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From the general air of benevolent conspiracy, just about everyone backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House knew that a surprise was in the making. Only a few —not including the Met's new General Manager Rudolf Bing—had been told the details. Last week, with a gala New Year's Eve audience settled in their seats for Fledermaus, the Met's bubbliest new production in years (TIME, Jan. 1), Mezzo Rise Stevens uncorked the surprise.
Waving a ludicrous 18-in. cigarette holder in her role of Fledermaus' bored, bemonocled Prince Orlofsky, Mezzo Stevens strutted center stage, put one foot on the prompter's box and waggled the holder at Box 23 of the Met's Diamond Horseshoe. Then, as Manager Bing winced in his box, she sang a switch on her song, Chacun a Son Gout:*
The operas that must be your choice If you like plays that sing Are solely dependent on one voice The voice of Rudolf Bing.
If he is in a Wagnerian mood We're forced to strain a lung And serve the ponderous musical food Of Götterddmmerung . . .
Mister Bing is the king uncrowned here Though he rarely is on view And we do Just what Bing Tells us to.
The expression is never found here Chacun à Son Gout; There is only one gout around here And you all know who.
Oldtimers in the audience tried to remember when any general manager of the Met had won so jovial an accolade, finally gave up. After only nine weeks of his first season, Rudolf Bing looked like the best thing that had happened to the Met in many a day. Nobody expected Bing to take all the creaks out of the old place overnight, but he had already accomplished the near miracle of persuading his singers, his board of directors and his audiences that the Met was not doomed to creak forever along ways established back in the gaslight era.
The chief reason for the Met's enthusiasm for its new manager is his own crisp air of enthusiasm. After 27 years of the autocratic rule of Giulio Gatti-Casazza and 15 years of worries and wartime headaches under Edward Johnson, the old Metropolitan has suddenly become, as one tenor put it, "a happy house."
Cross Your Fingers. It was Edward Johnson himself who first brought Rudolf Bing forward 23 months ago as a likely successor. The Met's directors were impressed by Bing's prewar experience with Britain's Glyndebourne Opera Company and the success he had made of the postwar Edinburgh Festivals. Bing's first acts as manager nonetheless made the 37 directors nervously cross their august fingers.