The Met at 75

I should advise the directors of the Metropolitan, said Tenor Italo Campanini, "to tear out the inside of their building and rebuild . . .

The house is unfit for music." That was just after the Met concluded its first Manhattan season, and Tenor Campanini's observation has been echoed by many a singer since. The Met has nevertheless attracted more first-rate stars than any other of the world's great opera houses. This week the house celebrates its 75th anniversary with a nostalgic birthday review (lantern slides and ancient recordings assembled by the Metropolitan Opera Guild) of some of its finest achievements. The yellow brick house was built (in 1883) at a cost of $1,732,478.71, principally as a showcase for New York society (the impresario of the older, posher Academy of Music referred to it as "the yellow brewery on Broadway"). The architect, Josiah Cleaveland Cady, had never seen a grand opera, and he built the Met on the theory that its most important feature was not the stage but the boxes. At first, there were three tiers of them (later reduced to one), and the press simplified things for house scanners on opening night by printing charts indicating the positions of celebrities.

From the first night (Faust, sung in Italian, with Christine Nilsson as Marguerite, Campanini in the title role, and Franco Novarro as Mephistopheles), regular seat holders howled about obstructed views, and singers complained about the strenuous demands the huge house placed on their voices. But nobody ever complained about the acoustics: Architect Cady had the good sense to face the auditorium with wood and to build an egg-shaped masonry sound chamber beneath the orchestra pit. During its early years, the Met removed the seats, held charity balls and a flower show on the orchestra floor. When Impresario Henry Abbey lost $600,000 in the house's first season, he recouped some of his losses by tossing in a special variety show at which Soprano Marcella Sembrich played a violin concerto, moved to the piano to rip off a Chopin mazurka, and sang Ah! non giunge from Bellini's Sonnambula.

Gerryflappers. For a seven-year period, inaugurated by Conductor Leopold Damrosch, not a word of anything but German was heard in the house. Wagner was performed in thunderous repetition, and the greatest soprano of the period, Lilli Lehmann, sang Carmen in German in her Met debut. But during the Met's "Golden Age of Song," at the turn of the century, Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Emma Eames, Lillian Nordica, Nellie Melba, et al. educated their audiences to hear Italian and French operas sung in their original languages. Still, educated or not, Guest Star Adelina Patti could stop the opera by singing Home, Sweet Home or The Last Rose of Summer in The Barber of Seville's lesson scene.

Then as now, the Met was not an adventurous house: it depended on its unparalleled roster of singers, and while for years it attempted more new works than it does today, most of them met with little immediate success. When it launched La Boheme (with Melba) in 1900, Henry Krehbiel, in the New York Tribune, roundly panned the new opera: "[It] is foul in subject, and fulminant but futile in its music."

The Met's greatest singer, Enrico Caruso, made his debut in Rigoletto in 1903, sang 607 performances of 36 operas in the next 17 seasons, and transformed the Met into a genuinely popular house. Soprano Geraldine Farrar, trailed by a worshipful female fan club of self-styled "gerryflappers," reigned with him. But Arturo Toscanini, with Gustav Mahler, the greatest of the Met's conductors, deftly cut his singers to size, and in only seven seasons changed the house from a kind of glorified star club into a smooth-functioning repertory theater. During one rehearsal, temperamental Soprano Farrar turned to him in a fury and shouted: "You forget, maestro, that I am the star!" Toscanini, with a weary wag of his head, replied: "I thank God I know no stars except those in heaven which are perfect."

New Home. The Met survived the Depression on the box-office pull of Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior. Now doing better business than ever under General Manager Rudolf Bing, the yellow brewery ranks with La Scala and the Vienna Staatsoper as one of the Big Three of the operatic world. The Met is hampered by a physical plant that was antiquated in 1910 (to be abandoned in three years for the Met's new home in Lincoln Center) and by the difficulties of competing for top talent with the state-supported European houses. But in addition to its European stars, it can rely on a fine supply of home-grown talent, enormous, well-earned prestige, and a manager with a sense of humor. Last week Manager Bing heard that one of the speakers scheduled for the anniversary program planned to invoke a comparison with Elvis Presley. He promptly sat down and scrawled a note: "I feel this name ought not to be mentioned in our House! We do not acknowledge his existence!"

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