Word: casazza
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Fresh off the boat from Italy, gourd-shaped Giulio Gatti-Casazza heads straight for Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. As the newly appointed general manager of the Met, he is eager to have a look at his new home. Mama mia! What he sees is enough to curl his beard. It's bad enough that the exterior looks like a brewery. But the backstage area is so cramped that it can hardly accommodate a P.T.A. pageant. Principal singers, he finds to his horror, have to rehearse in the ladies' powder room; scenery is stacked behind the building...
That was in 1908. Gatti-Casazza stayed on for 27 years, waiting patiently-but his singers never got out of the powder room. Not that the management wasn't serious about that new house. Indeed, the Be-Patient-New-Met's-A-Comin' recitative echoed through the old house more regularly than the Anvil Chorus. At one time or another, sites for a new Met were planned on 49th Street, 57th Street, 59th Street, 63rd Street, 110th Street, Washington Square, on the ground floor of the Seagram Building and underneath the Queensboro Bridge...
Every year Metropolitan Opera General Manager Rudolf Bing, 64, edges closer to the record of Italian-born Maestro Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who ruled the house from 1908 to 1935. Last week Bing and the Met agreed that he should stay on through the 1970 season. That will give him 20 harrowing years...
Cummings asks his audience to cast off cherished preconception so that they can feel the world with his own sardonic intellect and agile senses. "Whenever a stuffed platitude hits you in the exaggerated emphalos," Cummings counsels, "respond with a three-fisted aphorism to the precise casazza." If that advice does not offend you, the Theatre Company of Boston will delight you with its production...
Rudolf Bing, 61, and the Metropolitan renewed his contract as general manager for another four years, giving him 17 seasons at the Met, a tenure second only to that of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the Italian-born maestro who ruled from 1908 to 1935. "I thought it was a big job when I came, and it has grown even bigger," said Bing, looking forward to the Met's 1965 move into sumptuous new quarters in Lincoln Center: "It's going to be beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and acoustically perfect. These next few years are going to be unbelievably busy...