Grand Opera: The Story of the Met

by Affron, Charles

  In Il Trovatore (Nov. 12, 1987), a plethora of wandering columns became the object of hilarity; the staging obliged the cast to fight off an unfriendly acoustical environment, and at least one flight of stairs too many. Designer Rolf Langenfass described his Faust (Feb. 1, 1990) as “almost like a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari town.” German cinematic expressionism may have fit the subject, but it clashed with Gounod’s graceful score. This would be the one Met credit of Broadway director Harold Prince. Giulio Cesare, the company’s third Handel offering, was probably the weakest of all the new productions between 1986 and 1990. The direction and décor, imported from the English National Opera, would have better been embargoed. One critic wrote, “John Pascoe’s sets strained for exotic gilded effect, but on the whole reminded one of the lobby décor of a Grand Hyatt hotel.” Kathleen Battle, the Cleopatra, exquisite as always, had become overly cautious, and not much voice or temperament crossed the footlights. This Giulio Cesare would return with some frequency; with Handelians Stephanie Blythe, David Daniels, and Ruth Ann Swenson, it would make a persuasive argument for the Baroque’s place in the Met’s repertoire.38

  Two twentieth-century rarities and one core rereading were beneficiaries of the most intriguing treatments of the Crawford-Levine years. Bluebeard’s Castle (in English) and Erwartung shared not only a heavy dose of pre–World War I angst but the same set. Both would have profited from the direction of Peter Sellars, originally slotted for the productions. For Martin Bernheimer, the result was “all very chic and very silly. The claptrap could even be funny if it weren’t such an affront to Bartók’s brooding, decaying romanticism and Schoenberg’s febrile, ecstatic expressionism.” Bartók’s tonality and the snatches of melodic contour he fashioned for the mysterious Bluebeard and the inquisitive Judith played to the strengths of Ramey’s granitic bass and Norman’s deep soprano. The liquid flow of Norman’s voice was impeded by the sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s monodrama. Low box office may well have dissuaded the management from repeating these seminal works. Jürgen Rose’s provocative Salome (Feb. 20, 1989) gave Herod a palace all aslant, with much of the staging relegated to a repellent basement floor. The eclectic costumes and décor evoked not Biblical Palestine, but the seamy decadence of Gotham. Eva Marton made no secret of her aversion to Salome’s frilly prom dress.39

  Compounding disappointment over new productions was the decreasing presence of top-flight stars. Second casts were especially weak. Erich Leinsdorf minced no words: “Let’s face it, it is today absolutely a fact that even for roles that are not difficult, there are at best two or three first-rate singers in the world” (Times, Nov. 12, 1987). Defections persisted: Maria Ewing walked out when the Carmen telecast went to Agnes Baltsa, Renato Bruson canceled his Macbeth when the falling dollar cut into his fee, Eva Marton (his Lady Macbeth) found the replacement Thanes of Cawdor beneath her dignity. Already displeased with the Salome production and costume, and furious over the assignment of Hildegard Behrens to the telecast “Ring,” Marton stayed away for eight seasons. Still, many were happy to be at the Met. Carlo Bergonzi at sixty-three remained a mellifluous Nemorino, and Alfredo Kraus was ever astonishing as an eternally youthful Roméo, Werther, and Hoffmann. Mirella Freni was admired for her brave move to the Russian repertoire. After a seven-season hiatus, Teresa Stratas returned to take on all three heroines of Il Trittico. As for newcomers, Dawn Upshaw and Hei-Kyung Hong graduated from Barbarina to Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro (Hong eventually to the Countess), Heidi Grant Murphy from a Servant in Die Frau ohne Schatten to the Rosenkavalier Sophie, and Dwayne Croft from Fiorello to Figaro in Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Among those who debuted as principal artists—June Anderson, Jerry Hadley, Thomas Hampson, Richard Leach, Waltraud Meier, Cheryl Studer, Sharon Sweet, Carol Vaness, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Dolora Zajick—some were infrequent visitors, many came back often, a few to leave their mark on the company. In 2012–13, Hampson added Iago to his long list of roles and Zajick repeated her classic Azucena and Amneris. But the number of estimable singers who joined the Met in the 1980s was inadequate to the demands of the bread-and-butter titles. At the end of the decade, Levine felt impelled to state the obvious: “Our problem is in what used to be mainstream 19th-century repertory. I don’t mean to say that you can’t get a great performance; you can and you do. But you sometimes don’t.” Crawford followed suit: “You can sell out Madama Butterfly and Tosca every single night, but try naming the ladies that can do a good Butterfly—you won’t even get to five fingers on your hand” (Times, Jan. 22, 1989). Even with its excellent acoustics, the auditorium overwhelmed many voices appreciated in European houses, most of them half the size of the Met.

  TABLE 17 Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1980–81 to 1989–90

  Crawford was right, as far as he went. Big productions yielded big dividends. The Turandots and Aïdas helped turn attendance around from the 1985–86 low of 82.9 percent of capacity to 88.6 percent in 1986–87 and to 93 percent in 1989–90. The question for old Met hands was whether the high-caloric Zeffirelli diet, no doubt a tonic for the bottom line, was conducive to the long-term artistic well-being of the company.

  MORE MUSICAL CHAIRS

  Levine had built an outstanding ensemble in the decade and a half since his appointment as principal conductor in 1975. The Metropolitan orchestra would soon join four of the big five—the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra—in the centennial celebration of Carnegie Hall. There was no disagreement either on its remarkable evolution or on the credit due the conductor. If Carlos Kleiber graced New York with so many of his rare appearances, it was because of the quality and responsiveness of the players Levine had cultivated so meticulously. The Vienna Philharmonic had had to make a place for the Metropolitan in the operatic stratosphere that the Austrians had previously had all to themselves. In 1991, Levine began taking his orchestra out on its own, most frequently to Carnegie Hall; seven years later he founded the Met Chamber Ensemble. By 1990, the Metropolitan was three years into a prolific recording schedule following three decades in which only the Leonard Bernstein Carmen had been committed to disk. In the course of the next ten years, CBS/SONY, Philips, and Deutsche Grammophon would bring out nearly thirty recordings, mostly complete operas, a few featuring the orchestra alone. In 2000, Levine was still pressing the point: “The Met needs to tour, to record, and to film. These things are essential for the Met’s future at every level.” Later that year, he articulated what came close to a discourse on his method: “[The orchestra] has to be able to play at the maximum expression and communication in every style, and the only way you can do that is—like Verdi said—working with a file, every day, little by little, until the orchestra’s collective qualities emerge. . . . You try on purpose to get players with different qualities which will rub off on one another. . . . [The orchestra] has become like my own voice.” 40

  In spring 1988, Levine was on the short list to succeed Karajan at the Berlin Philharmonic; he denied agreeing “even to be thought of.” Others mentioned for the Berlin post were Abbado, Barenboim, Haitink, Maazel, Mehta, Muti, and Ozawa. Levine was said to have the inner track: he had no permanent symphonic post, he had conducted often in Berlin, and he had excellent connections with Salzburg, Bayreuth, and Vienna, and with Deutsche Grammophon. But there was “widespread resentment among West Berliners against what they perceive[d] as Mr. Wilford’s favoring of his client, Mr. Karajan, over the interests of the Philharmonic” (Times, April 26, 1989). And the self-governing musicians did not want to be subject once again to onerous demands made on behalf of another Wilford client. The job went to Claudio Abbado.41

  On November 4, 1988, Crawford announced that he would be leaving the following April. He gave as his reason an irresistible offer from the Omnicom Group, one of the world’s largest advertising conglomerates—at twice his Met salary. The Wall Street Journal implied that Crawford was on the losing end of “a tussle over turf” (Nov. 8, 1988) with his a
rtistic director. There was no question of Crawford running the Met as had the general managers of the past, free of the encumbrance of a music director. Volpe later offered a second explanation: “I rarely saw him mixing it up with the singers, the dancers, or the crew.” In fact, Crawford had a closed-door policy. Schmoozing bored him, as did squabbles among artists and skirmishes with labor. Whatever the truth, the Crawford regime was over. His evaluation of his time as general manager differed markedly from that of the critics. The minutes of the May 18, 1988, annual Association meeting read, “Mr. Crawford stated that while the box office was a major contributor to our recent successes other important factors played a role. There was the cancellation of the national tour, sound financial decision making, and restructuring the development and marketing departments.” Crawford saw the glass as quite full, critics as mostly empty: “During the Crawford administration, the Met has grown increasingly cautious, relying heavily on visual spectacle to sell the audience on its wares.” As for Levine, he was no less unhappy at seeing Crawford go than he had been at Chapin’s departure thirteen years earlier, at Dexter’s soon thereafter, and at Bliss’s in 1985. Looking to the future, the question was whether he would be able to face down the fiscally conservative board over his long-standing ambitions for a more recondite repertoire.42

  The search for a new general manager was on. Louise Ireland Humphrey, a Cleveland heiress, the first woman president of the Association and chair of the search committee, let it be known that this time the directors were of a mind to appoint an opera professional and not one of their own, as Crawford had been and Bliss before him. But that was not to be. Perhaps, as the anonymous head of another major opera company mused, it was because while Levine was in the artistic saddle, “what they [the trustees] want has all the unpleasant aspects of an opera director’s job with none of the fun” (Times, March 13, 1989). In Hugh Southern, appointed general manager on September 14, 1989, effective November 1, the directors got neither an opera professional nor precisely one of their own. Fifty-seven years old and a Cambridge-educated Brit, Southern came from the National Endowment for the Arts, where he had been acting chair. He had earlier been management associate at the San Francisco Opera and had supervised the tour of the Western Opera Theatre. His chief claim to fame was his stint as executive director of the Theatre Development Fund, a New York operation that supports productions and oversees the discount TKTS booths. Levine had apparently been all but excluded from the selection process; Bliss was so dismayed at the prospect of Southern that he stepped back into Met affairs to warn the directors of their impending mistake. When the announcement of Southern’s elevation finally came, it included the assurance that the appointment would in no way impinge upon Levine’s prerogatives. Asked about other prospects, Mrs. Humphrey replied, “Of all the candidates, Hugh Southern was the one who everybody said was the most diplomatic and good with people.” She would get to know him even better during quail hunts at her Florida plantation. And when asked about his lack of operatic credentials, she answered, “That did concern us. But with all the candidates, we put down the pluses and the minuses in columns, and we felt his attributes outweighed his liabilities—his administrative experience, his way of getting along with people, his relation with the board and his ability to help with fundraising.” Besides, Levine’s strengths with respect to artistic policy would make up for Southern’s deficits.43

  The straightjacket held taut by Levine on one side and Crawford (as chair of the board’s finance committee) on the other left Southern little room to maneuver, although there was scant evidence that he would in any case have been so inclined. Southern did take one action very early on, or rather, he took the fall for the cancellation of a spring 1991 season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music scheduled for John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. The company would have had to raise $1.5 million for the project, and Levine and others had come to the conclusion that all in all there was not enough to be gained. By April 1990, the board’s inner circle had decided to let the general manager go. On June 22, 1990, Southern submitted his resignation, effective virtually immediately, saying only that the post had left him unfulfilled. Some days later, sources declining to be named reported that he had been dismissed by unanimity; the key players in his firing had been Levine, Humphrey, and Crawford, who, the preceding month, had moved from head of finance to chair of the executive committee, leaving Humphrey very much weakened by the Southern fiasco. Southern was apparently cited for “passivity” and “failure to seize command of the company.” Volpe later wrote, “During Southern’s seven months in Rudolf Bing’s old office, from November of 1989 until June of 1990, I think I laid eyes on the man twice. . . . Jimmy Levine probably saw him even less than that. He apparently had a lot of lunches. If he heard about the Met’s daily crises, he didn’t hear about them from me, because he never asked.” The board promised to act swiftly to find a replacement, by fall if at all possible. The new general manager would be expected to accede to Levine in artistic matters and to Crawford in large policy issues. Nothing much was to change.44

  TEN

  Patronage and Perestroika, 1990–2006

  AMERICAN OPERA (REDUX) AND SLAVIC OPERA

  JOSEPH VOLPE

  THE SEARCH FIRM OF HEIDRICK AND STRUGGLES HAD spent a year rifling through more than four hundred entries. In the end, the board committee “coughed up” (Joseph Volpe’s words) Hugh Southern. Volpe himself was passed over; he was presumably undone by a surfeit of minuses in Louise Humphrey’s triage. High in the negative column, according to Volpe, was what he later called “the James Levine factor”: “Although Jimmy and I had developed a good working relationship, there were times when, as the keeper of the purse and the schedules, I had to tell him that something he wanted, such as extra rehearsal time, wasn’t in the cards. Jimmy wouldn’t argue with a used-car dealer. He just wanted to be free to be Jimmy.” Marilyn Shapiro, whose own candidacy was backed by Humphrey, was also opposed to Volpe. And Humphrey was identified as the anonymous trustee who volunteered blithely that Volpe was “NOCD” (Times, June 27, 1990): “I had to ask someone what that meant,” confided Volpe later. “The translation—‘Not our class, dear’—didn’t come as a surprise.” Once the ineffectual Southern regime was put out of its misery, there was no question of soliciting scores of nominations or of spending another year on a search. The executive committee, aggressively lobbied by Bruce Crawford, would make the decision. Ultimately NOCD gave way to a compromise. In summer 1990, Crawford informed Volpe that he had been promoted not to general manager—that title was retired for the time being—but to general director. The excuse was that the board wanted to return to “the triumvirate model of management”: Volpe would run the house, adding finances, press, and public relations to his current portfolio, and Shapiro, the newly named executive director for external affairs, would continue to head marketing and development. All artistic matters would remain under the control of Levine; Jonathan Friend, the artistic administrator, would report to the artistic director and not to the general director. In this restoration of the troika, each of its members would be responsible to the president of the Association. No sooner had his appointment become official than Volpe made the sort of impolitic comment that must have given pause to even his staunchest supporters; it certainly set the teeth of the musical press on edge: “I am not an opera groupie. I like opera, but I can’t say that I love it. But I do love running a theatre” (Times, Aug. 2, 1990).1

  Joe Volpe was born in Brooklyn on July 2, 1940, to an Italian-American family. His father, also born in the United States, was a clothing manufacturer. As the business prospered, the Volpes moved to Bayside, Queens, and then to Glen Cove, Long Island. His formal education ended with a high school diploma, whereupon he started his life’s work as a Broadway stagehand. His forty-three-year Metropolitan career began at the age of twenty-three, when he landed the job of apprentice carpenter, having scored first in the city on the union ex
am. In spring 1966, he was asked to set up the carpenter shop at the new house. Two days after opening night, the master carpenter resigned; Volpe was promoted to the vacated position on Herman Krawitz’s say-so. By the time Bing retired in 1972, Volpe, by now thirty-two, saw himself ready to fill Sir Rudolf’s shoes. Besides, a Ouija board had prognosticated that one day he would rise all the way to the top. In 1978, this time at John Dexter’s insistence, Volpe was appointed technical director. The next year, he became director of operations, with oversight of all but administrative and artistic functions, both backstage and at the front of the house. The climb continued in January 1981 with his appointment as assistant manager for operations, tasked with the coordination of all areas of personnel and budget, excepting fund-raising, repertory, and casting. He also became the company’s liaison to the labor unions. In 1986, he took over radio and television broadcasts; in 1987, the tour; in 1988, the summer season. And in 1990, he was named to the new post of general director.2

  Volpe’s first act that August, just days into his tenure, was to cancel the Werner Herzog/Maurizio Balò Die Zauberflöte on the calendar for January 1991. His predecessors had led off with similar take-charge gestures: Johnson canceled Witherspoon’s plans for Le Jongleur de Notre Dame and the Ponselle Adriana Lecouvreur; for his opening night, Goeran Gentele swapped Bing’s mean-spirited pick, the threadbare Tannhäuser, for a new Carmen he intended to stage himself; Bruce Crawford put an end to the spring tour. As Volpe explained it to Levine, and then publicly, it was too late to execute Die Zauberflöte properly. Although time was certainly a factor, it was also the case that Volpe found the Egyptian columns and “rugged ship” featured in preliminary sketches fitting perhaps for Aïda and Der Fliegende Höllander, but not for “Mozart’s Masonic fairy tale.” How he broke the news to the music director spoke to their relationship, at least at the start: “I knew that Jimmy Levine wouldn’t listen to me about Herzog’s sketches for The Magic Flute unless I kept my artistic opinions to myself.” However tactfully broached, the decision signaled that Volpe was boss. The Met eventually borrowed a production from San Francisco. 3