Music: Maybe Yes

Ever since Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera put up its surprise closing notice, ideas on how to save the Met, and how to improve it, had popped up with the frequency of horn cues in a Wagner opera.

In Los Angeles, Lauritz Melchior announced with a Heldentenor’s roar that he would put on opera if the Met wouldn’t. Said he: “It’s a scandal, a disaster. The eyes of the world are turned to America and the greatest country in the world cannot even have an opera house! It looks as if we’re only interested in jazz and crooning and all the semi-things.”

Melchior, who makes more money in such semi-things as Hollywood musicals than he does at the Met, volunteered to stage some of the operas he knows best—Wagner’s Tristan tmd Isolde and part of the Ring Cycle (“ones with not too big a chorus”)—with his fellow stars pitching in “on a cooperative basis.” If the operas went over, he would try some others. And if he couldn’t produce them in the Met, he would do it in a Broadway theater.

Another Lunch. Melchior was not the only one prepared to rescue grand opera. In Manhattan, bustling little Showman Billy Rose, who jazzed-up Bizet in Carmen Jones, got front-page publicity with a proposal that wasn’t as bumptious as it at first sounded. Five years ago, Billy had lunched with some Met board members, and made what Board Chairman George A. Sloan now gingerly refers to as “a number of helpful observations which were conveyed to our . . . management.” Now Billy was again ready to be the Met’s little helper.

If the board would let him clean house “without handcuffs,” and do some streamlining, he would personally foot any losses for the year (obviously he didn’t think there would be any). Billy would “introduce modern lighting, staging, choreography and certain other elements of present-day stagecraft . . . without tampering with what is fine and traditionally right about grand opera.” He also thought he could “fire and enthuse the staff into doing a more exciting job”—and the Met could certainly use a little of that. Chairman Sloan’s reply was respectful as could be: he wanted to have another lunch with Billy “so that we may have the further benefit of your thinking based on your long and successful experience in the theatrical field.” Snapped Billy: “. . . A gracious letter, although not exactly an answer.”

Another Season. But as the public uproar built up, Chairman Sloan did make himself a little more accessible. In calling off the season the week before, Sloan had cut off any further talk with the unions that he blamed for the shutdown (TIME, Aug. 16). Last week, he and six other board members huddled all one afternoon with the union representatives in a Grand Tier-floor room at the Met. When the meeting broke up, one union leader told reporters: “After all, we all left the meeting together, and nobody had any black eyes.”

At week’s end, it seemed certain that the Met would open this fall, though a little late. But if the crisis was about over, a few questions were still unanswered. What kind of opera was it going to be? Did the board realize that opera fans had given it no vote of confidence for the handling of its affairs? What was the board going to do to improve the quality of Met productions?