A Fantasy Becomes Real

Even as a successful music executive, Schuyler G. Chapin would sometimes have a fantasy about a genie rising from a bottle and asking him what he wanted most in life. Chapin would reply, "I'd like to be general manager of the Metropolitan Opera." Last week in New York, the genie delivered. After a full season as acting general manager (TIME, March 5), Chapin, 50, was given a three-year contract for the real thing--the most powerful job in opera.

It was a popular decision, if long in coming. Chapin had amply shown that he could run a smooth operation, and that it was possible to have aristocratic savoir-faire without resorting to the autocratic methods of former Met Manager Rudolf Bing. As many a diva has learned, Chapin's tact and graciousness do not signal a relaxed will. He pushed hard and successfully for the company's new Mini-Met, devoted to intimate or experimental operas in small halls with mostly young casts. To the Met staff's evident joy, he preserved and deepened the aura of good will between management and unions fostered by his predecessor, Goran Gentele, who was killed last July in a car crash in Sardinia before he ever really had a chance to run the Met.

Until Gentele hired him as his No. 2 man, Chapin had never worked in an opera house. Instead, he had served early on as a tour manager for Columbia Artists Management, later as head of Columbia Records' classical department, Lincoln Center's vice president for programming and executive producer of Leonard Bernstein's various television, film and musical enterprises.

Aside from Herbert Witherspoon, who died within weeks of taking over in 1935, Chapin is the Met's first American-born general manager in 77 years. It was appropriate therefore that Chapin should take the opportunity to announce, as his first official act as manager, that at long last Soprano Beverly Sills will make her Met debut in 1975 in Rossini's Siege of Corinth.

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