Word: blisse
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Despite his background of Groton, Harvard and Wall Street, Bliss, 69, almost grew up in the opera house. His father, Cornelius Newton Bliss, was the president of a textile firm. He owned a box in the grand tier, the so-called Diamond Horseshoe, of the old Metropolitan Opera House, and he was chairman of the board from 1938 to 1946. Anthony attended his first performance when he was six, hearing Enrico Caruso in I Pagliacci, and when his father died in 1949, he was automatically offered a seat on the governing board. "I was aware of the kind of problems...
...house at Broadway and 39th Street, which was built in 1883, was outmoded, and Bliss became a chief proponent of a move to a new structure in Lincoln Center. He won his argument, and the company journeyed north in 1966. But following a feud with Rudolf Bing, the Met's impresario from 1950 to 1972, he was pushed aside as board president. When Bing's successor, Schuyler Chapin, failed to curb the escalating deficits, Bliss was brought in as a salaried executive to put the house in order...
Once a week Bliss meets with his chief assistants, a quartet his secretary calls the "four Js: Joan, Joe, John and Jimmy." With their surnames attached they are known as Joan Ingpen, the scheduling wizard; Joseph Volpe, overseer of backstage activities; John Dexter, the production adviser; and James Levine. That weekly meeting enables Bliss to get the view from all four sides of the big house. "Sometimes," he observes, "an artistic decision will create a technical problem or a box office or funding problem. When you choose a new production, you also have to ask the question: Is this...
...Although Bliss has ultimate power, he has deliberately assigned creative authority to Levine and the rest of the quartet. "Basically," he says, "I don't consider myself qualified to make musical or even artistic decisions. I exercise veto power only very seldom and with great reluctance. I don't think a traditional impresario could function any longer in this job. There is not enough time to do everything. Levine tells me what he wants, and I may have to go back to him and say, 'We can't afford to use so-and-so because everything...
Indeed, critics complain that Bliss has imposed too strong a corporate style on the Met, and that his remoteness from the musicians was a factor in the labor dispute that shut down the company for eleven weeks in 1980. The charge obviously wounds him, and he takes pains to deny it. "The house is so big," he says, "that it doesn't lend itself to a family feeling. But I think we perhaps misjudged the extent of feelings. For months I didn't sleep at night. I would wake up and think, 'What did I do wrong...