Ars et Labor: 3. The Met, 1980

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Now that the Metropolitan has reached agreements with the last of the union hold-outs, and that the 2014-15 season is scheduled to open on September 22 as originally announced, opera fans all over the world can breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to a year of six new productions, including three Met premieres, and ten “Live In HD” afternoons between this October and next April. 

We conclude our survey of damaging disputes between management and labor with this post on the delayed season of 1980-81. In the news that summer, just as in this summer, were angry talks between the Met and the orchestra. As management increased its offer, the sticking point remained the maximum number of performances to which the musicians were obliged each week. And here neither side would budge. The players asserted that the demands on them were so heavy that too many suffered either physically or psychologically or both. Negotiations were declared failed on the September 2 deadline and rehearsals were suspended. Opening night was canceled. To the subsequent threat of junking the entire season, the union responded, “It’s the classic story of the boy who cried wolf” (Times, Sept. 24). This was, after all, the third time in five years that management had issued the same ultimatum. But the Met was not bluffing. On September 30, the season was canceled. The players found themselves caught between wealthy patrons who held that instrumentalists were overpaid as it was for fewer than sixteen hours of work per week, and stagehands who considered the musicians spoiled by the cushy terms of their employment, particularly as contrasted with their own. The administration feared that a prolonged delay or, worse, the cancelation of the season, would result in the same loss of subscriptions that had followed on the 1969 postponement. Eleven years later, the 16 percent drop had not been fully recovered. Talks resumed in early October at the urging of President Jimmy Carter. At this point, Joseph Volpe, then director of operations, entered the labor fray. Volpe was instrumental in brokering the four-year deal that included hiring subs for the uncovered services, a frugal solution acceptable to all.

The three-month delay had significant musical as well as fiscal consequences. Of the four projected new productions, La Traviata and Parade were heard once the labor dispute was resolved, and Così fan tutte postponed for a year. The fourth, The Queen of Spades, was scrapped. It was to star Plácido Domingo and Anna Tomowa-Sintow. Not until 1995 did Tchaikovsky’s opera receive a new investiture. Four years later, Domingo took on the role of Gherman. But New York never heard Tomowa-Sintow as Lisa. The versatile Bulgarian soprano excelled at the Met between 1978 and 1993 in Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Mozart, and Strauss, alas in only sixty-two marvelously vocalized performances. Her affinity for Tchaikovsky is evident in this concert rendering of the second part of Tatiana’s Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin; Kurt Masur conducts the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester. 

The highly anticipated opening night revival of Turandot also fell victim to the truncated season. It was to feature Montserrat Caballé and Luciano Pavarotti in an opera new to them both with the company. At the time, Caballé and Pavarotti stood on the highest rung of world operatic stardom. The soprano was taking on a role associated with the stentorian Birgit Nilsson, the tenor with the clarion Franco Corelli. As documented in a 1977 San Francisco production, Caballé and Pavarotti fearlessly expend splendid fortissimo high notes for the heroic phrases of Turandot and Calaf. They also apply supple lyrical phrasing to the repeated musical patterns of the Act II riddle scene. The opportunity of opening night 1980 lost, Caballé was never to sing the imperious Chinese princess with the Met. Pavarotti took on the Unknown Prince in 1997, late in his career, long after “Nessun dorma” had become his signature anthem. 

Ars et Labor: 1. The Met, 1906-1966

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The impending lock-out at Peter Gelb's Met has been covered extensively in the press in past weeks. And Friday, August 1, should bring either the happy news that the season has been saved, or the drastic report of its cancellation, at best its delay. This is not the first time the company has faced the gloomy prospect of a dark house. But despite the repeated threats of lock-outs and strikes that pepper the Met’s history, never in one hundred and thirty-one years has an entire season been cancelled for reasons of discord between management and labor, and only twice, in 1969 and 1980, did the curtain fail to rise on the appointed date.

It all began in 1906. The company was still young when the disgruntled choristers walked out for three days, demanding a hike in pay from $15 to $25 weekly, shorter hours, and sleeping car rather than coach accommodations on overnight travel.

The Great Depression brought hard times to the company and to its embattled general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. By January 1933, unions that had rejected pay cuts the year before saw no alternative but to submit to the reality that the Met might well go the way of the bankrupt Chicago Civic Opera that had shut down in 1932. (The recent demise of the New York City Opera inevitably comes to mind.) In the mid-1940s, with the approaching end of World War II, the Metropolitan was subject to the labor unrest that rocked the U.S. economy. The increasing strength of the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) in its negotiations with the Metropolitan management, in part the result of the dramatic rise in the number of American singers on the roster (the subject of our last several posts), produced a contract with this protectionist clause: that for every alien engaged, three Americans would be hired. In late summer 1947, a dispute with AGMA over the size of the chorus was finally settled. The 1948-49 season was declared in doubt by general manager Edward Johnson. Ploy or not, in August of that year the Met announced its cancellation. Three weeks later an accord was reached. Johnson’s successor, the imperious Rudolf Bing, and the then ten or so Met locals, not to mention AGMA, would soon be at sword’s point. In 1954, there was a stagehand wildcat strike that disrupted no performance. It did, however, cause a moment of alarm when the general manager, stationed at the ropes in place of a striker during the dress rehearsal of Norma, nearly dropped the heavy curtain on Zinka Milanov’s head. The shadow of cancelation loomed again in 1956.  But the most dramatic episodes in this ongoing narrative occurred in 1961, and then in 1966 as the company was preparing for its Lincoln Center inaugural.

In was late summer 1961, and Bing had dug in his heels. As labor moderated its demands, he grew more intransigent, claiming that his principal artists had been released, had in fact made other commitments, and that nothing other than an unsatisfactorily “late and patched-up season” could at this point be assured. In light of the company’s precarious finances, public opinion was initially opposed to the musicians; it now turned against management. Ostensibly moved by a plea from Risë Stevens, President John F. Kennedy intervened. Speculation went that following a spring and summer of Freedom Riders on busses through the South and student sit-ins across the country, Kennedy was eager to save Leontyne Price’s opening night La Fanciulla del West. He ordered Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate the dispute, a step AGMA welcomed and Bing dismissed with a characteristic wave of the hand. A Times editorial spoke for the greater good: “Surely, with the musicians continuing to be conciliatory, the management cannot be allowed to flout public wishes so high-handedly.” It concluded, pointing directly at Bing, “Better a late and patched-up season than no season at all.” Goldberg reached an agreement with the management that proved unsatisfactory to the musicians. They would not soon forget what they experienced as Goldberg’s betrayal. In 1966, the orchestra would leverage its bitterness at what for Bing was the worst possible moment. As he struggled to open the new house at Lincoln Center, the threat of a strike hung over already daunting challenges.

The joy of opening night in the new house was dampened by worry over the strike called for the next day. The cloud that hovered over the gala evening of September 16 was lifted during the second intermission of the world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra when Bing took the stage to announce that a deal was in place at last, the strike had been averted. This real-life coup de théâtre was met with the longest ovation of the evening.

Leontyne Price was the centerpiece of the near miss in 1966 as she had been five years earlier. The 1961 Fanciulla del West came just months after her triumphant debut in Il Trovatore. Fanciulla, which had its world premiere at the Met in 1910, had not been heard on 39^th Street in thirty years. High anticipation was rewarded with critical and public acclaim. Then, during the second performance of the run, Price lost her voice, had to speak the end of act II, and was replaced by Dorothy Kirsten in Act III. By the end of the 1961-62 season, she had returned to peak form. Price sang only three more Fanciulla’s in her long Met career, all of them in that year, none of them broadcast. In 1975, she recorded this excerpt from act I of Fanciulla. Known primarily as a Verdian, Price shows affinity for Puccini’s conversational passages: Minnie recalls her childhood, the tavern where her father dealt cards and her mother was cook and bar keep. At the climax, the character evokes her parents’ great love, and her wish to find one like it for herself; here the soprano takes wing, soaring up to her glorious high C.

Samuel Barber, the composer of Antony and Cleopatra, wrote the music of the Egyptian queen for Price, his friend and a favored interpreter of his songs. The first-night audience at the Met in 1966 was disappointed by the opera as a whole, but was rewarded with a smashing final scene that exercised the prima donna’s best qualities, her strength, her creamy timbre, her ease at the top of the range. Here she sings Cleopatra’s death scene in studio recording.

The next OperaPost will be centered on the delayed Met season of 1969, and the one after that on the truncated season of 1980.