Word: bing
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Rush the Ambulance. Rudi Bing has not worked his cures by coddling the singers or anyone else. His policy from the first has been "firmness-sympathy but firmness." Says one singer: "Bing is the boss. He knows it and makes everyone else know it." But the Bing firmness is tempered with wit, and even touches of slapstick. One sample last fall: when he suspected that the "illness" of one of his tenors was chiefly laziness, he rushed two doctors and an ambulance to the tenor's door in burlesque solicitude. Says Bing in his caramel-soft Viennese-British accent...
...Bing has also persuaded his singers that the Met comes first. He generally insists that they be on hand for a minimum of ten weeks a season; nowadays, stars who used to drop in at the Met to sing four or five times a year, almost at their own convenience, have passed up concert and radio engagements at $2,500 and up to work with Bing for a $1,000 top. Manager Bing, who lived long enough in Britain (15 years) to acquire a taste for understatement, takes such accomplishments calmly. Asked what he regarded as his biggest single innovation...
...Except for Them . . ." Among the chief assets inherited by Rudolf Bing is the glamorous tradition. Still lurking in the shadows of the old gilt and plush house are the ghosts of the Met's hallowed past, when Sembrich, Lilli Lehmann, the De Reszkes, Melba, Caruso, Farrar and Chaliapin graced the stage, and Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini ruled...
...liabilities Bing faces are nonetheless formidable. Probably the biggest of them are the Met's two warehouses and their contents: tons & tons of out-of-date scenery. Another is the unmanageable old house itself, with its grimy brick face staring stolidly out on Broadway. Designed in 1880 by a college (Yale, Williams) architect named J. Cleaveland Cady, who had never seen any of the world's great opera houses, nor so much as a single opera performance, the building is a nearly insuperable drawback. There is no backstage storage space for scenery; to haul a big opera...
...owner of the bookstore, who added a concert bureau on the side, soon transferred the artistically inclined Rudi to that branch of his business. Bing found he "loved selling," could sometimes let his enterprising imagination run wild. Once he billed a faltering troupe of dancers as "Dancers of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy," had to give extra performances to accommodate the crowds. Among the agency's clients were Soprano Lotte Lehmann, Conductor Fritz Busch, a young violinist named Eugene Ormandy, and a troupe of Russian dancers which included Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya, who later shortened her name to Mrs. Rudolf Bing...