Grand Opera: The Story of the Met Read online

  Grand Opera

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

  Grand Opera

  THE STORY OF THE MET

  Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2014 by Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Affron, Charles, author.

  Grand opera : the story of the Met / Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978–0-520–25033-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0-520–95897-5 (ebook)

  1. Metropolitan Opera (New York, N.Y.)—History. I. Affron, Mirella Jona, 1937– author. II. Title.

  ML1711.8.N3M384 2014

  792.509747′1—dc23

  2014015091

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

  In memoriam

  George Custen, Elliot Rubinstein, and Gloria Vilardell, fedeli amici nostri

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1.A Matter of Boxes, 1883–1884: Bel Canto

  2.Cultural Capital, 1884–1903: The German Seasons and French Opera

  3.Opera Wars, 1903–1908: Parsifal, Salome, and the Manhattan Opera Company

  4.Modernity, 1908–1929: Puccini

  5.Hard Times, 1929–1940: Wagner

  6.Strains of War, 1940–1950: The Conductor’s Opera

  7.Stage Business, 1950–1966: Verdi

  8.In Transit, 1966–1975: American Opera

  9.Maestro Assoluto, 1975–1990: Twentieth-Century European Opera and the Baroque

  10.Patronage and Perestroika, 1990–2006: American Opera (Redux) and Slavic Opera

  11.In the Age of New Media, 2006–2013

  Notes

  Index of Names, Titles, and Foreign-Language Musical Terms

  Illustrations

  FIGURES

  1.Exterior of Metropolitan Opera House, Broadway and 39th Street, 1883

  2.Interior of Metropolitan Opera House, 1895

  3.Christine Nilsson as Marguerite in Faust, 1883

  4.Lionel Mapleson with recording horn and cylinders, c. 1901

  5.Lucia di Lammermoor “Mad Scene,” Joan Sutherland as Lucia, 1961

  6.The war between the German and the Italian/French wings, Puck cartoon, February 11, 1891

  7.Emma Calvé as Carmen

  8.Jean de Reszke as Siegfried in Götterdämmerung

  9.Metropolitan stage rebuilt for Parsifal, Scientific American, February 6, 1904

  10.Olive Fremstad as Salome, 1907

  11.Salome banished, Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1907

  12.Giulio Gatti-Casazza, David Belasco, Arturo Toscanini, Giacomo Puccini

  13.La Fanciulla del West, act 3, Enrico Caruso, Emmy Destinn, and Pasquale Amato, 1910

  14.Geraldine Farrar

  15.Enrico Caruso as Nemorino in L’Elisir d’amore, 1904

  16.Backstage after the first matinee broadcast, Hänsel und Gretel, Deems Taylor and Giulio Gatti-Casazza, December 25, 1931

  17.Rosa Ponselle as Norma, 1927

  18.Lawrence Tibbett as Ford in Falstaff, 1925

  19.Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde and Lauritz Melchior as Tristan, c. 1940

  20.Bruno Walter

  21.Protest against Kirsten Flagstad’s Carnegie Hall appearance, April 21, 1947

  22.The conclusion of La Fille du régiment, Lily Pons as Marie, 1942

  23.George Szell rehearsing Tannhäuser, 1953

  24.Bust of Giulio Gatti-Casazza between Edward Johnson and Rudolf Bing, 1950

  25.Cavalleria rusticana, Zinka Milanov as Santuzza, 1950

  26.The standee line at Maria Callas’s Metropolitan debut, October 29, 1956

  27.Marian Anderson as Ulrica in Un Ballo in maschera, 1955

  28.Falstaff, act 1, scene 2, 1964

  29.Model with side arcades and tower for the new house at Lincoln Center

  30.Interior of Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 1966

  31.Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 4, 1966

  32.Birgit Nilsson as Isolde and three Tristans, Ramon Vinay, Karl Liebl, Albert Da Costa, December 28, 1959

  33.James Levine conducting rehearsal, c. 1980

  34.Dialogues des Carmélites, act 1, scene 1, 1977

  35.La Bohème, act 2, 1981

  36.Centennial Gala, October 22, 1983

  37.The Ghosts of Versailles, act 1, scene 3, 1991

  38.Gala celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Metropolitan debuts of Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo, September 27, 1993

  39.War and Peace, part 2, scene 4, 2002

  40.Lucia di Lammermoor “Mad Scene,” June Anderson as Lucia, 1992

  41.Madama Butterfly simulcast on screen outside the Met, September 25, 2006

  42.Peter Gelb, right, in production truck, simulcast of Aïda, December 15, 2012

  43.Cristina Gallardo-Domâs as Cio-Cio-San with “Trouble” and puppeteer in Madama Butterfly, September 11, 2006

  44.Satyagraha, act 2, 2008

  45.Natalie Dessay as Violetta in act 1, La Traviata, March 30, 2012

  46.Die Walküre, act 3, “The Ride of the Valkyries,” 2011

  47.West 72nd Street, New York City, September 2013

  TABLES

  1.The Metropolitan’s Inaugural Season, 1883–84

  2.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1884–85 to 1890–91

  3.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1891–92 to 1902–03

  4.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1903–04 to 1907–08

  5.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1908–09 to 1917–18

  6.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1918–19 to 1921–22

  7.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1922–23 to 1928–29

  8.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1929–30 to 1931–32

  9.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1932–33 to 1934–35

  10.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1935–36 to 1939–40

  11.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1940–41 to 1949–50

  12.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1950–51 to 1965–66

  13.Metropolitan Premieres of American Operas, 1910–11 to 2012–13

  14.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1966–67 to 1971–72

  15.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1972–73 to 1974–75

  16.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1975–76 to 1979–80

  17.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1980–81 to 1989–90

  18.Chronology of Slavic Operas in the Metropolitan’s Repertoire, 1990–2014

  19.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 1990–91 to 2005–06

  20.Metropolitan Opera Premieres, 2006–07 to 2012�
�13

  PREFACE

  Three decades have passed since Martin Mayer recalled the response of Oscar Hammerstein I to a casual, “How’s business?” “Opera’s no business,” Hammerstein shot back. “It’s a disease.” His quip resonated with Mayer, as it does with us and, we suspect, with many of our readers. Mayer’s The Met (1983) is the most recent comprehensive history of the company prior to this volume. And like Grand Opera: The Story of the Met, it is both an institutional and performance history of the premier opera company in the United States, one of the world’s most prestigious and influential cultural organizations. Thirty years and a changed universe later, an updated reconsideration is due.

  Each of our eleven chronologically sequenced chapters focuses on an area of the repertoire: a national canon (French opera, for example, as in chapter 2) or a composer, (for example, Giacomo Puccini, the central figure of chapter 4). The history of the company is in large part the history of the fortunes of bel canto and verismo, of Verdi and Wagner, and eventually of Adams and Glass. We trace the evolving profile of the repertoire as it responds to the push of reinvention and the pull of tradition, as it conforms to the talents of the stars, the interests of the board and of the management, the will of conductors, the taste of the critics, the predilections of the public. Through 1949–50, we are concerned primarily with premieres; to that point, new productions of revivals were generally staged as they had always been, simple refittings with fresh scenery and costumes. Beginning in 1950 with the advent of Rudolf Bing, and the attention he gave to direction and design, we take note of many revivals as well.

  And each chapter engages numerous remarkable performances in the context of the issues that informed the times. The inaugural 1883 Faust affirmed the compatibility of an aristocratic European entertainment with the temper of the still young New World republic. In 1907, the Met’s first performance of Salome erupted into a scandal that pitted the board of directors against the management; Richard Strauss’s opera spent the next twenty-seven years in exile from the Met. The 1910 world premiere of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West was a vehicle for Enrico Caruso whose fame in live performance ballooned through the diffusion of opera via the phonograph at the dawn of sound reproduction. The very survival of the Metropolitan during the Great Depression depended in large measure on the Tristan and Isolde of Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad, the two mighty pillars of a brilliant Wagnerian epoch. Bruno Walter’s Met conducting debut in Fidelio, less than a year before the US entry into World War II, speaks to the myriad positive and negative consequences of international conflict on an international company. In 1966, the choice of Leontyne Price to head the cast of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra as it opened the new house at Lincoln Center joined the politics of labor and race relations to the politics of opera as an American idiom. With John Dexter’s mise-en-scène for Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites in 1977, the Met sought to address its straitened budget while embracing cutting-edge stage practice. The 2002 company premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace kept the promise that perestroika would bring a notable expansion of the Slavic wing of the repertoire together with an influx of East European artists. The clamorous success of Peter Gelb’s ongoing initiative that between 2006–07 and 2012–13 beamed Robert Lepage’s contested “Ring” and more than sixty other Metropolitan productions onto screens that now number nearly two thousand drew millions of global spectators into animated debates over opera and its performance, staging in particular. However different the issues that pertained to the first Faust from those that surrounded the Barber premiere or the Wagner tetralogy, these extraordinary occasions, and so many others memorable and not, and invariably their reception, are products of multiple factors: the status of the work in the repertoire, the musical and dramatic values of the performance, the weight of institutional pressures, the broader political, social, and economic context. They call for the layered approach that underpins this history.

  A word about our sources. The Metropolitan Opera Archives house a rich lode of primary documents that shed light on the 290 different operas that the company has presented in nearly twenty-eight thousand performances between 1883 and spring 2013. The decisions that shape seasons and careers emerge in the day-to-day memoranda and correspondence of the board and its committees, of the general managers and their assistants, of artists and agents, in minutes of meetings, in contracts and paybooks, in box-office records, in audition notes. We have made extensive use of the archives through the 2005–06 season, Joseph Volpe’s last, and the last for which documents have been accessible to us. All primary sources we cite without attribution are holdings of the Met Archives.

  Along with Mayer’s The Met, we draw upon Henry Krehbiel’s two-volume chronicle, Chapters of Opera (1908) and More Chapters of Opera (1919), erudite and eloquent firsthand recitals of Met premieres and of the singers of the Golden Age. Irving Kolodin’s The Metropolitan Opera, 1883–1966 (1966) is the last of the author’s several editions (1936, 1940, 1953). Kolodin takes into account shifts in the relationship of the company to its patrons and organizational restructurings. He also makes note of every premiere, revival, new production, debut, and cast change. We have chosen instead to provide tables that constitute an inventory of all the operas produced by the company. These tables record the name of the composer, the date of the company premiere, the date of the most recent performance as of this writing, the number of seasons in the repertoire, the number of productions and performances, the date and place of the world premiere, and the names of the director and designer. Titles that made negligible impressions may be referenced only in these tables. Two other histories timed to coincide with the close of the Old Met, Quaintance Eaton’s The Miracle of the Met (1968) and John Briggs’s Requiem for a Yellow Brick Brewery (1969), are less systematic, more anecdotal than Kolodin’s. John Dizikes’s Opera in America (1993) locates the Met within the orbit defined in its title. Johanna Fiedler’s Molto Agitato (2001) is a spirited survey centered on the 1980s and 1990s, when the author was the company’s general press representative. Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met (1992), Sign-Off for the Old Met (1997), and Start-Up at the New Met (2006), Paul Jackson’s three-volume history and analysis of Metropolitan broadcasts, have been a valued companion to our own listening.

  Well before 1883, New York’s music journalism was a going concern. The city’s numerous dailies, the Times, the Tribune, the Herald, along with the World, the Sun, the Evening Post, the Morning Journal, the Commercial Advertiser, the Mail and Express, the Evening Telegram, and the German-language Staats-Zeitung, routinely devoted many inches to opera. New works earned the lengthiest columns: the 1883 La Gioconda racked up an astonishing three thousand words in the New York Times. Such extensive coverage continued through the 1930s. Singing, acting, playing, and dramaturgy came under expert, detailed scrutiny, not infrequently laced with vitriol. Today, for a Met premiere, the Times rations its music critics to half the ink allotted to their predecessors seventy-five years ago. Many dailies and weeklies have ceased publication altogether, and of those that remain, pitifully few have a regular opera beat. We have turned principally to the Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and to the out-of-town press, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Until the 1950s, reviews appeared on the day following the performance, since then on the day after that; we date only the exceptions to this rule. After 1950, we add our voices to published accounts of live performances. Mindful of the balance between the register of the historian and that of the critic, we lodge our views, whenever possible, among those of a sampling of the musical press.

  Grand Opera is the first history of the Metropolitan to exploit the audio, visual, and Internet technologies that have lengthened the reach of opera studies. We are especially indebted to the Metopera database at www.metoperafamily.org, the company’s online portal that opens onto the casts of all Met performances, the careers of artists, a wealth of photographs, revie
ws, essays, and other materials. We have also relied on audio resources, commercial recordings of singers from the early periods, transcriptions of Met broadcasts from the mid-1930s on, and videos of Met performances since 1977. Unattributed evaluations of recordings, broadcasts, and videos are ours. We urge readers to make their own judgments by tuning into “Met on Demand” and SiriusXM. “Met on Demand” is a vast online subscription library of audio and video transcriptions of performances from the late 1930s to the present; SiriusXM is a satellite radio station that broadcasts historic performances along with live transmissions. Artists active since the beginning of the twentieth century, and a handful even before, can also be heard on “Sounds of the Met,” accessed through the Metopera database, as well as on www.archive.org and www.youtube.com. “National Jukebox,” on the Library of Congress website www.loc.gov, makes available recordings that predate 1926. The “Un bel dì” of Farrar and Destinn, Rethberg and Albanese, de los Angeles, Tebaldi, and Racette are just a few clicks away.