Peep Show

The State Department, huffed Rudolf Bing, apparently does not think that the Metropolitan Opera "is important enough to be sent abroad." The Met, he said, cannot afford the trip, and "the State Department has given us nothing. We have to beg, and we are tired of begging." So he took matters into his own hands. Last week, with a gift of $140,000 from private donors, Bing packed up 50 tons of scenery and costumes, bundled 163 members of his company onto two chartered jets, and took the Met to Europe for the first time in 56 years.

Still, it was strictly an economy-class operation. Bing would have liked to have staged something extravagant, such as Aida or Turandot. Instead, the proud company was restricted to a measly six performances of two low-budget chamber operas -- Rossini's Barber of Seville and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro -- at the small (1,200-seat) Odeon Theater in Paris. Thus programmed, the Met's venture was bound to run into trouble.

"Fiftysix years' anticipation, burning jealousy and feverish curiosity," groused the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, deserved more than "this peep show," this "cocktail cracker thrown to a hungry lion."

There were problems right off. Since it was the Whitsunday holiday weekend in Paris, the prop men were unable to find any whipped cream to use in the Barber's shaving mug. Baritone Robert Merrill experimented with a gooey mixture of sour cream and beaten egg whites, finally, in keeping with the stage directions, had to smear Basso Fernando Corena's face and mouth with the fluffy filling from French cream puffs.

Legend's End. Tickets for the six performances were sold out weeks in advance, and a glittering audience of the city's high society turned out for opening night. Jean-Louis Barrault, director of the Odeon Theater, declared in a precurtain speech that since the Odeon was flying the American flag that night, the theater was now the 51st state.

But not everyone was ready to join the Union. The Barber of Seville went smoothly enough, though Soprano Roberta Peters as Rosina was in woefully bad voice. At the end of one of her arias, someone shouted "Vive la Callas!"; Merrill, Corena and the 38-piece orchestra under Thomas Schippers got the most enthusiastic applause.

The critics, on the other hand, tore into the Met like hungry hawks. Much of what they had to say was deserved. Yet, for a nation where opera has been in a low state for many years, some of the criticism seemed downright tendentious. Le Monde found Barber "an ungainly spectacle." The orchestra "lacked finesse," the "comic effects were so broad that they seemed destined for a public with numb wits." Perhaps the most devastating crack of all came from France-Soir. Describing Soprano Peters' singing, Critic Jean Cotte wrote: "At each note America was risking another Pearl Harbor." Paris' bargain-basement Met, concluded Cotte, "was, for the French, a legend until yesterday."

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