Opera: Lord of the Manor

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music and drama festival in Scotland, tailored after the Salzburg Festival. He launched the Edinburgh Festival in 1947, and overnight it became one of the biggest and most successful arts pageants anywhere in the world. The master manager and logistician also became adept at dealing with the peculiar brand of hysteria that so often swirls within musicians' souls. Once an Italian orchestra threatened a walkout because there were no coat hangers in the dressing rooms. Bing merely explained that the Scots have this quaint old custom of hanging their coats on the backs of chairs. Accordingly, when one is in Rome, one ought to, etc., etc., etc. Not wishing to offend, the Italians went native and played molto dolcissimo.

Six-Day Onslaught. In 1949, while visiting New York to investigate the possibilities of bringing a touring company to the U.S., Bing got into a discussion with some of the Met's board of di rectors. They were looking for a successor to Edward Johnson. What, the directors asked, would Bing do if he were head of the Met? "I haven't the slightest idea," he shot back. But further discussions generated significant ideas, and it was not long before Bing was awarded "the kind of job I had aimed at all my life."

Surely no man immersed himself more thoroughly in his work. Bing today has no private life, no hobbies, no interest in anything but the Met. To gather strength for each six-day onslaught of problems, he spends all day Sunday in bed, like Lenin lying in state. He is a solitary figure who thinks of himself still as "a guest in this country," and he keeps himself insulated from the rhythms that make other men move. He is Old World to the heart and carries his British citizenship like a shield. As far as Bing is concerned, he could be living in downtown London.

In the mornings at his two-room apartment on the 36th floor of Manhattan's Essex House, Bing pauses over his porridge to read the London Daily Telegraph ("I can't lift the New York

Times"), then claps on his black bowler, picks up his black umbrella and, looking for all the world like a department-store manager from Sloane Square, scissors briskly off to the Met. If the weather is bad, he will take the subway, often stopping off at a sleazy hashery for a cup of hot milk with a dash of coffee—much to the dismay of his staff, who feel that to be seen in such a place is beneath the dignity of his station.

Courtly as he is, Bing never stands on ceremony. In his dealings with singers, he trades on intuition, whether it is in negotiating a $3,000 difference in salary with Richard Tucker by flipping a coin (Bing won) or in putting Birgit Nilsson at ease before a performance by bursting into her dressing room wearing a Beatle wig (Nilsson screeched). The unexpected, the outrageous are among his chief weapons. On a recent tour in Cleveland, Bing desperately wanted to persuade an exhausted Franco Corelli to substitute for an ailing tenor. He went to Corelli's hotel, got his room number, went upstairs, knelt in a prayerful attitude before the door and rang the bell. The door opened. A disheveled woman squawked in astonishment. Hmmm, wrong room. Begging her pardon, Bing dusted off his knees, strolled away, found the right room, knelt, rang the bell. Corelli could not turn him down.

Nor can most people, when he serves up that