Verdi & the Lady

Not in a decade or more had Manhattan's cavernous Metropolitan Opera House buzzed so busily to get ready for opening night. And not in as many years had so much dust been shaken from Met tradition.

The Met's new general manager, Rudolf Bing, had promised in his first press conference (TIME, Feb. 6) that he was going to try to "adapt [the Met's] policy to changing times." In one of his first swings of the dust mop, Rudi Bing set out to improve "the visual aspect of operatic affairs"--i.e., make Met performances a pleasure to watch as well as to hear.

Henceforth, Bing let it be known, conductors would have to give up their absolute sway over assigned production, work "almost as coequals" with stage designers and stage directors. For the season's opener he picked a work which the Met had not produced in 27 years: Verdi's 24th opera, Don Carlo, a powerful story of conflict between tyranny and freedom, personified in the struggle between King Philip II and his son in 16th Century Spain. Consequence of Bing's choice: the opening-night production would have to be done from scratch; the Met's traditions about Don Carlo had been all but forgotten.

To design brand-new sets and costumes for Don Carlo, Bing hired topnotch Broadway Designer Rolf (Caesar and Cleopatra) Gerard. To direct it, he brought in Margaret Webster, Shakespearean director and actress, the first woman ever given a chance to direct an opera at the Met. Then Rudi Bing plumped designer and director down with able Conductor Fritz Stiedry and bade the three of them work closely together.

"If You Insist." At first, Director Webster had protested her lack of qualifications ("Bing must be mad"). She knew the theater; the daughter of the late English Actors Ben Webster and Dame May Whitty, she had been raised in it. She could also find her way through a score, but so far as she was concerned, she was still an "opera ignoramus." But by last week it seemed to everyone at the Met, from stagehands to stars, that theater-trained Margaret Webster was just what the old place needed.

Bing had offered to send her the libretto "if you insist." But he hoped "you won't go by it." She did not, entirely. She went back to Verdi's original inspiration, Poet Schiller's ringing drama, Don Carlos. Then Director Webster, Conductor Stiedry and Designer Gerard held a planning session "to be sure we all agreed as to what the opera was about."

Home Run in the Tenth. Once they were agreed that Don Carlo's concern is the effect of absolute power on men who wield it, she set about drilling thesis and action into her cast. Once she nabbed the chorus after a rehearsal break during which most had been listening to the World Series. The conflict in the opera, she told them for emotional parallel, is only resolved when the ghost of "Carlos Quinto hits a home run in the tenth" (as DiMaggio had done that afternoon).

Director Webster had hoped to have the whole cast on the stage "for at least three hours, totally mine, in which the conductor does not interfere at all." She never got it. She quickly learned that opera is a compromise between the eye & the ear--and that "the Met's great god is time." Even when Conductor Stiedry was not rushing up from the pit to correct an eighth note, or Designer Gerard was not moving a table or chair, she felt "them" creeping in on her: "The orchestra manager looking at his wrist watch and peering earnestly at me; the chorus master shifting on his feet, surreptitiously looking at his watch; the head stagehand; the chief electrician . . ." She learned to compute the cost of 15 minutes overtime in a flash; it could run into hundreds of dollars. But whenever she felt she had to have overtime drill, Rudi Bing, even though he was starting his first season with the biggest deficit in Met history ($430,502), usually gave it to her.

The Less the Better. By opening night this week, she had led all of the stars--Swedish Tenor Jussi Bjoerling (Don Carlo), new Italian Basso Cesare Siepi

(Philip II), Argentine Soprano Delia Rigal, new Italian Mezzo Fedora Barbieri, and the Americans Jerome Hines (the Grand Inquisitor) and Robert Merrill--through stage movements blocked out long before. She had cut down most of the operatic arm-flailing ("the less acting you do the better"), tried to keep them from staring dead ahead at Conductor Stiedry for the beat. Exhausted Margaret Webster hoped she had succeeded in her effort to "prevent the eye from too grossly contradicting the ear."

A gala white-tie first-night audience let her--and the Met's whole new directorate--know that they had traveled a long way toward that goal. The first-nighters saw & heard a Don Carlo that glowed with the high sheen of months of work and polish. Stunningly if starkly scened in grey and glowingly costumed in El Greco reds, it was beautifully sung, cleanly staged and intelligently acted.

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