(7 of 10)
As for the charge that he discourages the development of new singing talent "at the Met," Bing pleads guilty. "The Metropolitan is no place for beginners," he says. "Let them learn elsewhere—Chicago, San Francisco, Boston. They should sing here only at the peak of their careers. I came after a long climb; they can too."
"Child of the Muses." Bing's climb began with a prophecy. As a lad in Vienna, he was introduced to the Austrian poet-playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Placing his hand on Rudi's shoulder, the venerable man pronounced: "This is not a little boy but a child of the muses." His teachers found that hard to believe. On his first day at school, Rudi got up from his desk and began putting on his coat. "What are you doing?" the teacher demanded. "Thank you very much," he replied, "but I have had enough." He wasn't kidding. In the years following, he was, by his own admission, "thrown out of every school in Austria. I absolutely hated school—all that stupid talk." Aloof even then, he was dubbed "the irritable Christ" by his mother. At 14, he finally convinced his father, chairman of the board of the Austro-Hungarian steel trust, that he should be tutored privately. He took up singing and he tried painting, but he soon decided that both his baritone and brush were too shaky, so he got a job in a Vienna bookshop.
As it happened, his employer operated a concert agency on the side, and it was not long before the child of the muses began musing on the music business. He took to it like Barnum to bun kum. Once he billed a sorry troupe of dancers as terpsichorean exponents of "Vice, Horrors and Ecstasy," then hurriedly had to schedule extra performances to accommodate the crowds. Among his clients were Soprano Lotte Lehmann, a young redheaded violinist named Eugene Ormandy, and a troupe of Russian modern dancers, one of whose members, a slim, dark-eyed blonde named Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, later shortened her name to Mrs. Rudolf Bing.
When in Rome. By the time he was 25, Bing had become assistant to the Darmstadt Opera's famed Actor-Director Carl Ebert. Germany in those days, however, was rocking wildly. Bing, whose family for generations had been Roman Catholics (although one great-grandmother was Jewish), quickly got fed up with the Nazis and in 1933 left the country. With Ebert, he landed in England on a rolling Sussex Downs estate, and there the two founded the Glyndebourne Festival, the home of some of the finest Mozart performances heard anywhere. When World War II interrupted that idyl, Bing took a job as a coupon clerk in a London department store (Peter Jones in Sloane Square), stood nightly rooftop vigil as a volunteer fire warden. Eventually, he worked himself up to division manager, "hating every minute of it" except for his rounds to the store's hairdressing salon, where, he recalls dryly, "the atmosphere of hysteria reminded me of opera."
At war's end, he returned to Glyndebourne, later hit on the idea of creating a