Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (31 page)

How real was the impact of the directors who crossed from the legitimate to the lyric theater? How real could it be? Margaret Webster was reduced to bemoaning the conditions that sabotaged dramatic purpose. In the three weeks prior to the first performance of
Don Carlo,
a sprawling work unfamiliar to the chorus and to many of the soloists, she had to vie for rehearsal space with four other operas in preparation and was allowed only twelve hours on the main stage. She repaired to the “roof” stage high in the building, Sherry’s Bar, the lobby, the restrooms, and whatever other nook or cranny she could commandeer. Her hard-won results were compromised as soon as there was a cast change, sometimes by the second or third performance. Not only did directors play second fiddle to the music staff, they were inevitably overwhelmed by the force of tradition. Joseph Mankiewicz, so inventive in the movies, could do little more than freshen
La Bohème
(Dec. 27, 1952). When, early in the run, bits of his staging began to melt away, he asked, as had Webster, that his name be removed from the program. He never returned to the Met. Cyril Ritchard had tightened up
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
(Feb. 19, 1954) and had thrown out its most tired jokes. His subsequent productions,
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
(Nov. 14, 1955),
La Périchole, Le Nozze di Figaro
(Oct. 30, 1959), and
The Gypsy Baron
(Nov. 25, 1959), were even less intrepid. Those who hoped
Cav/Pag
(Nov. 7, 1958) would be invigorated by José Quintero, renowned for staging Eugene O’Neill, could only have been disap-pointed.
⁵¹

Only a handful of theater people managed to overcome Bing’s attachment to the middle ground, the limitations of the aged plant, foot-dragging stars, and conservative patrons to achieve their ends. Tyrone Guthrie did away with the “romantic trappings” that in his view had disfigured
Carmen
(Jan. 31, 1952). Gérard supplied him with a bare-bones act 1 Seville street corner. For act 4, director and designer, short on budget, came up with the arresting ploy of setting the scene in Escamillo’s quarters, where José could convincingly entrap Carmen. The production was a smash. Peter Brook’s rereading moved
Faust
(Nov. 16, 1953) from the prescribed Gothic sixteenth century to the Romantic nineteenth, a time trip that now seems unremarkable. Gone were Marguerite’s blonde braids and chaste cottage, Faust’s doublet and hose, and Méphistophélès’s red devil tights. The modishly coiffed heroine retired behind an ample weeping willow, the philosopher turned hedonist was decked out as Lord Byron, and the Prince of Darkness sported evening dress, top hat, and cane. Downes took advantage of this
Faust
to decry the engagement of stage directors who “regard opera as a kind of adulterated theatre, a form to which they must apply the methods of the spoken theatre to redeem it from its ways”
(Times)
. For a new
Madama Butterfly
(Feb. 19, 1958), the company first looked to Japanese cinema. Negotiations with Akira Kurosawa fizzled. Bing was leery of the next candidate, director Yoshio Aoyama, and of the “totally conventional realistic” designs submitted by Motohiro Nagasaka. He need not have been concerned. The “restraint and delicacy” that purged inauthentic representations of Japan yielded a refitting that, for
Time,
“set off the throbbing Puccini score far more effectively than did the old conventional melodramatic breast-beating.”
⁵²

The
Così fan tutte
(Dec. 28, 1951) assigned to Alfred Lunt, Broadway’s leading practitioner of the comedy of manners, was a resetting of such refinement that it launched a reappraisal of the work itself. Gérard’s sets, as elegant as the movements Lunt taught the principals, brought the action forward onto the apron of an interior proscenium. He limned eighteenth-century Naples from window frames, lattices, chandeliers, and a pastel color scheme accented by the luxuriant taffeta costumes of the fickle sisters. Two other revivals mediated the acceptance of what soon became canonical titles,
Eugene Onegin
(Oct. 28, 1957) and
Turandot
(Feb. 24, 1961). In 1957, in
English, Tchaikovsky filled the prestigious opening-night position. Reviewers were unruffled by the transposition of Onegin and Tatiana’s final encounter from the more transgressive interior of the husband’s house specified by the libretto to a more picturesque park in the falling snow. They admired Peter Brook’s staging and Rolf Gérard’s sets, but as for the opera itself, they agreed, as had their confrères in 1920, that
Eugene Onegin
was static, faded, and dated. Thanks to quite frequent revivals, today’s critics and audiences are devoted to what Tchaikovsky called not an opera, but “lyrical scenes.” And in 1977, Tatiana was at last freed to write her love letter in the original Russian. When Aoyama fell ill,
Turandot
devolved to Nathaniel Merrill. The delicate chinoiserie of Beaton’s long-ago Peking, with décor less grandiose than Puccini’s grand canvas had known in New York and elsewhere, helped secure a place for an opera not heard at the Met in three decades.

From Europe came Carl Ebert’s
Macbeth
and
Ariadne auf Naxos,
sickly transplants from Glyndebourne. His kitschy
Martha
(Jan. 26, 1961) suffered the indignities of an English adaptation disavowed by the translator (in one performance jettisoned by Tucker, who simply sang his big aria in Italian) and of a fractious horse that just missed dumping a wagonload of principals into the pit.
Martha
raised the question of Bing’s repertory choices: “One wonders why a great opera house should waste a magnificent cast on such a flimsy period piece when great masterpieces are neglected.” Gunther Rennert had piled up a cutting-edge resumé in Germany. After the absurd
Nabucco,
the unobjectionable
Un Ballo in maschera,
and a tepid
Manon
(Oct.17, 1963), Bing could take heart in Rennert’s collaboration with Rudolf Heinrich for a suitably decadent
Salome
. Margherita Wallmann’s impact on
Lucia di Lammermoor
(Oct. 12, 1964) paled before Sutherland’s patented version of Donizetti’s demented bride. The last of the European directors to make his debut, Jean-Louis Barrault, staged
Faust
in the clever, Brueghel-inspired designs of Jacques Dupont.
⁵³

That left the house directors, presumably less dashing and certainly less costly than the guests. It was to these journeymen that Bing turned increasingly as the 1950s drew to an end. The best-known was Herbert Graf, a Met veteran, “an opera man first and last.” His blocking and Berman’s ingenious decorated two-tiered set combined to smooth the way for the many scene changes of
Don Giovanni
(Oct. 31, 1957). Graf could do little with
Tannhaüser
’s flimsy Wartburg valley and Landgrave Hermann’s antiseptic castle (Dec. 26, 1953),
Die Zauberflöte
’s welter of ugly sets (Feb. 23, 1956, in English), or
Tristan und Isolde
’s shriveled proportions (Dec. 18, 1959). Dino Yannopoulos, who
had been on the staff since 1946, was handed a lavish
Andrea Chénier
(Dec. 16, 1954), an unsightly
Ernani,
and, for
Don Pasquale
(Dec. 23, 1955), the Met’s “first pseudo-revolving stage.” The local team of Nathaniel Merrill and Robert O’Hearn delivered the shows Bing was after—modern but not radical, flattering to the stars. Their most spectacular invention for
L’Elisir d’amore
(Nov. 15, 1960) was the balloon landing of the charlatan doctor.
Die Meistersinger
(Oct. 18, 1962) placed Hans Sachs’s house at the confluence of steeply raked alleys in a three-dimensional bourgeois Nuremberg. Here was a rare “sample of operatic production that would improve the look of any stage in the world,” high praise, indeed, from Irving Kolodin. Merrill and O’Hearn did their best to animate the notoriously static
Samson et Dalila
(Oct. 17, 1964); they devised a progression of shifting spaces for the long choral passages of act 1 and pulled off a spectacular collapse of the Temple of Dagon in act 3.
⁵⁴

Alceste
(Dec. 6, 1960, in English),
La Sonnambula
(Feb. 21, 1963), and
Adriana Lecouvreur
(Jan. 21, 1963) were revived for Eileen Farrell, Joan Sutherland, and Renata Tebaldi, and entrusted to staff directors. Farrell’s thrilling debut had been long awaited. As for
Alceste,
Schonberg minced no words: this conductor’s opera was “a stately bore, and most of us, if we were honest with ourselves, would admit it.” Michael Manuel’s bland staging and spare décor were of no help. Given Butler and Gérard’s listless production, there could not have been much hope that
La Sonnambula
(Feb. 21, 1963) would survive beyond Sutherland’s interest: “To hear her was to appreciate what the art of bel canto must have been when Bellini wrote the opera to show off the leading soprano’s voice.” Despite a libretto many consider absurd,
La Sonnambula
would be back. More surprising have been the iterations of
Adriana Lecouvreur
since the 1960s. In 1903, Caruso and Cavalieri failed to make a success of Cilea’s melodrama. In the late 1930s, Ponselle resigned from the company over Johnson’s refusal to program the opera. But Tebaldi’s wish was Bing’s command. In vocal crisis, she withdrew before the end of the run. A compliant handmaiden for divas more dramatically than vocally secure, and long the object of managerial and critical scorn,
Adriana Lecouvreur
has resurfaced once each decade.
⁵⁵

The Saturday matinée of
La Bohème
on April 16, 1966, closed out the final subscription season at the Old Met. At eight o’clock that evening, the curtain
came up on the farewell concert sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Guild; it came down at 1:25 a.m. the next day. From the set of
Tannhäuser
’s Hall of Song, former baritone and now executive stage manager Osie Hawkins called the roll of retired stars, each of whom took a place on the stage to the cheers of the crowd: in alphabetical order, Marian Anderson, Alexander Kipnis, Marjorie Lawrence (in her wheelchair), Lotte Lehmann, Giovanni Martinelli, Patrice Munsel, Lily Pons, Elisabeth Rethberg, Bidù Sayão, Risë Stevens, and many more, thirty-one in all. The history of the Metropolitan back to Martinelli’s 1913 debut paraded before an audience attuned to the emotional pitch of the occasion. And as the honored guests made their entrances, the corresponding section of the chorus seated on the stage rose in tribute: the basses for Kipnis, the sopranos for Lawrence, and so on. When Lotte Lehmann walked in, everyone stood.

A concert of fifty-seven artists, some few of whom had sung under Johnson, opened with the
Lucia di Lammermoor
sextet. Dorothy Kirsten (who sang “Depuis le jour”), Robert Merrill (“Eri tu”), and Regina Resnik (in the
Carmen
quintet) would continue on at Lincoln Center. Especially moving were the turns of those for whom this would be the last hurrah. A long ovation was touched off by Licia Albanese’s “Un bel dì”; to shouts of “Save the Met,” she kissed her hand and bent to touch the stage floor with her fingers. Another was for Eleanor Steber as Vanessa. This line from Barber’s quintet must have been achingly poignant: “Let me look around once more. Who knows when I shall see this house again!” Kurt Baum, too, made his adieu that night. But the most thunderous applause was reserved for Milanov. Near the end of the concert, with Tucker, she sang the final duet from
Andrea Chénier
. Bravos mixed with cries of “We love you, Zinka” lasted a full five minutes.

The gala was also the opportunity to show off the roster that had defined the first sixteen years of Bing’s regime, artists who had made their debuts after 1950. Nicolai Gedda (in the final
Faust
trio) was adept in all the languages and nearly all the styles then current at the house. Jon Vickers (“Winterstürme”) had become the Siegmund, Florestan, Don José, and Samson of his generation. Régine Crespin (in the Gioconda-Laura duet) had made her mark in Strauss, Wagner, and Verdi. James McCracken (in the “Sì, pel ciel” duet from
Otello
) had served a comprimario apprenticeship with the company before making his name elsewhere and returning to sing major roles. And Teresa Stratas (in the “Soave sia il vento” trio from
Così fan tutte
) had jumped from the ranks of the
Parsifal
Flower maidens to Micaela and
Mimì. Four of the superstars Bing had brought to the Met were also on the gala program: Renata Tebaldi and Franco Corelli (the act 2
Manon Lescaut
duet), Birgit Nilsson (Brünnhilde’s “Immolation”), and Leontyne Price (Leonora’s act 4 aria from
Il Trovatore
). Among the dazzling newcomers of 1965–66, Grace Bumbry, Mirella Freni, Nicolai Ghiaurov, James King, Alfredo Kraus, Pilar Lorengar, Sherrill Milnes, Renata Scotto, only Montserrat Caballé was on hand (in the
Rosenkavalier
trio).

There were other, even more notable absences, Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, both of whom had had bitter clashes with Bing. Then there were the stars Bing drew to the Met who had shone brightly and then had disappeared for various reasons in the years before the gala. Joan Sutherland had left in 1964 of her own volition and would return in 1966–67. Antonietta Stella was dismissed after just four seasons, likely because she challenged the general manager’s interdiction of the solo bow. Cesare Valletti had been let go for reasons still obscure. Victoria de los Angeles was offended when Bing chose Farrell for Manuel De Falla’s
Atlantida
. Farrell herself (not a Bing favorite) sang only forty-seven performances, a total that would have been far greater had she taken on the Wagnerian heroines to which she was so splendidly suited. The most glaring absence at the farewell was that of the most famously difficult of all sopranos, Maria Callas. Callas had sung at the Met for two seasons, 1956–57 and 1957–58. In November of what would have been the third, Bing fired her in as public a manner as he could contrive. She had committed herself in writing to alternating Lady Macbeth with Violetta and, for the first time, to the national tour. But the diva changed her mind, presenting the lame excuse that toggling between the heavier and the lighter Verdi roles, even with a week’s rest in between, would invite vocal strain. Bing suggested she replace Violetta with Tosca or Lucia, upon which Callas retorted: “My voice is not an elevator, going up and down.” When she failed to comply with her agreement by the deadline Bing set, he sacked her for breach of contract, to the outrage of the press and the public. The story made news the world over. Bing was happy to welcome Callas back in 1965 for two sold-out
Toscas
.
⁵⁶

The standard of performance at the Old Met, even in Bing’s best years, fluctuated markedly. The disparity was reflected in the gala when Arturo Sergi took the stage as Edgardo, Mary Curtis-Verna as Aïda. That said, in any given week during the last decade and a half on 39th Street, operagoers could hear singers who shook the walls with their mighty voices, others who wafted shimmering pianissimos through the theater, and some capable of both.
There were those who captured audiences with the passion of their song and, more rarely, with the subtlety of their art. Some even had compelling acting skills that enlivened the strategies of the new directors. And a few possessed a personal alchemy of sound, presence, and dramatic instinct that made an irrefutable case for calling Bing’s Met a house of stars.