This Day in Opera History (The Met Meets Disaster in New Lincoln Center Home)

Sept. 16, 1966—There’s something in the story of Cleopatra that inspires wretched creative excess. Three years after a four-hour blockbuster film starring Elizabeth Taylor broke up two marriages and put Twentieth-Century Fox on the financial brink, the Metropolitan Opera made the ancient Egyptian queen the centerpiece of its inaugural production at its new home in New York’s Lincoln Center.

You’ve probably already guessed that Antony and Cleopatra (whose program appears to the left), composed by Samuel Barber and directed by Franco Zeffirelli, became a legendary fiasco. How could it go so wrong?

The Met’s longtime general manager, Rudolf Bing, had done everything he could to ensure a fail-safe production. He secured the services of Leontyne Price, already an international opera superstar; Justino Diaz, a 26-year-old bass-baritone who, three years before, had become the first Puerto Rican to win the Met’s National Council Auditions; and Thomas Schippers, a charismatic young conductor.

Box-office considerations usually governed Bing’s pronounced predilection for tried-and-true European opera imports. (In fact, in his 22 seasons at the helm of the Met, he commissioned only four new pieces composed by Americans.)

But for the company’s new home, the occasion all but begged for something that would stake out an American claim to greatness. So he turned to Barber, who had won critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 opera at the old Met, Vanessa—and whose neo-romantic scores would not shock or offend the Met’s conservative listeners.

What Barber (increasingly anxious that his operas would make listeners stop talking about his searing Adagio for Strings) had in mind for the new work was something low-key and subdued, according to Sudip Bose’s 2016 retrospective for American Scholar: “an intimate piece highlighting the conflict between politics and passion, a work that reveled, above all, in Shakespeare’s intense and febrile poetry.”

Pairing one Shakespeare admirer with another, Bing hired Zeffirelli, who had won plaudits at the Met with his 1964 production of Verdi’s Falstaff. The Italian’s film versions of The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Romeo and Juliet (1968), and Hamlet (1990) would underscore an affinity with The Bard so strong that he was nicknamed Scespirelli (“Shakespearelli”).

An accomplished director and designer, he thought he could take on the role of librettist for this show, too, weaving the Elizabeth playwright’s blank verse around Barber’s score.

With revolving stages and five underground floors, the Lincoln Center Met was a decided technical improvement over the site it had occupied since 1883 at Broadway and 39th Street—one with so little storage capacity that stagehands had to pull scenery off-stage and store it out on the street.  

Zeffirelli decided to take full advantage of the enhanced new space. As Barber later recalled, “Zeffirelli wanted horses and goats and 200 soldiers, which he got, and he wanted elephants, which fortunately he didn’t get.”

The audience filling the new theater’s 3,850 seats (making it the largest capacity opera house in the world) along with TV watchers who saw news reports and documentary footage beheld a train wreck, including:

*400 principals, choristers, dancers (choreographed by Alvin Ailey) and supernumeraries that often hindered movement onstage;

*missed lighting cues;

*a massive, Egyptian-modeled headdress that even the director admitted was meant to make Ms. Price look like “a giant praying mantis,” and widely derided as unbecoming the voluptuous diva;

*a turntable that broke down just a few days before the premiere, leading to a frantic reconception of the set; and,

*most terrifying, a massive moving pyramid that inexplicably stalled during a dress rehearsal, leaving Ms. Price locked inside—and which still couldn’t be fixed by opening night.

An African-American entertainer at the height of the civil-rights movement, Price was already acutely conscious of her heavy burden in inaugurating the Met’s new venue. “I got fed up with the attitude which I received from the former Met administration [Bing’s] that I had the plum of the century,” she told Stephen E. Rubin in a 1973 New York Times interview.  “That's not true. I had the plum of responsibility.”

It wasn’t Barber (who had given her one of her early great roles in Vanessa) whom she blamed for the chaos on and off stage, nor Schippers, who, by many accounts, kept everything from spinning completely out of control with his brisk leadership of the orchestra. When Bing offered her the lead in her next Met production, Il Trovatore, she successfully insisted that Zeffirelli be removed as designer and director.

Barber had it out with the director sooner. Antony and Cleopatra was not only removed from the Met’s repertory after only seven performances, but when the composer sought to revise the opera in 1975, he turned to his longtime companion, Gian Carlo Menotti, to rework the libretto. By this time, critics, though still not enthusiastic about the opera, showed greater appreciation for Barber’s sonorous score.

In a way, however, it was already too late for the composer. After the catastrophic dress rehearsal at the Met, he vowed to a cousin, “I’m not going to write any more music—I’m through.” It wasn’t entirely true, but his final 15 years were plagued by intensifying alcoholism, depression, and creative blocks.