Word: binges
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With that, Rudolf Bing, general manager-designate of the Metropolitan Opera, strode off the Queen Elizabeth and into operatic history. The remarkable thing about Bing during the two decades that followed was that he rarely gave evasive answers-at least to the press. "Reporters found me what is called good copy," he recalls. He never evaded a fight either-whether with prima donnas or temperamental conductors. When last winter, during his final season at the Met, it was announced that he had written his memoirs, the general reaction was "of course." Bing liked to have the last word, and with...
...result, 5,000 Nights at the Opera (Doubleday; $10), is a good book that should have been better. Indulging in the perennial prerogative of the autobiographer, Bing opts mostly for one side of the story-his. He says nothing of his glaring failure to bring Soprano Beverly Sills to the Met, for example, but grows highly petulant because she and the New York City Opera scheduled Donizetti's Tudor trilogy (Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, Roberto Devereux) at the same time he was planning it at the Met for the Spanish prima donna Montserrat Caballé. "We finally accepted...
However tart his tongue and whatever his shortcomings, Bing unquestionably saved the Met itself from near-collapse. What he found in 1950 "was much worse than I had expected, in every way," says Bing. By the time he was through, he had set a managerial record virtually unparalleled in opera annals. He boosted ticket sales to 97% of capacity (before they dropped to 85% in the last four years), came up with new productions of 80 operas, put the company on a year-round basis, and found it a badly needed new home in Lincoln Center...
...this was in spite of various glaring differences with his board of directors, whom Bing does not spare in his book. Of George Moore, for example, Met president and former board chairman of the Manhattan-based First National City Bank, Bing writes: "Moore could not believe there is a basic, unbridgeable difference between a theater and a bank or a rug factory." But, as Bing readily concedes, Moore time and again came up with money the Met badly needed...
...could Bing get on with union negotiators. "There is no question that my style and personality are not right for the American labor movement. They don't feel comfortable with me, and to tell the truth, I don't feel comfortable with them." Once during a tense session with the stagehands, Bing leaned forward over the table and said, "I'm awfully sorry, I didn't get that. Would you mind screaming it again...