Backstage Pass

Most kinds of music can be liked or disliked according to individual taste, but hating opera is a mass cultural investment. “Opera” to many means not the largest emotional and philosophical themes expressed in beautiful song but a foreign antiquity before which listeners feel lower-class, awkward and stupid. Occasionally, accidental collisions with opera’s magnificence--Leontyne Price’s appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” or the Grammys, for example--created new devotees. But despite the success of what is one of the world’s greatest opera companies--New York’s Metropolitan Opera--the world’s first mass musical entertainment is now quarantined from the rest of American culture.

Johanna Fiedler seems especially qualified to relate the Metropolitan’s past to its present. The music journalist’s father was Arthur Fiedler, longtime conductor of the Boston Pops, and she was the Met’s general press representative for 15 years. In “Molto Agitato” (Italian for “lots of turmoil”), Fiedler has made “an attempt to open up the Metropolitan’s world and study the three main forces that propel it: the artistic, the financial, and the social.” She is clearly acquainted with the considerable literature covering the Met’s history, from Irving J. Kolodin’s gargantuan “The Metropolitan Opera” to more recent studies by such authors as Robert Tuggle, the Met’s wise director of archives.

Her recounting of backstage shenanigans should not be discounted as of interest only to New York opera-goers. The Metropolitan Opera is the most important performing arts institution in the country, the template upon which other not-for-profits consciously or unconsciously grew. None has been as phenomenally successful. In addition, the initiation of the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts--still going strong in Los Angeles and elsewhere--brought free opera to the entire country and helped several generations of opera lovers and future performers discover it. And lest anyone think such organizational intrigues occur only behind the Met’s gold curtain, the recent replacement of Peter Hemmings as director of the Los Angeles Opera with Placido Domingo (who is already artistic director of the Washington Opera, in addition to still pursuing his ferociously busy operatic and Three Tenors careers) should convince the dubious that as the Met goes, so go the arts everywhere.

Despite evident passion for her subject, Fiedler is largely immune to partisanship. This may not win her book a unanimously grateful following. Most opera lovers thrive on partisanship, and partisans like duels. Still, although the tone of “Molto Agitato” could sometimes be livelier, as the stories of rich contributors hounding one another over every detail of operatic administration accumulate (and one gets to especially nasty tales--such as that of Otto Kahn, a wealthy New Yorker of real taste and intelligence barred from the Met board because he was Jewish), a reader can respect the author for her doggedly calm approach.

“Molto Agitato” effectively details the relationship between the people who created the opera house and those who have kept it going, beginning with “the Met owed its birth not to musical passion or philanthropic zeal but a squabble over real estate.” Old New York’s highest sign of belonging was the possession of a box at the city’s opera house, the Academy of Music. Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, rolling in diamonds but simply not a member of Old New York, had no chance of getting a box of her own at the Academy--so she and a number of Gotham’s nouveaux riches opened their checkbooks and built the Metropolitan Opera for themselves, ultimately vanquishing the old-money institution. The opera house that opened in October 1883 at 39th Street and Broadway was ugly on the outside and inadequate onstage and backstage, but it had plenty of boxes in which its patrons could show off. The artistic decisions of its early years were often bizarre: seasons of German-only operas, seasons of Italian and French operas but no German, seasons in which principal singers sang German operas in German while choristers answered them in Italian and seasons full of frenzied offstage infighting. Eventually, singers and conductors of world-class stature dominated the stage and orchestra pit, and managers with taste and ideals were lured by board members who also possessed both.

Fiedler is at her best when recounting recent Met years. Unlike Manuela Holterhoeff, whose “Cinderella & Company,” is about the young Italian diva Cecilia Bartoli and present-day goings-on at the Met, Fiedler never places herself in a position of superiority to her subjects, is never snide and never has fun at anyone’s expense. But she is also not obsequious toward her subjects, even when writing about the two leaders of today’s Metropolitan (and her former employers), conductor and Artistic Director James Levine and General Manager Joseph Volpe. She recounts the years of effort it took Volpe, first employed by the company in the 1960s as a carpenter, to win the general manager’s position and the reservations socially prominent board members expressed about giving that job to someone with no social pedigree. (One Met higher-up supposedly protested “[Volpe] wouldn’t even know what fork to use.”)

Levine is a harder subject to write about, partly because he is covered so frequently and also because he is so persistently charming yet thoroughly inscrutable. (Fiedler makes this quality her central study of Levine’s character.) Her frank attempt to separate fact from fiction when approaching Levine’s heavily gossiped-over but seldom written-about private life is certain to be one of the most avidly discussed chapters of her book.

In a book covering more than a century of operatic activity, it’s not surprising that attentive readers will catch Fiedler in some errors. She devotes an entire chapter to Italian diva Renata Scotto and her career-shortening humiliation on the opening night of the 1981-82 season when, performing the challenging title role of Bellini’s “Norma,” she was heckled and booed. Fiedler states Scotto was singing the role “for the first time anywhere,” when in fact she had performed it before (to good reviews) and that a heckler cried, “Brava, Callas!” at Scotto’s entrance; I was there and can attest that he yelled that plus a loud obscenity in Italian, which a shocked Scotto clearly heard.

As satisfying as “Molto Agitato” often is, it doesn’t fulfill the author’s own brief outline, shortchanging the artistic end of her study. Fiedler barely mentions the moment in 1935 when a near-unknown Norwegian soprano named Kirsten Flagstad sang her first Met rehearsal as a substitute Sieglinde in “Die Walkure,” her unbelievably powerful, beautiful voice summoning Met staffers from all over the building to the auditorium. Her debut changed company history, filling performances for years and saving the company from financial disaster in the middle of the Depression. There are other moments when not fund-raising schemes but sheer artistic power saved the Met: Why Fiedler chose not to highlight these is a mystery.

Fielder also fails to tackle the greatest threat to the company’s survival--one epitomized in an incident I witnessed in early September, when a dozen teenagers had their picture taken outside the Met. “So, you like the Metropolitan Opera?” I asked. “Oh, yeah,” one of the girls answered. “This is where they have the MTV Video Awards!” Her response was symptomatic of the segregating of concert and opera music within the wider culture. With the businesses that own television networks, newspapers and magazines cutting back or shunning any mention of “difficult” “classical” music (stressing, instead, popular music, which these companies produce) it has become nearly impossible for operatic and concert music to be part of the American cultural mainstream mind-set.

It is disappointing that Fiedler fails to address this issue; even sadder still that the Met doesn’t. Recent events demonstrate the necessity of creating, performing and experiencing operatic and concert music, as well as the folly of relying upon what cultural product purveyors push upon consumers. I recently stumbled upon an outdoor service for victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in a neighborhood a few miles from the site. After readings and meditations, mourners squirmed unhappily as someone played Madonna’s “Live to Tell” on a boombox, the music miserably inadequate to the occasion. Someone else played R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” which many felt was in poor taste. Then a third person slipped into the box a CD of Leontyne Price singing the “Libera Me” of Verdi’s “Requiem.” At first, listeners were puzzled: “Is that opera?” “What’s she saying?” some whispered. But gradually, the music’s plangent, lamenting force took them over. As the singer launched into the “Requiem’s” last, vast pleas for deliverance and mercy, the music met and freed what the hearts of its listeners had searched so fruitlessly for in the earlier music. As long as we can listen, we’ll need such music.

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From ‘Molto Agitato’

On the night of the final performance [of “Figaro”] in Tokyo, the cast gathered onstage for the curtain call. When the applause died away and the curtain came down for the last time, the singers hugged one another, tired yet exuberant after the ovation they had received. [Conductor James] Levine stood talking to [soprano Kathleen] Battle as [soprano Carol] Vaness approached. “Kathy,” she said in a cold, firm voice, “I want you to know that I’ve instructed my manager that I will never sing with you again. You are the most horrible colleague that I have encountered in my whole career.”

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Patrick Giles is associate editor of Interview magazine.