Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (36 page)

Siegfried
(Nov. 17, 1972) was the next new production, a Bing legacy, the third installment of the Salzburg “Ring.” Leinsdorf was no Karajan, Jess Thomas barely adequate in the rigorous title role; Nilsson took heroic charge in the act 3 “Awakening” scene: “the soprano poured waves of golden tone over an audience that had been waiting for some hours for singing of this magnitude.” The season’s three other new productions were staged at the “Mini-Met.” High among Gentele’s priorities had been the search for a hospitable venue for chamber opera and contemporary pieces unsuited to the main auditorium. When the ideal alternative of Juilliard was quashed by its president, Peter Mennin, the Mini-Met found a temporary home at Lincoln Center’s Forum, later renamed the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, which seats around three hundred. Poor acoustics and the lack of a pit (a balcony had to
be built above the stage for the orchestra) were flaws that designer Ming Cho Lee could not overcome. Still, Henry Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas
and Virgil Thomson’s
Four Saints in Three Acts
found their audience; the microtonality and electronic music of Maurice Ohana’s
Syllabaire pour Phèdre
did not. An anonymous donor and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts seemed to ensure a season for 1974–75. Two double bills, a pastiche of Charles Ives with
Miss Donnethrone’s Maggot
by Peter Maxwell Davies and Massenet’s
Le Portrait de Manon
with Chabrier’s
Une Éducation manquée,
were projected, not for the Forum, but for the nearby Harkness Theater. The plan was postponed for a year, and then canceled altogether, on the say-so, it was rumored, of Anthony Bliss. Hopes for an intimate opera theater went uneasily into the night. In 1985, James Levine insisted, “a second, smaller performing space is absolutely critical to the Metropolitan’s future” (
Times,
March 3). In 1987, general manager Bruce Crawford contemplated the Victory Theatre on 42nd Street for “smaller productions [that] would offer the Metropolitan Opera the possibility of a thirteen-week season.” In 1997, there were discussions of building an annex to serve Lincoln Center’s several constituents. The odds against a “little” Met are every bit as high as they have ever been and, alas, likely higher.
³³

In Chapin’s first season, planned partly by Bing, and then by Gentele and Kubelik, the Met continued to boast an enviable international roster.
Norma
was sung by Caballé and Fiorenza Cossotto,
Peter Grimes
by Vickers,
Orfeo ed Euridice
by Horne,
Aïda, Der Rosenkavalier, Tosca,
and
La Fille du régiment
by Arroyo, Rysanek, Sutherland, Corelli, Domingo, Pavarotti, Gobbi, and Milnes—and the list went on. Rita Hunter was on hand as a credible backup for Nilsson in Wagner. Gwyneth Jones and Ingvar Wixell made impressive debuts as Sieglinde and Rigoletto. Sixten Ehrling, Charles Mackerras, and Peter Maag strengthened the conducting staff.
The Queen of Spades,
the first opera sung entirely in Russian, had as its principals Raina Kabaivanska and Nicolai Gedda, both of whom possessed not only the language, but the style. True, when evenings featured Marcia Baldwin, a comprimario mezzo, as the lead soprano Lisa, and Robert Nagy, Vickers’s overused cover, as Gherman, many wondered who was minding the store. But after all, previous managements had had their share of ho-hum, even dreadful performances. In the main, the casts conscripted by Gentele and Kubelik were up to the standard set by their predecessors.

Chapin weathered his first season, however shakily. He had been obliged to make good on the hefty bill left behind by Gentele while complying with
board demands for ever greater fiscal stringency. As early as January 11, 1973, Moore had questioned the number of new productions projected for the year to come, and this despite the private sponsorship already guaranteed for their support. He was apparently looking ahead and “disturbed by the fact that for 1974–75 no such funds were in sight.” Levine was scheduled to conduct another monumental Met first, Verdi’s
I Vespri Siciliani
. Chapin would have to go to bat for the upcoming double bill of Puccini’s
Gianni Schicchi
and Luigi Dallapiccola’s
Il Prigioniero,
the latter eventually scuttled in favor of Bartók’s
Bluebeard’s Castle
. He had to argue for the audience appeal, rehearsal time, and overall expense of the
Les Troyens
scheduled for Kubelik’s debut.
³⁴

In June 1973, with Kubelik’s long-anticipated arrival finally imminent, Chapin thought it prudent to warn the music director that a dark horizon had replaced the sunny landscape Gentele had painted all those months earlier in luring him to the Met. The deficit at the end of the 1972–73 season, he wrote, would amount to $4.7 million, which, subtracted from the $15 million in total assets (including the appraised value of the 39th Street site), would leave only $10.3 million. At this rate, the Met would soon be out of business. The boardroom was “close to hysteria”; directors harbored the illusion that issues ignored for years could be quickly resolved: “You and I both must remain flexible because if either of us takes an intransigent point of view, we are in danger of sinking the whole operation.” And it went without saying that it would be more difficult to enact the necessary reforms with a music director “who is not here on a daily basis coping with the problems that arise.” In his June 28 report to the board, Chapin expatiated on his message to Kubelik. The detail was this: Every production on the calendar for the coming season, bar none, would be scrutinized with an eye to reducing labor costs. That included Gentele’s prized
Carmen:
“By removing the [act 1] stairs we free three stage elevators and the labor necessary to build a graduated staircase of ten feet in depth and fifty feet of width. This will not only save on performance crew but also space in storage areas and trucking.” There would be fewer orchestra rehearsals, especially for the core repertoire. The number of choristers would be decreased: for
Tristan und Isolde,
for example, thirty would suffice, a third fewer than customary; megaphones would enhance the offstage voices. More use would be made of contract artists. As for star salaries, nothing could be done about the weakening dollar and associated increases in cachets. New revenue streams would have to be explored, perhaps Sunday rentals, or special concerts, or added stops on the tour. And why not
hurry the media program advocated by Moore? As always, better-coordinated fund-raising would make a difference. But these measures, even taken together, would be too little, too late.
³⁵

1973–1974.
In October, as the 1973–74 season was under way, Chapin announced that the scheduled new
Don Giovanni
was canceled and that there would be no further performances in the city’s parks: “The fact is that the Met is broke. If we couldn’t borrow money we couldn’t mount a season.” Three weeks later, Kubelik made his debut in an unusually complete
Les Troyens
. If Berlioz profited little from Peter Wexler’s production (“the sets and costumes are excessively busy and rather ugly”), he could hardly have hoped for more stirring interpreters than Vickers, Ludwig, and Shirley Verrett. An additional dose of drama was injected into the first night when Verrett, the Cassandre, was called upon to play Didon as well, in place of the indisposed Ludwig.
L’Italiana in Algeri
(Nov. 10), a congenial vehicle for Horne’s high-spirited virtuosity, returned after more than a half-century in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s first Met staging; the rest of the cast and the conductor, Gabor Ötvös, fell flat. A production of
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
(Nov. 29) was borrowed from Seattle to satisfy Joan Sutherland; predictably stupendous as Olympia, the mechanical doll, she also made hers the dramatic and lyric music of the poet’s other loves.
³⁶

A month later, the revival of
Tristan und Isolde
scheduled for January 11 began to unravel. Chapin had engaged Swedish soprano Catarina Ligendza for the role of Isolde and Vickers for his first Met Tristan. In late December, Ligendza bowed out. Doris Jung, her cover, failed to get the nod, and when Isolde was handed off to Klara Barlow, Vickers, who had exacerbated the situation by arriving late for rehearsals, withdrew. Kubelik, in Europe as usual, was unavailable to manage the crisis. All he could come up with was that Mario and Tosca step in for Tristan and Isolde. Leinsdorf, furious at Kubelik’s absence, fanned the discontent. When the dust settled, Barlow was cast opposite Jess Thomas, won praise for her pluck and her acting, and eventually sang the January 26 broadcast with Vickers, who had rethought his earlier stand. Four days later, Nilsson and Vickers sang Wagner’s opera together. On an embarrassing evening during Nilsson’s debut season, 1959–60, three Tristans pleading illness were needed, one per act, to complete the show. As always, Nilsson had taken all three acts in her confident stride. By 1974, she had sung twenty-nine Met Isoldes opposite seven different leading men, some good, some not, all challenged by the ferocious score. In Vickers,
Nilsson finally met her match. That single smashing evening served to tell Met audiences how otherwise impoverished were the contemporary Wagnerian ranks. “One would have thought the audience as well as the two principals had swallowed that love potion.” By comparison, through the 1930s, Flagstad and Melchior had been the tallest in a field of giants. Nilsson and Vickers did justice to the musical and theatrical values of the roles as no one else of their generation could. Regrettably, by reason of schedule, of indisposition, and of the peripatetic life of the opera singer in the 1970s, their voices twined only once in the “Liebesnacht” in New York.
³⁷

 

FIGURE 32
.
Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, and her three Tristans, left to right Ramon Vinay, Karl Liebl, Albert Da Costa, December 28, 1959 (Louis Mélançon; courtesy Metropolitan Opera Archives)

 

The Nilsson-Vickers
Tristan
was a luminous instant in this dark season. Chapin was obliged to announce that 1974–75 would be shortened from thirty-one weeks to thirty, and 1975–76 to only twenty-seven. The administrative staff would be cut by 20 percent. To add to the adversity, costumes
valued at $3 million had gone up in the smoke of a Bronx warehouse fire. Chapin and Kubelik were censured for mediocre casting, inferior conducting, and chaos onstage and off-. Levine, meanwhile, was unsure of the stance he should take vis-à-vis the warring powers. He consulted with his agent, Ronald Wilford, who advised the tactful waiting game the young conductor played to his future advantage. On February 12, in the middle of his first year, Kubelik resigned. His decision, he cabled Moore, had been prompted by three factors: that he had “tried in vain in the past year to get the administration of the Metropolitan Opera House to work as planned,” a grievance left ill defined; that the company’s “unfortunate financial situation [had changed] the basic conception of my ideals on how to lead musical affairs of the Met”; and “the latest attacks on my person from the New York Times.” Only the second of the three found its way into the press release.
³⁸

Of the original troika, Chapin alone was left standing, although weakened to the point that he learned of Kubelik’s resignation only when he read about it in the newspaper. Two weeks later, in an inspired stroke, the general manager appointed John Dexter production supervisor, a new position on a par with the recently vacated slot of music director. Dexter, whose reputation was largely based on landmark stagings of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Peter Shaffer, had come to the Met from England’s National Theatre for Verdi’s
I Vespri Siciliani
just a couple of months earlier. The dynamic director succeeded in persuading the nearly “immobile” Caballé (shades of Margaret Webster and Zinka Milanov) to negotiate his angular patterns on Svoboda’s carpeted steps. With Dexter on board, a reconfigured troika was in the offing.

1974–1975
The fitting epilogue to the troubles of 1973–74 was the summer double bill of a so-so
Gianni Schicchi
and a wrong-headed
Bluebeard’s Castle,
the company premiere of Bartók’s opera. The 1974–75 season began no more felicitously. The weeklong Cleveland engagement was a box-office bust, an experiment that would not be repeated. And the aura of the New York opening night was dimmed by the cancellation of its star attraction: Caballé was replaced by Cristina Deutekom in
I Vespri Siciliani
. Anticipation surrounding
Death in Venice
was heightened by the debut of Peter Pears, the original Aschenbach, now in his mid-sixties. Britten’s opera, dwarfed by the large house, generated respect, little affection, and average ticket sales. Janáček’s
Jenufa
(Nov. 15, in English) was revived a half-century after its Met premiere. The new investiture had many virtues—brooding sets designed by Schneider-Siemssen,
Rennert’s staging, the musical leadership of John Nelson, and a strong cast headed by Teresa Kubiak, Vickers, and Astrid Varnay, who had come home after eighteen years. The superb presentation of an unfamiliar masterwork that would eventually find many devotees was hastily mothballed, not to return until 1986.
³⁹