Music: Where Is Santa Fe?

“There is no opera in America worth speaking of outside New York City,” Met Manager Rudolf Bing was quoted as saying in an interview last week. The only exceptions he conceded: Chicago and San Francisco. But even they, he felt, do not have long enough seasons or sufficient facilities to bring them up to the level of the Met or the best European houses.

Such fighting words propelled Bing into the kind of operatic hassle usually reserved for prima donnas. San Francisco’s Vienna-born Kurt Herbert Adler tore into Vienna-born Rudi Bing, pointed out that the San Francisco company has welcomed such artists as Tebaldi, Del Monaco, Christoff, Siminonato, Valletti, Gobbi, Schwarzkopf and Rysanek for their U.S. debuts, can boast a list of U.S. premieres that puts the Met to shame. Last week San Francisco gave the first U.S. stage performances of two short works by German Composer Carl Orff—Die Kluge and Carmina Burana. Other noted San Francisco firsts: Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, Poulenc’s Carmelites, Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake. Retorted Bing: “My congratulations and greatest respect to Mr. Adler for his daring to introduce these operas to empty houses.”*

The trouble, according to Bing, is that “the American public has been completely ruined by the press, radio, television and the movies; they have been so educated to the star cult that even the smallest little provincial city will take opera only if it has a star. I see no desire of the public in the country to build opera from young companies.” What about Santa Fe, which has recently formed a successful summer opera company? “Where,” said Rudi Bing, “is Santa Fe?” In a rare, ruffled moment, he added: “Perhaps I am too much of a European.”

* Actually, the San Francisco Opera sold an average of more than 3,000 tickets (capacity: 3,285) for each performance of these operas.