Cancellation at the Met

In its illustrious 77-year history, the New York Metropolitan Opera House has missed only two seasons: 1892-93, when the opera house was gutted by fire, and 1897-98, when the company was being reorganized. On two occasions, in 1948 and again in 1956, the Met has canceled seasons during angry labor disputes, only to rescind in the nick of time when the opposing sides came to terms. But last week the Met's big black stage door on 40th Street was locked tight again. This time the Met insisted that its gesture was not mere negotiating histrionics, and that it would take a near miracle to open the black stage door--or the Diamond Horseshoe--again for opera until 1962.

The closing notice was an exasperated end to a protracted and angry quarrel, beginning last April, between the Met's stubborn manager Rudolf Bing and the equally stubborn negotiating committee representing the Met's 92-man orchestra. The subject was money. Last season the Met's musicians, all members of famed Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, were paid $170 a week per man for the 25-week season--a figure that has gone up only $11 in the past eight years. This is $10 less than New York Philharmonic musicians get for a far shorter work week: 19 hours, against the Met's average of 45 hours.

Soaring Costs. The musicians clearly had a case, and they were not modest about asserting it. They demanded a whopping $78-a-week increase for the 1961-62 season. The Met was outraged, told the union, according to Local 802 President Alfred J. Manuti, that its proposals were "not to be seriously considered now or ten years from now." The Met offered the musicians a cumulative $6 raise by the 1963-64 season, argued that to give the musicians the full $78 would add $750,000 to the cost of an operation that already runs at a chronic deficit (approximately $903,000 last season before contributions, on which the Met depends).

By staging well-designed new productions, building an impressive roster of singers, and boldly doubling ticket prices for choice locations, Bing has boosted Met income higher than it has been since the days of Italian-born Impresario Gatti-Casazza's reign in the 1920s. But costs have soared even higher: last season the Met spent $6,950,000. Opera, said Bing last week, is "an art form never designed for the economics of the 20th century." The era has passed, he might have added, when men such as the late Banker Otto Kahn, the Met's perennial chairman of 40 years ago. would look at the annual losses and scribble a six-figure check. Today, contributions account for only 12% of Met income. Pre-Depression grand opera paid its own way in the U.S., but it presumably never will again. Both Bing and Manuti went on record last week as favor ing some form of Government support.

Negotiations Resumed. But no one was prepared to call the canceled season irretrievably lost. Most of the Met singers were behaving as if they expected to be back at the old stand in the fall. Only two--Sopranos Birgit Nilsson and Anna Moffo--had announced their availability to other opera houses. In response to a pleading wire from Soprano Leontyne Price (who was to open the Met season in Girl of the Golden West), Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg called Bing and the union and offered his negotiating services to New York Mayor Robert Wagner. At week's end the union and the Met resumed negotiations. And the Met went ahead with plans to move to Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which will be completed in 1964.

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