Under New Management

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From the general air of benevolent conspiracy, just about everyone backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House knew that a surprise was in the making. Only a few --not including the Met's new General Manager Rudolf Bing--had been told the details. Last week, with a gala New Year's Eve audience settled in their seats for Fledermaus, the Met's bubbliest new production in years (TIME, Jan. 1), Mezzo Rise Stevens uncorked the surprise.

Waving a ludicrous 18-in. cigarette holder in her role of Fledermaus' bored, bemonocled Prince Orlofsky, Mezzo Stevens strutted center stage, put one foot on the prompter's box and waggled the holder at Box 23 of the Met's Diamond Horseshoe. Then, as Manager Bing winced in his box, she sang a switch on her song, Chacun a Son Gout:*

The operas that must be your choice If you like plays that sing Are solely dependent on one voice The voice of Rudolf Bing.

If he is in a Wagnerian mood We're forced to strain a lung And serve the ponderous musical food Of Goetterddmmerung . . .

Mister Bing is the king uncrowned here Though he rarely is on view And we do Just what Bing Tells us to.

The expression is never found here Chacun `a Son Gout; There is only one gout around here And you all know who.

Oldtimers in the audience tried to remember when any general manager of the Met had won so jovial an accolade, finally gave up. After only nine weeks of his first season, Rudolf Bing looked like the best thing that had happened to the Met in many a day. Nobody expected Bing to take all the creaks out of the old place overnight, but he had already accomplished the near miracle of persuading his singers, his board of directors and his audiences that the Met was not doomed to creak forever along ways established back in the gaslight era.

The chief reason for the Met's enthusiasm for its new manager is his own crisp air of enthusiasm. After 27 years of the autocratic rule of Giulio Gatti-Casazza and 15 years of worries and wartime headaches under Edward Johnson, the old Metropolitan has suddenly become, as one tenor put it, "a happy house."

Cross Your Fingers. It was Edward Johnson himself who first brought Rudolf Bing forward 23 months ago as a likely successor. The Met's directors were impressed by Bing's prewar experience with Britain's Glyndebourne Opera Company and the success he had made of the postwar Edinburgh Festivals. Bing's first acts as manager nonetheless made the 37 directors nervously cross their august fingers.

Amidst loud cries of wounded pride and outrage, the new manager proceeded to drop 39 singers, including hitherto sacrosanct Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, 60, whose wanderings from the score had been the bane of Met conductors for years. There were wild charges that Manager Bing, Vienna-born and German-trained, would try to force even more of the heavy dumpling of Wagner down the throats of audiences that are notably partial to lighter Italian and French fare. (Actually, Bing has little enthusiasm for Wagner.) When he signed famed Soprano Kirsten Flagstad to appear at the Met for the first time since she left it in 1941 to go to her husband in Nazi-occupied Norway, Walter Winchell and others set up a drumfire heard across the nation. Said Bing calmly: "Quality and quality alone is to be the test. If there is to be any shooting for this decision, let it be at me."

After the curtain went up on opening night, the firing diminished. Bing began with a brand-new production of Verdi's Don Carlo, rebuilt from scratch with brilliant new sets and costumes, and staged by bright Broadway Director Margaret Webster. He quickly followed that with an entirely new mounting of The Flying Dutchman, done almost equally well. To make a full season, Bing had to reach into the standard repertory (and the warehouse) for operas he had had neither time nor money to rebuild, e.g., Tristan, Faust, Trovatore, Traviata. But except for Traviata and Faust, which most critics panned, even the old productions came through with some grace. Finally came the success of the brilliant new Fledermaus, restaged by Broadway's and Hollywood's Garson Kanin. Said one beaming and relaxed Met director last week: "We all have our fingers uncrossed now."

Rush the Ambulance. Rudi Bing has not worked his cures by coddling the singers or anyone else. His policy from the first has been "firmness--sympathy but firmness." Says one singer: "Bing is the boss. He knows it and makes everyone else know it." But the Bing firmness is tempered with wit, and even touches of slapstick. One sample last fall: when he suspected that the "illness" of one of his tenors was chiefly laziness, he rushed two doctors and an ambulance to the tenor's door in burlesque solicitude. Says Bing in his caramel-soft Viennese-British accent: "He sang that night, and very well, too."

Bing has also persuaded his singers that the Met comes first. He generally insists that they be on hand for a minimum of ten weeks a season; nowadays, stars who used to drop in at the Met to sing four or five times a year, almost at their own convenience, have passed up concert and radio engagements at $2,500 and up to work with Bing for a $1,000 top. Manager Bing, who lived long enough in Britain (15 years) to acquire a taste for understatement, takes such accomplishments calmly. Asked what he regarded as his biggest single innovation at the Met thus far, he replied with a quick smile: "Tea at 4. Do have a cup."

"Except for Them . . ." Among the chief assets inherited by Rudolf Bing is the glamorous tradition. Still lurking in the shadows of the old gilt and plush house are the ghosts of the Met's hallowed past, when Sembrich, Lilli Lehmann, the De Reszkes, Melba, Caruso, Farrar and Chaliapin graced the stage, and Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini ruled the pit.

Thanks to Edward Johnson, who brought the best singers of both Europe and the U.S. to the Met, the new manager has the finest roster of singers in the world. If they are not the finest in history, that is less the fault of the Met than of history. Says 70-year-old Mrs. August Belmont, pillar of the Met's board: "Caruso and Chaliapin were the kind of singers who appear only once in a hundred years. Except for them, we have just as good singers today."

The Met can boast, as no other house in the world, that it can assemble two complete, topflight Casts for almost any of its performances. No other house has interchangeable lyric tenors of the quality of Jussi Bjoerling and Richard Tucker: baritones such as Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill; bassos such as Jerome Hines and Cesare Siepi; and dramatic sopranos such as Helen Traubel and Kirsten Flagstad, not to mention the good looks and comic flair of a Patrice Munsel.

The liabilities Bing faces are nonetheless formidable. Probably the biggest of them are the Met's two warehouses and their contents: tons & tons of out-of-date scenery. Another is the unmanageable old house itself, with its grimy brick face staring stolidly out on Broadway. Designed in 1880 by a college (Yale, Williams) architect named J. Cleaveland Cady, who had never seen any of the world's great opera houses, nor so much as a single opera performance, the building is a nearly insuperable drawback. There is no backstage storage space for scenery; to haul a big opera in & out of the warehouse for one performance can cost the Met around $3,000. Furthermore, the Met as now laid out contains 500 "blind" seats, i.e., those from which the customer can see less than two-thirds of the stage. It takes salesmanship--and devout love of operatic music --to keep such seats filled.

But though a committee is studying the advisability and cost of building a new house in the neighborhood of Rockefeller Center (estimated cost: $20 million), no one around the Met can really bear the thought of giving up the beautiful old house with its rich tradition. One considerable advantage of the present spot: service by two subway lines, three bus lines. Even though glossy limousines are still lined up on subscription nights, Board Chairman George A. Sloan says, "We're not really a carriage-trade house any more. Much of our audience today comes from Brooklyn and The Bronx. And that means the subways."

Money, Money, Money. The Met has always had to scrabble for money. Tradition has it that the Met's first manager, Henry E. Abbey, went $600,000 in the hole in his first season (1883). In his own day, the great Gatti complained: "What can one say of the largest and richest city in the world that finds so much difficulty in keeping open a single opera house for three or four months of the year? What a misery!" Gatti's miseries were painless compared to those of his successors: in the good old days of .little or no income tax, Gatti had music-loving, multimillionaire Banker Otto Kahn around to ask the amount of the annual deficit and write a check to cover it. Says Rudolf Bing with some grimness: "The word art is seldom heard in this house. It is always money, money, money."

Opera lovers across the U.S. last week were hearing the word too. To pay off last season's deficit of $430,000 and to insure new productions for next season, Board Chairman Sloan went on the radio in an intermission in the performance of The Flying Dutchman and broadcast a plea for $750,000 from members of the Met's regular Saturday network audience of 14 million listeners. Sloan could be reasonably sure that the nation, which seems to regard the Met with about the same vaguely dutiful feelings as it does the Community Chest or March of Dimes, would respond as it has in the past.*

This time, tall, distinguished George Sloan was also talking to a special listener: Uncle Sam. Sloan made the obvious point that an exemption from the federal admissions tax would mean everything to the Metropolitan, while the sum involved is only a drop in the U.S. Treasury bucket. Last season's tax came to more than $410,000. An exemption, based on the fact that the Metropolitan is a nonprofit institution, would have left the Met with what Bing calls a "manageable" deficit of about $20,000.

Everything Proper. The man who now has the job of trying to keep the deficit manageable was born just 49 years ago this week, the fourth child of a well-to-do Viennese industrialist (steel). As a boy, he remembers, "we had a box at the opera, chamber music at home, everything that was right and proper for an upper bourgeois family."

He was "frightfully bad at school . . . I don't know why." He was also "very naughty," and even then had some of the easy wit that spreads smiles around the Met today. Once he managed to creep up to the teacher's desk, tie the teacher's leg to his chair. When the teacher got up to leave and dragged the chair with him, he demanded, fuming, the culprit's name. Young Rudi stood up and said, "Why, professor, you came in that way."

At 17, Rudi decided he did not want to go into the family business. He studied painting and singing. He says he was a baritone. The Met's grey and fatherly (67) Wagner Conductor Fritz Stiedry fondly remembers him instead as an ambitious young tenor who auditioned for him in 1919 by singing parts of the third act of Lohengrin. (Says Bing: "Never mind, don't spoil Stiedry's story if it is a good one.") At any rate, father Bing was almost ruined in World War I, and there was no money for singing lessons. Rudi went to work in a Vienna bookstore. That was the turning point in his career.

The owner of the bookstore, who added a concert bureau on the side, soon transferred the artistically inclined Rudi to that branch of his business. Bing found he "loved selling," could sometimes let his enterprising imagination run wild. Once he billed a faltering troupe of dancers as "Dancers of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy," had to give extra performances to accommodate the crowds. Among the agency's clients were Soprano Lotte Lehmann, Conductor Fritz Busch, a young violinist named Eugene Ormandy, and a troupe of Russian dancers which included Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, who later shortened her name to Mrs. Rudolf Bing.

"Take Me." Invited to join a bigger agency, Bing went to Berlin on his 25th birthday. There he had to supply artists for some 80 German opera houses--"75 of which were terrible."

He had worked in Berlin for two years when the man who was to give his career its most important and lasting twist walked in the agency door. Famed (in Germany) Actor-Director Carl Ebert-(TIME, Sept. 4) had just been appointed artistic director of the Darmstadt State Theater. Among other things, he wanted a bright young man for his assistant. Rudi Bing told him brightly: "I know an excellent man. Take me."

Under Ebert, Bing got most of the experience that makes him a valuable boss for the Met today--the tedious and complicated work of engaging artists, scheduling rehearsals, programming, and overseeing ticket sales. He also met two of the men who are now his right and left hands at the Met: Artistic Administrator Max Rudolf, 48, and General Assistant John Gutman, 48, who in the old days used to drop into the Darmstadt theater as music critic for the Berlin Boersen-Courier. Rudolf, then a conductor, recalls Bing and wife Nina as "a handsome couple," Bing himself as "a man I liked to talk to." Says another German critic who knew him well at Darmstadt: "He was clearly destined to have a great future."

To a Turn. Bing's future turned dark before it brightened much. After two years in Darmstadt, he went back to Ber lin as artistic administrator of the Municipal Theater. Ebert arrived the next year. The following year, 1933, all hands were summarily dismissed by the Nazis. Bing went home to Vienna, then to a tiny theater near Prague, where he helped produce "absurd" things, such as Figaro in modern dress.

Back in Vienna, he got word from Carl Ebert in England to round up singers for a wealthy British landowner and music lover named John Christie, who wanted to start a Mozart festival at his Sussex estate, Glyndebourne. Bing did, later dropped around to see how the singers were doing. He fell in love with England, and with green Glyndebourne in particular.

In John Christie, Bing found the incarnation of an opera producer's dream -- an "art patron who pays, but does not interfere. Not that he simply bought and paid for productions. It was really the Christies who gave the whole thing its tone, and gathered together the people who could appreciate it." In Glyndebourne's six-week season, usually only one or two operas were given in the little 600-seat theater, and Ebert demanded (and Christie paid for) enough rehearsal time to insure that the operas were done to a turn.

The Right Man. John Christie took a liking to the likable, competent Viennese, hired him to work under Ebert and Busch. He found Bing useful to have around. Among other things, Bing thought up some ideas for persuading music lovers to travel 60 miles from London into the Sussex countryside to enjoy Mozart. One of them -- gift vouchers at Christmas which could be exchanged for Glyndebourne seats-- is still in use. Says John Christie, who is proud of having a former assistant running the Met: "He's the right man; he can do the job."

Rudi Bing now thinks of his five years at Glyndebourne as the best of his life. The idyl was shattered by World War II. Glyndebourne shut up shop; Bing went to work in a London department store (Peter Jones in Sloane Square) as a coupon clerk, eventually worked his way up to manager. Technically, he was an enemy alien; he had applied for British citizenship in 1939, but the war had prevented his papers from going through. He was never interned. Moreover, he was able to bring his aging parents from Austria to England.

At war's end, Bing gave up storekeeping for good. He saw that Glyndebourne could not reopen on its old affluent basis: taxes had reduced Christie's purse, and austerity made the whole idea out of the question. Bing hit on a solution: if Glyndebourne could no longer afford large productions, it could afford small ones. Young British Composer Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia (TIME, June 9, 1947), which requires next to no scenery, only a handful of singers and an orchestra of twelve, reopened Glyndebourne in 1946.

Then came Edinburgh, originally thought up by Bing to create a market for the Glyndebourne company, which was to be the main attraction. One of the most remarkable examples of Bing's tact, competence and persuasiveness is that he managed to persuade the Scots to have an Edinburgh Festival at all. He did it, not by promising it would make money, but, says his onetime assistant and successor at Edinburgh, Scotsman Ian Hunter, by infusing "a terrific sense of idealism about the venture." At any rate, as the 150,000 music lovers who visited Edinburgh last year proved, he created one of the most remarkable musical and dramatic festivals of all time.

Fans for Fledermaus. Now, running the world's No. 1 opera house, Rudi Bing is in his plain, southwest-corner office on the ground floor every morning by 10. He walks to work down Seventh Avenue from his apartment in fashionable Essex House, on the edge of Central Park. He travels home for dinner by subway, returns to the Met and seldom gets home again before midnight. The strain of twelve-hour days has already made Bing look a little more drawn and grey than when he took over last summer.

To him, each day seems almost a continuous round of shelling out money. "Someone comes in and wants 30 fans for Fledermaus. How much do they cost? $1.50 apiece. All right. In two hours he wants sequins to put on the fans . . . Can we use beer mugs in the champagne scene? Of course not. Those little things add up to a total effect. Before I know it, I've spent $750 or something like that." There is always the question of whether or not to allow rehearsals to run into overtime, which can within minutes run into three figures. To find out if rehearsals are going on, Bing, as a somewhat awed singer put it, "is every place, checking up all of the time." If by chance they are not, some hapless assistant is almost certain to hear a cold voice inquiring: "There was no rehearsal of Trovatore at 3? Why?" The answer had better make sense.

Bananas for Tea. He looks in on almost every performance--a habit he got from Ebert. He usually takes notes, sometimes races backstage to correct some defect he finds intolerable. He has a direct phone from his box to backstage, but says, with a grin, that he thinks someone has disconnected it: "No one ever answers." Some part of the night he usually finds time to do some planning with his staff: Gutman, Rudolf, the business office's Reginald Allen, the box office's Francis Robinson, production's Horace Armistead and Publicity Director Margaret Carson.

Fifteen minutes during the day Bing usually reserves for himself. Along about 4, his secretary brings in tea; he pulls out a sandwich and a banana from his desk drawer and munches and sips.

Sundays, when no operas are scheduled, Bing stays in bed most of the day, gets up only to run with his dachshund Pip in Central Park, and to write to his mother, who has now moved back to Austria. Nina Bing usually goes to several operas each week with her husband. Otherwise, the Bings rarely take time to go out together in the evening.

The Word Refurbish. Despite his dislike of the big claim, Rudolf Bing takes due pride in the Met season thus far. There have been criticisms and complaints, and Bing himself has made some of his own. His credo is that "after the curtain goes up, there can be no apologies. The performance must stand on its own as it is." To make his performances stand more sturdily on their own, he scheduled fewer operas (21 this season v. 24 last), more rehearsals. Even so, he still had to "sit and see these awful things [in Traviata and other old productions], but what can I do? I am not a magician--there is just so much time and money."

He has "given up hope of trying to redo old productions without starting at the beginning. People ask why I don't restage Carmen, say, even if I have to use the old sets. How can I ask a new stage director to take over a job when the floor plan is already laid for him; when, if in his mind he sees people coming in through a door, they must come in through a window because the old sets have a window where he wants a door? Altogether, the word refurbish makes me a little sick."

Why Not Gamble? Some advance-guard music lovers have complained that instead of spending money on works such as Don Carlo and The Flying Dutchman, which were never highly profitable, Bing should have gambled the same money on a more contemporary work, such as Alban Berg's formidable atonal opera, Wozzeck. Bing's answer to that is that he would like to do Wozzeck, but he cannot afford right now to overlook the fate of another contemporary opera, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which was withdrawn after two seasons, so offended one opera lover that he spat in the box-office window. (Says John Gutman: "Whenever I mention Wozzeck, Bing threatens to put me in the box office." The Met still faces the problem of having to run a new production (cost: between $50,000 and $70,000) for at least five seasons to get its investment back.

Hamstrung as he is by lack of money, Rudi Bing thinks that the most he can do is "to try to build up the stock repertory in a contemporary way." Says he: "I think we must do away with 40-year-old productions even if they were great in their day." He believes that "new productions must not be thought of as a luxury that one may indulge in if one happens to strike a gold mine. New productions are as important to have as singers and an orchestra. I may want eight and get only four, but I cannot have none." He has convinced the board that he is right; they have already tentatively approved four (most likely popular favorites) for next season.

To Rudi Bing, the paradox of the old Met is the fact that, despite the old sets and old costumes, standbys such as Traviata and Trovatore "still sell out the house." His task, he thinks, is "to get the public to demand new and better productions." He has to admit, from box-office records, that so far "the public just does not care." But, says Rudi Bing, with the look of a man setting out to do something about it: "I do care."

* Everyone to his own taste.

* Most notable response: asked for $1,000,000 in 1940 to help buy up the deed of the opera house, 166,000 opera lovers from coast to coast topped the amount by $57,000.

& No kin to Republican Germany's Socialist President Friedrich Ebert (1919-1925).

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