Julius the Cool

Racing is not a sport with Julius Rudel. It is practically a way of life. Briefcase clutched in one hand, a tuxedo in a plastic bag slung over his arm for use later that night, he hurried out of his apartment on Manhattan's upper West Side one recent midday and jumped into a worn 1966 Chevy. A morning full of conferences had left him just ten minutes to get to a dress rehearsal of a new production of Carmen at Lincoln Center, 20 blocks south. "If we take the proper turns, we'll make all the lights without stopping once," he explained. "The ride should take no more than four minutes."

Actually it took five, but promptly at one o'clock Rudel was at the podium raising his baton--or, rather, a thin white knitting needle--to start the Carmen overture. His instructions to the orchestra were brief and to the point: "Trumpets, didn't you notice I slowed down?" Politely but firmly he told an overeager tenor: "Please don't cut off the baritone in mid-phrase." He remained unperturbed when a voice from backstage implored: "Wait, Julius, wait. Don Jose's costume has just fallen apart." The singer finally appeared onstage clutching uncertainly at his trousers. "Jesus Christ, Julius," he wailed, "I'm losing my pants and I've got nothing on underneath." Deadpanned Rudel: "Now you've got it made."

That kind of cool is indispensable for Rudel as he pursues one of the busiest schedules in the music world. After 14 years as director and chief conductor of the New York City Opera, Rudel is now also music director of Washington's new John F. Kennedy Center. As if that were not work enough, he is also consultant to the Wolf Trap Farm summer festival in Vienna, Va., and is music director of both the Cincinnati May Festival and the elegant, intimate Caramoor summer festival in New York's Westchester County.

Economist's Talent. Gray-haired but athletic at 50, Rudel has an uncanny ability to get things done, an economist's talent for budget balancing and a gift for inspiring loyalty in colleagues. As a conductor--the job he likes best--Rudel is almost wholly devoid of showy theatricality; yet his taste, musicianship and sense of rhythm are faultless, and he is at home in an unusually wide variety of styles. Says Soprano Beverly Sills: "I think he is one of the greatest opera conductors in the world."

Rudel frequently conducts opera six nights in a row, which is a little like pitching six baseball games back to back. "Obviously, there is something driving me," he admits. "I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know." Rudel came to the U.S. in 1938 as a teen-age refugee from Vienna. Studying music on scholarships at settlement schools and later at Manhattan's Mannes College, he supported himself by working part time in a button-dyeing factory. After graduation he became assistant conductor at Mannes at a salary of $35 a month. "We used to turn in the milk bottles so he would have enough money to go to work," remembers his wife Rita. A neuropsychologist, she raised their two daughters (now married) and Son Anthony, 14, more or less on the side, while going to college and pursuing her own career.

Rudel applied for a job at the New York City Opera in 1943, when the company was still being formed, and worked his way up via rehearsal pianist, coach, scene changer and even chorister when the occasion demanded. He was named director in 1957.

Under Rudel's stewardship, the company has become one of the most inventive opera troupes in the world. Rudel has presented 38 operas by living composers (15 of them American-born). It does not bother him that few of these new works are likely to be permanent additions to the repertory. "Of 20,000 operas written throughout history," he notes, "1 defy anyone to name 50 masterpieces." He has also dug brilliantly into the past to retrieve and remount such almost forgotten musical delights as Handel's Julius Caesar and Donizetti's Roberto Devereux.

True Amalgam. An evening at City Opera does not alway glitter with great singing stars, although in Bass Norman Treigland and Soprano Sills the company possesses two of the finest voices in the world. But Rudel's shows are rarely dull. Because he believes that "open should be a true amalgam of the visual and musical," he was steering City Opera toward total theater long before the term became fashionable. He hired such experienced directors as Frank Corsaro and Tito Capobianco, and gave then free dramatic rein. In those hands even old familiars like Gounod's Faust became provocative productions. In 1968, for instance, Corsaro transformed the simple good-conquers-evil parable of that libretto into a chilling Gothic horror tale of clashing wills between God and the devil. A year later, Capobianco launched Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele a a space-age sonet lumiere production in which the devil seemed about to vanquish the music of the spheres until he was whistled down at final curtain. Contemporary operas seldom fare well with the public, but Alberto Ginastera's atonal, astringent Bomarzo and Don Rodrigo are successful items in the repertory.

With some justice, Rudel boasts this "our repertory is about as safe as a British soldier in Northern Ireland." Presumably, he will bring his sense of theater and his fondness for growth and risk to his tasks at Kennedy Center. His first two productions in Washington were Ginastera's strident Beatrix Cenci (TIME, Sept. 20) and Handel's rarely performed Ariodante. Though he hopes to invite La Scala, the Vienna Staatsoper and Britain's Royal Opera to Washington, he wants "nothing to do with a glorified booking house." Included in his future plans for the center are a series of programs of choral masterpieces that will employ the resources of the city's excellent choirs, and an election-year revival of George Gershwin's musical spoof of the presidency, Of Thee I Sing.

The Bigger Gamble. Although Rudel lacks the fame of such maestros as Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, he seems an ideal choice to head the Kennedy Center. Along with his high standards, he has always had a remarkable sense of what the public will accept, and his experience with the City Opera has taught him how to provide quality on limited budgets. "I have never found that purely financial limitations need to limit you artistically," he says. "Sometimes it is an advantage to have limited funds but unlimited imagination. At City Opera, we have long ago learned to turn every disaster into an advantage. It makes the gamble bigger, the cliff-hanging more perilous, but the excitement more intense."

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