Opera: Lord of the Manor

OPERA

(See Cover)

Fresh off the boat from Italy, gourd-shaped Giulio Gatti-Casazza heads straight for Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera. As the newly appointed general manager of the Met, he is eager to have a look at his new home. Mama mia! What he sees is enough to curl his beard. It’s bad enough that the exterior looks like a brewery. But the backstage area is so cramped that it can hardly accommodate a P.T.A. pageant. Principal singers, he finds to his horror, have to rehearse in the ladies’ powder room; scenery is stacked behind the building on Seventh Avenue. Just be patient, the board of directors tells him, the company will be moving into a new and spacious house in two or three years.

That was in 1908. Gatti-Casazza stayed on for 27 years, waiting patiently—but his singers never got out of the powder room. Not that the management wasn’t serious about that new house. Indeed, the Be-Patient-New-Met’s-A-Comin’ recitative echoed through the old house more regularly than the Anvil Chorus. At one time or another, sites for a new Met were planned on 49th Street, 57th Street, 59th Street, 63rd Street, 110th Street, Washington Square, on the ground floor of the Seagram Building and underneath the Queensboro Bridge. In 1938, a 3,700-seat theater was actually built in Rockefeller Center to be used by the Met, but when the acoustics proved faulty, the company refused to move in, and it was eventually torn down. Many times blueprints were drawn up, models constructed, traffic studies made, fund-raising dinners held. But what with depressions, wars and chronically empty coffers, all the grandiose schemes came to little more than the ragged canvas castles of stage sets piled in the snow on Seventh Avenue.

But now, praise Gatti-Casazza, the impossible has dawned. Last week, in an explosion of unabashed pride born of years of frustration, the Metropolitan Opera formally opened a stunning new $45.7 million house in Lincoln Center. And what a house to come home to!

It stretches 451 ft. from front door to rear window—as long as a 47-story building is high. The gracefully arching fagade, soaring 96 ft. in cathedral-like splendor between the glass-and-marble rectangles of the New York State Theater and Philharmonic Hall, dominates the surrounding plaza like a queen among princesses. It is a fittingly magnificent capstone to Lincoln Center: the world’s largest opera house set in the world’s largest cultural complex. It is, moreover, a fitting memorial to an enduring art, for it symbolizes, if not a resurgence of opera (for opera has never before been so popular), at least the conviction that opera is an essential golden thread in the nation’s cultural fabric. The mere existence of the new Met, in short, means that grand opera is headed for a grander future.

On opening night, smiling benevolently and dutifully playing host, was the wisp of a man who has led the cast of thousands to the Met’s auspicious debut: General Manager Rudolf Franz Josef Bing. If he was looking more gaunt than usual, it was only understandable. “We,” he said wistfully, “have been pregnant for so long.”

To christen the offspring, Bing had scheduled the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. Never was a musical event launched in such a tide of pageantry and publicity —and intimations of disaster (the musicians, after threatening to go on strike after opening night, agreed on a new contract between the acts). Tickets, dispensed by a “secret” committee at a top of $250 each, were sold out months ago, leaving a waiting list of more than 16,000 seat seekers fuming in vain. Said Bing: “Never have so many been insulted by so few.”

Massive Everything. And never had a social event in New York exploded with such excitement. From Lady Bird Johnson and her guests, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, straight down the line through the Nelson Rockefellers, the Jacob Javitses, the Robert McNamaras, the Henry Fords, the John Drexels, the Alfred Vanderbilts, the William Fulbrights, the Kennedy brothers, and rafts of diplomats and fashion plates, the audience of 3,800 first-nighters provided a show-stopping spectacle of animated finery. The total weight in diamonds and emeralds alone could have sunk Cleopatra’s barge, and the gold lame could have papered the Met walls. On the whole, the fashion was strictly haute, although here and there a kooky costume or two dazed the 3,000 or so beholders who checked over the operagoers as they arrived. The wife of Met Tenor Jess Thomas, for example, was decked out in a black dress that was drenched in 15 Ibs. of floorlength gold chains (while a flack followed breathlessly, tossing out mimeographed press releases).

The opera itself had no trouble competing for spectacle. The night belonged to Franco Zeffirelli, who designed the sets and costumes and directed the whole shebang. His scenery was framed and overhung with scrims that looked like free-form Venetian blinds—around and through which appeared massed armies, a massive moon, a massive sphinx, a massive pyramid, a massive throne, and just about every other eye popper that Cecil B. de Zeffirelli could imagine, not forgetting three live horses, three live goats, one live camel, and three fake asps.

Playing Cleopatra, Soprano Leontyne Price was so heavily costumed in bolts of sparkling cloth that she looked like a junior-sized pyramid herself; it was a wonder that she eould sing at all, though sing she did, and her burnished voice never sounded better. At the top of their form, too, were Basso Justino Diaz as Antony and Tenor Thomas as Caesar. Composer Barber’s setting for Shakespeare’s text was notable chiefly for an orchestration built of conflict ing clouds of moody, often eerie thun-derbursts of sound, punctuated with enough jutting exclamations of dissonance to label it contemporary, and Conductor Thomas Schippers gave it all the fierce sweep of a Force Three hurricane. Yet it was only in the latter part of the second act and in the third that the music itself overwhelmed the stage dazzles. There alone did Barber’s vocal writing transform itself into genuine opera. And so what the Met had to offer on its first night in its new quarters was a musical extravaganza—which is precisely what Rudolf Bing had had in mind as a bauble fit to set in his shiny showcase.

Grand Irrationalities. At that, the showcase easily upstaged whatever took place behind the proscenium. The cavernous auditorium (3,800 seats—179 more than in the old house) is an acoustical success. There, and throughout the red-carpeted corridors, lobbies and unfurling marble staircases, Architect Wallace K. Harrison provided an environment in which not only can the art of opera flourish but opera’s mystique as well. Neither really modern nor really traditional, neither daring nor conservative, the house spills over with the wealth and the glitter and the grand irrationalities of myth and legend that together form the compelling unreality of opera itself, a dream world of the Theater of the Surd.

Behind that myth is a backstage world that matches the dream in technological terms. It is a world within worlds, a vast labyrinth of shops—carpentry, electrical, wig, prop, tailor, paint—two ballet studios, 20 rehearsal rooms (three of them as large as the main stage), 14 dressing rooms for principal singers, and hangar-sized chambers capable of storing the sets for all 23 of the Met’s productions this season. For the singers, accustomed to the Stygian confines of the old Met, it was like being turned loose in Wyoming; so many of them got lost in the first few weeks that guides had to be assigned to show them around.

The stage area alone is six times as large as the one in the old Met. The main stage, 100 ft. wide, 80 ft. deep, is bordered on the sides and rear by motorized stage wagons. In a dazzling display of sleight-of-hand, the main stage can drop 28 ft. into the subterranean storage chambers and emerge with a teahouse, garden, bridge and cherry orchard all ready for Madame Butterfly’s entrance. Meanwhile, the three wagons can be loaded with upcoming scenes and wait to glide into the center-stage slot at the push of a.button. For other effects, the backstage Merlins can conjure up storms and floods, encircle Brunnhilde in flame and smoke, or simply change night into day by unreeling one of two massive 110-ft. by 270-ft. cycloramas. For more subtle moods, there is a space-age lighting booth with 3,000 switches that can say love in a rainbow of shades.

Parchment over Steel. Any man who can oversee and become intimately involved with every facet of such a sprawlingly disparate world, and who can deal with opera singers besides, needs the stamina of a Siegfried, the charm of a

Don Giovanni, and the guile of a Mephistopheles. For Rudolf Bing, it’s all in a day’s work. At 64, he is the undisputed lord of the manor, and he looks it. Though in physique (6 ft., 139 Ibs.) he resembles a patrician heron stuffed into herringbone, there is an impeccably correct bearing about him that says “Beware: regal and remote.” His face and grey-fringed dome, all right-angle turns, are a study in parchment over steel. A Vienna-born English subject, he could easily pass as the British ambassador to Paris—a job that he wouldn’t mind having if the Met could ever find 15 men to replace him.

In the weeks preceding the debut of Antony and Cleopatra, Bing worked a 16-hour day instead of his usual 14. He usually started his days with an assault on a pyramid of mail, meanwhile giving orders over his intercom system and fielding rapid-fire phone calls: “Hello. Yes. No. Tomorrow. Fine. Goodbye.” Then, dictating memos over his shoulder, he would go off on his rounds, turning up onstage to admonish a stagehand (“Don’t smoke on our stage, please”), switching off the lights in sub-basement storage rooms, climbing into the uppermost rafters to check on a special staging effect.

Dropping into one of the three restaurants and bars in the new Met, he suggests that the lights are too bright. As electricians scramble, he calls, “Go on. Go on. Kill them! If we turn them down low enough, we can raise the prices.” (Laughter.) Now he sits unnoticed in the back of the auditorium, watching a rehearsal. Then he leaps up, steps over some seats and halts a bevy of girl dancers onstage. “How about raising the hems above the knee? Hmm. Better check the knees first.” (Titters.) Now he is off to one of the rehearsal rooms to tend to a soprano who is feeling neglected. “It’s freezing in here,” she shivers. (Singers hate air conditioning more than they hate other singers.) Ignoring the air-conditioning controls, Bing ceremoniously goes to the wall and turns the knob for the intercom system. “There,” he purrs in his caramel-soft Viennese-British accent, “is that better?” “Yes,” she says. “It is much warmer now.” (Warm smile.)

Ego Chewing. This is the kind of virtuoso performance that Met regulars have come to know as the Bing style: a disarming combination of urbanity and no-nonsense determination, wit and steely single-mindedness. In opera, where people chew on each other’s egos like lozenges, Bing’s cool cools all. “I really enjoy dealing with difficult people,” he says. “I just make them believe they really want to do what I want them to do.” Or else.

When Bing took over the Met in 1950, there were all kinds of toes waiting to be stepped on—and he did not miss many. His predecessor, an easygoing ex-tenor named Edward Johnson, had run a tidy if not altogether harmonious house where the terrible-tempered diva and the haughty, naughty tenor reigned supreme. Bing started with a bang by firing 39 singers and several musicians, including his cousin, Conductor Paul Breisach, as well as aging Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, whose variations on the score had been the bane of Met conductors for years. Amid the howls of “Adolf Bing!” and “Prussian dictator” Bing remained serene. “I will run this house,” he said, “on the principle of quality and quality alone.” In 1958, when Maria Callas refused to sing the roles in the sequence that Bing had assigned her, he summarily dismissed her, touching off an international cause celebre. (Bing later hung a photograph in his office showing himself and the celebrated diva kissing, with the caption: “Darling!” “You’re fired!”)

To protect the prestige of the Met name, Bing dropped Soprano Helen Traubel for “singing in smoky nightclubs” and Baritone Robert Merrill for taking leave to make a class-C movie, Aaron Slick from Punkin Crik (Merrill was reinstated a year later after making a public apology: “I have learned my lesson”). That lesson was clear: the wiry Mr. Bing was no man to tangle with. One Met dowager, who like most of the oldtimers was eying the new manager with suspicion, had to learn the hard way. “From what I hear,” she airily informed him one night, “you won’t be around very long.” Replied Bing: “From what I see, you won’t be around very long.”

Shrinking Sopranos. Bing endured handsomely. He swept out tons of tattered old scenery and replaced it with sparkling productions of Don Carlos and Die Fledermaus. An early champion of the belief that opera worth hearing is also worth seeing, he raided Broadway, Hollywood and London for directors and set designers of the caliber of Garson Kanin, Tyrone Guthrie, Alfred Lunt and Cecil Beaton, who were imaginative if not daring. And he has at least reduced the incidence of love duets between a bandy-legged tenor and an overstuffed loveseat of a so prano; only the tones, Bing discreetly has hinted, should be pear-shaped. Significantly, wardrobe mistresses at the Met report that over a few short years the average size of the women’s costumes shrank from 20 to 14.

On the theory that 18 well-done productions are better than 26 haphazard jobs, he cut the company’s repertory to make more rehearsal time for each opera. He took one look at the opera’s anemic ballet troupe and got Antony Tudor in as ballet master. The Met’s ballet is still nothing to dance in the streets about, but at least it is on its toes. (Years ago a secretary explained to Bing that ballerinas who got too old to dance became secretaries at the Met. “Curious,” murmured Bing. “I thought it was the other way around.”)

Preaching that an appearance on the Met stage is a unique honor, Bing insisted that the principal singers—who in the past were repeatedly lured away by the more lucrative concert circuit—either sign up for a longer season or none at all. The public responded in kind; in Bing’s 16-year tenure, the Met season has expanded from 18 to 31 weeks, and the number of subscribers has grown from 5,000 to 17,000, with another 3,000 waiting longingly in line to get into a house that was 97% sold out last season.

On the Plus Side. For their money they get the greatest roster of international talent in a longer season than any other opera house. Nowhere but at the Met, for almost any given performance, could two complete casts be mustered that would boast such operatic deities as Sopranos Renata Tebaldi and Leontyne Price, Tenors Richard Tucker and Franco Corelli, Baritones Robert Merrill and Tito Gobbi, Bassos Cesare Siepi and Nicolai Ghiaurov—not to mention a bevy of most attractive younger sopranos such as Anna Moffo, Teresa Stratas and Mirella Freni.

The Met gets top talent because Bing is there first, though not always with the most; a few houses, for example in Chicago and San Francisco, in the past have offered principal singers more for a performance; but now the Met’s top of $4,000 is on a par with most houses’. Though the state-subsidized houses of Europe do well to schedule a singer a month before a performance, Efficiency Whiz Bing already has most of his 1969 season all booked.

Moreover, he does it on a nonsubsi-dized budget ($10 million for this sea son), which, he proudly points out, “I have never failed to meet within 1 %, and that always on the plus side.” Another considerable profit flowing from Bing’s careful planning comes in the form of singers’ appreciation. They get their Met contracts set months and even seasons in advance; this enables them to schedule outside performances with confidence. No other opera house offers such service.

Calling the Tunes. Bing’s plus-side rating with the critics, however, has been less spectacular. He has been skewered for “rank ineptness” in casting, “scandalous” deficiency in hiring good conductors, “fossilized” repertory, and “anti-Americanism” in the matter of developing new talent. All of which prompts a weary smile from Bing. He responds, characteristically, by criticizing the critics. “Most of the people in our audience,” he says, “have better taste than the critics. They know the operas, the singers, and what they want. They are completely uninfluenced by critics—and that annoys the critics so. We can get shocking reviews and you can’t get into the house. Critics should be licensed, like doctors.” He does not, of course, suggest that singers should be licensed too.

As for the charge that he sometimes miscasts his operas, Bing says: “Casting an opera at the Met is easy. If you want to do a Lucia, then you know you have to get Sutherland. If it’s Turandot, then you get Nilsson. Ah, but if you’re trying to cast Lucia in Magdeburg, Germany, and you have six sopranos who can sing it, then you have to know something about music.” More reasonable is the complaint that Bing has failed to bring along enough first-rate conductors. He contends that “there are few really distinguished conductors around, but the shortage at the Metropolitan is no more severe than anywhere else. After all, nobody knows who conducts in Vienna when it isn’t Von Karajan.” More to the point, everybody knows that it is Bing who calls the tunes at the Met. Great conductors usually have egos to match, and the inevitable collision between Bing and the baton men caused such autocratic maestros as George Szell and the late Fritz Reiner to boycott the house.

Machine-Gunning the House. In the area of repertory, Bing’s record at the old Met speaks for itself: 50 new productions, three U.S. premieres (Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Strauss’s Arabella, Menotti’s The Last Savage), and one world premiere (Barber’s Vanessa). His own taste favors Italian opera; he is only lukewarm about Wagner and, with a few exceptions, indifferent to modern. Compared with Milan’s La Scala or West Berlin’s opera, whose repertories are laced with contemporary works, the Met, as one critic puts it, “remains a coach-and-four in a jet age.” Bing has no desire to stand in the spotlight of the avantgarde. “Remember what Gustav Mahler used to say,” he explains: ” ‘Interesting is easy; beautiful is difficult.’ ”

It is, Bing says, all a matter of economics. “I am behind the times—so is the American public. And they are the people who buy the tickets; the critics get in free. To make successful opera in New York you do Carmen, Boheme and Traviata, and then Traviata, Boheme and Carmen, Stage a modern work and during the third performance you could put on a blindfold, spray the house with a machine gun and be pretty sure that you would never hit anybody.”

Though there is some basis for the view that Bing could be a bit more versatile in his programming, he is not the stuffed shirt some detractors make him out to be. Last year he launched the Metropolitan National Company, a sort of touring farm club for the Met, to “perform the kind of out-of-the-ordi-nary works that the Metropolitan cannot do,” such as Rossini’s La Cenerentola and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah. Perhaps the best indication of his flexibility is the Met’s schedule for the upcoming season: in addition to Antony and Cleopatra, it includes an unprecedented nine new productions, including such contemporary operas as Britten’s Peter Grimes and the world premiere of Marvin Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra.

As for the charge that he discourages the development of new singing talent “at the Met,” Bing pleads guilty. “The Metropolitan is no place for beginners,” he says. “Let them learn elsewhere—Chicago, San Francisco, Boston. They should sing here only at the peak of their careers. I came after a long climb; they can too.”

“Child of the Muses.” Bing’s climb began with a prophecy. As a lad in Vienna, he was introduced to the Austrian poet-playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Placing his hand on Rudi’s shoulder, the venerable man pronounced: “This is not a little boy but a child of the muses.” His teachers found that hard to believe. On his first day at school, Rudi got up from his desk and began putting on his coat. “What are you doing?” the teacher demanded. “Thank you very much,” he replied, “but I have had enough.” He wasn’t kidding. In the years following, he was, by his own admission, “thrown out of every school in Austria. I absolutely hated school—all that stupid talk.” Aloof even then, he was dubbed “the irritable Christ” by his mother. At 14, he finally convinced his father, chairman of the board of the Austro-Hungarian steel trust, that he should be tutored privately. He took up singing and he tried painting, but he soon decided that both his baritone and brush were too shaky, so he got a job in a Vienna bookshop.

As it happened, his employer operated a concert agency on the side, and it was not long before the child of the muses began musing on the music business. He took to it like Barnum to bun kum. Once he billed a sorry troupe of dancers as terpsichorean exponents of “Vice, Horrors and Ecstasy,” then hurriedly had to schedule extra performances to accommodate the crowds. Among his clients were Soprano Lotte Lehmann, a young redheaded violinist named Eugene Ormandy, and a troupe of Russian modern dancers, one of whose members, a slim, dark-eyed blonde named Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, later shortened her name to Mrs. Rudolf Bing.

When in Rome. By the time he was 25, Bing had become assistant to the Darmstadt Opera’s famed Actor-Director Carl Ebert. Germany in those days, however, was rocking wildly. Bing, whose family for generations had been Roman Catholics (although one great-grandmother was Jewish), quickly got fed up with the Nazis and in 1933 left the country. With Ebert, he landed in England on a rolling Sussex Downs estate, and there the two founded the Glyndebourne Festival, the home of some of the finest Mozart performances heard anywhere. When World War II interrupted that idyl, Bing took a job as a coupon clerk in a London department store (Peter Jones in Sloane Square), stood nightly rooftop vigil as a volunteer fire warden. Eventually, he worked himself up to division manager, “hating every minute of it” except for his rounds to the store’s hairdressing salon, where, he recalls dryly, “the atmosphere of hysteria reminded me of opera.”

At war’s end, he returned to Glyndebourne, later hit on the idea of creating a music and drama festival in Scotland, tailored after the Salzburg Festival. He launched the Edinburgh Festival in 1947, and overnight it became one of the biggest and most successful arts pageants anywhere in the world. The master manager and logistician also became adept at dealing with the peculiar brand of hysteria that so often swirls within musicians’ souls. Once an Italian orchestra threatened a walkout because there were no coat hangers in the dressing rooms. Bing merely explained that the Scots have this quaint old custom of hanging their coats on the backs of chairs. Accordingly, when one is in Rome, one ought to, etc., etc., etc. Not wishing to offend, the Italians went native and played molto dolcissimo.

Six-Day Onslaught. In 1949, while visiting New York to investigate the possibilities of bringing a touring company to the U.S., Bing got into a discussion with some of the Met’s board of di rectors. They were looking for a successor to Edward Johnson. What, the directors asked, would Bing do if he were head of the Met? “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he shot back. But further discussions generated significant ideas, and it was not long before Bing was awarded “the kind of job I had aimed at all my life.”

Surely no man immersed himself more thoroughly in his work. Bing today has no private life, no hobbies, no interest in anything but the Met. To gather strength for each six-day onslaught of problems, he spends all day Sunday in bed, like Lenin lying in state. He is a solitary figure who thinks of himself still as “a guest in this country,” and he keeps himself insulated from the rhythms that make other men move. He is Old World to the heart and carries his British citizenship like a shield. As far as Bing is concerned, he could be living in downtown London.

In the mornings at his two-room apartment on the 36th floor of Manhattan’s Essex House, Bing pauses over his porridge to read the London Daily Telegraph (“I can’t lift the New York

Times”), then claps on his black bowler, picks up his black umbrella and, looking for all the world like a department-store manager from Sloane Square, scissors briskly off to the Met. If the weather is bad, he will take the subway, often stopping off at a sleazy hashery for a cup of hot milk with a dash of coffee—much to the dismay of his staff, who feel that to be seen in such a place is beneath the dignity of his station.

Courtly as he is, Bing never stands on ceremony. In his dealings with singers, he trades on intuition, whether it is in negotiating a $3,000 difference in salary with Richard Tucker by flipping a coin (Bing won) or in putting Birgit Nilsson at ease before a performance by bursting into her dressing room wearing a Beatle wig (Nilsson screeched). The unexpected, the outrageous are among his chief weapons. On a recent tour in Cleveland, Bing desperately wanted to persuade an exhausted Franco Corelli to substitute for an ailing tenor. He went to Corelli’s hotel, got his room number, went upstairs, knelt in a prayerful attitude before the door and rang the bell. The door opened. A disheveled woman squawked in astonishment. Hmmm, wrong room. Begging her pardon, Bing dusted off his knees, strolled away, found the right room, knelt, rang the bell. Corelli could not turn him down.

Nor can most people, when he serves up that Viennese pastry tray of charm. A few years ago, all three of his heldentenors suddenly came down with colds at the same time. Rather than cancel a sold-out performance of Tristan and Isolde, he cajoled each tenor into singing one act apiece. When Bing decides that an aging singer should retire, he eases the pain with a line he has polished to perfection: “Wouldn’t you rather have your public say, ‘Already?’ than ‘At last!’ ” Of course, if the singer won’t take the hint, Bing will fire him without batting an eye.

Bing Sting. The ease with which Bing pulls off this kind of frosty switch-about has left some people with a case of the shivers. One detractor described him as having “the look of a man constantly inhaling bad odors which only he can detect.” When a tenor called in sick one day, Bing smelled the odor of laziness. Immediately he dispatched an ambulance and two doctors to the tenor’s door. “He sang that night,” recalls Bing with a wry smile, “and very well too.” Some who have felt the Bing sting claim that he has a lofty distaste for all singers and regards them as children who must be pampered or spanked. Recently he was asked: “Do you consider yourself a dictator?” “Of course!” he replied. But, of course, he is not; he is, rather, a honey-tongued Janus, able to meet any situation with the proper amount of sweetness or fight, as the occasion demands.

Thus it is that, despite the occasional grumbling, he runs a remarkably happy house. A vast majority of the best singers prefer working at the Met to anywhere else because of its superefficiency, its high morale, and its standing as the world’s most important opera house. True, their squawks over federal and New York State taxes sound like anything but glowing arias, but they muddle through—rather brilliantly at times. “Singers will do anything to evade taxes,” explains Bing, “so I have to cope with the names of their dogs listed as secretaries, and of their wives as managers.” Birgit Nilsson once paid Bing a double-edged tribute by listing him on her income-tax report as a dependent. At all events, as Italian Soprano Mirella Freni says, “The Met is marvelous experience, a theater where one works with tranquillity in a warm, almost friendly atmosphere without nervousness. In Italy you can feel this nervousness all around you.”

The most nerveless member of the company, of course, is Bing himself. He often pulls a Hitchcock and turns up onstage as a breastplated soldier in Eugen Onegin or leading the soldier’s band in Faust. But he is really a frustrated conductor. In the theater, in the subway, walking along the street, his hands are continually dancing as he sings and hums some aria playing through his mind (he also knows the words and music to more than 1,000 lieder, continually amazes the singers by quoting snatches of librettos from obscure operas). At night, sitting in his office, he has been known to sneak a baton out of his desk drawer and direct with full arm movements the music pouring over the house speaker system.

Only trouble is, he hardly ever gets the beat right. Not long ago, Bing sat in the Met auditorium watching a rehearsal and conducting his own version of the rhythm, his hand discreetly fluttaring around below seat-top level. Behind him sat Conductor Thomas Schippers, who grew so annoyed that at last he leaned forward, tapped Bing on the shoulder and said: “Please, Mr. Bing, I wish you’d stop it—you’re making me nervous, and besides, you’ve got it all wrong.”

Gesamtkunstwerk. Fortunately for the Met, and for the state of opera everywhere, there is very little else that Rudolph Bing has got wrong. For 16 years he has stood in the dead center of a musical vortex and managed to conduct both himself and opera with admirable skill. Dragging opera by the scruff of the neck into modern times, demanding improvements in production techniques and performance quality, Bing has helped the art to achieve the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, the amalgamation of drama, singing, acting and dancing into total theater.

This, in turn, has widened the audience that once was restricted almost wholly to the moneyed gentry. Young people are now more involved than ever—on both sides of the footlights. In the past 16 years, the quality and quantity of American singers have risen sharply—though many still have to go to Europe to serve their apprenticeship. But even that trend is beginning to reverse itself as Dallas, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Boston and Chicago develop their own troupes, though they still continue to import the finest singers from the international circuit. In 1950, for example, there were 200 opera companies in the U.S.; today there are more than 700—amateur and semiprofessional for the most part, but all bristling with energy and enterprise.

Firm Ship. This alone, however, does not necessarily signify a blossoming of new works for the operatic stage, the few Barbers and Brittens notwithstanding. Few composers today find much encouragement to write opera. Some feel that the Met is not providing the impetus that it should in this direction, but that is one subject on which Bing cannot be moved. The Met’s job, he says, is like that of a museum, “to put old masterpieces in new frames.” He is convinced that opera can survive on its classical foundation without a strong infusion of contemporary music and subject matter.

As long as opera fans are willing to hear Carmen 100 times over and not tire of the same old rose clamped in the same old teeth, Bing’s reasoning is hard to fault. At least he seems to think so, and the splashy new Met monument in Lincoln Center provides dramatic supporting evidence. The swipes from his critics, the tantrums of his singers, the sour notes from his musicians, all fail to stir even a hemidemisemiquaver of irritation in his aplomb. Among the scores of appropriate quotations from operas that he uses for punctuation, Rudolf Bing likes best the line from the Flying Dutchman: “My ship is firm; it suffers no damage.”