Word: binges
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...opening night, smiling benevolently and dutifully playing host, was the wisp of a man who has led the cast of thousands to the Met's auspicious debut: General Manager Rudolf Franz Josef Bing. If he was looking more gaunt than usual, it was only understandable. "We," he said wistfully, "have been pregnant for so long...
...christen the offspring, Bing had scheduled the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. Never was a musical event launched in such a tide of pageantry and publicity...
...Schippers, who grew so annoyed that at last he leaned forward, tapped Bing on the shoulder and said: "Please, Mr. Bing, I wish you'd stop it-you're making me nervous, and besides, you've got it all wrong...
Gesamtkunstwerk. Fortunately for the Met, and for the state of opera everywhere, there is very little else that Rudolph Bing has got wrong. For 16 years he has stood in the dead center of a musical vortex and managed to conduct both himself and opera with admirable skill. Dragging opera by the scruff of the neck into modern times, demanding improvements in production techniques and performance quality, Bing has helped the art to achieve the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, the amalgamation of drama, singing, acting and dancing into total theater...
...necessarily signify a blossoming of new works for the operatic stage, the few Barbers and Brittens notwithstanding. Few composers today find much encouragement to write opera. Some feel that the Met is not providing the impetus that it should in this direction, but that is one subject on which Bing cannot be moved. The Met's job, he says, is like that of a museum, "to put old masterpieces in new frames." He is convinced that opera can survive on its classical foundation without a strong infusion of contemporary music and subject matter...