Happy birthday Edith Head
The legendary costume designer for film was born October 28, 1897 in Searchlight, Nevada. Miss Head dressed practically everyone in Hollywood, including Helen Traubel, seen after the jump in an outtake from the 1961 comedy The Ladies’ Man.
Bing was also making a point to Solti that conductors didn’t get to overrule him on casting (Solti wanted Claire Watson, while Bing knew that he owed Amara a new production in return for her loyal service). Backing down would have set a precedent that other guest conductors would have pounced on.
figaroindy, I think I may be able to guess who your teacher was! I was a music grad student there through the 1970s, and knew a number of Harshaw and Farrell students.
I hoped someone would mention Traubel’s favored designer, Adrian. Most of the posed photos of her in Wagnerian roles show his handiwork. He of course also contributed glamorous threads to projects from that camp classic The Women (he really kind of did go off the deep end there) to the original Broadway production of Camelot.
(Because I see that my last paragraph looks ambiguous:) I meant that I was hoping someone would mention Adrian, and was pleased to see that somebody DID.
“Traubel had also behaved in a way that offended Bing’s acute sense of decorum.”
Did you mean “a cute sense of decorum”? I mean Bing’s habitually sucking off the ushers might have offended the truly acute sense of some.
“And he must have had knipshins when Steber sang at the baths.”
Why? That was long after Bing had banished her from the Met.
Bing seems to have likes singers who were dependable, disciplined, played by the rules and and didn’t make the brutally difficult job of running an opera house any worse than it is already.
Melchior and Traubel were seriously undisciplined. They refused to rehearse, and in Traubel’s book St. Louis Woman she delights in telling stories of extremely unprofessional behavior they engaged in during performances. Bing had been brought to the MET at the end of the Edward Johnson regime specifically to be a much-needed new broom and it was a job from which he did not shrink.
He claims in one of his books that he really admired Callas. I think she could have eventually had anything she wanted but she arrived at the MET at a time when things were beginning to come apart for her. She was opting out of Macbeth engagements and becoming very difficult to deal with. She was gone before she ever really got established. On the other hand, Nilsson rarely canceled, Gabriella Tucci was a rock of dependability–both got a lot of things because he could count on them.
He stood by Rysanek during a major vocal crisis because he believed in her and because she gave everything she had when performing. Their joint reward was when she got it together and became one of the most astonishing singers of the second half of the 20th century. Bing liked that. And there were a lot of singers who liked Bing. Nilsson knew–in one interview she said that there were a lot of people who complained bitterly about Bing but that they’d come to miss him very much when he was gone. And boy–did they!
Very well said, Will. And of course Bing and Stratas got along very well, she being one of the few to visit him during his sad final years.
Quite possible, Orlando – Farrell wasn’t at IU long, just 9 years…not too many students. My teacher isn’t a “household name” though…..
If I knew how to contact off-blog, I’d say guess, and I’ll let you know if you get it right!
Re Bing and Nilsson: he is reported to have said about her, “You put in a lot of money and then a beautiful sound comes out.” A bit ambivalent, I’d say.
Bing’s habitually sucking off the ushers might have offended the truly acute sense of some
Or at the very least chafed.
Bing’s reasoning was that he wanted his singers to give their best to the Met audiences. (Or so he claimed, anyway.) He felt that a singer doing other appearances in between Met performances would impair those performances. Remember that this was the time of live TV when opera was a more common occurrence on the home screens. He didn’t want Traubel or anyone going on TV the night before singing at the Met. He also wanted some exclusivity for the Met. If you want to hear singer XYZ, you’d better come to the Met. That’s why he objected to Robert Merrill’s going to Hollywood. As the 60’s approached, however, the economics changed and rapid transportation allowed singers to give recitals in Philly or Boston and elsewhere in between Met performances. Bing couldn’t sustain that practice any longer. In one of his books he mentions granting permission to Birgit Nilsson to appear on a TV show the night before she was scheduled to sing her first Senta at the Met. The result was that Nilsson was on TV but then cancelled her scheduled Met performance. We never heard her Senta.
Regardless of how accurate all this may be, Bing did take total personal responsibility for what went on the Met stage. Agree or not with him, he tried to do what he thought was the best for the Met. I give him more credit for this than I did years ago because now I don’t see anyone taking responsibility for goes on at the Met. Who in his or her right mind consider reviving Turandot and Norma with Guleghina? Even if Guleghina had said that she would not sing at the Met ever again unless she was given those roles, the Met should have said, sorry, but no. Guelfi as Amonasro?
When a production failed (e.g., Carmen), Bing took responsibility for it. When a conductor proved unacceptable (e.g., Amaducci), he took responsibility for it. He did not point fingers at others, nor did he blame the audience for its conservative taste.
Re Bing -
According to his first autobiography, Bing retained Traubel because he had to avoid making it seem he was pushing an American out to make a place for Flagstad. It’s hard to imagine now, but Bing was bitterly attacked for hiring Flagstad (due to husband’s collaboration with the Quislings). There’s a quote in his bio that Billy Rose (a major B’way producer of the time) suggested in print, that after Flagstad, Bing was going to hire the Nazi monster who made lampshades of human skin to be in charge of wardrobe at the Met.
From his second auto-biography, he eventually came to be on very good terms with Callas – their correspondence was very friendly when he was trying to get her back at the Met in a double bill: Poulenc’s La voix humaine and as an actress in Richard’s Strauss Joseph Legend ballet, opposite Nureyev. He admitted it would be a short evening but that getting Callas twice, once opposite Nureyev, should be enough for the public.
I understand Roberta Peters also visited him several times during his last years.
Bing had plans to hire Furtwangler – once the board turned him down; the second time they approved, but Furtwangler died before he could come. His Nazi associations had been behind the boards objections. Bing’s objections to those who felt were Nazi collaborators delayed the debuts of Gottlob Frick and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
Tenor:
Bing may have objected to Merrill going to Hollywood, but the reason he was fired is that he broke a contractual agreement to sing in Don Carlo on the Met tour in order to make “Aaron Slick from Pumpkin Crick” [No! I am not making that up!] His firing was a warning shot across the bow of all Met singers that the days of “Good old Eddie” [Johnson] were over.
messa di voce–thanks for the kind comment.
Tenoredigrazia–yes, indeed.
““And he must have had knipshins when Steber sang at the baths.”
Why? That was long after Bing had banished her from the Met.”
True, but also by the time Steber did her gig at the Baths (1973) Bing was also retired from the Met.
Bing mellowed to the point of appearing in a non singing role in the NYCO production of Henze’s The Young Lord in the mid 70s.
Talking of Melchior and Traubel at Edward Johnson’s Met and lax atmosphere, does anyone know if they even did full dress rehearsals
of operas that were in every season’s repertory?
I don’t know, I’m not saying it’s the case but I got the impression that , say Tristan would have only piano rehearsals as it was done season in, season out and the singers rotated anyway quite a bit.
A major revival would be another matter. Particularly the very rare new productions.
Does anyone know to what extent operas were reheared in the Johnson years?
As I mentioned, Kolodin’s History of the MEtropolitan Opera has hundreds of pages of intense detail. And from the 1930s on, much of the performance commentary is first hand from Kolodin himself. (He mentions that a period in the early 40s had limited coverage because he was in active service)