Sweet Harmony

There will be a Met season

It may go down in history as the Metropolitan Opera's elevator contract. Talks with the orchestra started on the second floor of Manhattan's Doral Inn, moved up to the sixth, and then rose still higher to the 17th, where a tentative agreement was finally reached over the weekend. Though the musicians still have to ratify the contract--and 16 other unions must settle as well--one thing seemed virtually certain: the Met will have a 1980-81 season after all.

The chief issue never was pay but hours. The 93 members of the orchestra, who had to play five performances a week under the previous contract, insisted on a reduction to four. They were so determined that they even volunteered to accept a slightly smaller pay increase than the opera had offered. Said Union Counsel I. Philip Sipser: "The cause of the dispute is overwork, which produces illness and tension." The Met board was equally adamant, claiming that to give in would set a precedent for other unions and wreck the opera's precariously balanced budget. Said Executive Director Anthony Bliss: "Survival is the question."

Actually, as the negotiators finally discovered, there was always room for compromise. The musicians have particularly exacting jobs and cannot be compared with members of most other unions; indeed, about 20 who play unusually demanding instruments such as the horn and the oboe already had four performance weeks. The precise details of the settlement awaited this week's ratification vote, but it almost certainly represented a mutually acceptable tradeoff. "We got to the top in more ways than the 17th floor," exults Violinist Sandor Balint. The management is just as happy. "I'm elated," says Bliss. The real hero is Federal Mediator Wayne Horvitz, who persuaded both sides to lay aside their almost pathological hostilities. Says he: "They got rid of all that nonsense in the last three days and stopped shouting at each other."

Unfortunately for opera lovers, the discord has already cost five weeks of performances, including the season premiere of Turandot, starring Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballe. It will be two or three weeks before the house reopens. For some productions, like Samson et Dalila, Das Rheingold and Gotterdammerung, the agreement almost certainly has come too late. A new staging of Queen of Spades, planned for next March, may also be scratched. Even so, there were few tears at Lincoln Center. If the accord had not come now, there might have been no season at all.

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