventured onto the home field. It was n
ot until December 19, 1991, that the company mounted a new American work, John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles. In the new millennium, rising enthusiasm for products “made in the USA” has been generated primarily in other theaters.11

  TABLE 13 Metropolitan Premieres of American Operas, 1910–11 to 2012–13

  TABLE 13 (continued)

  POSTMORTEM: 1966–1967

  By the end of the first Lincoln Center season, Bing was done with American experimentation. With Mourning Becomes Electra he shut the door to native works. And with barely disguised satisfaction, he drove the final nail into the coffin of the Metropolitan’s two-year-old National Company, established to bring opera to communities all over North America and opportunities to young American artists. President Kennedy had announced the initiative with some fanfare in October 1963. The enterprise got off to an inauspicious start when the State Department denied a visa to Walter Felsenstein of East Berlin’s Komische Oper. Felsenstein had been engaged to do the staging. The recently retired Risë Stevens was drafted to head the operation. The first season opened in Indianapolis in September 1965 with Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, one of the few American operas to have gained a measure of acceptance. Occasionally the company played in large urban centers. In New York, it took up residence at the New York State Theatre to the dismay of both the New York City Opera (it had not yet itself christened its new home) and of the Metropolitan’s general manager. Both tours were beleaguered by poor attendance, high expenses, and commensurate deficits. Bing resented the diversion of monies and energy to the fledgling troupe and, most particularly, the association of the Met’s gilt-edged brand with an undertaking of modest luster. A loan of $1 million, sufficient to keep the project aloft for another year at least, had been promised, but Bing and the board, ignoring Anthony Bliss’s remonstrations, refused the gift. Bliss resigned his presidency of eleven years and was replaced by the treasurer, George Moore. The National Company had something of an afterlife. Among the graduates who would go on to careers as Metropolitan leads were bass Paul Plishka, soprano Maralin Niska, and tenors Enrico Di Giuseppe and Harry Theyard.12

  Looking back on the 1966–67 season in his annual report, Bing acknowledged the failure of Antony and Cleopatra, Lohengrin, and La Traviata, and boasted of the “outstanding successes,” Die Frau ohne Schatten, Peter Grimes, Mourning Becomes Electra, La Gioconda, Die Zauberflöte, and Elektra, “not too bad an average.” Beni Montresor conjured a fantastical Venice for La Gioconda (Sept. 22) with Renata Tebaldi as the street-singer. Anna Moffo’s Violetta wore Cecil Beaton’s extravagant costumes as she traversed his long, winding staircases in Alfred Lunt’s staging of La Traviata (Sept. 24). It was with the Met premiere of Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten that the brilliance of the company and of the resources of the new opera house came together. The audience had never seen anything like it. The Merrill-O’Hearn production made smart use of stage elevators, seven in all, to move the action from the netherworld of Keikobad and the Nurse upward to the Earth of Barak and his wife and into the beyond, the ethereal kingdom of the Emperor and Empress. With Straussian Karl Böhm leading Leonie Rysanek, Christa Ludwig, and Walter Berry, the Met made the strongest possible case for the work. Strauss was again well served by the House of Atreus erected by Rudolf Heinrich for the new Elektra (Oct. 28), and by the titanic portrayals of Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, and Regina Resnik (Oct. 28). Wieland Wagner, the master’s grandson, died two months before he was scheduled to stage Lohengrin (Dec. 8). Peter Lehmann, his assistant and replacement, based the show on Wieland’s prior productions for Bayreuth and Hamburg. Oratorio-like, with the chorus stationed on risers or slowly marching in hypnotic formation, the opera took most of its urgency from Christa Ludwig’s Ortrud. “On the whole . . . this is an inoffensive Lohengrin . . . not as imaginative (for better or worse) as the best work that comes from Bayreuth.” Peter Grimes (Jan. 20) returned after a hiatus of nearly two decades; at the center of the gritty production was Jon Vickers, who found a voice to challenge the force of the sea, the community, and the hero’s own demons. Although Chagall’s décor did little to support the dramatic values of Die Zauberflöte (Feb. 19), the painter’s iconography delighted most spectators and would continue to do so through eight revivals.13

  METROPOLITAN/METROPOLIS IN CRISIS

  The cost of inhabiting and maintaining the Met’s grand precincts had been grossly underestimated: operating expenses had run over by $796,000; the year’s new productions cost $856,000 more than had been budgeted; the settlement reached with the musicians added $280,000 to the burgeoning deficit; and remedying the most pressing defects of the new building added $307,000 more. Ticket prices were raised by 20 percent in November, an unprecedented midseason hike, desperately needed despite near-capacity attendance. At the April 10, 1967, meeting of the Metropolitan Opera Association, chairman Lauder Greenway offered this explanation: “The delay in the delivery of the new house [five months after it was promised], mechanical difficulties with the new equipment, difficult labor negotiations involving work stoppages during the vital rehearsal period, and the problems of launching nine new productions in one season (four in the opening two weeks) put unprecedented and almost unmanageable technical and administrative burdens on our staff. We temporarily lost control of our costs, for reasons which we might have partly anticipated, but which, when they arrived, proved beyond our control. We are happy to report that things are now back on track.” Greenway’s upbeat conclusion notwithstanding, the financial turbulence of 1966–67 would plague the Met for years to come. A sobering caveat was appended to the invitation from Bing to Attilio Colonnello for the design of a new Luisa Miller: “I should tell you right now that we cannot again approach anything as heavy and bulky as Lucia was. We have neither the money for it, the space for it, nor the manpower to handle these enormous productions any more” (Nov. 9, 1966).14

  Meanwhile, New York had entered one of the most treacherous periods of its history. On January 25, 1965, after six months of digging by four of its reporters, the Herald Tribune published a hard-hitting piece titled “City in Crisis,” an indictment of New York under the mayoralties of Democrat Robert Wagner and his Democratic predecessors. The Tribune’s jeremiad covered topics from poverty to traffic, business to welfare, housing, hospitals, finances, the elites, the press, the police, and many more. The litany of urban disaster spawned a four-month series that took a deeper look into the most intractable problems of the city. The 1960s saw crime, racial unrest, “Burn, baby, burn,” flight to the suburbs by business and the middle class, assassinations, antiwar protests, student takeovers, and strikes. The Metropolitan, like other cultural institutions, suffered the effects of the social and economic turmoil. Of passing consequence was the cancellation of Il Trovatore during the blackout of 1965; far more lasting was the drop in ticket sales caused by anxiety over dark streets.

  But nowhere was the intersection of the Metropolitan’s troubles with those of the city more evident than in the arena of labor relations. In 1966, the year the orchestra threatened to disrupt the Met’s first Lincoln Center season, the transit workers took to the picket lines for twelve days. In 1968, the sanitation workers walked off the job; that same year, the firing of white, mostly Jewish teachers and administrators of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district led to a three-month strike over decentralization and race. In 1969, the Met musicians made good on their threat. As New York Magazine put it, “ ‘They’d Never Strike the Met,’ say the same people who said last year that they’d never strike the schools. But opera isn’t life.” Unlike the teachers, the musicians had not actually struck. As contract talks stalled and opening night approached, Bing was unwilling to schedule costly rehearsals until an uninterrupted season was guaranteed. In effect, he preempted the work stoppage and in doing so gained what he perceived to be a strategic advantage. The standoff lasted three months. Bing was cast as the villain, which was not surprising, given his open hostility toward unions in general and, in partic
ular, his fully reciprocated antipathy for Herman Gray, the musicians’ representative. He had no trouble playing hardball: he withheld summer pay and attempted, unsuccessfully, to delay the distribution of unemployment checks. By the time the two sides came to terms on salary and benefits and performances could begin, it was not September 15 (as originally announced), but December 29. The Metropolitan Opera Association had to return $2.3 million of the $2.85 million it had collected in subscriptions; the total box-office take was $7.5 million, down drastically from the $11.2 million of the previous season. Average capacity tumbled from 96 percent to 89 percent.15

  BING’S LAST STAND: 1967–1972

  Bing was not alone responsible for the failed salary talks of spring and summer 1969. He was under instructions from George Moore, since 1967 president of the Metropolitan Opera Association. The directors had elected Moore, chairman of Citigroup, with the expectation that a banker would succeed in checking the runaway expenditures of the first Lincoln Center season. Bing soon learned to regret the change of the guard, particularly when it came to programming. His infuriating clashes with Moore were reminiscent of early struggles with then board president George Sloan “to get authorization for new productions.” Nonetheless, Bing managed to pull off twenty-one restagings, nearly all conferred on the “perennial classics,” as Edward Johnson had defined them, or, at the very least, on titles that had enjoyed multiple revivals. Fully nine of the twenty-one were underwritten by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the others by a small coterie of Maecenases, foundations, and corporations. Novelties were all but absent. Bing’s final half-decade as general manager has the dubious distinction of constituting the longest spell in Met history without a premiere, let alone a world premiere. As for the dramatic and visual dimensions of opera, he came to rely, more and more, on the tried and true. Only five stage directors and three designers made debuts.16