Word: bing
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...busy week at the opera, too. Among other things, the Met offered a new twin-bill production of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. Not everybody was satisfied with the way Rudolf Bing & Co. went about streamlining the old favorites (see below), but the singing was good...
Fans for Fledermaus. Now, running the world's No. 1 opera house, Rudi Bing is in his plain, southwest-corner office on the ground floor every morning by 10. He walks to work down Seventh Avenue from his apartment in fashionable Essex House, on the edge of Central Park. He travels home for dinner by subway, returns to the Met and seldom gets home again before midnight. The strain of twelve-hour days has already made Bing look a little more drawn and grey than when he took over last summer...
...Gamble? Some advance-guard music lovers have complained that instead of spending money on works such as Don Carlo and The Flying Dutchman, which were never highly profitable, Bing should have gambled the same money on a more contemporary work, such as Alban Berg's formidable atonal opera, Wozzeck. Bing's answer to that is that he would like to do Wozzeck, but he cannot afford right now to overlook the fate of another contemporary opera, Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which was withdrawn after two seasons, so offended one opera lover that he spat...
Hamstrung as he is by lack of money, Rudi Bing thinks that the most he can do is "to try to build up the stock repertory in a contemporary way." Says he: "I think we must do away with 40-year-old productions even if they were great in their day." He believes that "new productions must not be thought of as a luxury that one may indulge in if one happens to strike a gold mine. New productions are as important to have as singers and an orchestra. I may want eight and get only four, but I cannot...
...Rudi Bing, the paradox of the old Met is the fact that, despite the old sets and old costumes, standbys such as Traviata and Trovatore "still sell out the house." His task, he thinks, is "to get the public to demand new and better productions." He has to admit, from box-office records, that so far "the public just does not care." But, says Rudi Bing, with the look of a man setting out to do something about it: "I do care...