Ongaku by the Met

Ask any culturally hip American or European what ongaku means, and he will reply that it is the Japanese word for music. He will no doubt be thinking of the silken flutter of the 13-stringed koto or the modal mysteries of the pentatonic scale. Ask a Japanese, and he will tell you that ongaku means Beethoven, Mozart, Western-style symphony orchestras and, last week most of all, the Metropolitan Opera of New York.

Some 325 members strong, the Met flew to Japan for a three-week visit. The company brought along stars like Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Home, Adriana Maliponte, Luciano Pavarotti, Franco Corelli and John Alexander, and three of the most popular works in its repertory: Puccini's La Boheme, Bizet's Carmen and Verdi's La Traviata. The stand began with Traviata at Tokyo's 4,000-seat NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai, or Japan Broadcasting Corp.) Hall. With Soprano Sutherland dying rapturously as Violetta and Tenor Alexander showing a cad's remorse as Alfredo, it was one of the brightest in a long line of grand Met opening nights.

Animal-Like Howl. The Japanese had paid up to 32,000 yen ($110) for a pair of top tickets, about twice the tab in New York. No price was too high to hear the Meto, as the Japanese call the visitors. The ticket holders sat still and intent during the opera. Not a late straggler nor a cough marred the concentration. The company had just finished its annual spring tour of the U.S., which featured Traviata, and so the production was in crisp form. Conductor Richard Bonynge slowed up now and then for the singers' benefit, but the orchestra, playing with precision and rich texture, expressed most of the considerable drama in Verdi's score.

At evening's end the applause lasted six minutes. This is not spectacular by New York standards, but highly generous when measured against the traditional reticence of Tokyo theatergoers. The biggest hand went to Robert Merrill, 56, who sings the role of the elder Germont with almost all of his familiar baritone magnificence. Mixed with the bravoes and clapping was a certain animal-like howl that signifies Japanese enthusiasm. To Western ears, the sound is uncomfortably like booing. From the brief, but noticeable, look of pain on Alexander's face, it seemed clear that he had not previously heard this form of applause.

However they express their appreciation, the Japanese are now saturated with Occidental sound. It was during the reign of the actively Westernizing Emperor Meiji (1868-1912) that European music was adopted by the Japanese school system. But as recently as World War II, the country had only one major orchestra, the then state-sponsored NHK Symphony, and only one basic source of non-Asian music, Germany. Today Tokyo alone has seven full-time orchestras, and Ludwig van Beethoven of Bonn remains Japan's favorite composer. Roughly 15% of all symphonic music played in Japan was written by him. Last December, in the season when the Japanese traditionally try to find year-end spiritual solace, there were 75 performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

These days Japan ranks as a major stop on the international concert circuit. Pierre Boulez and the BBC Symphony have just finished a three-week visit; Rafael Kubelik and the Bavarian Radio Symphony are playing now. Next week Native Son Seiji Ozawa comes in with the San Francisco Symphony. On a refueling stop in Anchorage, the Met crowd encountered the entire company of Britain's Royal Ballet in the airport waiting room. They were on their way home to London from Tokyo.

The trip abroad was only the Met's third in 91 years (the previous visits were to Paris in 1910 and 1966). From Minneapolis, where the company had concluded its spring tour the night before, two planes flew over the Arctic Circle to Tokyo. One was a cargo jet holding 48,000 Ibs. of musical instruments, wardrobe trunks, props, makeup kits, shoes, nails, hammers and extra pin wire to hold the sets together. The other was a Boeing 747 carrying soloists, choristers, dancers, musicians, technicians, managers, wives, husbands, children--and a jittery Franco Corelli, who hates to fly.

Bizet and Bach. The notion of a tour came from Kazuko Hillyer, a Japanese-born concert manager based in New York. When she put the idea to General Manager Schuyler Chapin two years ago, he replied: "Go away and don't bother me. That will cost millions." It did cost that, $2.5 million to be precise, but Hillyer found someone to pick up the tab: the Nagoya-based Chubu Nippon Broadcasting Co., which decided to sponsor the tour in honor of its 25th anniversary.

Do the Japanese understand and enjoy Verdi, Puccini and Bizet? By and large, yes. Reflects Tokyo Music Critic Shigeo Kimura: "The mode of life here is one .of great variety. It is very international. The people may go to bed in a Japanese fashion, but the question when they get up is: Do they consider themselves Asiatics?" Aurally at least, the answer seems to be no. In the elevators of Tokyo's hotels, the canned music is not the koto, but usually Chopin or Bach. Traditional Japanese music survives in the Kabuki and No theaters but in few other places. To Composer Toshiro Mayuzumi, Western music has become a symbol of Japanese learning and culture. "The visit of the Met is another step in their education," he says. The Met seems to have learned something too. The 1966 Paris trip was an artistic flop because of questionable repertory and eccentric casting. This time the company realistically drew on its greatest strength: the presentation of standard operas with the best casts available in the world.

Meanwhile in New York, the Met was gearing up for a major change in its management. Just before the Japan tour, the company announced that Principal Conductor James Levine, 31, would be elevated to the post of music director with "primary responsibility for artistic matters." Last week TIME learned that General Manager Chapin will step down after a stormy two-year tenure. The Met's executive committee has decided to entrust the immediate future of the company to a troika headed by Anthony A. Bliss, who was named executive director last November. Reporting to him will be Levine and John Dexter, formerly with Britain's National Theater and the Met's director of production. Levine will be only the second man in Met history to hold the title music director, and he is expected to have more authority than the first, Conductor Rafael Kubelik, who quit the job in 1974. Bliss, a Wall Street lawyer and former Met board president during the Rudolf Bing era, thinks highly of Levine and has made no secret of his own reluctance to get involved in day-to-day artistic decisions.

Chapin came to the leadership of the Met after serving as assistant to his predecessor Goeran Gentele. After Gentele died in a car crash in Sardinia three years ago, Chapin functioned for an entire season as acting general manager before he was granted the full title and authority. Despite some triumphs, like Boris Godunov and The Siege of Corinth, he has never had the full support of the Met's faction-ridden board.

The executive committee's decision must be ratified by the entire board at a meeting late this month, but that is considered only a formality. The title of general manager will be abolished, for now at any rate. Chapin has been offered a position as head of the company's fund raising, something he has worked on hard and successfully during his tenure. He has not decided whether to take the job.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.