Word: binges
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...long as opera fans are willing to hear Carmen 100 times over and not tire of the same old rose clamped in the same old teeth, Bing's reasoning is hard to fault. At least he seems to think so, and the splashy new Met monument in Lincoln Center provides dramatic supporting evidence. The swipes from his critics, the tantrums of his singers, the sour notes from his musicians, all fail to stir even a hemidemisemiquaver of irritation in his aplomb. Among the scores of appropriate quotations from operas that he uses for punctuation, Rudolf Bing likes best...
...after threatening to go on strike after opening night, agreed on a new contract between the acts). Tickets, dispensed by a "secret" committee at a top of $250 each, were sold out months ago, leaving a waiting list of more than 16,000 seat seekers fuming in vain. Said Bing: "Never have so many been insulted...
...third that the music itself overwhelmed the stage dazzles. There alone did Barber's vocal writing transform itself into genuine opera. And so what the Met had to offer on its first night in its new quarters was a musical extravaganza-which is precisely what Rudolf Bing had had in mind as a bauble fit to set in his shiny showcase...
...Giovanni, and the guile of a Mephistopheles. For Rudolf Bing, it's all in a day's work. At 64, he is the undisputed lord of the manor, and he looks it. Though in physique (6 ft., 139 Ibs.) he resembles a patrician heron stuffed into herringbone, there is an impeccably correct bearing about him that says "Beware: regal and remote." His face and grey-fringed dome, all right-angle turns, are a study in parchment over steel. A Vienna-born English subject, he could easily pass as the British ambassador to Paris-a job that he wouldn...
...weeks preceding the debut of Antony and Cleopatra, Bing worked a 16-hour day instead of his usual 14. He usually started his days with an assault on a pyramid of mail, meanwhile giving orders over his intercom system and fielding rapid-fire phone calls: "Hello. Yes. No. Tomorrow. Fine. Goodbye." Then, dictating memos over his shoulder, he would go off on his rounds, turning up onstage to admonish a stagehand ("Don't smoke on our stage, please"), switching off the lights in sub-basement storage rooms, climbing into the uppermost rafters to check on a special staging effect...