Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  FIGURE 32. Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, and her three Tristans, left to right Ramon Vinay, Karl Liebl, Albert Da Costa, December 28, 1959 (Louis Mélançon; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  The Nilsson-Vickers Tristan was a luminous instant in this dark season. Chapin was obliged to announce that 1974–75 would be shortened from thirty-one weeks to thirty, and 1975–76 to only twenty-seven. The administrative staff would be cut by 20 percent. To add to the adversity, costumes valued at $3 million had gone up in the smoke of a Bronx warehouse fire. Chapin and Kubelik were censured for mediocre casting, inferior conducting, and chaos onstage and off-. Levine, meanwhile, was unsure of the stance he should take vis-à-vis the warring powers. He consulted with his agent, Ronald Wilford, who advised the tactful waiting game the young conductor played to his future advantage. On February 12, in the middle of his first year, Kubelik resigned. His decision, he cabled Moore, had been prompted by three factors: that he had “tried in vain in the past year to get the administration of the Metropolitan Opera House to work as planned,” a grievance left ill defined; that the company’s “unfortunate financial situation [had changed] the basic conception of my ideals on how to lead musical affairs of the Met”; and “the latest attacks on my person from the New York Times.” Only the second of the three found its way into the press release.38

  Of the original troika, Chapin alone was left standing, although weakened to the point that he learned of Kubelik’s resignation only when he read about it in the newspaper. Two weeks later, in an inspired stroke, the general manager appointed John Dexter production supervisor, a new position on a par with the recently vacated slot of music director. Dexter, whose reputation was largely based on landmark stagings of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Peter Shaffer, had come to the Met from England’s National Theatre for Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani just a couple of months earlier. The dynamic director succeeded in persuading the nearly “immobile” Caballé (shades of Margaret Webster and Zinka Milanov) to negotiate his angular patterns on Svoboda’s carpeted steps. With Dexter on board, a reconfigured troika was in the offing.

  1974–1975 The fitting epilogue to the troubles of 1973–74 was the summer double bill of a so-so Gianni Schicchi and a wrong-headed Bluebeard’s Castle, the company premiere of Bartók’s opera. The 1974–75 season began no more felicitously. The weeklong Cleveland engagement was a box-office bust, an experiment that would not be repeated. And the aura of the New York opening night was dimmed by the cancellation of its star attraction: Caballé was replaced by Cristina Deutekom in I Vespri Siciliani. Anticipation surrounding Death in Venice was heightened by the debut of Peter Pears, the original Aschenbach, now in his mid-sixties. Britten’s opera, dwarfed by the large house, generated respect, little affection, and average ticket sales. Janáček’s Jenufa (Nov. 15, in English) was revived a half-century after its Met premiere. The new investiture had many virtues—brooding sets designed by Schneider-Siemssen, Rennert’s staging, the musical leadership of John Nelson, and a strong cast headed by Teresa Kubiak, Vickers, and Astrid Varnay, who had come home after eighteen years. The superb presentation of an unfamiliar masterwork that would eventually find many devotees was hastily mothballed, not to return until 1986.39

  On the day of the Jenufa premiere, pummeled by the press and the board, and convinced that the only remaining defense was offense, Chapin wrote to the directors: “We are now at a point where there is a developing schism between the general manager and the executive committee as to what steps should be taken.” The provocative comment prefaced a review of his accomplishments: receipts had grown by 5 percent in his first season, he had personally secured upward of $1.8 million from private sources, he had negotiated million-dollar federal and state challenge grants, he had brought in John Dexter, and he had engineered the upcoming tour to Japan. And all this in the face of obstacles for which the board was directly responsible. To begin with, he had inherited “staggering building costs”; the trustees had left him hanging as “acting” for almost ten months, causing “enormous problems of uncertainty.” Their mistrust of his management had “delayed planning and is continuing to cause us to lose major artists,” a state of affairs the press had laid unjustly at his door. The better news was that 1973–74 had ended with a deficit of $532,000, compared with the much greater $2.8 million shortfall of the previous season. Chapin clinched his argument with, “When, for example, you start with a $4 million building liability before creating a season and ask for a deficit limit of $5–6 million, you are really talking about a $1–2 million artistic program. . . . $2 million is the approximate City Opera operating budget.” The general manager’s brief carried both the ring of truth and the dangers of lèse-majesté.

  Within a week, Anthony Bliss was named to the new full-time post of executive director and made chairman of the Association’s administration committee, with oversight of the company’s day-to-day operation, a move that further rattled Chapin’s authority. His father, Cornelius N. Bliss, had been a longtime board member and chair of the Metropolitan Opera Association from 1938 to 1946. Anthony Bliss was elected to the board in 1949 and served as its president in the 1950s and 1960s. William Rockefeller, the current president, made the new chain of command official: “Mr. Bliss as the Metropolitan’s chief operating officer will report to me, and Mr. Chapin will report to Mr. Bliss” (Times, Nov. 22, 1974). A short three weeks later, the Times led off with this question: “Bliss and Chapin: On a Collision Course?” (Dec. 11). Chapin glossed Bliss’s role as liaison between management and board; in Bliss’s definition, the job also entailed a large say in artistic policy. The distance between the two understandings could not be bridged.

  By February 1975, fiscal exigency had reached a point (the house was at just 86 percent capacity while expenses were still on the rise) that 10 percent across-the-board salary cuts seemed inescapable. Bliss pleaded with the unions to accept a one-month reduction of the hard-won twelve-month provision. He went before the Met employees to explain that these and other steps would ensure the 1976–77 season: “This is distasteful, but I see no alternatives. We must not let the opera house die. If it closes, I question whether it will ever open again” (Times, Feb. 27). Joseph Volpe, then a master carpenter, later described Bliss’s appearance on that day: “A tall, slender man in a plain gray suit, he didn’t make much of an entrance. He introduced himself quietly, without smiling, and when he said his last name, I detected the hint of a lisp. Then he went on to say that his father had helped out the Met in bad times, and that the Met was in bad times again.” A headline in New York Magazine ran, “Suicidio or Ritorna Vincitor—the Met’s Choice” (March 24). Volpe proposed a third way: he demonstrated how equivalent savings could be realized by controlling waste. The salary slashes were not implemented.40

  The Met’s fiscal emergency and that of the city came to a head that month, ten years after the first installment of the Herald Tribune’s “City in Crisis.” Abe Beame was mayor, succeeding the Republican-turned-Democrat John Lindsay, under whose watch conditions had deteriorated beyond the sorry mess described in the exposé. The short-term debt had climbed to $3.4 billion, three times that of 1971. And by the last day of March, it had reached $6.1 billion. New York was unable to service its debt. The metropolis avoided bankruptcy by the grace of a federal loan and the debt-restructuring plan executed by the Municipal Assistance Corporation. For the next two years, New York was effectively governed by the Emergency Financial Control board. The end of the harrowing decade was punctuated by the speech President Gerald Ford delivered to the National Press Club. It would be long forgotten but for the unforgettable Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead” (Oct. 30, 1975).

  Chapin’s last season was crowned by the unconscionably overdue house debut of Beverly Sills in The Siege of Corinth. For this company first, Schippers adopted an unsatisfactory edition that patched together several of Rossini’s versions; the production was meant “to re-create (not even re-interpret!) the La Scala sett
ings of the 19th Century premiere. This curious idea is being presented as a widely revolutionary concept. Hardly. The effect created is that of a museum piece.” Despite, or better, because of, her years of glory at the New York City Opera, sometimes in roles less brilliantly cast at the Met, Rudolf Bing had boycotted the girl next door. Sills had proudly become the star she was without Bing’s help. She was finally appearing at America’s foremost opera house and, to top it all off, in a reconstruction of the sumptuous production that had propelled her from La Scala to international celebrity in 1969. New York hailed its Brooklyn-born daughter once again. But when the hoopla had died down, even her most fervent partisans had to acknowledge that the City Opera had enjoyed her best years.41

  Four days earlier, there had been another long-overdue debut. Among the management’s 1974–75 bungles was the scheduling of a mystifying twenty performances of Tosca. The last of the seven divas to undertake the title role that season would be a late replacement for Nilsson. At the urging of Marilyn Horne, who had heard her in Dallas, Magda Olivero, age sixty-five, was invited to bow with the company. Her career had begun in Turin in 1932, the year of Jeritza’s last Met Tosca; by the late 1950s, Olivero had an international following thanks to mostly pirated recordings. Beginning in 1968, American audiences in Kansas City, in Hartford, in Newark, and even at neighboring Philharmonic Hall had received her rapturously. An unusually committed actress, the Italian soprano transformed her unpromising sound into an expressive and, yes, beautiful instrument that bore little resemblance to conventional voices. On April 18, her third and last Met performance (she sang Tosca on tour in 1979), Olivero acknowledged the insistent cheers of the throng pressing forward on the orchestra floor by edging along the narrow lip at the base of the proscenium to touch the outstretched hands of her admirers. A misstep would have plunged her into the pit. With this gesture, Olivero showed what made her unique: she sang and acted as if her life depended on it.42

  On February 11, Bliss had informed Chapin by memorandum that Levine would, as Chapin himself had proposed, be named music director, and that he would be “the principal voice in the areas of repertoire, casting, and musical decisions.” Wilford’s waiting game had worked like a charm. He had dragged his feet on Levine’s contract and, when finally nudged by Chapin, responded that the matter was now in Bliss’s bailiwick. Bliss also let Chapin know that he was on a short leash; he would expect “a written progress report on a bi-weekly basis.” On May 27, the handwriting on the wall was there for everyone to read: Levine, age thirty-one, was appointed music director on a five-year contract; he would continue to be at the Met seven months out of the year and would work closely with Dexter. In case of disagreement between the music director and the production supervisor, the music director would have the last word. From May 29 to June 14, Chapin and the Met were in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka for a visit under Japanese sponsorship. Two days after the troupe returned, the press had it on good authority that the June 26 meeting of the board would seal Chapin’s fate. And it did. The directors exercised the option of terminating his contract a year before its expiration. Yet another troika would be constituted, now by Bliss, Levine, and Dexter. For the first time in its history, the company would do without a general manager. Rockefeller offered Chapin the consolation of heading up the Metropolitan Opera Foundation, the newly constituted fund-raising arm of the Association. Chapin turned him down.43

  TABLE 15 Metropolitan Opera Premieres 1972–73 to 1974–75

  On February 7, 1976, the Saturday Review published a long piece signed by the recently fired general manager, “Musical Chairs at the Met” (39–42). Chapin’s apologia began, “Perhaps the story of my experiences there may reveal something of the workings of America’s leading opera house and of its responsibilities to the public it serves.” He recalled the pique of the Metropolitan board years earlier on learning that, in his capacity as a vice president of Lincoln Center, he had prevailed in bringing the Hamburg and Rome operas to the Met. When Gentele invited him to join his team, he had accepted, but not without reservations. And then, the awful accident, and everything changed. With valid resentment, Chapin quotes Moore at the time of his promotion to general manager in spring 1973: “There wasn’t anything better around the ball park.” Nothing better apparently once feelers sent to Maria Callas and to Massimo Bongianckino had gone nowhere. In Chapin’s second year, relations with the executive committee had decayed further, and by the beginning of the third, plans to remove him were in motion. There was a happy ending—of sorts. On July 1, 1975, as Chapin walked onto the stage to welcome a crowd of seventy-five thousand assembled in Central Park to hear Renata Scotto sing Cio-Cio-San, he was greeted with a tremendous ovation both from the audience and from the cast and crew grouped behind him: “I stood at the microphone in tears, hearing voices chanting, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’ Suddenly one voice shouted: ‘Bring back Tebaldi!’ That did it. I was home free. Reality had asserted itself with that cry from an opera nut, without whom none of us could exist. If he could only have known, I thought, of the efforts we had made to persuade that great star to return.” 44

  NINE

  Maestro Assoluto, 1975–1990

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPEAN OPERA AND THE BAROQUE

  JAMES LEVINE

  THE NEW MET POWERHOUSE was born in Cincinnati on June 23, 1943, to a musical and theatrical family, the eldest of three children. His parents recognized his vocation while he was still a toddler. The ten-year-old prodigy made his professional debut with Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Concerto in a neighborhood concert of the Cincinnati Symphony. At about the same time, Walter Levin, principal violinist of the LaSalle Quartet, was called to guide the boy’s musical training. Levin was said to have designed “a European-style education for Jimmy, an interdisciplinary approach to music that placed it in a cultural, historical and philosophical context.” Soon thereafter, Levine began to travel to New York on weekends to study the piano with Rosina Lhévinne. At thirteen, he was at Marlboro working with Rudolf Serkin, where his first conducting assignment was the chorus of Così fan tutte. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight, Levine spent his summers at Aspen, graduating from student to performer. It was there at eighteen that he conducted his first opera, Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles. That same year, 1961, Levine enrolled at Juilliard to work with Lhévinne and, on conducting, with Jean Morel. Three years later, he was heard by George Szell, who brought him to Cleveland, first as apprentice, and then as assistant conductor. “Jim has to brush his own teeth,” his mother observed, “but since his Cleveland days he has concentrated on the things that only he can do.” On Szell’s death in 1970, Levine began conducting elsewhere, with the Philadelphia Orchestra during the summer, with the Welsh National Opera, and then the San Francisco Opera. His Metropolitan debut came during the summer season of 1971, in Tosca, with Grace Bumbry, Franco Corelli, and Peter Glossop. Szell and the other foremost conductors of his generation who “stayed with their orchestras almost all season long . . . [and] supervised everything” set the pattern of Levine’s career. In 2000, Levine was profiled by the Guardian. He had celebrated twenty-five years as the Met’s music and, later, artistic director; he had also chalked up twenty-three summers with the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia, seventeen at Salzburg, and fifteen at Bayreuth: “I’ve always been the opposite of the school of come in and do a program and then go away.” In the crucial matter of artistic management, he landed immediately at the top: his agent, Ronald Wilford, represented Mstislav Rostropovich and Seiji Ozawa.1

  FIGURE 33. James Levine conducting rehearsal, c. 1980 (Winnie Klotz; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

  BLISS, LEVINE, AND DEXTER, 1975–1980

  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 intendan
t. 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.2