Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (18 page)

The “Grand Operatic Surprise Party” of February 26 celebrated Gatti’s twenty-fifth anniversary as general manager. Its $16,000 take was directed to the Metropolitan Opera Emergency Fund. Marcella Sembrich, who had sung Lucia a half-century earlier on the second night of the Met’s first season and, again, a quarter of a century later in Gatti’s first season, was on hand for the festivities. In the audience was Maestro Toscanini. Among the many comic spoofs of popular operas was an Apache dance that partnered the petite Lily Pons and the corpulent Lauritz Melchior. Gatti sat in the director’s box. He acknowledged the ovation at the end of the evening with standard bows and twice with the Fascist salute.

In early March, NBC transmitted a half-hour program during which Cravath owned that it was no longer possible to “rely . . . upon a small group of rich men”; the Metropolitan was turning for help to its faithful clientele and “to the vast radio audience that listens to opera through the National Broadcasting Company.” Bori sang a short recital, and then made her pitch: “Are you, my dear radio listeners, going to forsake this national institution, the Metropolitan Opera, in its present crisis, or are you coming to the rescue? I can almost hear you shout: To the rescue! Because I know you want the Metropolitan to carry on—just as we do.” Other solicitations over the airways originated from the stage during the remaining Saturday matinees. Geraldine Farrar returned to add her voice to those of current stars. Within two months, the $300,000 goal was reached. One-third of the total came from radio listeners, $50,000 from the Juilliard Foundation, and $45,000 from benefit performances and charity events. A meager $39,000 was contributed by the Real Estate Company and the Association, the very folks that Cornelius IV, an iconoclastic member of the Vanderbilt clan, had excoriated for extracting pennies from Macy’s employees while continuing to flaunt the luxury to which they were accustomed. This relatively young Cornelius,
much to the dismay of his parents a working journalist, was the great-nephew of the W.H. Vanderbilt who had made so proud a display in his two boxes at the opening of the house in 1883. His mother was the Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt who had led the opposition to Kahn’s cherished 57th Street plans.
¹⁵

By January 1933, it was clear that if the Met was to make it through 1933–34, there would have to be additional immediate, that is, midyear budgetary, adjustments. Among other stringent measures, Gatti ordered that singers be denied the number of performances guaranteed by their contracts. He cloaked his actions in the premise that the transfer of functions to the Metropolitan Opera Association had nullified the terms agreed to in the name of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Unions that had rejected cuts the year before now had no alternative but to accede to an even more dire threat: that the Met might go the way of the bankrupt Chicago Civic Opera, which had shut its doors in 1932. The first of the years that Gatti had described to Bruno Zirato, Caruso’s old secretary, as an unimaginable Calvary was finally over.

Salary negotiations between Gatti and those tapped for the 1933–34 and 1934–35 rosters were particularly grueling. For most, 1933–34 would represent a second round of cuts, and 1934–35 a painful third. Ponselle, who had commanded $1,900 per performance, dropped to $1,500 and then to $1,000, the top fee. Pinza was paid by the season; he was promised $20,000 for 1932–33 and saw only $17,000. Among the principals who were talked down by relatively small amounts was Friedrich Schorr, who went from $562.50 per show to $500. The Met was watching its pennies—literally. Perhaps the most telling figure is this: that the aggregate expense for female soloists in 1928–29 was $407,000; in 1933–34, it was $147,000. The shortening of the season by two weeks more to fourteen accounted for approximately one-half of the savings. Even so, 1933–34 would end with a deficit of $317,000.
¹⁶

All told, this would be a sorry jubilee year for the company. With disgruntled stars contracted for only part of the season and lucrative concert, radio, and recording dates trumping operatic commitments, casting was subject to the vagaries of availability as never before. In the fall of 1933, Rockefeller came back with a variant on his recurrent proposal: that the company share the Centre Theatre, already erected on his property, until a house designed for the
Metropolitan could be built. The Centre was not suited to opera, and if for that reason alone, the offer was rejected. By spring, the management was confronted with another pressing issue; an inspection had revealed violations that rendered the 39th Street facility unsafe. Without major renovation, the theater’s license would be revoked. Work on the stage and backstage, on the lighting bridges, on a new broadcasting booth, and on the much-needed face-lift of the auditorium could only be financed through a mortgage. The dreaded Roosevelt regime began on March 4; on March 5, the newly inaugurated president ordered a four-day bank holiday. The New Deal would soon be underway. For the Met as for the nation, it was a time of firsts and lasts. The year 1933–34 was the first in which citizen contributions offset company costs and the first in which the Saturday matinees had a radio sponsor, Lucky Strike cigarettes. For the first time, the public and publicly traded firms played a significant role in keeping the company afloat, indeed in safeguarding the Met’s prestige. And if donors, individual and corporate, had no say in artistic matters, their clout had nonetheless ground down that of the stockholders, as the return of
Salome
in January 1934 signaled. Gatti’s penultimate season was the first to open with an American work,
Peter Ibbetson,
and the first in ten to see liquor served in the foyer (“Magnums Pop and Cocktail Shakers Rattle” [
Herald Tribune,
Dec. 27, 1933]). As to lasts, in March 1934, Otto Kahn died, and by the end of the operatic year, Giulio Gatti-Casazza had told Paul Cravath that he would not serve beyond spring 1935.

To avoid a Christmas start, opening night was set for Tuesday, December 26. The feature article in the
Times
of the next day was full of praise for the
Peter Ibbetson
principals, Bori (the Met’s “Joan of Arc”), Johnson, and Tibbett, who, “through their public appeals spread country-wide on the upper air, had saved” the day. Yet the campaign that season was predominantly an in-house affair: fund-raising through Metropolitan contacts, another “surprise party,” and another Juilliard Foundation subvention brought in $250,000. The ball was a Louis XV extravaganza for which the stage was dressed as the Forest of Fontainebleau and visiting monarchs celebrated the birthday of the Dauphine of France. During the pageant, New York’s upper crust took on the roles and garb of the vanished aristocracy: Mrs. Vincent Astor was Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Theodore Steinway the King of Prussia. Walter Damrosch came as Bach. Music of the ancien régime gave way to Joe Moss and his Band as the assembly proceeded to the dance floor laid over the pit and orchestra level. Meanwhile, Mrs. Belmont was at work. In early December, she announced the founding of the Women’s Metropolitan Opera
Club, whose members would have use of the quarters and Grand Tier omni-box of the Metropolitan Opera Club on popularly priced, generally second-string Saturday nights (
Times,
Dec. 3, 1933). An exclusive and well-to-do fraternity, the Metropolitan Opera Club was by then an institution. It had been established in 1899 for the “cultivation of vocal and instrumental music, the encouragement and support of operatic and musical performances, and the promotion of social intercourse among its members.” Eleanor Belmont’s initiative, on the other hand, was directed toward women who could not afford subscriptions and were, in any case, reluctant to attend unaccompanied. The next month, January 1934, on joining the board of the Association, she declared “that the people should look upon [opera] as an integral essential part of the life of the city.” The next year, she would launch the Metropolitan Opera Guild with herself as chair, firm in her contention that “the democratization of opera had begun.”
¹⁷

Gatti left for Europe at the end of the 1933–34 season to attend performances, audition singers, and have his vacation. Back in New York, the seven-month May to November recess provided the space for confabulations over the company’s future. The power to determine the direction and director of the post-Gatti era had careened uptown to the Juilliard School of Music and to the conference room of its president, John Erskine. Erskine’s candidate for the position of general manager was Herbert Witherspoon, known to old-timers as a Metropolitan Wagnerian bass between 1908 and 1916. In 1931–32, he had been artistic director of the Chicago Civic Opera Company. In that capacity, on May 25, 1932, he had written to Ziegler seeking advice on the threat of closure facing his troupe. Ziegler responded two days later, laying out the steps the Met had taken to meet its own emergency: lowering prices so as to compete with the Philharmonic and shaving the season at beginning and end, periods in which box holders were mostly out of town. Despite Ziegler’s good counsel, the Civic Opera would not live to see another season, and its artistic director was on his way to Cincinnati to head up its conservatory.

Witherspoon began angling in earnest for the Metropolitan job in 1933 when rumors of Gatti’s retirement began to circulate. He asked his colleague on the board of the American Academy of Teachers of Singing, Percy Rector Stephens, to intercede on his behalf, boasting that he “could assemble a company in thirty days which would make New York sit up.” Stephens wrote to
Cravath, insisting that, “if an appeal is to be made to the general public for support, the opera must take on the complexion of an American institution. . . . An American as manager of our Opera House would do much, at the present time, to stimulate interest.” He then put forward Witherspoon’s name. Cravath was unwilling to take the issue head on: “Shifting the Opera Company to American management and a more American personnel than it has today is a very complicated problem.” Stephens then advised Witherspoon to pin his hopes on Erskine: “The Juilliard backing will have to be given consideration to a great extent.” It was in fact Erskine who would be the deal maker. Witherspoon wrote to Erskine offering a blueprint for Metropolitan policy and practice in the coming years. His letter had the desired effect.
¹⁸

In September 1934, Witherspoon moved back to New York and was promptly appointed to the Juilliard faculty. The next month, the story goes, Erskine walked into a room in which Mrs. Witherspoon was lunching with Mrs. Tibbett and said, “I’ve just dumped the Metropolitan Opera in Herbert’s lap.” For the length of the season, Witherspoon would be a presence at the opera house, privy to the detail of operations, scribbling proposals for reform. His involvement, however unofficial in 1934–35, was a condition of what would later be announced as a Juilliard grant of $150,000 for the next year and $100,000 for the year after. Other provisos recorded in the March 7, 1935, minutes of the Metropolitan Opera Association include increased subscriptions, a balanced budget, and the appointment of three members of the Juilliard Musical Foundation, Erskine among them, to the Association board. A last stipulation was that the Met introduce a popularly priced supplementary spring season featuring young Americans, possibly Juilliard trained. By the time Gatti returned to New York in November, and his resignation effective April 1935 was made public, the Met’s future had been charted.
¹⁹

Gatti’s final season lasted again only fourteen weeks. And again he opened with
Aïda
and not on a Monday, but on a Saturday, December 22, this time to avoid Christmas Eve. The audience was cheered by the more comfortable seating, the new lobby chandeliers, and ice water in the just installed drinking fountains. (Hot water flowed for the first time in the dressing rooms.) Nearly a third of the names attached to the boxes were preceded by “The Estate of . . . ” Harriman, for example, or Mills, Whitney, or Kahn. One critic attributed the more subdued atmosphere to a sense that an era was coming to an end and that “somewhere and somehow, [the opera’s] own New Deal is
taking form”
(Times)
. Contrary as usual, Henderson thought the audience “unacquainted with the sinister word ‘depression’” (
Sun,
Dec. 24). Another reviewer wrote under the caution “Metropolitan Opera and Its Musical Prestige Now in Danger. Support Is Needed. Future of Lyrical Art in This City Is Problem That Must Be Met”
(American)
. The hopeful news was once again the number of radio listeners, estimated at fifty million for the season. During intermissions, Geraldine Farrar was at her miniature piano in Box 40 to illustrate passages from the afternoon’s opera and sing the words she herself had translated into English (
Times,
Jan 13, 1935).

On March 6, the press reported Witherspoon’s appointment. The previous November, the
Daily Mirror
had quoted odds on Gatti’s replacement: Johnson 10 to 1, Sir Thomas Beecham 15 to 1, Cornelius Bliss 20 to 1, Bori 25 to 1, Ziegler 35 to 1, Erskine 40 to 1; bringing up the rear was Witherspoon at 50 to 1 (Nov. 19). The
Mirror
’s musical bookie notwithstanding, Witherspoon had had no real competition. Ziegler was named assistant manager for business administration and Johnson assistant manager in charge of the supplementary spring season. Also announced were drives to increase subscription rolls and opportunities for young American talent. Juilliard’s fingerprints were everywhere.
Time
gave this version of the nearly year-long maneuvers: “In a desperate attempt to save its life, the Metropolitan sold its independence. . . . To further their aims the Juilliards demanded greater representation on the Metropolitan board. It was not a suggestion but a command when they named as their candidates Lawyer John M. Perry, who drew up Augustus Juilliard’s will, Dean Ernest Hutchison of the Juilliard School of Music, President John . . . Erskine who has long been ambitious to dictate Metropolitan policies” (March 18, 1935).
²⁰