Thanks & Farewell

Onstage, red-haired Bulgarian Soprano Ljuba (Salome) Welitch was singing her first Tosca at the Metropolitan, and it was as exciting and free-swinging a performance of Tosca as a Met audience had ever seen. Backstage, there was more excitement still. Whispered one anxious artist in a thick Italian accent: "Do you know the words to this For He's a Jolly Good Fellow?" Replied another: "I don't even know the melody." Nevertheless, when the curtain went down on Tosca, then up again on a gala pageant of recent Met history, every singer present seemed to roar it out like a native, and from the heart. There was good reason for their fervor: the pageant was the Met's farewell to pink-cheeked, white-haired General Manager Edward Johnson, who will retire when Manager-Designate Rudolf Bing takes over at the end of May.

Canada-born Eddie Johnson had held grand opera's No. 1 managerial post for 15 years. Before that, he had been a world-famous tenor who got his start in Italy as Edoardo di Giovanni. In 1922, under his rightful name, he became Tenor Johnson of the Met.

From the Depths. He well remembered the day he had been asked to step up to the Met's top job. He was preparing to sing a performance of Peter Ibbetson in Detroit when the phone call came: Met Manager Herbert Witherspoon had just fallen dead in his office, and the trustees wanted Johnson to succeed him. It was a job he never regretted taking. In 15 years, Manager Johnson had withstood roars of rage from all sides; but even his bitterest critics would admit that, when the books of the Johnson era were closed this May, there would be more written in black than in red. He had taken over a depression-ridden opera company and kept it going through hard times, a war, and mounting battles with the twelve unions with which the Met does business. But in those 15 years, only once did the Met have to admit that it could not get its golden curtain up.*

He had given Met audiences many a performance they might not have seen but for him: the Met's first Abduction from the Seraglio of Mozart, the first Alceste of Gluck, Mussorgsky's Khovanchina. He had resurrected the dusty Marriage of Figaro (now one of the Met's best performances and biggest hits), Boris Godunov, Otello, Falstaff. He brought the best of Europe's singers to the Met, but he made his era the era of the American singer too: in this year's roster of 108 singers, more than half are U.S.-born.

The Met's subscription list, its backbone, was up to a strong $1,000,000 a year; there were some 15 million weekly radio listeners. And over 14 years, the Met had played to some 180,000 high-school children--"our future audience--the toughest audience we have."

Now for the Fun. All of the performances had not been of the best. True, there was not always money for new sets, and casting problems were sometimes insoluble. "When an artist's health fails two hours before curtain or he collapses in mid-aria," says easygoing Edward Johnson, "you have problems. Those are the things that give a man white hair." But some of the Met's ailments--clumsy staging, sloppy ensembles, a tendency to be unimaginative about new sets--might have been cured by a more demanding and more disciplinary hand.

Now that his job is done, Edward Johnson, still vigorous at 68, wants to "have fun for a while." He plans to travel--to Florence, where his wife is buried, to South America, which he has not visited since he sang there in 1916. He plans to visit his daughter, Mrs. George Drew, wife of Canada's Tory party leader, and his grandchildren. But Manhattan and the opera house will see him again. Still a Canadian citizen, Johnson says "I have lived [in New York] too many years to be anything but a New Yorker."

*In 1943, when Tenor Lauritz Melchior was taken ill before a scheduled matinee performance of Siegfried.

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