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Massive Everything. And never had a social event in New York exploded with such excitement. From Lady Bird Johnson and her guests, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, straight down the line through the Nelson Rockefellers, the Jacob Javitses, the Robert McNamaras, the Henry Fords, the John Drexels, the Alfred Vanderbilts, the William Fulbrights, the Kennedy brothers, and rafts of diplomats and fashion plates, the audience of 3,800 first-nighters provided a show-stopping spectacle of animated finery. The total weight in diamonds and emeralds alone could have sunk Cleopatra's barge, and the gold lame could have papered the Met walls. On the whole, the fashion was strictly haute, although here and there a kooky costume or two dazed the 3,000 or so beholders who checked over the operagoers as they arrived. The wife of Met Tenor Jess Thomas, for example, was decked out in a black dress that was drenched in 15 Ibs. of floorlength gold chains (while a flack followed breathlessly, tossing out mimeographed press releases).
The opera itself had no trouble competing for spectacle. The night belonged to Franco Zeffirelli, who designed the sets and costumes and directed the whole shebang. His scenery was framed and overhung with scrims that looked like free-form Venetian blinds—around and through which appeared massed armies, a massive moon, a massive sphinx, a massive pyramid, a massive throne, and just about every other eye popper that Cecil B. de Zeffirelli could imagine, not forgetting three live horses, three live goats, one live camel, and three fake asps.
Playing Cleopatra, Soprano Leontyne Price was so heavily costumed in bolts of sparkling cloth that she looked like a junior-sized pyramid herself; it was a wonder that she eould sing at all, though sing she did, and her burnished voice never sounded better. At the top of their form, too, were Basso Justino Diaz as Antony and Tenor Thomas as Caesar. Composer Barber's setting for Shakespeare's text was notable chiefly for an orchestration built of conflict ing clouds of moody, often eerie thun-derbursts of sound, punctuated with enough jutting exclamations of dissonance to label it contemporary, and Conductor Thomas Schippers gave it all the fierce sweep of a Force Three hurricane. Yet it was only in the latter part of the second act and in the third that the music itself overwhelmed the stage dazzles. There alone did Barber's vocal writing transform itself into genuine opera. And so what the Met had to offer on its first night in its new quarters was a musical extravaganza—which is precisely what Rudolf Bing had had in mind as a bauble fit to set in his shiny showcase.
Grand Irrationalities. At that, the showcase easily upstaged whatever took place behind the proscenium. The cavernous auditorium (3,800 seats—179 more than in the old house) is an acoustical success. There, and throughout the red-carpeted corridors, lobbies and unfurling marble staircases, Architect Wallace K. Harrison