Music: The Dutchman Cometh

“Bing brought it off beautifully,” reported the society editor of the New York Daily News. She was referring to the social glitter of the Metropolitan Opera’s opening night, but the judgment was just as applicable to the business onstage. With Don Carlo for an opener (TIME, Nov. 13), new General Manager Rudolf Bing had handsomely kept his promise to bring operatic productions up to date. Furthermore, he had made money doing it. An audience of 4,000 had packed the big house (paying a $36 top) to give him the biggest opening-night gross (after taxes) in Met history: more than $50,000.* Over his first hurdle with thoroughbred ease, later last week Rudi Bing settled down to running the rest of the race.

His second opera was also a completely rebuilt production: Wagner’s romantic The Flying Dutchman, which had not been staged at the Met in ten years. As he had for Verdi’s Don Carlo, Bing went to Broadway for his designer, commissioned new sets sketched by Robert Edmond (The Iceman Cometh) Jones. Conductor Fritz Reiner polished cast and orchestra until they shone. If The Dutchman was less of a triumph than Don Carlo, it was mainly because Wagner had given the Met less of a grand opera to work with than Verdi had.

The inspiration for The Dutchman came to Wagner during a seasick voyage in a small sailboat through the Baltic to

London. His second successful opera, it was based on the legend of a Dutch captain condemned by the Devil to sail the seas until judgment day, unless, in brief excursions ashore every seven years, he could find a woman who would be faithful until death. The ghostly Dutchman finds his woman in the second act, but without giving operatic stage directors much lively theater business to go on.

The Met’s singers did their best to make up for all that. For U.S.-trained Astrid Varnay, The Dutchman was a chance to prove again that she really belongs at the top, and opulent-voiced Soprano Varnay (as Senta) proved it. For German Baritone Hans Hotter, 41 (the Dutchman), it was a brilliant debut. A onetime choir director with a big, barreling but expressive voice, huge (6 ft. 4, 223 Ibs.), handsome Baritone Hotter filled the stage, both vocally and visually.

The Met’s next new production, due in December: Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, staged by Broadway and Hollywood’s topnotch director, Garson Kanin.

* One unbudgeted item of last-minute expense: in a gesture of good fellowship and good showmanship, Bing ordered 100 cups of afternoon coffee served to a sidewalk queue that had lined up for standing-room tickets.