Music: Bing’s Five-Year Plan

In his seven seasons as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, elegant, acerbic Rudolf Bing has taken some sharply critical looks at culture in the U.S., has cast an occasional wistful eye at the old-world advantages—including fat government subsidies—of European opera houses. Despite the fact that, artistically speaking, there are really no big managerial plums after the Met (Milan’s La Scala is not likely to hire a non-Italian boss), gossip that Vienna-born Manager Bing was about to leave has persistently cropped up. Last week the Met’s directors announced that Bing has been signed to a new five-year contract, and that the Opera was reserving the option of signing him for two years after that.

The contract, longest in the Met’s history, will keep Bing in New York (at a “substantially improved” salary) through the spring of 1962, and perhaps 1964. will allow him to lead the Met from its old house into the promised land of Manhattan’s huge new Center for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Square. While the Met directors were praising Bing’s 1956-57 record (the house sold 94% of capacity all season long), Bing was in Germany, window-shopping for the latest fashions in opera houses. After clambering about the bobsled-shaped boxes of Cologne’s stark new opera theater, plush-and-gilt partisan Bing said with a shudder: “The sacrifice you make here is glamour. I believe New York still wants its opera glamorous.”