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Money, Money, Money. The Met has always had to scrabble for money. Tradition has it that the Met's first manager, Henry E. Abbey, went $600,000 in the hole in his first season (1883). In his own day, the great Gatti complained: "What can one say of the largest and richest city in the world that finds so much difficulty in keeping open a single opera house for three or four months of the year? What a misery!" Gatti's miseries were painless compared to those of his successors: in the good old days of .little or no income tax, Gatti had music-loving, multimillionaire Banker Otto Kahn around to ask the amount of the annual deficit and write a check to cover it. Says Rudolf Bing with some grimness: "The word art is seldom heard in this house. It is always money, money, money."
Opera lovers across the U.S. last week were hearing the word too. To pay off last season's deficit of $430,000 and to insure new productions for next season, Board Chairman Sloan went on the radio in an intermission in the performance of The Flying Dutchman and broadcast a plea for $750,000 from members of the Met's regular Saturday network audience of 14 million listeners. Sloan could be reasonably sure that the nation, which seems to regard the Met with about the same vaguely dutiful feelings as it does the Community Chest or March of Dimes, would respond as it has in the past.*
This time, tall, distinguished George Sloan was also talking to a special listener: Uncle Sam. Sloan made the obvious point that an exemption from the federal admissions tax would mean everything to the Metropolitan, while the sum involved is only a drop in the U.S. Treasury bucket. Last season's tax came to more than $410,000. An exemption, based on the fact that the Metropolitan is a nonprofit institution, would have left the Met with what Bing calls a "manageable" deficit of about $20,000.
Everything Proper. The man who now has the job of trying to keep the deficit manageable was born just 49 years ago this week, the fourth child of a well-to-do Viennese industrialist (steel). As a boy, he remembers, "we had a box at the opera, chamber music at home, everything that was right and proper for an upper bourgeois family."
He was "frightfully bad at school . . . I don't know why." He was also "very naughty," and even then had some of the easy wit that spreads smiles around the Met today. Once he managed to creep up to the teacher's desk, tie the teacher's leg to his chair. When the teacher got up to leave and dragged the chair with him, he demanded, fuming, the culprit's name. Young Rudi stood up and said, "Why, professor, you came in that way."
At 17, Rudi decided he did not want to go into the family business. He studied painting and singing. He says he was a baritone. The Met's grey and fatherly (67) Wagner Conductor Fritz Stiedry fondly remembers him instead as an ambitious young tenor who auditioned for him in 1919 by singing parts of the third act of Lohengrin. (Says Bing: "Never mind, don't spoil Stiedry's story if it is a good one.") At any rate, father Bing was almost ruined in World War I, and there was no money for singing lessons. Rudi went to work in a Vienna bookstore. That was the turning point in his career.