Word: binged
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...Better check the knees first." (Titters.) Now he is off to one of the rehearsal rooms to tend to a soprano who is feeling neglected. "It's freezing in here," she shivers. (Singers hate air conditioning more than they hate other singers.) Ignoring the air-conditioning controls, Bing ceremoniously goes to the wall and turns the knob for the intercom system. "There," he purrs in his caramel-soft Viennese-British accent, "is that better?" "Yes," she says. "It is much warmer now." (Warm smile...
...Chewing. This is the kind of virtuoso performance that Met regulars have come to know as the Bing style: a disarming combination of urbanity and no-nonsense determination, wit and steely single-mindedness. In opera, where people chew on each other's egos like lozenges, Bing's cool cools all. "I really enjoy dealing with difficult people," he says. "I just make them believe they really want to do what I want them to do." Or else...
...When Bing took over the Met in 1950, there were all kinds of toes waiting to be stepped on-and he did not miss many. His predecessor, an easygoing ex-tenor named Edward Johnson, had run a tidy if not altogether harmonious house where the terrible-tempered diva and the haughty, naughty tenor reigned supreme. Bing started with a bang by firing 39 singers and several musicians, including his cousin, Conductor Paul Breisach, as well as aging Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, whose variations on the score had been the bane of Met conductors for years. Amid the howls of "Adolf Bing...
...protect the prestige of the Met name, Bing dropped Soprano Helen Traubel for "singing in smoky nightclubs" and Baritone Robert Merrill for taking leave to make a class-C movie, Aaron Slick from Punkin Crik (Merrill was reinstated a year later after making a public apology: "I have learned my lesson"). That lesson was clear: the wiry Mr. Bing was no man to tangle with. One Met dowager, who like most of the oldtimers was eying the new manager with suspicion, had to learn the hard way. "From what I hear," she airily informed him one night...
Shrinking Sopranos. Bing endured handsomely. He swept out tons of tattered old scenery and replaced it with sparkling productions of Don Carlos and Die Fledermaus. An early