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.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/YIFXQisEIwY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
La,
My post was based almost completely on information from Irving Kolodin’s History of the Metropolitan Opera including not only the events themselves that I described but also Koldin’s descriptions of Bing’s motivations and comments. Admittedly Kolodin had an agenda with Bing but he was also evidently very well connected with the inner workings of the Met during the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
One way or another he seemed to have very extensive sources .
His recounting of Bing’s comments (complete with Kolodin’s description of Bing’s Austrian accent) of the difficult negotions with Arthur Goldberg’s mediation efforts in the Met strike during 1961-62 are very vivid and Kolodin makes a point of how Bing resented the US governments intervention into the Met’s labor dispute.
What can I say but that his comments mesh with my own take on Bing’s rather haughty, icy
personna. I think you get a fairly clear reading on this is from Bing’s own autobiography. And I had some limited contact with the man during his last few seasons as GM of the Met.
Really the only potion of my rather long post was my own conjecture of what Bing was thinking when he aliented Varnay ; considering that she was the only
top tier Wagnerian soprano associated with the Met by the mid 50s.
For the record I don’t think Bing was acting ONLY out of spite with Traubel. She WAS a symbol of the discipline problem , and as I noted, by 1953, although the rest of her voice still sounding astonishingly beautiful, anything higher than A was gone. (The Siegfried broadcast from 1951 shows this, most of her voice was still very fresh, steady, and beautiful but all the high notes are little flat squawks.)
There wasn’t much rep that Traubel could do by
1953 so Bing could have felt she was a good sacrifice trade off wise.
Give a hand to Ms Head. Or maybe vice versa.
I think one has to look closely at Bing’s biography to understand his perspective; he was brought to the Met after running Glyndebourne, which was noted for it’s stringent rehearsals under Busch and Ebert, obviously he was going to bring that work ethic there. His distaste for Wagner was well-known, although it may have been more cultural than artistic in it’s roots. Having escaped the Holocaust, he was hardly going to respond warmly to the idea heavy Wagner seasons in an era when Furtwangler and Karajan and Gieseking were shunned in the United States. No matter what his feelings on the matter were privately, it wouldn’t have been good business sense in the extremely xenophobic 1950′s to continue with the program planning he had inherited. One also has to remember that Bing’s mentor, Fritz Busch was heavily involved in the Verdi revival of the 1920s and 30′s. It’s not an accident that he began with a new production of Don Carlo.
One can easily argue over Bing’s mistakes, but he did bring a viewpoint of considerable strength to the organization. I doubt that he would have considered releasing Traubel a mistake, any more than ending contracts with Jane Eaglen was a mistake when she had outlived her usefulness.
I’m not trying to be snarky by asking this (although everything I type seems to be snarky), but why would Bing frown on Traubel singing in nightclubs, but not at Eileen Farrell recording jazz?
And he must have had knipshins when Steber sang at the baths.
hilarious post, La C—and I’m always happy to see a discussion of Traubel hereabouts. But the designer most closely identified with her was really Adrian. She famously hired him to do all of her Met wardrobe at the beginning of her tenure as reigning dramatic soprano in the early 40′s. The costumes themselves were striking—she was always carefully draped, and I remember seeing a story someplace about his workroom at MGM, where you could see the mannequins for Shirley Temple and Helen Traubel standing next to each other! Perhaps her using Adrian can be taken as another example of managerial laxity in the Johnson era. Do sopranos still travel with their own wardrobe, wearing it onstage in preference to what was designed for the role?
About the clip—my reading of it is that La Traubel was on the edge of losing patience with her director. He’s into clowning around, she seems to be all business, and is definitely NOT into discussing opera, or her possible return to it.
Here is the 1953 broadcast of Traubel’s Isolde:
http://rapidshare.com/files/187706903/Tristan_und_Isolde—Stiedry-MET—Svanholm-Traubel—1953.zip
It is really worth hearing – Svanholm and Hotter are fantastic and Traubel sounds beautiful, but she skirts every single high note. It’s actually kind of funny to hear, but this would be the real reason not to renew a contract. Even popular and sounding beautiful, Wagnerites tend to prefer their music come scritto…
Here’s something that turned up on Youtube awhile ago—the only video I’m aware of of Traubel singing Wagner. The provenance is unknown—if anyone has a clue I’d be delighted to know. Orchestra and conductor are uncredited, and it looks like it must have been sweltering under the lights, because it’s totally unflattering, but her smile at the end is terrific—she nailed it and she knows it.
uh oh la cieca’s gonna bitch slap you for posting rapidshare links on here
So right Harry. Painful to compare today’s Wagner singers with Flagstad and Melchior. Utterly different world. Today we have pipsqueaks who have to strain their wee little voices to do Wagner. Behrens was much praised in Wagner roles but in reality she was very underpowered. Eaglen had a big voice for a while until she blew it out. In any case I never heard her hit a top note on the button; always a bit off. Nilsson was okay but not equal to Flagstad.