Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ever since Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera put up its surprise closing notice, ideas on how to save the Met, and how to improve it, had popped up with the frequency of horn cues in a Wagner opera...
...Angeles, Lauritz Melchior announced with a Heldentenor's roar that he would put on opera if the Met wouldn't. Said he: "It's a scandal, a disaster. The eyes of the world are turned to America and the greatest country in the world cannot even have an opera house! It looks as if we're only interested in jazz and crooning and all the semi-things...
Another Lunch. Melchior was not the only one prepared to rescue grand opera. In Manhattan, bustling little Showman Billy Rose, who jazzed-up Bizet in Carmen Jones, got front-page publicity with a proposal that wasn't as bumptious as it at first sounded. Five years ago, Billy had lunched with some Met board members, and made what Board Chairman George A. Sloan now gingerly refers to as "a number of helpful observations which were conveyed to our . . . management." Now Billy was again ready to be the Met's little helper...
...been in trouble before, but it had usually found a way out, even during the depression. The late opera-loving Banker Otto H. Kahn, longtime board chairman, used to shake his white head at the losses, say "That's all right, that's all right," and dash off six-figure checks. The U.S. public, when asked, had also rushed to the rescue; once when it was asked to donate $1,000,000 to buy the Met's building, it oversubscribed by $57,000. Yet when opera lovers last week suggested raising a fund to "save...
...Without opera, management could easily rent the hall to ballets, concerts and rallies every night of the season. Thus only the Met's employees-and the operagoing public-really stood to lose by the shutdown. The unions were sure the Met was out to get them. Obviously stunned by the shutdown, they met together this week to see whether, by modifying their demands, they could change the board's mind. If they did, the Met might yet open this fall, possibly several weeks late. But the board expressed no such hope: it promised only to "consider ways & means...