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The Inseparable Histories of Julius Rudel and New York City Opera: A Reminiscence

By Robert Wilder Blue

Julius Rudel

Morris, Baum and La Guardia set their sites on the Mecca Temple on 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, formerly occupied by The Ancient Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine and currently owned by the city which had taken it over in 1942 owing to nonpayment of real estate taxes. The negotiations and subsequent renovation of the Mecca Temple were not without the expected drama, delays and near-disasters such ventures attract; but on December 11, 1943, the City Center opened officially to the public; the first performance was Rachel Crothers’ Susan and God starring Gertrude Lawrence, which took place two days later.

From the beginning, Morris and Baum wanted a resident opera company for City Center. When auditions were announced in October over 1,000 singers showed up; they were accompanied on the piano by a 22-year-old, recent graduate of the Mannes School of Music, Julius Rudel.

Rudel was born in Vienna on March 6, 1921. He demonstrated an interest in music early in life (it would have been hard to avoid the influence of music in Vienna). “My family was not professionally musical; my grandfather was a cantor but that’s the only connection, shall we say, to professionals. My father was an insurance executive. When I was maybe four years old, my parents got me a little, half-sized violin. I was evidently enamored of it and taught myself to play a little and so then my parents gave me instruction. When I was about eight or nine I began to be seriously interested in trying to compose and later on I had instruction in piano. I took piano because I liked the full sound – it more aptly imitated the orchestra.

“I fell in love with opera at about age two-and-a-half when my parents took me to a performance.” Rudel spent many adolescent nights in standing room at the State Opera. He became fascinated with theater and stagecraft and at home converted shoe boxes into miniature theaters. In his teens he composed two short operas, König Ferdinand and Die Bauern. “They were the products of a young kid trying to write something. I just sort of put the plot together for myself and wrote naturally. In retrospect they were very simplistic, really.

“Then when I was sixteen my father became quite ill and died. My mother and brother and I left Austria. It was sad to leave behind something that was very familiar and comforting, but circumstances were such that there was no question about it.”

Reacting to the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany and Austria, the Rudels joined the countless other European Jews who fled to the U.S. They settled in New York where Julius worked at odd jobs to support the family and attended the Greenwich Street Music Settlement. Upon completion of his course he won a scholarship to Mannes. “By that time I had decided I was going to be a musician. I started out thinking in terms of composing but I also planned to conduct my own works. That’s how it worked out in my mind. Eventually, though, I decided I really wasn’t going to be a good composer, so I stopped. I felt that conducting was what I really wanted to do.”

The 40s: Establishing the Tradition

Hungarian-born conductor László Halász had come to the United States in 1936 as Arturo Toscanini’s assistant at the NBC Symphony. He left soon thereafter to join the St. Louis Symphony as chorus master and quickly climbed the ladder to become its artistic and musical director. Almost immediately, conflicts arose between Halász and the board and Halász resigned. He spent the next five years pursuing guest conducting assignments. Reading about City Center in The New York Times, Halász wrote to La Guardia to add his name to a list of candidates the Mayor would choose among to run the City Center; by October he had been appointed artistic and musical director.

New York City Opera’s first season in the winter of 1944 lasted seven days and included eight performances. It opened with Tosca on February 21; Martha followed; Carmen (with Jennie Tourel as Carmen and Regina Resnik as Micaela) closed out the week on February 28. Two months later the company returned for a two-week spring season, adding La Bohème, Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci and La Traviata to the repertory, the latter featuring the debuts of Dorothy Kirsten and Mack Harrell. Rudel made his conducting debut on November 25, 1944 leading a Saturday matinee performance of The Gypsy Baron.

As the company grew, so did Rudel’s responsibilities; he was given the task of preparing the rehearsal schedules and also served as impromptu errand runner, prompter and even supernumerary, in addition to his official duties as pianist and conductor. For the next twelve years he balanced artistic and administrative assignments, becoming more and more involved in the daily operations of the company.

The remainder of the ‘40s saw the company’s repertory expand to include The Flying Dutchman, The Bartered Bride, Ariadne auf Naxos, Eugene Onegin, Salome, Werther, Pelléas and Mélisande, The Love for Three Oranges, as well as The Old Maid and the Thief, Amelia Goes to the Ball and The Medium, all by Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Artists joining the company included Brenda Lewis, Ramón Vinay, Ivan Petroff, Frederick Jagel, Jean Morel, Ellen Faull, Frank Guarrera, Marie Powers, Maggie Teyte, Walter Cassel, Theodor Uppman, Robert Weede, Frances Bible, Alberta Masiello, Richard Bonelli, Robert Rounseville, Lawrence Winters, Joan Hammond, choreographers George Ballanchine and Charles Weidman and dancer Maria Tallchief. In 1945, Todd Duncan became the first African-American artist to appear on a major U.S. opera stage, his appearance predating Marian Andersen’s at the Met and Mattiwilda Dobbs’s at San Francisco Opera by a decade. He was followed the next season by Camilla Williams, who would become a company favorite as Madame Butterfly, and Robert McFerrin, who went on to become the first male African-American singer at the Met. The spring 1949 season also featured the company’s first world premiere: William Grant Still’s Troubled Island written to a libretto by Langston Hughes. Still was the first African-American composer to have an opera performed by a major U.S. company.

The ‘40s and ‘50s were an exciting time in American music; musical stage works were growing ever more sophisticated and art and politics mixed as never before in the U.S. Composers such as Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill and Marc Blitzstein created a hybrid form of musical theater that blurred forever the line between musical comedy and opera. Gian Carlo Menotti, Douglas Moore, Jack Beeson, Carlisle Floyd and Samuel Barber burst on the scene with operas of a more conventional nature, although many of them were on American subjects. From the beginning, Rudel was a proponent of American music. “I was terribly impressed when I first heard American musicals. Of course that was the heyday of the great American musical coming in the ‘40s and ‘50s. As Broadway made advances towards the more serious and ambitious forms, so did the opera become more and more comfortable with the popular aspect of music. There was a general rapprochement between the two. I did not know the full extent of American composition and composers but I certainly knew of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, William Schuman, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, to some extent of Howard Hansen and, of course, Kurt Weill. When City Opera did Regina, I thought that finally there was something that was not just as a pale imitation of what European opera was about but something more indigenous. Of course that’s exactly what Weill was hoping for too in the kind of works he was writing. Weill was particularly close to me somehow. His way of writing – of making music – was part of my background. Politically, most of them, as you know, somehow ended up being left of center. That was almost taken for granted.”

The 50s: Pioneers

By the 1950s American opera composers were welcomed with open arms at City Opera. Menotti’s operas appeared in almost every season with Amahl and the Night Visitors and The Consul joining its previous productions; Blitzstein’s Regina, Kern’s Showboat and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah and Wuthering Heights were also added to the repertory. Off stage, things were not all rosy. In a presage of changes to come in relationships between conductors and musicians, László Halász’s relations with the company and the board were growing more volatile by the season. At the end of the fall 1951 tour, Halász was called before the board to defend himself against claims of his “autocratic way of running the company; bad manners, violent actions, foul language; and unjust methods of casting.”2 Two solutions were posed: that he be fired or that someone be hired to supervise him until his contract expired. At the board meeting of December 21, it was decided that Halász be replaced; conductor Joseph Rosenstock was appointed interim company director. He held the position until 1956.

For the first half of the ‘50s company debuts included Rose Bampton, Patricia Neway, Martial Singher, Margaret Tynes, Thomas Schippers, Donald Gramm, Tullio Serafin, Claramae Turner, Cornell MacNeil, Norman Treigle, William Wilderman, Phyllis Curtin, Anna Russell, Burl Ives, Thomas Stewart, Betty Allen, John Reardon, Adele Addison, Barry Morell, Emerson Buckley, Beverly Sills, Richard Cassilly, Louis Quilico, Yi-Kwei Sze (possibly the first Asian-American to sing with a major U.S. company?), Mignon Dunn, Aldo Protti, Christopher Plummer, Frank Porretta, director Margaret Webster, dancers Donald McKayle and Glen Tetley. David and Alex Tamkin’s The Dybbuk and Copland’s The Tender Land were given their world premieres; Respighi’s The Four Ruffians, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, von Einem’s The Trial (directed by Otto Preminger) were presented in the U.S. for the first time.

Erich Leinsdorf assumed the position of music director in the fall of 1956, but left after one season when budget and contractual disagreements arose. If his time at City Opera was short, his only season there was memorable: the company presented the U.S. premieres of The Tempest (Martin) and The Moon (Orff) and the company premieres of Orpheus in the Underworld (Offenbach), Mignon (Thomas), Susannah and The Soldier’s Tale (Stravinsky).

At the end of the fall 1956 season, the company was facing disaster. There was no general director; audience interest, once enthusiastic, had declined; and the company’s financial situation, always precarious up to that point, was positively dismal (they would end up canceling the spring 1957 season). Under Leinsdorf’s leadership, the company and Rudel had almost parted ways. Rudel was offered the directorship of the Houston Opera in 1956 and went to Texas to meet the board of directors. Learning this, Leinsdorf cancelled his City Opera assignments. Rudel ultimately felt he would be unhappy in Texas and declined Houston’s offer; but he returned to New York to find he was without a job.

Enter John S. White, born Hans Schwarzkopf in Vienna, educated at the University of Vienna and the Sorbonne in romance languages, art history and philosophy. He was also a pianist with an interest in opera. He had joined the company in 1946 as a language coach and after Halász’s departure had gradually assumed the administrative management of the company; he had supported Leinsdorf’s appointment and when Leinsdorf needed to be replaced he nominated Rudel. (After Leinsdorf cancelled Rudel’s conducting assignments, White intervened to get some of them reinstated.) On January 10, 1957, the company’s performers and staff met to affirm its support of Rudel’s appointment and elected a committee (Phyllis Curtin, Michael Pollock and Cornell MacNeil) to present its position to the board. With the additional backing of Baum and White, Rudel was appointed general director a week later.

Rudel’s first season, in the fall of 1957, opened with Puccini’s Turandot, still a novelty in New York having been seen in four seasons at the Met (1926-1929) and only once previously at City Opera (1950). The second production was a revival of Susannah; company premieres of de Falla’s La Vida Breve and El Amor Brujo, Verdi’s Macbeth (also a rarity; the legendary Met premiere with Leonard Warren and Leonie Rysanek was two years in the future), Lehar’s The Merry Widow and Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio followed.

But, it is the three spring seasons of 1958, 1959 and 1960 that stand out among the company’s achievements up to that point. In 1957, the Ford Foundation inaugurated its grant program for the arts and humanities. In order to obtain funding, City Opera needed to define a specific project and the idea to present a season comprised entirely of American operas seemed a perfect solution. Rudel recalls, “It seemed the time was just right for it and so we hatched the idea and got the help of the Ford Foundation. Mind you, the help was really more in, shall we say, morally supporting us because all we got was $100,000 for the whole season. But it gave us the imprimatur so to speak – the official sanctioning – which was helpful. There was great excitement, I must say. The idea of doing ten works, most of them new to the repertory, in a five-week season seemed absolutely crazy, but very exciting. In choosing the pieces, we went through both printed and unprinted manuscripts. I read through I’d say about 200 scores and sort of culled what I felt was viable, interesting and contrasting enough to give the season variety.”

The spring 1958 season opened with the company’s first production of Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe and continued with company premieres of Tale For a Deaf Ear (Mark Bucci), Trouble in Tahiti (Bernstein), Lost in the Stars (Weill) and The Taming of the Shrew (Vittorio Giannini), plus revivals of Regina, The Old Maid and the Thief, The Medium and Susannah. Robert Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik received its world premiere.

“We even sold tickets, although at that time we did not have a subscription program so we had to literally sell each performance from scratch. Selling 3,000 seats was quite a task. But there was a great deal of excitement in the music world and the press was trying to be helpful and so it played out well. The general success of that first season was such that we were able to go back to the Ford Foundation and ask for a more money to put on two more seasons and even take a couple of works on tour.”

A second season of American works was organized for the spring of 1959. Susannah, Regina, The Ballad of Baby Doe and The Medium were revived; Maria Golovin (Menotti), Street Scene (Weill), Wuthering Heights (Floyd), The Triumph of Saint Joan (Norman Dello Joio), The Scarf (Lee Hoiby), The Devil and Daniel Webster (Moore) and He Who Gets Slapped (Robert Ward) were given for the first time by the company; and Hugo Weisgall’s Six Characters in Search of an Author had its world premiere.

The spring 1960 season was unusual in that the New York portion lasted only eleven days. An extended tour of the Eastern Coast followed and repertory included Blitzstein’s Cradle Will Rock, in its company premiere, plus The Consul, Susannah, Street Scene, The Ballad of Baby Doe and Six Characters in Search of an Author.

In its sixteen years of existence, City Opera had presented twenty-six operas by American composers. We wondered what Rudel’s impressions were now of all those works. “I have a particular soft spot for Giannini; he was able to bridge the gap between the European tradition and the new American aesthetic for me. Basically I would say he followed in the line of Menotti. Giannini really had the Italian vocalist in him; it’s joyful, it’s beautiful, it’s sophisticated. Granted it looks backwards rather than forward, but I still think The Taming of the Shrew is a wonderful piece. I did it several times, not only at City Opera but at Chauttauqua and in Boston. I’d love to see it played again.

“There was another piece I’m surprised doesn’t get done more and that’s The Good Soldier Schweik. Unfortunately that was the only thing Kurka ever wrote because he died shortly before the premiere. But I think it’s brilliant and very touching at the same time.

“Wuthering Heights is also wonderful. Carlisle made some revisions for us after the premiere in Santa Fe and I thought it really worked. We had a wonderful cast as I recall [Phyllis Curtin, John Reardon, Patricia Neway and Frank Porretta]. It’s a work that should be kept in a repertory. Somehow the public has the last word, though, and they didn’t take to it. I never understood that quite frankly; I thought it was a very beautiful work.”

The 60s: NYCO Moves Uptown

The ensuing decade brought world premieres of The Wings of the Dove (Moore), The Crucible (Ward), The Golem (Abraham Ellstein), The Passion of Jonathan Wade (Floyd), Gentlemen, Be Seated! (Jerome Moross), Natalia Petrovna, later revised as A Month in the Country (Hoiby), Lizzie Borden (Jack Beeson), Miss Julie (Ned Rorem), The Servant of Two Masters (Giannini), Nine Rivers From Jordan (Weisgall), The Most Important Man (Menotti) and Summer and Smoke (Hoiby). Porgy and Bess (George Gershwin), The Saint of Bleeker Street (Menotti) and Carrie Nation (Moore) also joined the repertory.

City Opera’s repertory adventure continued in 1965 when the company devoted its spring season entirely to 20th century works. The season opened with Shostokovich’s Katerina Ismailova (revised later as Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) and continued with Porgy and Bess, The Ballad of Baby Doe, Three Penny Opera (Weill), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Britten), The Saint of Bleeker Street, Il Trittico (Puccini), Susannah, a double bill of Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky) and Carmina Burana (Orff) and Lizzie Borden. “Again, we got money from the Ford Foundation; having already presented the American seasons, we wanted to put on American and European works side-by-side, to give the public a better variety and a chance to see the whole spectrum of 20th century opera. We were trying to present the best of both worlds, so to speak.”

In 1966, after much wrangling and despite the objections of Rudel and many others, the New York City Opera moved to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, the new arts complex destined to transform the upper west side of Manhattan and alter Manhattan’s musical life forever. Rudel says, “I did not want to go. We had no intention of going and it was only because of the immense pressure put on us by Lincoln Center that finally made me go. Once having gone and having tried to fix up the house which was really acoustically terrible before we moved in, it seemed to be alright for me.”

The company’s first season at the State Theater in the spring of 1966 was another all-20th century affair, opening with the North American premiere of Alberto Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo with Plácido Domingo in the title role. Von Einem’s Danton’s Death was given its U.S. premiere and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites saw its first New York production (neither the public nor the press thought much of it). Revivals of Street Scene, Ballad of Baby Doe, The Consul, Katerina Ismailova, Capriccio (R. Strauss), Oedipus Rex/Carmina Burana, and The Love for Three Oranges (Prokofiev) rounded out the season.3

The following September, an event occurred next door to the State Theater that changed the climate for new American operas. The new Metropolitan Opera House opened with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra starring Leontyne Price and Justino Díaz. But opening night was a disaster. Technical mishaps sabotaged Franco Zefferelli’s complicated production; the work itself was perhaps too difficult for easy consumption by the opening night audience. The event was deemed a fiasco and subsequently entered into operatic legend (joining Carmen, La Traviata, Madame Butterfly and so on). The press erupted with an adverbial flow that has hardly slowed still; Barber fled to Europe; and American opera went into hiding. While the City Opera continued to present American works regularly into the middle ‘70s (Susannah, Regina, The Ballad of Baby Doe, as well as the operas of Menotti were rarely out of the repertory), only three premieres were given between 1973 and 1980 (Rudel’s final year at City Opera): Leon Kirchner’s Lily (1977), Dominic Argento’s Miss Havisham’s Fire (1979) and An American Trilogy: Madame Adare (Stanley Silverman), Before Breakfast (Thomas Pasatieri), The Student from Salamanca (Jan Bach) (1980). The company continued to present U.S. premieres of new European works as well as revivals of unusual 20th century, bel canto and baroque operas; but interest in American opera had waned. “Don’t forget during that period that atonalism was de rigueur. The rules were very rigid and very little ‘public-pleasing’ writing was going on. Anyone who wrote a simple melody was looked down upon and laughed at. Well, people still wanted opera to be melodic – to have some kind of a singing line. I think that’s the reason there was a falling off of creativity. But then, you certainly see nowadays it’s come up again. A lot of things are being written again. Some of them look backward more than might be optimal, but still, things are happening again.”

From his experience with City Opera and beyond, we wondered if Rudel had any observations about the process of presenting new American operas. “I think if you leave out the word ‘American’ it’s the same as it’s always been. The death rate for new operas has always been high. In 400 or so years there have been well over 40,000 titles. How many do we remember? How many do we know today? We didn’t do badly in the ‘50s and ‘60s with what we did. I think we established that one could write operas here even though there was less encouragement than you would find in Europe. But look at what is happening today. I mean, I’m constantly astonished. I get notifications of new works being done everywhere. It’s hard to keep up with it all.

“During our American seasons we had a special fund for composers and librettists to permit them to be around during the entire season and observe and learn. There were five composers and five librettists selected by a committee, if I’m not mistaken. They were encouraged to come to all rehearsals and see how things happened. We had them crawl underfoot and overhead and everywhere and they could ask technical and practical questions about what actually worked and what didn’t. It seemed like a good idea and a good program, although nothing came out of that – no new pieces, I mean – that could have been used.”

The 70s: More Changes

As early as 1975 there were rumors of Rudel stepping down as company manager and star soprano Beverly Sills taking over. Indeed, dissatisfaction was abrew: the adventurous planning of the Rudel era had taken its toll on the company. In the 1950s at City Center, such repertory had been greeted mostly with enthusiasm from public and press. But, the ‘70s were not a hospitable time for new music, whatever its style and the company’s larger home meant it had to take box office receipts more seriously than ever. City Opera’s proximity to the Met had also caused a bit of a personality crisis for the company.

On December 13, 1978, the company held a press conference to report that Mr. Rudel would resign his post and that Ms. Sills would become the company’s fifth general manager. Rudel has good feelings about his time at City Opera. “We did a lot of interesting things. Many of the pieces we introduced are now seen a lot; some of the American works we premiered have stayed in the repertory and others are being reexamined. Production values changed enormously. We brought in theater directors and introduced other media – film, projections and so forth. I think we did some really important work.”

Julius Rudel will conduct Susannah in September at Lyric Opera of Chicago.

In addition to those listed above, a partial list of artists who debuted at City Opera during the Rudel era includes:
John Alexander, Chester Ludgin, William Lewis, Arturo Basile, José Iturbi, Shirley Carter (who would later become quite well known as Shirley Verrett), Carol Brice, Beverly Woolf, Conrad Bain, McHenry Boatwright, Leonard Bernstein, Debria Brown, Carol Brice, Regina Sarfaty, John Macurdy, Reri Grist, Judith Raskin, Leopold Stokowski, Tammy Grimes, Patricia Brooks, Richard Fredericks, Gérard Souzay, Arlene Saunders, Dominic Cossa, Spiro Malas, George Shirley, Walter Susskind, Lili Chookasian, Tatiana Troyanos, Ara Berberian, Skitch Henderson, Alice Ghostley, Sherrill Milnes, Enrico di Giuseppe, Julia Migenes, Nico Castel, Plácido Domingo (as a singer in 1965, as a conductor in 1973), Michael Devlin, Alain Lombard, Maureen Forrester, Anton Guadagno, Huguette Tourangeau, Robert Hale, Barnabé Martí, Lucas Foss, Hugo Weisgall, Maralin Niska, Julian Patrick, Patricia Wise, Alberto Zedda, Arleen Augér, Joy Davidson, Carol Neblett, Gilda Cruz-Romo, Patricia Kern, Johanna Meier, Presto (nothing new here though; Dalida and Cher had done the one-name thing the previous decade), Kenneth Riegel, Esther Hinds, Sheila Nadler, Robert Bass, Susanne Marsee, Christopher Keene, Mario Bernardi, Gwendolyn Killebrew, Marisa Galvany, Mary Beth Peil, Pauline Tinsley, José Carreras, Alan Titus, Faye Robinson, Olivia Stapp, Michael Best, James Billings, Hilda Harris, Justino Díaz, Rudolf Bing (speaking role), Samuel Ramey, Diana Soviero, Ruth Falcon, Pablo Elvira, Willard White, Imre Pallo, Judith Somogi, Catherine Malfitano, Michel Plasson, Clamma Dale, Gianna Rolandi, Norman Bailey, Henry Price, Frederica von Stade, Kathleen Battle, Carole Farley, Joseph Evans, Adam Guettel, Barry Bostwick, Benjamin Matthews, Leon Kirchner, Manuel Rosenthal, Cynthia Clarey, Faith Esham, Mariana Neculescu, Jacque Trussel, Sergiu Comissiona, John Mauceri, Thea Musgrave, Frederick Burchinal, Luis Lima, Marilyn Zschau, Dennis Bailey, David Rendall, Eve Queler, June Anderson, Ashley Putnam, Donnie Ray Albert, Vinson Cole, Dalmacio Gonzalez, Victoria de los Angeles, Ann Murray, Carol Vaness, Rockwell Blake, Jerry Hadley, Thomas Moser, John Crosby, Henry Holt, Joel Grey, Barry McCauley, Calvin Simmons, directors Frank Corsaro, José Quintero, William Ball, Tito Capobianco, Beni Montresor, Dino Yannopoulos, Sarah Caldwell, John Cox, Lotfi Mansouri, Harold Prince, John Copley, Colin Graham, Robert O’Hearn, Nathaniel Merrill, Christopher Alden, choreographers Robert Joffrey, Rhoda Levine, Joyce Trisler, Peter Martins, Jerome Robbins, dancers Gerald Arpino, Paul Taylor, Edward Villella, Patricia McBride, Rudolf Nureyev, Suzanne Farrell, Cynthia Gregory and Robert La Fosse.

For more information on the history of New York City Opera, see also the interview with Paul Kellogg

FOOTNOTES

1. Among those who attended were Mrs. August Belmont (Metropolitan Opera Association), Olin Downes (New York Times), Edmond A. Guggenheim, George S. Kaufman, Erich Leinsdorf, Elmer Rice, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Deems Taylor, and Lawrence Tibbett. City Center’s original sponsors and incorporators included the above plus Marshall Field, Lillian Gish, Walter W. Haumburg, Paul Robeson, NBC, various theater and musicians unions and Playwrights’ Producing Company.
2. Letter from Carroll Wright Taussig (a soprano with the company) to Newbold Morris, December 1951. Martin L. Sokol, The New York City Opera, An American Adventure.
3. The Love for Three Oranges and the double bill of Oedipus Rex and Carmina Burana were rarely absent more than a season between 1959 and 1973. The Ballad of Baby Doe was presented in twelve seasons between 1958 and 1976; Susannah was seen in eleven seasons from 1956-1972. Never more than one season passed between 1948 and 1976 without the presentation of one of Gian Carlo Menotti’s operas on the bill.

The New York City Opera, An American Adventure

Martin L. Sokol’s book, The New York City Opera, An American Adventure, was the source for most of the material on New York City Opera reiterated here. Sadly, the book is out of print now. Maestro Rudel’s comments are taken from an interview with USOPERAWEB earlier this year.