A Letter From The Publisher: Sep. 23, 1966

“AFTER only nine weeks of his ¶first season, Rudolf Bing looked like the best thing that had happened to the Met in many a day,” wrote TIME in its first cover story on the opera’s manager in 1951. He had at least convinced people, the story went on, “that the Met was not doomed to creak forever along ways established back in the gaslight era.”

Last week an older but no less energetic Rudolf Bing led the Met into a new era and a new house at New York’s Lincoln Center. Our second cover story on Bing not only brings his career up to date but assesses the present condition of an ever-appealing, grandly irrational art form—and reports the event itself in words and color pictures.

Covering the opening was for us the final act of many weeks of journalistic effort. In July, after a vacation in the Dolomites, when Mr. and Mrs. Bing embarked on the France at Le Havre for the trip home, Music Researcher Virginia Page was also on board. Bing had agreed in advance to some leisurely seaborne interviews since there would be little time once he plunged back into the swirl of work awaiting him at Lincoln Center.

Immediately after boarding the ship, Virginia sent a bottle of Moselle to Bing’s cabin with a note saying that she was ready to begin at his convenience. Within 20 minutes, he called her to say: “Miss Page, I would have sung without the wine.” Bing himself set up the schedule: two hours in the morning, two more in the afternoon, and further talks at cocktails every evening. But after filling six large notebooks, she gave him—and herself—one day off. Virginia found him an “ideal” person to interview: “I believe he is the wittiest man I have ever met.”

Back in New York, Virginia saw Bing (and other officials and artists) at the Met, and he made no secret of the interest he took in being a TIME cover subject. “Is it still on?” he would ask. Writer Ray Kennedy and Senior Editor Jesse Birnbaum both had separate talks with Bing, took an exhaustive tour of the new house from the Top-of-the-Met restaurant to the basement practice rooms eight floors below, and saw rehearsals of the opening work, Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra.

Like Bing, Cover Artist Henry Koerner was born in Vienna and spent his vacation in the Dolomites—in the same area at the same time.

But the two men did not meet until Paris, where Koerner painted his subject in seven hours of sittings over a period of three days. “A beautiful head, a very interesting head,” was Koerner’s dominant impression. Bing’s concern was with the eyes. “I have sad eyes,” he told Koerner, “but don’t make them look afraid. I’m not afraid of anything.”