Word: binge
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...