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Gesamtkunstwerk. Fortunately for the Met, and for the state of opera everywhere, there is very little else that Rudolph Bing has got wrong. For 16 years he has stood in the dead center of a musical vortex and managed to conduct both himself and opera with admirable skill. Dragging opera by the scruff of the neck into modern times, demanding improvements in production techniques and performance quality, Bing has helped the art to achieve the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, the amalgamation of drama, singing, acting and dancing into total theater.
This, in turn, has widened the audience that once was restricted almost wholly to the moneyed gentry. Young people are now more involved than ever—on both sides of the footlights. In the past 16 years, the quality and quantity of American singers have risen sharply—though many still have to go to Europe to serve their apprenticeship. But even that trend is beginning to reverse itself as Dallas, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Boston and Chicago develop their own troupes, though they still continue to import the finest singers from the international circuit. In 1950, for example, there were 200 opera companies in the U.S.; today there are more than 700—amateur and semiprofessional for the most part, but all bristling with energy and enterprise.
Firm Ship. This alone, however, does not necessarily signify a blossoming of new works for the operatic stage, the few Barbers and Brittens notwithstanding. Few composers today find much encouragement to write opera. Some feel that the Met is not providing the impetus that it should in this direction, but that is one subject on which Bing cannot be moved. The Met's job, he says, is like that of a museum, "to put old masterpieces in new frames." He is convinced that opera can survive on its classical foundation without a strong infusion of contemporary music and subject matter.
As long as opera fans are willing to hear Carmen 100 times over and not tire of the same old rose clamped in the same old teeth, Bing's reasoning is hard to fault. At least he seems to think so, and the splashy new Met monument in Lincoln Center provides dramatic supporting evidence. The swipes from his critics, the tantrums of his singers, the sour notes from his musicians, all fail to stir even a hemidemisemiquaver of irritation in his aplomb. Among the scores of appropriate quotations from operas that he uses for punctuation, Rudolf Bing likes best the line from the Flying Dutchman: "My ship is firm; it suffers no damage."