The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera - Softcover

Volpe, Joseph; Michener, Charles

 
9781400096756: The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1400096758 ISBN 13: 9781400096756
Verlag: Vintage, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The Toughest Show on Earth is the ultimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the divas and the dramas of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, by the remarkable man who rose from apprentice carpenter to general manager.

Joseph Volpe gives us an anecdote-filled tour of more than four decades at the Met, an institution full of vast egos and complicated politics. With stunning candor, he writes about the general managers he worked under, his embattled rise to the top, the maneuverings of the blue-chip board, and his masterful approach to making a family of such artist-stars as Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Teresa Stratas, and Renee Fleming, and such visionary directors as Franco Zeffirelli, Robert Wilson, and Julie Taymor. Intimate and frank, The Toughest Show on Earth is not only essential for music lovers, but for anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of the culture business.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Volpe was born in Brooklyn. He joined the Metropolitan Opera in 1964 and was its general manager for sixteen years. He lives in New York City with his wife, the former ballet dancer Jean Anderson Volpe, and their daughter.

Charles Michener was senior editor for cultural affairs at Newsweek and senior editor at The New Yorker and has written widely on music for many publications. He collaborated with Robert Evans on The Kid Stays in the Picture and was coauthor with Peter Duchin of Ghost of a Chance. He lives in New York.

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1

“BE PATIENT”

My maternal grandmother, Marianna Cavallaro, spoke no English, and whenever she came to babysit for me and my sisters while our parents were out, she’d go over to a shelf in the living room, take down a record album, and say to me in Italian, “Joey, put this on.”

I was only five or six, and carrying the bulky volume of 78s over to the Victrola wasn’t easy. But I liked climbing up on a stool, removing a shiny black disc from its sleeve, hearing it plop into place, and then positioning the needle in the groove. My grandmother always sat in the same place—an armchair with a straight back that made it impossible to slouch. She wanted me to sit nearby on the sofa, perfectly still. But I hated sitting still. Once the music started and my grandmother closed her eyes, I slid down to the floor, leaned against the sofa, and imagined myself somewhere else.

The music was always the same—Mascagni’s one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana, which is set in a Sicilian village like the one from which my grandmother had come to America, not long after the opera was written, at the turn of the century. Nobody told me that this was “opera.” Even if anyone had, I wouldn’t have paid attention. This music belonged to my grandmother. It made her happy. She always insisted on listening to the whole album—there were perhaps eight or ten discs—and she never fell asleep. I guess she picked that particular chair so she wouldn’t miss a note.

I couldn’t fall asleep either. Before I knew it, the needle had reached the center of the disc, the loud, scratchy voices had stopped, and my grandmother was saying quietly in Italian, “Change the record, Joey.”

Looking back, I find it interesting that my grandmother never asked my older sister, Joan, to participate in those musical séances—this was a job only for me. Was she sending me a message? Was this how it all began?


The thought that I could one day run The Metropolitan Opera first crossed my mind when Rudolf Bing retired as general manager in 1972. At the time, I was still only master carpenter, in charge of the seventy or eighty men who set up and dismantled The Met’s stage for every performance. I’d wrestled with budgets. I’d demonstrated a knack for learning quickly on the job. I was good at solving problems and handling emergencies. I felt I knew better than anyone how The Met worked, mechanically and logistically.

The Met is the biggest performing arts institution in the world. Every year it presents some 240 performances of thirty or so different operas, each with an international cast and elaborate sets. It employs more than two thousand people and has annual operating expenses of more than $220 million. To keep it going requires not just the muscle and the know-how of carpenters, stagehands, painters, designers, electricians, and prop men, but also the skills of musicians, singers, vocal coaches, dancers, ballet masters, stage directors, conductors, artistic administrators, marketing and publicity people, and the efforts of The Met’s board of directors, which raises the funds to pay for what the box office doesn’t. In 1972, I didn’t really understand how many of those jobs were done. Nor did I have the slightest idea how Rudolf Bing had managed to coordinate everyone during the two decades he’d been in charge.

Still, I thought that the top job at The Met—which means the top job in the opera world—was not out of reach. I felt that in some mysterious sense I’d been chosen by Rudolf Bing himself. Not that he ever hinted as much. He was too much the aristocrat, out of a Viennese operetta. But on more than one occasion, he’d taken me aside to offer advice in a way that suggested he had bigger things in mind for me.

One of our earliest encounters took place at the end of my first season as master carpenter. In those days, The Met went on an eight-week tour every spring. Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, Memphis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Detroit—for years the company had been playing to packed houses beyond the Hudson River. That year, we opened with La Gioconda in Atlanta. The stars were the soprano Renata Tebaldi and the tenor Franco Corelli. After the performance, Mr. Bing came backstage and said, “Mr. Volpe, I’d like to see you in the morning.”

The next morning, he led me into one of the principals’ dressing rooms and closed the door. “Mr. Volpe,” he said, “I think you’re doing a wonderful job. I’m going to give you a raise of fifty dollars a week.” That came as a huge relief, but then he said, “So how did Mr. Corelli do last night?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“How was his behavior backstage?”

Before a performance, Franco Corelli was always a wreck, complaining that his girdle was too tight or fighting with his wife, Loretta, who never left his side until he was able to summon the courage to make his entrance. “You didn’t notice?” Mr. Bing went on. “Franco Corelli, one of the most important tenors in the world, and you didn’t notice?”

“I guess I was too busy with the scenery.”

“Well,” Mr. Bing said, “the next time I ask you about Mr. Corelli’s behavior, you will have noticed!”


Rudolf Bing had his finger on the pulse of The Met. His retirement, after the 1971–1972 season, gave way to twenty years of turbulence. First came the death of his successor, Goeran Gentele, in a car crash in Sardinia. This was followed by a brief, rudderless period under Gentele’s assistant, Schuyler Chapin. Next came the stormy triumvirate of John Dexter, the brilliant head of production; James Levine, the boy-wonder music director; and Anthony Bliss, a patrician estate lawyer who ran The Met out of a sense of family duty. Those years were marred by backstage intrigue, financial instability, and bitter fights with The Met’s seventeen unions, culminating in the cancellation of the 1980 fall season—a labor lockout ordered by The Met’s imperious board. The brief reign of Levine as artistic director and of Bruce Crawford, a smooth, opera-loving advertising executive, as general manager, began in 1985. Bruce became something of a godfather to me. I admired his velvet manner, but it wasn’t a style I would emulate.

Along the way, I’d been promoted from master carpenter to technical director to operations director (responsible for backstage budgets and labor negotiations) to assistant manager (in charge of everything except artistic matters and fund-raising). None of these advancements came without an objection from someone higher up; in each case, I had to swallow my pride. But I had been at the center of everything—watching, learning, and not keeping my mouth shut. In 1988, Crawford decided to return to Madison Avenue. I felt that I was his logical successor. Instead, The Met’s board chose an arts bureaucrat named Hugh Southern whose only qualifications for running the company seemed to be that he’d never seen the front office of a great opera house—but he sported an English accent, courtesy of Cambridge University. Those qualifications turned out to be not quite enough. Southern was dismissed after seven months.

In the summer of 1990, Crawford, who was now the chairman of The Met’s executive committee, came into my office to tell me that I was being promoted to “general...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400096758
ISBN 13 
9781400096756
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
EDITIONS GALLIMARD
ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it

Via Verdi, 8.
Assago Milano
20090
Italien

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