Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (35 page)

Finally, even those who judged Bing’s record most harshly acknowledged that he had attracted the illustrious singers of the time to New York. They nevertheless complained about his handling of the stars: he played favorites, snobbishly preferring European artists; he often attributed roles inappropriately; he allowed insufficient rehearsal time. And to top it all off, star salaries had gone through the roof. Although the official ceiling was $4,000 per performance, sweetheart deals were surreptitiously struck with the superstars, Sutherland, Nilsson, Tebaldi, and Corelli: they might be contracted for twenty shows and sing only ten. Perhaps the best deserved of the many grievances was that once the first cast had completed its run, another would be thrown onto the boards with scant if any preparation, subverting the widely touted attention to stagecraft. And there was the other gripe that he had let go some of the most accomplished, if not the most lucrative, artists of the day, Victoria de los Angeles and Cesare Valletti, to name just two.
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TABLE 14
Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1966–67 to 1971–72

 

 

By late spring 1972, the gentlemen of the musical press would not have Rudolf Bing to kick around anymore. What they did not know was that Bing would be the last Met general manager to be alone responsible for all administrative and artistic matters. The last, that is, until Peter Gelb.

The race to define the ideal successor to the lately knighted Sir Rudolf was on, as was the even more intriguing game of identifying who the candidates might be. Should the Met be looking for an administrator, someone who would make ends meet (as George Moore argued)? Or an artistic personality (as recommended by Zubin Mehta)? An American who would take pride in the Met as “an American institution” (Mehta, again)? Or a person “under sixty so that he can give us at least a full decade” (Moore, again)? Or was all this beside the point? For many, the fundamental question was whether the company should at last have a separate and distinct artistic director who would work alongside an administratively and financially astute general manager. Among the names in circulation were Robert Herman (Bing’s first choice), Max Rudolf (another longtime member of the inner circle), Herman Krawitz (Bing’s aide responsible for business and technical operations), Leonard Bernstein (Moore claimed no offer had been made, while Bernstein insisted he had waved off official and “sub-rosa” overtures), Herbert von Karajan, Rolf Lieberman (head of the Paris Opéra), bass-baritone George London, and board member Anthony Bliss.
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Schuyler Chapin, in charge of programming at Lincoln Center, threw three more names into the hopper: Massimo Bogianckino, director of the Rome Opera; Peter Mennin, president of Juilliard; and Goeran Gentele, intendant of the Royal Swedish Opera. The offer was first made to Mennin, who declined. The selection committee then approached Gentele; he cheerfully accepted. His five-year appointment, beginning in 1972, was announced on December 9, 1970. Like Heinrich Conried, an actor, stage director, and administrator, the fifty-three-year-old Gentele had been a hands-on presence as head of the relatively small Stockholm company since 1963; he had staged more than a score of operas in just seven years, all the while tripling
government subsidies. He had been much praised for the premiere of Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s science fiction
Aniara
and for an authentically Swedish
Un Ballo in maschera,
in which the love triangle was infused with the bisexuality of Gustav III. The Royal Swedish Opera and its head had attracted international attention when they played Montreal’s Expo 67. And most appealing to the media-conscious board president George Moore, Gentele had produced a substantial number of films and several operas for television. Years earlier, Chapin had met with him in Stockholm to request the loan of Ingmar Bergman’s production of
The Rake’s Progress
for the Hamburg Opera visit to New York. Gentele turned him down with grace and humor, and a friendship was born. A subsequent visit by the John D. Rockefellers cemented Gentele’s connections to the Met. All this led to the insertion of his candidacy into what Chapin called “the Metropolitan sweepstakes.”
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1971–1972.
Gentele spent 1971–72 as an observer, more than enough time for insiders and outsiders to draw the contrast between the outgoing and incoming general managers. Whereas Bing pressed for formality, Gentele urged one and all to call him by his given name; in an effort to attract a younger audience, he discouraged evening wear. If he announced, just as Bing had at the time of his appointment, that he intended to draw exciting directors to the Met (in Gentele’s case Bergman, Jerome Robbins, and Giorgio Strehler), he also expressed this decidedly un-Bing-like sentiment: that he hoped “to bring about close cooperation with other American opera companies” (
Times,
Dec. 11, 1970). As for his relationship to singers, “From my point of view, the best way to get in touch with them—to know how they feel and explain things to them—is by personal contact both with the artist and their agents. . . . I think it impossible to negotiate only by letter because what you accomplish by telephone calls would take months of letter-writing.” The chasm between Bing and Gentele opened wide when in June 1971 the general manager–designate declared that, for the first time in its history, the Metropolitan would have an official music director, a position neither Bing nor any of his predecessors had countenanced. His choice was Rafael Kubelik, a self-exiled Czech who had been music director of the Czech Philharmonic, the Brno Opera, the Chicago Symphony, Covent Garden, and Munich’s Bayerischer Rundfunk. Gentele followed up with the news that Schuyler Chapin would be the assistant general manager, whereupon a curious John Gutman invited Chapin to lunch, and then hastened to let the vacationing
Bing know that a radically altered organizational model was in the works, a “troika,” as he put it, of Gentele, Kubelik, and Chapin.
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On his return to the United States that fall, Bing took a swipe at Gentele’s break with past practice: “A musical director considers himself responsible for deciding repertory and cast, to say nothing of maintaining the quality of the orchestra and chorus. I was not prepared to abdicate. An opera house must be a total democracy run by one man, and one man only” (London
Times,
Nov. 10, 1971). By the time of this interview, on this point at least, Bing had already been vindicated. The previous month, fully two years before Kubelik was scheduled to take up his duties, the
Times
(Oct. 17, 1971) had published a long profile of the conductor, replete with his overly frank views on the primacy of the music director and his very own plans for the future of the company. Three days later, Gentele chided Kubelik for the “embarrassing” remarks. In reply to Kubelik’s assertion that “a general manager must run the administration for the artistic purpose which is set by the music director,” Gentele wrote, “You know very well that I was not engaged here as an ordinary administrator but because of my artistic qualifications. I am not going to serve you or anybody but the Met—I hope together with you.” And in response to Kubelik’s statement that “opera is music and the music director is the conscience of the House,” Gentele countered, “Of course opera is music but not only music: it is even theatre. If you don’t stick to that, I think we can never get any great director to work here. Neither Bergman nor Robbins—not even myself.” Kubelik had also spilled the beans intended for Gentele’s forthcoming press briefing: that there would be fewer productions per season, more rehearsal time, and cheaper tickets. He had positioned himself baldly as the lead figure of the troika.

More friction was to come. The demands of advance planning dictated that Bing schedule Gentele’s first season and as far into the future as 1973–74. Sir Rudolf was therefore in a position to program his successor’s opening night. For that gala occasion he chose Wagner’s
Tannhäuser,
to general astonishment and to the counterfeit shock of Birgit Nilsson, Gentele’s compatriot: “It’s very strange that Mr. Bing who has never opened any season with a German opera, suddenly takes the oldest production he has in the house and gives it to Mr. Gentele. When I did
Tannhäuser
in 1965 the costumes were in terrible condition and some of the scenery was practically transparent” (
Times,
Sept. 12, 1971). Gentele dodged the bullet. The board agreed that Marilyn Horne and James McCracken, signed for the twenty-year-old
Tannhäuser,
be cast instead in a new
Carmen
. When Giorgio Strehler,
invited to direct the production, could not be located, Gentele took on the job himself, by now persuaded of the wisdom of putting his own imprint on the house. In the intervening months, the original concept of shared governance among the triumvirate, with the general manager as first among equals, was scrapped for a more distinctly hierarchical organization.
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By February 1972, it was clear that the general manager would be in control both administratively and artistically. He would divide responsibility for the stage with the music director, and reporting to the music director would be a principal conductor. Appointed to the latter post on February 15, 1972, was the twenty-eight-year-old James Levine, who had made his Met debut only the summer before. Levine would devote seven months each year to the company and lead four works a season, including one new production. He would be, as he said, “Rafael Kubelik’s right-hand man, although not an assistant music director—he feels assistants are useless.” He would take on administrative duties when Kubelik was away. The assistant general manager Schuyler Chapin, the artistic administrator Charles Riecker, replacing Herman, and the technical administrator Michael Bronson, replacing Krawitz, would support the artistic team of Gentele, Kubelik, and Levine.

In the end, tragically, it was not to Conried or Bing that Gentele would be compared, but to Herbert Witherspoon, he too freshly appointed Met general manager almost four decades earlier. Both died just months before their opening nights. On July 19, 1972, on holiday in Sardinia, Gentele and two daughters were killed in an automobile accident. His wife and frequent collaborator, Marit, and a third daughter survived. He had been the official company head for only eighteen days. With what little was recorded of his directorial intentions, with the stark designs of Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda, and with Leonard Bernstein in the pit, Gentele had a posthumous debut capable of holding its own against Bing’s 1950
Don Carlo
.

The transfer of power to Gentele’s successor was necessarily a study in improvisation. There was no time and, understandably, no stomach for dispute about who should take over. Opening night was barely two months away. And the rational solution in the circumstance, bringing back Rudolf Bing, was to all appearances unpalatable. Bing cabled board president Lowell Wadmond, “Deeply shocked tragic disaster. If you feel my temporary help
useful naturally at your disposal in this terrible emergency,” to which Wadmond replied, “Appreciate greatly your cable and generous offer of assistance. Board appointed Schuyler Chapin acting general manager who is grateful to you and will be in touch in event necessary.” Don’t call us. The stunned Metropolitan directors had indeed assembled the day after Gentele’s death to hear Chapin’s detailed report on the accident, and then to vote on what everyone knew to be a fait accompli. Moore made the offer on the spot and Chapin accepted. At the press conference following adjournment, the board’s action was made public, together with the implausible assurance that there would be no disruption in the Met’s operation: Chapin would carry out Gentele’s well-laid plans for the coming season. No immediate search for a permanent general manager was contemplated; the arrangement was to be open-ended. The next day, July 20, as Chapin was in the midst of briefing his staff for the first time, there was, unimaginably, a second fatality: a stage hand fell through a trapdoor to his death. With that, the inexperienced Chapin, forty-nine, was thrust into the crisis-ridden universe of a Metropolitan impresario. As he described it in his memoirs, “Up to this point my entire professional life had been as a second man. . . . Until this moment I had never been in command, never been at the top, never been the one to bear the ultimate responsibility for the decision-making process.” Chapin had held a variety of positions in the entertainment industry: at NBC, at Columbia Artists Management, and at Columbia Records. He had come to Lincoln Center as one of its vice presidents, he had helped launch the New York Film Festival, and had brought the Hamburg and Rome operas for summer seasons. But he was neither a musician, nor a theater person, nor ever a CEO.
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A wary Wadmond and a diffident, often dismissive Moore made certain that the reins were tight around Chapin’s authority. From July 1972 to May 1973, when “acting” was dropped from his title and he was granted a three-year contract, Chapin was in the hapless position of performing the role for which he was auditioning. The vaguely complimentary statement issued in conjunction with his promotion made mention of his successful negotiation of new union contracts (the first peaceful negotiations in more than two decades, for which Gentele had earlier been credited) and an increase in box office for the current year and in subscriptions for the year to come. Few were naïve enough to believe that the Chapin appointment would usher in “a new era of expansion and achievement for the Metropolitan” (
Times,
May 9, 1973). The perilous financial waters in which the Met had foundered for
decades were at flood tide. To make matters worse, Kubelik’s contract, as negotiated by Gentele, called for his presence in New York only five months out of the year. And those two realities, the ballooning debt and the absent music director, would soon lead to an artistic/administrative meltdown that would end Chapin’s regime after just three seasons.

1972–1973.
The opening night
Carmen,
September 19, 1972, offered only a glimpse at what might have been. Gentele’s discussions with collaborators had been preliminary and general: with Svoboda, agreement on stylized sets; with Bernstein, the return to Bizet’s original opéra comique. Assistant director Bodo Igesz, promoted that summer to full responsibility, found no prompt book and just a few annotations in a score. During rehearsals, the principals, Horne in particular, expressed concern over the acoustic effect of the designer’s wall-to-wall carpeting. Bernstein could do no wrong. One instrumentalist was quoted, “He makes hard things easy, like Karajan, and he makes old things new. I mean, who else would bother with tambourine dynamics.” The result was an invigorated look at one of the beloved warhorses of the repertoire. The uncluttered sets kept the elemental conflicts in focus, sparing the audience yet another picturesque tour of Seville and its environs. The entire production created “a level of musical drama whose attainment is a new chapter in Met history.” Horne brought the right voice and an engaging sense of humor to her Carmen; McCracken played José with a riveting mixture of obsession and frustration. Deutsche Grammophon began to record the Met production a few days after the premiere, the first such venture in nineteen years, that is, since union wages dispatched record companies to Europe’s more affordable studios.
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