What is the Backstory on the Metropolitan Opera House? | Conversations with Jim Zirin

[@liedersanger1]

Lots of errors in this. Leontyne Price was not "discovered" by Bing. She was an international star already by the time of her Met debut, and had been made so by Herbert von Karajan, who had brought her to Vienna for her European operatic debut in 1958. In fact the Met had been SLOW to give her a decent invitation to join the company in multiple leading roles, finally doing so in 1959. (Bing had issued her an invitation to sing a pair of Aidas, a typical "black" role, as a guest artist, in 1958.) By then, her absence from the Met's roster had become noticeable, especially given Bing's very public commitment to casting black singers in appropriate roles. Leontyne Price's Met debut was not in the late 50s, but in January 1961. She sang five roles in her first season, not seven. And it wasn't Bing who insisted that her debut be in Il Trovatore rather than Aida, a slave (and the usual default role for black sopranos)--in fact it was Leontyne (through her agents at Columbia Artists), as a letter in the Met archives shows. Also, Leontyne Price premiered Barber's Hermit Songs in 1953 and 1954--not Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which as another poster notes, was premiered by Eleanor Steber, although, as the poster also notes, Knoxville was a work that Leontyne performed often and recorded. Personally--and this is my opinion now--I think Gelb is wrong to suggest that "Antony and Cleopatra" was not successful musically. The production was the problem. It also needed some focusing dramatically, which Gian Carlo Menotti effected in the mid-1970s. The opera has been revived successfully in several places, including the Juilliard School, the Spoleto festival in South Carolina, the Chicago Lyric Opera and, a few years ago, in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall. With the right staging, ie. that focuses on the intimacy of the drama instead of drowning it in pageantry, it might well be successful. However, and it's a big however, the role of Cleopatra requires a soprano voice with a glorious, soaring top on the order Leontyne's. Such voices are very few and far between. The soprano Esther Hinds, in the Spoleto production, came very close. Leontyne Price lobbied Kurt Herbert Adler, the impresario of the San Francisco opera, to stage the opera in the 1970s, but he was never persuaded.

[@kellicoffman8440]

True the opera house movie says she was onstage at the royal opera house in London

[@JoanBette]

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 was written for Eleanor Steber, not Leontyne Price, although she was a great interpreter of the work.

[@andrenewcomb3708]

"Splat!" Lots and lots of holes in the ceiling dropping hundred and hundreds of fish lines with crystals on them into the theater space as the "sputniks" ascend. Looking through the universe as a dream on stage begins.

[@roberttartaglia1715]

It is my opinion that Gelb has brought a lot of trash productions of classic works ….example the new production of Lucia di Lammermoor was an abomination in recent years along with other productions that show no respect to librettists or composers. As far as I am concerned he cannot leave too soon…..

[@JoanBette]

Gelb does not look well.