Deep shadows had fallen where angels and sponsors used to tread. The Metropolitan Opera's 1,100 doors were shut tight. The stage lights (total power: 6,000,000 watts) peered purblindly down on bare boards. In the pit a dirty dust rag lay limply on the conductor's stand, in place of a score.
The source of the gloom was not new. In the past eight years, labor disputes have four times brought the Met to the brink of disaster. In 1961 its opening was ensured at the last moment deus ex machina (when President Kennedy intervened). But this time, New Yorkers were realizing with shock, there might be no opening at all. Worried, tired and gaunt, Met General Manager Rudolf Bing told TIME, "We don't know where to go. It is now a matter of life and death."
Saber Rattling. On the surface it had all looked like part of a familiar cycle—labor v. management saber rattling over money, hours, work conditions —all capable of rational settlement. But the talks between the Met and eleven unions were hampered by past rancors and lack of trust. Bombay-born Zubin Mehta, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a regular conductor at the Met, last week scornfully characterized the negotiations as an "Oriental-bazaar style of bargaining." Bing speaks openly of the "sheer demagoguery" of his adversaries, and is furious that they don't take pity on the Met's general economic plight. They, in turn, blame management for locking them out of summer rehearsals and blocking their claims for unemployment benefits while contracts are being negotiated.
The most crucial dispute is with the members of the orchestra. Last year they were paid a minimum of $14,000 for 44 weeks of work and four weeks of vacation. Initially, they demanded half again as much by the third year of the new contract, but have since come down to a demand for $20,000. Bing's offer has been and is a three-year package that amounts to a 24% increase —or $17,370. "We are entitled to make as much as, if not more than plumbers,"*the legal spokesman, Herman Gray, asserts. "The community has no right to expect the artists to support the Met. It should pay adequate salaries or go out of business." In the view of many New Yorkers, Met salaries are not exactly inadequate. Met musicians make less than the $15,000 minimum paid players at the New York Philharmonic—though Bing's offered increase would at least put their pay in line with that.
For a city that only three years ago saw a rancorous strike senselessly deprive thousands of printers and journalists of jobs, and New York of a great newspaper, talk of the Met's going out of business was chilling indeed. Considerable damage has already been done. Two promising revivals—Puccini's Fanciulla del West and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin—have already been lost even if the Met opens, as it still conceivably could, in a month. Herbert von Karajan's new Siegfried, which must be done in November or not at all, seems likely to be scratched too. Though a handful of the Met's leading stars are still being paid full fees to keep them available, some are obviously itching to drift away and perform elsewhere. As one of them observed ominously, "A singer must sing."