Opera Impresario Sir Rudolf Bing Dies

Sir Rudolf Bing, the ascetic and acerbic general manager of the New York Metropolitan Opera for 22 years, died Tuesday. He was 95.

Bing, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and was the subject of court battles over his care, died at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, N.Y., said Francois Giuliani, a spokesman for the Metropolitan. He had lived at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx since 1989.

Bing, who summarily dismissed both heldentenor Lauritz Melchior and diva Maria Callas, was known for his sharp, no-nonsense verbal flaying of superstars. But he also will be remembered for his kindness, including the establishment of a pension plan for poorly paid members of the Met orchestra, chorus and ballet corps.

“With Bing you always know where you stand,” one performer said during the impresario’s tenure at the Met, “even if the knowledge is not always pleasant.”

Acknowledging that he ran the Met as a dictatorship, Bing thrived on his 14-hour-a-day job, which Musical America in 1964 called “the most responsible, hazardous, complicated and controversial post in the operatic world.”

Relying on his business and artistic expertise--mixed with luck--to pull a performance together, Bing once related his daily experience:

“There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up and one knows that there is going to be a performance. . . . The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.”

At the peak of his power, Bing was described by New Yorker magazine as “an elegant iceberg of a man who obviously conceals at least seven-eighths of his feelings.”

Fifteen years after his 1972 retirement from the Met, Bing recaptured headlines because of a second and unusual marriage to Carroll Douglass, a former mental patient and twice-divorced Washingtonian four decades his junior.

The marriage took place in Alexandria, Va., Jan. 9, 1987, only two days after the mentally declining Bing had been placed under the court conservatorship of attorney Paul C. Guth, who had handled his financial affairs for 30 years.

The couple’s activities, including a honeymoon odyssey to the Caribbean island of Anguilla and England, kept them prominent in the tabloid press and more traditional news media for two years until the marriage was finally annulled by a Manhattan judge Sept. 6, 1989.

Many considered the new “Lady Bing” a romantic who was truly sincere about her May-December marriage. But Guth and others, despite her independent income from her family’s real estate concerns, saw her as an opportunistic “gold digger.”

What with the checks Bing made out to her before their marriage, their travels, her extravagances and the resultant legal fees, Bing’s estate dwindled from $900,000 at the beginning of 1987 to less than $30,000 in cash and two valuable paintings at the time of the annulment.

However, the pension Bing had set up for Met employees, plus Social Security and other limited income, continued to provide more than $85,000 a year for his care. His legal guardians received court permission in late 1989 to sell his remaining possessions, including a Marc Chagall painting valued by Sotheby’s at $120,000 to $150,000 and a Grandma Moses work valued at $60,000.

Bing had written in his second autobiography of his sadness and loneliness after his wife of 54 years, Russian ballerina Nina Schelemskaya-Schelesnaya suffered a stroke. Friends say Bing’s mental deterioration began after her death in 1983.

There was little in Bing’s birth or upbringing to presage his reign over one of the world’s foremost opera ventures.

He was born in Vienna into a solidly middle-class business family, the son of Ernst Bing, head of the Austrian iron cartel, and Stefanie Hoenigsvald Bing. His sister married a businessman, his two brothers became businessmen, and he was expected to become one too.

After a childhood in which he was expelled from several schools for bad behavior and for failing to pass the examination required for university admission, Bing worked at a string of theaters and operas in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

By 1935, Bing received an invitation to stage Mozart performances on the estate of “a crazy Englishman” named John Christie in Glyndebourne, England. Bing, who later described his several seasons (1935-49) in Glyndebourne as “one of the happiest times of my life,” obtained British citizenship.

He courted the image of the Englishman, favoring double-breasted suits, a bowler and a tightly rolled umbrella even during the years in New York when he walked from his home in the Essex House on Central Park South to the Met in Lincoln Center.

One of Bing’s greatest sources of pride was his knighthood. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in her 1956 New Year’s Honours List.

When World War II forced a hiatus in the Glyndebourne productions, Bing worked as assistant manager in a London department store.

Bing’s first encounter with the Met came in 1939 when he traveled to the United States to attend the New York World’s Fair.

Ten years later, in New York to raise money for Glyndebourne, Bing paid a courtesy call on Met General Manager Edward Johnson.

“By the way,” Johnson said as Bing was about to leave, “how would you like to become my successor?”

His appointment, which took the opera community completely by surprise, was announced three weeks later.

Bing’s beginnings at the Met in the early 1950s were rocky. He was criticized by the entire board of directors when he fired Melchior, three dozen other artists, and key management assistants in a wide-ranging dispute over their age, salaries and other differences.

Over the years, Bing was praised generally for careful budgeting that allowed him to expand the Met season from 18 weeks to more than 30; for admitting black performers to the Met roster and encouraging their acceptance by tony opera buffs even when the Met toured the South; for hiring American-born conductors and experimenting with Broadway directors; and for improving the visual segments of opera--the sets, costumes and movement.

Bing considered the removal of the color barrier his biggest single achievement at the Met. In 1951, beginning his second season, he gave black dancer Janet Collins an important part in the ballet for “Aida” and in 1955 he made possible the long overdue Metropolitan debut of soprano Marian Anderson.

Bing earned criticism for casting, the conductors he hired, failure to discover or launch new singers or operas, and failure to expand the reach of opera to the public. He was also accused of turning the Met into an “Italian house” because of the popularity of Italian operas with New York audiences, of neglecting Wagner, whose works Bing disliked, and of generally ignoring contemporary works.

He was notorious for getting what he wanted from singers--or telling them to leave. His feud with the temperamental Callas in 1958 made New York front pages. Bing ultimately fired her, although the two later smoothed over their differences.

One diva suddenly declared in the middle of a performance that she would not continue unless she was granted a solo curtain call after her next aria.

“I shall give you exactly three minutes to go back onstage and continue,” Bing said, looking at his watch. “Otherwise, I’ll have you thrown out of the Met and sue you for tonight’s entire house receipts. Incidentally, you now have only 2 1/2 minutes left.”

She sang--without the bow.

Among his honors, in addition to the knighthood in Great Britain, Bing received the Chevalier Legion d’ Honneur from France, the Grand Officer Order of Merit from Italy, the Grand Silver Medal of Honour from Austria, and the Commander’s Cross of Order of Merit from Germany.