Patrick Bade
Rudolf Bing at The Met

Patrick Bade | Rudolf Bing at the Met | 02.25.24

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

Well, Sir Rudolf Bing is best known as the director of the Metropolitan Opera House in one of its golden periods from 1950 to 1972. Most of what I’m telling you this evening is based on his autobiography, which you can see on the right hand side, “5,000 Nights at the Opera.” And I do recommend this book, if you can get a hold of it. It’s wonderfully entertaining and informative. It’s full of hilarious anecdotes about famous singers. And it’s remarkably candid, really, about himself as well. I mean, he doesn’t really come across as a very likeable man. “Nice” is not the term I would use for him. He was ruthless, arrogant, snobbish, vindictive, absolutely Machiavellian. Some of the stories he tells about how he got the better of singers are really jaw dropping.

But on the other hand, I do think he was a man of principle. One, he really believed in things such as he’s courageous and very determined introduction of Afro-American artists to the Metropolitan. This was something he decided very early in his career that he was going to do this. So he was born in Vienna in 1902 into a very wealthy, assimilated, highly cultivated Jewish family. His father was an industrialist, his mother was a gifted amateur singer, and they… Of course, it was a wonderful time to be in Vienna. And so, they met everybody who’s anybody. They knew Marla. They knew Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Oh, this is his mother in her wedding dress. You get a sense of them being elegant and well-heeled. And here he is as a very handsome young man on a bicycling trip with Christiane von Hofmannsthal, the daughter of the famous poet and librettist of the Strauss Operas.

So he decided he certainly didn’t want to follow his father into industry. And initially, he worked in the book trade, and then he moved into concert management. And already we get some wonderful stories about singers and musicians that he worked with. And then, from concert management, he moved into theatre management and opera house management. And the first house he was in charge of was in Darmstadt in Germany. And then around 1930, he moved to the Charlottenburg. That’s the, well, it says here, Deutsches Opernhaus, but it was actually the Stadtische Oper, the Town Opera House or Berlin. Berlin, at the time, had three major opera houses. There was the Staatsoper under Erich Kleiber. There was the Kroll opera under Otto Klemperer. And he was working at Charlottenburg with the man you see on the right hand side, a very distinguished actor/manager called Carl Ebert, who is going to turn up again more than once in Rudolf Bing’s career.

Well, of course, both of them got the sack as soon as the Nazis arrived in 1933. Bing, because he was Jewish, and Carl Ebert, he wasn’t Jewish, but he was outspokenly critical of the Nazis. So there was no way he could hold onto his job. And I do think it’s really worth remembering how many Germans did make sacrifices, did leave the country, did give up their jobs because they were opposed to the Nazis. I mean, you often hear from people, oh, well, the entire German nation went along with the Nazis, and that is absolutely not true. And it’s not true the man we see in the middle here. This is Fritz Busch. He was chief conductor in the Dresden opera till 1933.

Again, not Jewish, but he and his siblings, famous violinist and cellist brothers, Herman Busch and Adolf Busch, they were outspokenly anti-Nazi. And therefore had to leave Germany very quickly in 1933. So here we see Bing on the left-hand side, Busch in the middle, and Carl Ebert on the right-hand side in the gardens of Glyndebourne. It was the most miraculous timing, actually. And there is a book, perhaps, you know, called, “Hitler’s Gift.” Hitler’s gift to the World. Those remarkable people, those courageous people who left Germany in 33, what they took with them to the rest of the world. Glyndebourne would never have happened in the form that it did without Adolf Hitler. It would’ve been remained a provincial and essentially amateur exercise.

But suddenly, John Christie, who set up the Glyndebourne Festival, first festival in 1934, he had these incredibly professional people to work with him in the middle of the Sussex countryside. Something that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. So in fact, it was, I think Adolf Busch, the violinist who was giving a concert at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne of all places. Great monstrous Victorian hotel, which I stay in every autumn when I take people to the Glyndebourne festivals. It’s played actually an interesting role in the history of music more than once. Debussy stayed in that hotel when he was finishing off “La mer.” And so, John Christie met Adolf Busch in the hotel, and Christie said that he was thinking up of setting up an opera festival. And Adolf said, “Well, why don’t you try asking my brother Fritz? He’s free. He’s lost his job at the Dresden opera.” And it was Busch who then brought in Carl Ebert and Rudolf Bing.

So it was really a remarkable piece of luck. In fact, you could say that Bing was one of those rare people who had an extraordinarily brilliant career, international career, thanks to Adolf Hitler, wouldn’t have happened, otherwise. So in his book, again, he, I’m not really dwelling on that today ‘cause I’m talking about the Met. But there are wonderfully funny, ironic anecdotes. I mean, he’s very much a sort of sophisticated middle European, and he views the English with sort of amused, I mean, affectionate. It’s quite affectionate, really. But he obviously finds 'em extremely odd. And he tells a lot of very funny stories about the behaviour of John Christie and all the English people at Glyndebourne. Here they are, the great and the good. The elegant upper classes who got into their cars and drove down into the Sussex countryside for the first Glyndebourne Festival.

And here are their wonderful cars that they arrived in. And you can see a couple of chauffeurs there on the left-hand side. So that was a brilliant and extraordinary success and a wonderful combination of English amateurism and continental professionalism. But that, of course, comes to an end. The last Glyndebourne Festival, before the war, 1939, as soon as war breaks out, the festival shuts down. And Bing finds other occupations. He actually works for a department store in London during much of the war. But then, after the war, there is a discussion. would the Glyndebourne Festival get off the ground again? Would it be resumed? Well, the whole economic situation had changed. Britain had been very impoverished by the war. The taxes were much higher, had a socialist government after the war, and John Christie could no longer really afford to fund the festival.

So Bing comes up with an absolutely brilliant idea, why not set up a performing arts festival in Edinburgh? So he essentially, he was the one who created, who thought of the idea and created the Edinburgh Festival which of course continues to this day. But it was really, the point of it was to enable Glyndebourne to resume. So the first Glyndebourne operas, after the war, were presented not in Glyndebourne itself but under the aegis of the Edinburgh Festival in Edinburgh. I mean, nearly screwed up the whole thing. By one error of judgement , he decided to launch the first Edinburgh Festival with a performance in the Edinburgh Cathedral of Verdi’s Requiem. Of course, Scotland being super protestant and very, very anti-Catholic. It was an absolute scandal. And it nearly scuppered the entire festival. The idea of having a Catholic mass celebrated in Edinburgh Cathedral.

But you can see, these are the first operas that they put on, Verdi’s “Macbeth.” And that in itself is interesting. Verdi’s “Macbeth” was an opera that, by the early 1900s, had completely dropped out of the repertoire. It’s a fairly early opera by Verdi. But there was the so-called Verdi Renaissance in Germany in the 1920s, Franz Werfel who’s cropped up, I’m sure in many, many lectures was a part of that. He wrote a biography of Verdi or several operas of Verdi. I mean, by the early 1900s, only really a handful of Verdi operas that got done, “La traviata”, “Il trovatore,” “Otello”, “Rigoletto” and so on. But German opera houses in the twenties started exploring Verdi’s work. And three operas in particular were brought back into the repertoire. “Macbeth”, “Don Carlo’s” and “Simon Boccanegra.”

We’ll hear more about that later when Bing gets the Met. He’s very much pro Verdi. And you can see here, it was produced again by Carl Ebert and fine lineup of singers here, including Ella, the wonderful American soprano, Eleanor Steber, and the Australian Soprano, Margherita Grandi, and the conductor George Szell. Now, I mentioned that Bing could be very vindictive. He really held grudges, lifelong grudges, and he didn’t get on with George Szell, who, by all accounts, was a very obnoxious and difficult man. And there’s a famous anecdote years later. Somebody said to Rudolf Bing “Oh, that man, George Szell, he’s really appalling. That man is his own worst enemy.” And Bing came back very sharply, “Not while I’m still alive.”

So here this is, you can see 1947, first Edinburgh Festival at Bruno Walter, who Bing had actually known since childhood in Vienna. He conducted the first Edinburgh Festival. Here is Bruno Walter accompanying Kathleen Ferrier in a concert in that festival. So that gets going, 1947, 48. Then 1949, the director of the Metropolitan since 1935, a Canadian called Edward Johnson, decided to retire, and the Board of the Metropolitan are looking around for a replacement. And, of course, they’d heard wonderful things about Rudolf Bing, both from his years at Glyndebourne and at the Edinburgh Festival. So they put out fillers to see if he’s interested, and he said yes, he was. So in 1949, they invited him over to observe the last season of the Edward Johnson regime. And he takes over officially in 1950. Here is the interior of the Metropolitan as it looked in 1950. And you can see the horseshoe boxes on the level immediately above the orchestra level. This is the theatre of the old Met. And here are the boxes in the horseshoe with all the high society of New York from the latest costumes.

This is actually a pre-war photograph. And as I said, he was a tremendous snob, rather as Diaglott, had been a tremendous snob, but it was creative snobbery, I think you could say. He was very, very good at schmoozing, and he knew how to turn on that Viennese charm. And you can see him doing a hand kiss here to Mrs. August Belmont, who was the sort of queen of New York High Society, and you can see him accompanying Jackie Kennedy on the right-hand side. So when he took over, he was very determined that everything would change. He wanted to be a new broom, and he wanted, it’s a bit like Marla, when he took over the Vienna Opera in 1897. He wanted really a clean sweep, and he wanted to stamp his character on the Met straightaway. And so, the Johnson regime was particularly celebrated for Wagner. That was one of the greatest golden ages of Wagner’s singing. I’ve talked about that. You had Lauritz Melchior, Kirsten Flagstad, Lotte Lehmann, Friedrich Shaw, Alexander Kipnis, Helen Traubel.

Well, by 1950, several of those had departed the Met, but you still had the stalwarts Lauritz Melchior on the left, no longer the handsome young man he once was, he’s a rather overweight, I would say, “Lohengrin” on the left, but still in fantastic vocal form. If you hear broadcasts of recordings of that period, he’s still, without doubt, the greatest helden tenor in the world. And he knew it, and the public knew it. And on the right-hand side side, a very, very great heroic soprano, Helen Traubel, on the right hand side. Well, straight away, Bing took against them. And really he schemed to get rid of them. And he did so. And he describes all this very, very openly in his book, how he really, his machinations to force both of them to resign. I mean, he did it in a very unpleasant way with Melchior. Melchior’s old partner, with whom he had intense rivalry. Kirsten Flagstad was invited back, I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.

And knowing that Melchior would be grievously insulted, he announced the public that Flagstad was coming back before he’d even offered a contract for the new season to Melchior. And that prompted Melchior to resign. And his justification for this was he said he wanted to get rid of Melchior for reasons of discipline. Melchior, he sang just a handful of roles, the big Wagner roles. He’d sung literally hundreds of Tristan’s and Siegfried’s. And he really feel that he needed to turn up to rehearsals. And Bing thought this was a very bad example. And also he disapproved of Helen Traubel. And it took him a bit longer to get rid of her, but this is how he puts it, dripping with sarcasm. He can be very waspish in his book. He says, “Eventually, she decided that she found nightclub work more rewarding and less debilitating than opera and changed the focus of her endeavours.”

That’s how he put, how he managed to get rid of Helen Traubel. Three other singers that he makes no bones about, you know, who he likes and who he doesn’t like. Rose Bampton, very fine American soprano. She saw the writing on the wall immediately that he didn’t like her, and she promptly left. The very popular Brazilian soprano, Bidu Sayao, he didn’t like her either. They were too much. I think they were too associated with the old regime. As I said, he wanted a complete clean sweep, and he wanted his people on the stage in front of the audience. And so, Bidu Sayao found that she was getting less and less to do, and she left of her own accord in 1952. Lily Pons, she hung on bitterly till 1960. But Bing is extremely rude about her and makes it very clear that he absolutely despised her. So he wants to, as I said, put his stamp on the opera house, and he thinks we’re going to open the new season with an opera, which was unfamiliar to New York. It’d only been done once before about 30 years earlier, but very familiar to him. And that was Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” And it was perhaps his favourite opera.

And so, he puts on a very fine new production with the best cast that he can possibly put together. He actually wanted Giuseppe Di Stefano for the tenor role of “Don Carlo.” But for reasons I’ll explain later, he couldn’t use him. So he used Jussi Bjorling who you see here on the left. Another singer, very popular with the New York public. And again, very much associated with the Johnson regime. And Bjorling’s name crops up many times in the book. And Bing doesn’t have a single nice thing to say about him at all. Only repeats very negative judgements and stories about him. The Argentinian soprano, Delia Regal as Elisabetta, wonderful farry, hairy-chested Italian mezzo, Fedora Barbieri as Eboli. Cesare Siepi, top right, making his debu as King Philip. And Robert Merrill as Rodrigo. So there is actually quite a good sound live broadcast of the performance of the opening. The first night of “Don Carlo” at the Met. But I’m going to play you a commercial recording of the same date with Bjorling and Merrill in the “Friendship Duet” from Act One.

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Now, the first big controversy of Bing’s ring concerned the return of Kirsten Flagstad. She had been the greatest star at the Met in the late 1930s and the most loved singer in America. But in 1941, and I’ve mentioned this before, she chose to go back to German occupied Norway to be with her husband. And her husband was a notorious collaborator. And so when Flagstad, when it was announced, Flagstad was coming back, there was a huge fuss, and there were protests and stink bombs thrown. And dreadful things were said about her. She was accused of being a Nazi or a collaborator herself. Bing says he was extremely sensitive to these things, you know, being a Jewish refugee himself. And he really went in detail, and he concluded that actually Flagstad was in no way to blame and had nothing to answer for. And also, I’ve read everything about it, and I fully agree with him, actually.

In fact, she was far, far more scrupulous in her behaviour than most artists were in Europe, in occupied Europe. She gave up her career completely. She refused to sing. She refused pressing invitations to go and sing in Nazi Germany. She actually refused to sing in her own country as long as the Nazis occupied it. And she’s not to blame, I suppose, for her husband’s actions. And she was a woman, I think, of considerable moral principle and great bravery. And Bing pointed out that Erna Berger, who you see on the left hand side, had already been invited to sing at the Met the year before in 1949. She was a singer who sang all the way through the war in Nazi Germany. She was a favourite singer of Hitler. There’s film footage of her singing. Here’s the concert given to celebrate his birthday in 1942. And again, I’m not suggesting that Berger was a Nazi sympathiser, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t.

You know, she’s very honest and upfront about it, really, in her autobiography. And I once had the pleasure of spending a whole day with her. We talked nonstop for seven hours. I didn’t quite have the courage to say, “Well, what was it like singing at Hitler’s birthday concert?” But she was clearly a woman who was aware of the wickedness of the Nazis. But anyway, Bing had a point where there was a real inconsistency here. And my theory is, it has to do not with their behaviour in the war or their political beliefs, but to do with the roles that they sang, that Erna Berger always sang, sweet innocent girls. Gilda in “Rigoletto” was perhaps her greatest role. And when I met her, she was nearly 90. And she still had this persona of incredible gentleness and sweetness. Nobody could possibly believe that she could have been a Nazi. Whereas Flagstad, well, look at her, you know?

She’s a big, tall blonde woman who struts out onto the stage with a breastplate and helmet and spear, and she was everybody’s idea of a Nazi. And I think it was really just as simple as that. So she sang in a ring cycle and a couple of these olders. She stayed at the Met for two seasons, '51 to '52. And there is, again, quite a fine recording of record broadcast of one of her ring cycles. I’m going to play you a bit in a minute. Bing very much wanted Furtwangler to conduct this. And again, he having gone into it, he felt that Furtwangler, however foolish he may have been on some occasions, was definitely not a Nazi and didn’t really deserve to be banned from America. But that was just too controversial and he couldn’t bring it off. So, in fact, the conductor was Fritz Stiedry, who you see on the right hand side, another German Jewish refugee. And I’m going to play you just an excerpt from this live performance in 1951 of “Die Walkure” with Flagstad still, in her late fifties, in splendid form. This incredible power and richness in the lower part of her voice, in the scene from Valkyrie when she announces Siegmund’s forthcoming death to him.

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Now, another singer who made a rather, in a way, surprising comeback to the Met was the Yugoslavian Soprano, Zinka Milanov. She’d had a fine career from 1937 to '47, and then went back to Yugoslavia in '47 to get married, and I think that didn’t work out, and she came back to America in '49, and I mean, I think she was quite a difficult woman, I think, and probably not very popular with some of her colleagues. And Edward Johnson shunned her, wouldn’t have her back at the Met. And that, funnily enough, turned to her advantage because I think it was another way that Johnson felt that he could distance himself from the Johnson regime, that the singer who’d been rejected was, would now come back. And he brought her back and she had, in fact, the greatest part of her career from 1950 up till 1966, she was a real star award to the Met and gave many great performances.

And I’m going to play you the most famous moment in her repertoire, probably her best role was in Ponchielli’s opera, “La Gioconda.” And there was one moment in this opera where she was absolutely incomparable and no other singer on record comes near her, not Callas, not Tibaldi. And it’s in Act One. And she walks off stage declaring her love for Enzo, the tenor hero of the Opera. And as she walks off the stage, she has to hold a long high B pianissimo. Callas wobbles all over the place. Tribaldi, by the time she came to do it, really has to sing a fortissimo. She can’t do it softly. But Zinka Milanov, it’s an absolute object lesson in how it should be done. And I’m going to play you the commercial recording, but there are numerous live recordings of her doing it. And this moment always brought the house down that the house would absolutely erupt into applause when she did this.

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So, as I said, he was an autocratic man and he maintained a narrow aristocratic superiority. And in his book he says, “I think it is improper for a manager to be on terms of personal friendship with any of the artists who work for him since he cannot be personally friendly with all.” Well, here he is actually on stage, is presumably a production of “Rigoletto,” I think. As you can see, yes, there it is, with Richard Tucker. But he firmly kept his distance from singers. And much of the entertainment value of the book is his many stories of feuds with famous singers and how he generally got the better of them. And the first victim really was Giuseppe Di Stefano.

Bing says he thought that Di Stefano had the potential to be the greatest Italian tenor since Caruso. And he’s certainly wonderful, if somewhat erratic, in the live broadcast from the early part of his career. And again, he was very undisciplined. He turned up late for rehearsals and so on. And eventually, Bing took legal action against him and had him actually banned from appearing on stage in America. But he’s generous in his praise of Di Stefano’s singing. And he talks about the High C in the aria “Salut! Demeure” from Gounod’s “Faust,” where he does this long diminuendo. He starts it quite loudly and then trails it off. And he says, “I shall never forget as long as I live the beauty of that sound.” And here we have it live.

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On the left is a popular American soprano called Patrice Munsel. She had made her debut, age 17, the youngest debut in the history of the Met in 1943. And being regarded, he was always, I think, a little bit dismissive of American singers. He regarded her as being a useful soubrette. Soubrette is a very young, light voiced soprano who sings small roles for young girls. But she was very popular in the public, and she was ambitious and she wanted more of that and more than that. And she kept on lobbying him and pestering him. She wanted to sing the role of Mimi in “La boheme.” And he thought, no, no, no, she’s just not up to it. Voice isn’t big enough. No, she’s not a Mimi. But he eventually, really, again, it’s a very dirty trick that he played on her. And he tells this with great pride in the book. He said, “Okay, I’m going to cast you as Mimi.” And he didn’t tell her, and she didn’t find out until rehearsal that he’d cast the great Bulgarian soprano, Ljuba Welitsch as Musetta.

You know, Musetta is meant to be a secondary role, but with Welistsch on the stage, you know, everything else was secondary to her. She was such a powerhouse of extraordinary temperament and such an amazing voice. I mean, totally thrilling, huge pure penetrating voice. I love this photograph of her on the right-hand side, with Callas in the background, looking like she’s chewing on a lemon. And so, when poor Patrice Munsel arrived and she found herself singing opposite Welistsch, well, she completely freaked out and she actually fled from the theatre. And another American soprano, Dorothy Kirsten stood in for her. But obviously, Kirsten seems to have got on quite well with Welistsch from this photograph you see on the left hand side.

Well, this performance has gone down in history as one of the most extraordinary events at the Met because Welistsch, she chewed up the scenery, she chewed up the other singers, she behaved absolutely, totally outrageously. There are so many stories of the naughty things she did in this performance. Unfortunately, I can’t show you all of that, but I will play you a little bit of her wolf song, and you’ll hear this incredible voice that she had that it… Not really such a huge voice, but it was a voice that, of course, she was a very famous Salome, and it was a voice that had very, very penetrating quality.

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Another example of Bing’s Machiavellian behaviour was for the debu of Leonie Rysanek as Lady Macbeth in 1956, I think this was, or late fifties. And he’d originally cast Maria Callas, and there’d been a lot of publicity about that, but they’d had a very public falling out and eventually he sacked her. So there was great disappointment that the public were not going to hear Maria Callas. And he was worried that people will be prejudiced against an unknown Austrian soprano at the time, Leonie Rysanek. So with perverse logic, he planted somebody in the audience, a member of the claque so that just as Leonie Rysanek came onto the stage to sing her at one aria, this person planted in the organs, shouted, “Viva Callus!” Long live callus. And he reckoned that the American public sense of justice would be outraged, and that would bring them around to be more sympathetic to Leonie Rysanek. I don’t know whether it worked or not, seems a very strange idea to me. But here is Leonie Rysanek recorded at the time as Lady Macbeth.

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Very fine, but not Callas. I think that would’ve been wonderful if we had a nice live recording of Callas at the Met in that role. Now, a lot of the funniest anecdotes in the book concern Franco Corelli, who was the big star tenor throughout this period at the Met. As you can see, a very handsome man, was film star, good looks, and really one of the most thrilling tenor voices ever recording. It has what the Italians called, “Squillo, Squillo.” This sort of amazing, brilliant vibrating quality at the top of the voice. So he had everything, but he was a nutcase according to Bing. He says, “Keeping Franco Corelli cheerful seemed to be one of the things which I was paid. In this case, grossly underpaid.” And he describes all the whims and the temper tantrums, and the fact that he had to produce holy water before every, and if there was no holy water, he wouldn’t go on. And his pet dog had to be given star treatment and so on. He was obviously a total nightmare to have to deal with.

Here is Corelli and Bing together. And oh, this is Bing with Birgit Nilsson, of course, Birgit Nilsson, she was another singer. Rather he found her, he jewelled with her, you could say. I mean, she was a lot more rational than Franco Corelli, but she was very determined to get her way. And, on one occasion, at the Met Party, she did a simulation of a “Salome” with the head of John the Baptist, but with the head of Bing, as you can see on the right hand side. Well, Bing, no, with Corelli and Nilsson were cast together as “Turandot.” And at the climax of her big aria, they have to sing together. And on one occasion, Nilsson held onto the note for longer than Corelli could. His breath ran out and she was left triumphant on her own, and he had a colossal hissy fit.

He went back to his dressing room, had a screaming temper tantrum, thumped his dressing table so hard that he got a splinter in his hand and was bleeding and was screaming in pain and refusing to go on for the last act and so on. And Bing had to go in and trying to soothe him and calm him down. And to try and placate him, he said, “Look, next time you do it and she hangs onto that note, just bite her ear.” And suddenly, Corelli thought this was so funny that he calmed down, and he went back and he sang the last act. And he told Nilsson afterwards that when the next time they sang it, he was going to bite her ear. And she said, “Don’t worry, I’ve been vaccinated for rabies.” That was her sharp comment. Here they are together.

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With that note. This is a commercial recording so, of course, they sing it.

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Now Corelli could out prima donna, any prima donna. And he was a man of incredible vanity. And as his career was drawing to a close in the late sixties, well, it went on into the seventies, but by the time I heard him in the mid seventies, he was a shadow of his former self. But there was a new young prima donna who arrived at the Met, and that’s Montserrat Caballe in the late sixties. And there was a performance of “Don Carlo.” He was singing the Hero, she was singing Elisabetta. And he became very jealous of the incredible reception she was getting from the Metropolitan audience. And in the last act was she has her really huge aria, very demanding aria.

And she was waiting in the wings to go on, and he deliberately bumped into her to wind her just as she was walking on to sing this aria. And, of course, she was absolutely furious. So she got her revenge, and I’m going to play you her revenge. High notes, of course, are a matter of huge rival, as we’ve already discovered. And so, right at the very last moments of the opera, she has to sing a high, I dunno what it is, whether it’s a B or a C, it’s very high anyway. And in order to get her own back on Corelli, she just hangs on it forever and ever and ever. I mean, the curtain comes down and she’s still holding her top C. And of course, the audience go absolutely crazy.

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The most dramatic event of his career was in a performance of “La Forza Destino” in 1960, Of course, “Forza Destino” has a very sinister reputation in the opera world. It’s equivalent to say “Macbeth” in the theatre. You know, actors are very superstitious. They won’t say the name, “Macbeth,” they talk about the Scottish play. And singers are very superstitious about “Forza.” And one reason is the death of Leonard Warren, great baritone, one of his best roles as the baritone role in “Forza Destino.” And on March the 4th, 1960, he was singing his big aria. The first words of that aria are “Morir! Tremenda cosa!” To die is a momentous thing. And halfway through the aria, he just keeled over and died in front of the audience. Here he is in that aria, which was the very last thing that he ever sang, although this is, of course, not that performance.

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There’s a whole chapter in the book devoted to his very troubled relation with Maria Callas. He obviously, hugely admired her, but he found her very difficult to deal with. And eventually, as I said, he sacked her from the Met after she’d really only given a handful of performances. The real diva of the Met though was Callas’s great rival, Tibaldi, who was not necessarily that much easier to deal with. She was always very calm, very rational, very sweet and smiling. But Bing described her as having dimples of iron. And she usually got her way including a new production of “Adriana Lecouvreur” which was put on, especially for her in the late 1960s. Although, Bing said he actually hated the opera. I think I’m running out of time, so I won’t play you that.

Oh, yes, and then there’s this famous incident. When she sang in “Adriana Lecouvreur” and Callas was in the audience, and Bing took Callas back to Tibaldi’s dressing room for a somewhat artificially staged reconciliation between the two rival divas. Now, as I said, right from the start, Bing was very determined to break the colour bar at the Met. And in his very first season, that’s 1951, he signed up a Black ballerina called Janet Collins. And he says in the book, he did this off his own back. He didn’t pass it by the board. He signed the contract with her without telling the board, and he got away with that. So he was very really planning this to do it in stages. And then, 1955, he signed up Marian Anderson. And I think he felt he could get away with it with her because she was really a national figure.

She was such an incredibly respected artist, especially after this famous incident of singing at the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of 75,000. Whole thing, very, very carefully planned. I mean, she was getting to the end of her career. And so, he chose a role that he thought she could manage Ulrica in “Ballo in Maschera” because it has a very low tessitura, doesn’t have any high notes for a mezzo, and it’s quite a short role. So here she is signing the contract, and that succeeded, and that opened the door. And he had Robert McFerrin, who’s the first Black man to sing at the Met, so to speak, waiting in the wings. And a week after Marian Anderson’s debut, Robert McFerrin made his debut as Amonasro in “Aida.” And then, of course, in the sixties is Leontyne Price followed by a whole generation of very fine Black sopranos and mezzos. And I’ll be talking about that in a week or so.

This is Leontyne Price and Corelli in “Trovatore.” Now, I’ve really talked about, mainly about singers. As far as productions were concerned, he, like Marla, he was very determined that the performance should be a Gesamtkunstwerk. It should be a total work of art, and that everything should work together and everything should be on a high level. This had not always been the case at the Met. Often, the great singers had been thrown onto stage with very little rehearsal. There was sort of bumping into each other. There was no real direction. Often, the sets were very shabby. Often, there might be rather poor conductors. So Bing raised standards all round. And he puts on very magnificent and lavish productions. This is actor of Bohm in his day, but quite conservative. He didn’t really have any track. He wouldn’t have approved of these modern productions. And he says that only once in his entire life, early on in his career at Darmstadt, that he ever do a modern dress production of an old opera.

This is Eugene Berman’s design for Don Giovanni that he was one of the chief designers. Beautiful, rather, romantic set. The one, I suppose more daring production that he commissioned was the Chagall “Magic Flute.” Here it is again. Oh, that’s Bohm again. And Zeffirelli was, of course, very much a house designer in his day. And this is the famous “Turandot” that went on for many, many years. And his last important contribution to the history of Met was moving it. It was his decision to build a new house at Lincoln Centre in the 1960s and to make the controversial a momentous decision to demolish the old house that was a house so full of history, so full of memories that many people were angry and resented the fact that he had ordered the destruction of the old house.

But as far as he was concerned, it was necessary because they needed the money from the redevelopment of the site in order to build the new house. This is what the new house looked like when it was opened in 1966. And again, of course, famous murals by Chagall, which you can see through the glass front of the house. This is Bing’s Farewell Gala in 1972. And you could see him shaking hands with a man who was meant to take over from him. The Swedish director, Goran Gentele. But he actually was killed in a car crash just a few weeks later. So the end story is a sad one.

After the death of his wife in 1980s, he went into a steep decline dementia. And for a short time, in the late eighties, he was, again, front page news because he married a woman half his age who ripped him off. She really robbed him of all his savings and he had to be rescued from her. And the marriage was annulled on the grounds that he wasn’t mentally competent to make the decision to marry. But two singers who’d worked with him, Roberta Peters and Teresa Stratas, they got together the funds to have him put into the Hebrew Home For The Aged in the Bronx in New York. And that’s where he died, age 95 in 1997. And let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments

Yes, I think I covered the Edinburgh Festival. This is Judy who was born in Budapest with Bing as maiden name. Well, of course, Vienna and Budapest are very, very close to one another. It’s very likely indeed that you are related to him. I dunno how common the name of Bing is, but it’s very possible that you’re related to him. Yeah, that’s a different version of the Szell’s story. “The moderate soprano deals with the founding of Glyndebourne.” Yes, it is a very good play. It’s a wonderful characterization of John Christie. 'cause David, I know him very well actually, and we had many conversations about that play. And he has such a gift for putting convincing dialogue into his characters.

Q: Why did the Met have a permanent group of singers on contract? A: Well, it’s probably only for, I don’t think the major singers would’ve had short term contracts. And, of course, they were singing in other major houses of the world being the mind of the confirmaria singers who would’ve had longer term contracts.

And Myrna, thank you very much to discover that the “5,000 Nights” is available on Amazon. Yes, Francine, it’s funny, on the old Met, it’s like the old Glyndebourne, I was terribly sad when that was knocked down. And I don’t think anybody would say the old Met was an architectural masterpiece. But, of course, a building like that with so much history, it gets a kind of paterno. Yes, very famous recording, of course, Margaret. That and on the same LP it came out was with two of them in the “Pearl Fishers” duet. Oh, thank you. Monique. “1950 up, 'Don Carlo’ was televised, as was Bing’s Gala Farewell.” Thank you. You know, of course, there are a huge number of Met Saturday afternoon broadcasts, which it is possible to get hold of them on CD.

Thank you, Rita. Yes. Well, ‘cause I, in a way, I think Bing was right about Di Stefano. And yes, he was very ruthless in dealing with him in that way because Di Stefano didn’t last. He was only good for a very short period of time. Oh, how, Rita, thank you so much that people can actually tune into the Met Gala for Bing. So Barbara, you got Di Stefano’s autograph, who’s a handsome man, wasn’t he when he was young? I’d loved to, which Giordano Opera was that? Because it could have been there were two. He sang “Andrea Chenier” and “Fedora.” Air raid warning. I don’t think that 1952, that can’t have been an air raid warning. I’ll have another look at that. This is Yana who heard Corelli is radians at the old Met.

Q: Did he really have atrocious diction? A: Of course, nobody has quite as good diction as Pavarotti. That is the chief virtue of Pavarotti.

Thank you, Abigail. You telling us you had a ticket to the story? So disturbing. Which opera was that? Oh, Wagner. Oh, right. Yes. One of the productions of Wagner. Yeah, Wagner is, I have mixed feelings like you, “Roberta Peters arranged him to be.” That’s right. Thank you Patricia and Ed. Hi Ed, we need to have a talk. The book. It’s “5,000 Nights at the Opera.” Thank you. Very sad. Yes. And as I said, it was in all the papers at the time. I remember reading about it, this story with this young woman who was apparently herself mentally ill. Thank you, Pat. “Anyone in the world of opera without,” I don’t know. Yes, I think there are. Well, my favourite singer of all time, Magda Olivero, she was certainly a very modest woman and without a huge ego.

I don’t think he had any children. Zeffirelli set still being used. I hope it is never decommissioned. I think Puccini doesn’t lend himself to be these modern experimental productions. Rise Stevens, he talks about her a lot and obviously admired her. You saw Corelli and Birgit Nilsson in Detroit. “He had a cold.” Oh, dear. “Well, wipe his nose on the bosom of her costume.” He really was a pig, wasn’t he? I heard him in Carmen too late. I heard her as , of course, many times. And she was wonderful. Mala vita. How interesting. That is never done. I didn’t know it had ever been done in modern times. Lucky you to see that. And Joan heard Callas in her last. And well, you know, she was a very erratic singer. She could be very great, but it’s not always beautiful what she does. And I’m glad they’ve kept the Zeffirelli “Turandot” as well.

Thank you all very, very much. Bye-Bye.