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"Except for Them . . ." Among the chief assets inherited by Rudolf Bing is the glamorous tradition. Still lurking in the shadows of the old gilt and plush house are the ghosts of the Met's hallowed past, when Sembrich, Lilli Lehmann, the De Reszkes, Melba, Caruso, Farrar and Chaliapin graced the stage, and Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini ruled the pit.
Thanks to Edward Johnson, who brought the best singers of both Europe and the U.S. to the Met, the new manager has the finest roster of singers in the world. If they are not the finest in history, that is less the fault of the Met than of history. Says 70-year-old Mrs. August Belmont, pillar of the Met's board: "Caruso and Chaliapin were the kind of singers who appear only once in a hundred years. Except for them, we have just as good singers today."
The Met can boast, as no other house in the world, that it can assemble two complete, topflight Casts for almost any of its performances. No other house has interchangeable lyric tenors of the quality of Jussi Bjoerling and Richard Tucker: baritones such as Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill; bassos such as Jerome Hines and Cesare Siepi; and dramatic sopranos such as Helen Traubel and Kirsten Flagstad, not to mention the good looks and comic flair of a Patrice Munsel.
The liabilities Bing faces are nonetheless formidable. Probably the biggest of them are the Met's two warehouses and their contents: tons & tons of out-of-date scenery. Another is the unmanageable old house itself, with its grimy brick face staring stolidly out on Broadway. Designed in 1880 by a college (Yale, Williams) architect named J. Cleaveland Cady, who had never seen any of the world's great opera houses, nor so much as a single opera performance, the building is a nearly insuperable drawback. There is no backstage storage space for scenery; to haul a big opera in & out of the warehouse for one performance can cost the Met around $3,000. Furthermore, the Met as now laid out contains 500 "blind" seats, i.e., those from which the customer can see less than two-thirds of the stage. It takes salesmanship—and devout love of operatic music —to keep such seats filled.
But though a committee is studying the advisability and cost of building a new house in the neighborhood of Rockefeller Center (estimated cost: $20 million), no one around the Met can really bear the thought of giving up the beautiful old house with its rich tradition. One considerable advantage of the present spot: service by two subway lines, three bus lines. Even though glossy limousines are still lined up on subscription nights, Board Chairman George A. Sloan says, "We're not really a carriage-trade house any more. Much of our audience today comes from Brooklyn and The Bronx. And that means the subways."