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The owner of the bookstore, who added a concert bureau on the side, soon transferred the artistically inclined Rudi to that branch of his business. Bing found he "loved selling," could sometimes let his enterprising imagination run wild. Once he billed a faltering troupe of dancers as "Dancers of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy," had to give extra performances to accommodate the crowds. Among the agency's clients were Soprano Lotte Lehmann, Conductor Fritz Busch, a young violinist named Eugene Ormandy, and a troupe of Russian dancers which included Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, who later shortened her name to Mrs. Rudolf Bing.
"Take Me." Invited to join a bigger agency, Bing went to Berlin on his 25th birthday. There he had to supply artists for some 80 German opera houses—"75 of which were terrible."
He had worked in Berlin for two years when the man who was to give his career its most important and lasting twist walked in the agency door. Famed (in Germany) Actor-Director Carl Ebert-(TIME, Sept. 4) had just been appointed artistic director of the Darmstadt State Theater. Among other things, he wanted a bright young man for his assistant. Rudi Bing told him brightly: "I know an excellent man. Take me."
Under Ebert, Bing got most of the experience that makes him a valuable boss for the Met today—the tedious and complicated work of engaging artists, scheduling rehearsals, programming, and overseeing ticket sales. He also met two of the men who are now his right and left hands at the Met: Artistic Administrator Max Rudolf, 48, and General Assistant John Gutman, 48, who in the old days used to drop into the Darmstadt theater as music critic for the Berlin Börsen-Courier. Rudolf, then a conductor, recalls Bing and wife Nina as "a handsome couple," Bing himself as "a man I liked to talk to." Says another German critic who knew him well at Darmstadt: "He was clearly destined to have a great future."
To a Turn. Bing's future turned dark before it brightened much. After two years in Darmstadt, he went back to Ber lin as artistic administrator of the Municipal Theater. Ebert arrived the next year. The following year, 1933, all hands were summarily dismissed by the Nazis. Bing went home to Vienna, then to a tiny theater near Prague, where he helped produce "absurd" things, such as Figaro in modern dress.
Back in Vienna, he got word from Carl Ebert in England to round up singers for a wealthy British landowner and music lover named John Christie, who wanted to start a Mozart festival at his Sussex estate, Glyndebourne. Bing did, later dropped around to see how the singers were doing. He fell in love with England, and with green Glyndebourne in particular.
In John Christie, Bing found the incarnation of an opera producer's dream — an "art patron who pays, but does not interfere. Not that he simply bought and paid for productions. It was really the Christies who gave the whole thing its tone, and gathered together the people who could appreciate it." In Glyndebourne's six-week season, usually only one or two operas were given in the little 600-seat theater, and Ebert demanded (and Christie paid for) enough rehearsal time to insure that the operas were done to a turn.