Opera: Lord of the Manor

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restaurants and bars in the new Met, he suggests that the lights are too bright. As electricians scramble, he calls, "Go on. Go on. Kill them! If we turn them down low enough, we can raise the prices." (Laughter.) Now he sits unnoticed in the back of the auditorium, watching a rehearsal. Then he leaps up, steps over some seats and halts a bevy of girl dancers onstage. "How about raising the hems above the knee? Hmm. Better check the knees first." (Titters.) Now he is off to one of the rehearsal rooms to tend to a soprano who is feeling neglected. "It's freezing in here," she shivers. (Singers hate air conditioning more than they hate other singers.) Ignoring the air-conditioning controls, Bing ceremoniously goes to the wall and turns the knob for the intercom system. "There," he purrs in his caramel-soft Viennese-British accent, "is that better?" "Yes," she says. "It is much warmer now." (Warm smile.)

Ego Chewing. This is the kind of virtuoso performance that Met regulars have come to know as the Bing style: a disarming combination of urbanity and no-nonsense determination, wit and steely single-mindedness. In opera, where people chew on each other's egos like lozenges, Bing's cool cools all. "I really enjoy dealing with difficult people," he says. "I just make them believe they really want to do what I want them to do." Or else.

When Bing took over the Met in 1950, there were all kinds of toes waiting to be stepped on—and he did not miss many. His predecessor, an easygoing ex-tenor named Edward Johnson, had run a tidy if not altogether harmonious house where the terrible-tempered diva and the haughty, naughty tenor reigned supreme. Bing started with a bang by firing 39 singers and several musicians, including his cousin, Conductor Paul Breisach, as well as aging Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, whose variations on the score had been the bane of Met conductors for years. Amid the howls of "Adolf Bing!" and "Prussian dictator" Bing remained serene. "I will run this house," he said, "on the principle of quality and quality alone." In 1958, when Maria Callas refused to sing the roles in the sequence that Bing had assigned her, he summarily dismissed her, touching off an international cause celebre. (Bing later hung a photograph in his office showing himself and the celebrated diva kissing, with the caption: "Darling!" "You're fired!")

To protect the prestige of the Met name, Bing dropped Soprano Helen Traubel for "singing in smoky nightclubs" and Baritone Robert Merrill for taking leave to make a class-C movie, Aaron Slick from Punkin Crik (Merrill was reinstated a year later after making a public apology: "I have learned my lesson"). That lesson was clear: the wiry Mr. Bing was no man to tangle with. One Met dowager, who like most of the oldtimers was eying the new manager with suspicion, had to learn the hard way. "From what I hear," she airily informed him one night, "you won't be around very long." Replied Bing: "From what I see, you won't be around very long."

Shrinking Sopranos. Bing endured handsomely. He swept out tons of tattered old scenery and replaced it with sparkling productions of Don Carlos and Die Fledermaus. An early