Opera: Lord of the Manor

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good conductors, "fossilized" repertory, and "anti-Americanism" in the matter of developing new talent. All of which prompts a weary smile from Bing. He responds, characteristically, by criticizing the critics. "Most of the people in our audience," he says, "have better taste than the critics. They know the operas, the singers, and what they want. They are completely uninfluenced by critics—and that annoys the critics so. We can get shocking reviews and you can't get into the house. Critics should be licensed, like doctors." He does not, of course, suggest that singers should be licensed too.

As for the charge that he sometimes miscasts his operas, Bing says: "Casting an opera at the Met is easy. If you want to do a Lucia, then you know you have to get Sutherland. If it's Turandot, then you get Nilsson. Ah, but if you're trying to cast Lucia in Magdeburg, Germany, and you have six sopranos who can sing it, then you have to know something about music." More reasonable is the complaint that Bing has failed to bring along enough first-rate conductors. He contends that "there are few really distinguished conductors around, but the shortage at the Metropolitan is no more severe than anywhere else. After all, nobody knows who conducts in Vienna when it isn't Von Karajan." More to the point, everybody knows that it is Bing who calls the tunes at the Met. Great conductors usually have egos to match, and the inevitable collision between Bing and the baton men caused such autocratic maestros as George Szell and the late Fritz Reiner to boycott the house.

Machine-Gunning the House. In the area of repertory, Bing's record at the old Met speaks for itself: 50 new productions, three U.S. premieres (Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Strauss's Arabella, Menotti's The Last Savage), and one world premiere (Barber's Vanessa). His own taste favors Italian opera; he is only lukewarm about Wagner and, with a few exceptions, indifferent to modern. Compared with Milan's La Scala or West Berlin's opera, whose repertories are laced with contemporary works, the Met, as one critic puts it, "remains a coach-and-four in a jet age." Bing has no desire to stand in the spotlight of the avantgarde. "Remember what Gustav Mahler used to say," he explains: " 'Interesting is easy; beautiful is difficult.' "

It is, Bing says, all a matter of economics. "I am behind the times—so is the American public. And they are the people who buy the tickets; the critics get in free. To make successful opera in New York you do Carmen, Boheme and Traviata, and then Traviata, Boheme and Carmen, Stage a modern work and during the third performance you could put on a blindfold, spray the house with a machine gun and be pretty sure that you would never hit anybody."

Though there is some basis for the view that Bing could be a bit more versatile in his programming, he is not the stuffed shirt some detractors make him out to be. Last year he launched the Metropolitan National Company, a sort of touring farm club for the Met, to "perform the kind of out-of-the-ordi-nary works that the Metropolitan cannot do," such as Rossini's La Cenerentola and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah. Perhaps the best indication of his flexibility is the Met's