If Club Med had me pushing lifestyle, next I was promoting culture.
As a young man, Saturdays were always one long aria. I listened to the Texaco broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera and soliloquized with Milton Cross, the opera’s fabled radio voice, as he made his trademark seesaw cast announcements. EZio PINza, ROSA PonsELLE, ALICia AlbenESE. SalvatorAY BaccaLONI, GioVANNI MartinELLI. He would literally sing his way through the performers and libretto.
In the late sixties, when the opera house left its time-honored Broadway and 39th Street home to become the cornerstone of Lincoln Center, I was fortunate to acquire a subscription for aisle seats. At an opera fundraiser I met Francis Robinson, assistant manager, whose weekly broadcast profiles were intermission favorites, and Al Hubay, box office director. Following a number of additional meetings, Gilbert Advertising was named to handle advertising and marketing for the Metropolitan Opera. The budget was small, but opera was a favored social and classical music form, and I would have accepted the assignment even as a public service.
At the time, choice ticket subscriptions to the Met were an eagerly sought, sold-out commodity. A series subscription consisted of seven or more performances depending on the length of the season, and allotted individual tickets could be purchased, when available. Standing room tickets, too. However, the economy was sputtering in the early seventies and for only the second time (the Great Depression was the first) in the eighty-year-plus history of the opera, attendance dropped. The five-percent decline was only a minimal dip, but it did provide an opportunity to secure seats for the 1971-72 season.
I told Al Hubay it was time to advertise, something the opera had never done. I showed him a large schematic drawing of the inside of the house with the headline,
“Announcing a rare opportunity for lovers of the Metropolitan Opera. SEATS.”
The copy said,
“Unfortunately, we won’t be able to accept applications after June 21. So, if we don’t hear from you by the end of the week, you’ll have to wait until we run our next ad. But don’t forget. It took us 87 years before we ran this one.”
The ad scored high, sold the few available subscriptions, and brought hundreds of new names to the box office. From that one promotion, an entire new selling strategy emerged, not only for the Met but also for the New York Philharmonic and New York City Opera, as well. Hard to believe our metropolitan culture once lived in the old world order of scarcity, selectivity, and privilege.
Ownership of an opera subscription remained a revered commodity, and tickets were handed down like old jewels from one generation to the next. This controlled ownership restricted growth. The country was getting younger; opera companies had to find a way to keep up with the new demographics. Full subscriptions were frightfully expensive, particularly when you factored in cocktails, dinner, and parking. I found it hard to believe that the Met Opera and New York Philharmonic kept their emphasis on lengthy repertory. How do you get young people to subscribe? How do you replenish the audience?
Must it only be a long series? I wondered.
Why can’t people subscribe to two, three, or four operas — Duets, Trios, Quartets? I realized this might be a logistical nightmare for the box office, but why not test it? If the Proctor and Gambles of the world could build package goods distribution by sampling and testing of product, why not high culture? Of course, sampling is free, but the cost of a short custom series versus the staggering expense of long-term subscription was almost like free. I had no idea I was on the cusp of a recommendation that would one day change subscription policy for all serious music and dance. Advertising men and women are not used to legacies. They’re roused by the thrill and ego satisfaction of immediate success.
I took my short series theme to Robinson, Hubay and Goeran Gentele, former director of the Swedish Opera who recently replaced the legendary Rudolph Bing as general manager. He was a charming, energetic modernist, and a notable musical talent.
Grand opera has its elitist appeal and the thought of democratizing brought predictable doubt. Then Gentele, after thoughtful silence, said, “Why not, Al? Let’s lay out a plan for a mini series we could test next season.”
Unexpectedly, the idea fit in with many other plans he was entertaining for the Met. Earlier, he had expressed concern about the deteriorating brand of standard, night-after-night repertory and recruited Leonard Bernstein for an eagerly awaited production of Carmen and Erich Leinsdorf to lead the rarely performed, twentieth-century Doktor Faust by Busoni. Later, Leinsdorf recounted, “I told Gentele I would be happy to do the opera but we should not expect full houses at current prices for such an esoteric work. The production should be deficit financed with a $25 top ticket. All the city’s intellectuals would turn out and you would need extra seats. The same should be done for Lulu and other hard-to-sell operas. Met prices are beyond the means of audiences that want to see them. You should price your offerings according to the public you’re addressing.”
Leinsdorf was our secret advance guard helping fan Gentele’s creative restlessness. The new manager also responded to other suggestions.
“Why not survey the parking facilities in the area and send the list to all opera subscribers,” I suggested. Also, “You should think of posting final curtain times to alert taxis. It’s like knowing the plane arrivals at Kennedy and LaGuardia.” It was dumbfounding to see opera marketing so insulated and uninvolved. Gentele went beyond my suggestions and personally contacted the taxi commissions, and saw that all final curtain times were posted near the underground garage areas. In Sweden, he had been a stickler for customer service and immediately responded to our parking ideas.
It was a privilege to spend time with him and he made it so comfortable to talk opera. I remember once asking him why Porgy & Bess wasn’t performed. He said I should be pleased to know that it had been planned for the American Bicentennial in 1976 but was delayed because the Houston Opera’s expanded, uncut version had been announced for that time.
“But we are considering it,” he said. (The Met did present a stunning interpretation in 1985 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the opera.)
Gentele was also a showman. Operas were not televised in the early seventies, and this was one of his key goals. He dreamed of the day when cameras would come into the opera house and beam the magnificent productions around the world. He also was light-years ahead of his contemporaries in saying that we should be looking for ways to make it easier to follow a libretto.
“Maybe, we could project on a screen?” (Little could he have imagined that one day Met subtitles would be shown on a small panel on the back of seats, while the New York City Opera would project titles on a long bar above the stage.)
His television dream became an exciting reality. March 15, 1977, Puccini’s La Boheme, starring Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Scotto, was seen by more than 15 million viewers, more than the total audience that had seen every production in every theater since its premiere on February 1,1896, in Turin, Italy. The Met also built the largest simulcast stereo network in the world, and its live extravaganzas became eagerly awaited offerings. (Today, with two outstanding television series, Live from the Met and In Concert at the Met, the Metropolitan Opera has become a major cultural presence on the home screen.)
Sorrowfully, tragedy, so much a part of grand opera, was awaiting Goeran Gentele, and he never saw the fulfillment of his grand vision. In the summer of 1972, he was killed in a car crash in Europe just before officially assuming his full duties.
After the tragic loss, Schuyler G. Chapin, an arts administrator and later New York City commissioner of cultural affairs, became the interim manager and continued pressing many of Gentele’s ideas. And ours. In the last years of the decade, operas were regularly televised and became a highly popular feature on PBS. The telecasts were funded in part by Mobil, Gulf, and Exxon, leaving some to refer to those call letters as the Petroleum Broadcast System.
On March 12, 1988, worldwide Met television history was made when Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos was seen and heard by more than 200 million viewers in the United States, the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Even Goeran Gentele could never have anticipated such a landmark event.
During Schuyler Chapin’s reign, Al Hubay and his box office crew, working with the subscription department, introduced and implemented my mini series concept that eventually brought millions of dollars in sales and added thousands to the subscriber list. The short, custom series, highlighted by an imaginative variety of Trios, became a key part of the overall Met marketing and influenced the promotion of classical music nationwide. Now, there are Met Premiere Trios, Introductory Samplers, Mid-Week Trios, Saturday Matinee Trios, Friday and Saturday Trios, Trios of Special Interest, Early Curtain Trios, Trios for Your Visit to New York.
Across the promenade, the New York Philharmonic offers Trios from specially pre-selected concerts in addition to customizing a three- to five-program choice. There are also Saturday matinee and special, early rush-hour series. The City Opera lets you create your own “repertory” of four, five, or six productions. For the 2004 season, the American Ballet Theatre introduced a Take 3 or Make 3 pre-selected trio choice.
After the first season of the mini series, Al Hubay called and said, “Richard, the idea was terrific. All those new subscribers have contributed to a healthy box office.” And Francis Robinson, who was always a fan of mine, wrote, “Richard, I have never made any secret of what I think of you professionally and personally. I regret your subscription is Thursday when I am not usually in the House. Pick something you want to hear on a Monday or Wednesday, my usual duty nights, and be my guest.”
Marjorie and I accepted the offer and those evenings were memorable. We were also delighted with the gift of a personally signed copy of his illustrated book on the life of Enrico Caruso.
Today, practically all of our cultural institutions offer a variety of short series for their subscribers. Fueled by the restless creativity of a young adman many years ago, what lifted off the test pad of the Metropolitan Opera is now part of national marketing history.
As I attend a Metropolitan Opera Trio, glance at my Movado “Museum” watch, I keep thinking how life’s grinding equation of circumstance, timing, and luck influences success.
And how these same factors should never be forgotten in keeping accomplishments honest, and their authors humble.