Rudolf Bing, who served as the general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera from 1950 to 1972, was an impresario right out of Central Casting.
Bing, who died Tuesday at the age of 95, was a quick, elegant, supremely self-assured Viennese autocrat who rarely ventured out without his bowler hat and umbrella. Deeply conservative and proudly Eurocentric in his tastes, Bing nevertheless led America's most prestigious - and probably best - opera company through an era of seismic change.He displaced the Met from its home of 83 years - a luxurious auditorium hidden within an undistinguished building at the corner of 39th Street and Broadway - and moved the troupe uptown to its current home at Lincoln Center in 1966.
He upgraded the quality of the Met's stage action enormously. Before Bing arrived, Met productions were infamous for their static stagings: A celebrated diva might simply walk out from the wings, sing her part and walk off again. Bing emphasized structural unity within his productions; to this end, he engaged such directors as Franco Zeffirelli, Jose Quintero, Cyril Ritchard and Otto Schenk, and the painter Marc Chagall designed the sets for a revival of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."
In his prime, Bing was delighted by his reputation as a fearsome leader, quoting with approval Ritchard's acerbic comments about him: "Don't be misled - behind that cold, austere, severe exterior, there beats a heart of stone."
His wit could be brutal; it was suggested to him that the Czech-born conductor George Szell was "his own worst enemy."
"Not while I'm alive," Bing snapped back.
After soprano Roberta Peters received terrible reviews during a Met visit to Paris, he held a news conference at which he said, "Miss Peters may have had a bad night, but the Paris Opera has had a bad century."
He opened up the company to African American singers, beginning in 1955 with Marian Anderson, who was cast as Ulrica in "Un Ballo in Maschera." It was rather late in Anderson's career for such a debut - moreover, the part was a small one - but, as so often in her life, Anderson made history.
Bing was sometimes a controversial figure. Fans of the willful Maria Callas blamed him for the infrequency of her appearances in New York - only 20 performances at the Met during the two decades when she was perhaps the opera world's most famous soprano. Indeed, Bing went so far as to fire Callas in 1958 following a dispute about her repertory, although she returned in 1965 for two portrayals of "Tosca."
For different reasons, he refused to allow Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to sing at the Met during her greatest years; he thought her youthful complicity with the Nazis was unforgivable. Nor did Herbert von Karajan show up on the Met rolls until 22 years after the end of World War II. Indeed, when Bing brought the legendary Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad back to the Met in 1950 from her native Norway (which had been under Nazi control throughout much of the war), he was abused and threatened, even though Flagstad's connections to the Third Reich were tenuous. He once codified his position in regard to the hiring of politically questionable artists: "I am only willing to consider a very great artist who was a very poor Nazi."
Bing was sometimes criticized for his lack of interest in contemporary music. Yet he produced what now seems a fair number of modern works by the Met's sad standards - Britten's "Peter Grimes," Menotti's "The Last Savage," Marvin David Levy's "Mourning Becomes Elektra" and two works by Samuel Barber, "Vanessa" and "Antony and Cleopatra," the last of which opened the new house at Lincoln Center with a gala performance in 1966.
His entrepreneurial philosophy was simple - keep up your standards but fill the house. If you wanted to produce successful opera in New York, he insisted, you would produce "Carmen," "Boheme" and "Traviata" one week and "Traviata," "Carmen" and "Boheme" the next. Mount a new work, he explained, and you could spray the house with machine-gun fire on the third night and be pretty sure that you wouldn't hit anybody.
Bing was overstating the case - the Met's premiere production of John Corigliano's "The Ghosts of Versailles" was the smash hit of the 1991-92 season. Moreover, he didn't really practice what he preached; while he may have been timid in his commitment to new work, he was better in this regard than those who followed him. Once Bing had resigned, the Met didn't produce a single brand-new opera for almost 20 years.
Bing was born in Austria on Jan. 9, 1902, and was recognized as a talented singer from an early age.
In the late 1940s, he was a founder of the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, one of Europe's leading interdisciplinary arts festivals.
His wife, Nina, died in 1983, and her husband began showing signs of Alzheimer's disease shortly thereafter. In the mid-'80s, the operatic world was stunned when Bing suddenly took up with an eccentric British heiress, Carroll Lee Douglass. They married on Bing's 85th birthday in January 1987, but the marriage was annulled in 1989 by the New York State Supreme Court. Soon after, he was moved into the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx, where he lived the rest of his life.