House proud

Joseph Volpe , the general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, loves to hold forth. His flow is almost unstoppable. When the phone rings as we talk in his all-wood-and-leather office at the Met, rather than allow himself to be interrupted, he yanks the lead out. Volpe, like great musicians, the surname will suffice, likes to control his own destiny.

He has worked for the Met for 36 years, starting as an apprentice carpenter and now running the whole show. To some, he is a monster to others, a glorious maverick who, in his 10 years as head of the Met, has transformed it into the greatest (well, certainly the richest and starriest) opera house in the world.

The Met is huge – it has 3,800 seats compared with Covent Garden’s 2,200 – and, after a period of instability in the 1980s, has settled down under Volpe’s benign despotism. It is in a healthy financial state (60% of its funds are earned, most of the rest is contributed by individuals, only a tiny amount comes from the government) subscription renewal rates are close to 80%; it puts on 24 productions a year, four or five of which are new rather than revivals, and attracts most of the world’s great singers. Best of all, you can stand – admittedly a long way back but the acoustic is good – for just $12 (pounds 7.50) or sit in the balcony family circle for $25. The Met is a people’s opera, a good New Yorker’s night out, in a way Covent Garden can only dream about. Much of that enviable reputation for accessibility should be put down to this Brooklyn boy with no time for opera’s snootiness and petty jealousies.

“When I became general manager in 1990,” he says, “my opinion was that the management of the Met had a very arrogant attitude to the public, and I said that’s what I’m going to change. In those days you couldn’t even exchange your ticket at the Met. It was ridiculous. We’ve held prices, the family circle seats I’ve not raised in three years. I’ve raised the prices of the stalls seats every year, but we’ve protected the lower-price seats. It’s all a question of trying to deal with your public in a way that is reasonable.”

So where did Covent Garden go wrong? Why has it failed in the Arts Council’s objective of opera for all, which was supposedly the payback for the £78 million lottery grant? “How can you have opera for all when you only have 2,200 seats?” says Volpe bluntly. “Covent Garden’s ticket prices are higher than ours. We have 3,800 seats and we sold last year at 92.5% of capacity. When they were thinking of renovating and of making the opera the people’s opera, why didn’t someone say ‘You can’t do that with 2,200 seats, we have to do something else?’ Why? Because you had a treasure, you had the opera house, and the intention was to restore that.

“But why was it so important to spend pounds £215m on backstage and ancillary facilities when you didn’t increase the seats? Obviously, making it the people’s opera was not that great a concern, if one wants to face the truth. The truth is that there was a lot of lip service to the ‘people’s opera’, but everybody knew down deep that it was never going to happen. It doesn’t make sense, it’s just part of the political game.”

Volpe is also critical of the spate of technical problems that have hit Covent Garden, and of the cancellations of productions and individual performances that have resulted. “If I had to go in front of an audience and say we’re cancelling tonight’s performance because we couldn’t get it on stage, I’d pack my little bag and I’m gone. The day we cancel a performance because we don’t know what we’re doing, I have to get out.

“Cancelling performances is a very bad habit. We were once on tour in Atlanta and two of the trucks went to the wrong city. We had no scenery but the curtain still went up. I said to Mr Bing [Rudolf Bing, general manager at the Met from 1950-72] “I’ll build a production out of what we have here.” The scenery arrived after the curtain had gone up, and by the end of the show we had it all on stage. But in the meantime we found a way to improvise to make it work. That’s what you have to do. This is the theatre. We’re not trying to fly to the moon.”

Volpe knows the score when it comes to scenery, because that’s where he began in 1964, in the scenery-building shop in the old Met. His plan had been to start his own business building scenery for Broadway shows, and he’d been told the best place to start was the Met. He was a carpentry apprentice when the house moved to the Lincoln Center in 1966, was promoted to master carpenter by Bing, switched to management under the patronage of the then head of production, John Dexter, and by the late 80s was an assistant manager. In 1990, after a succession of short-term general managers and at a time when the Met’s fortunes were at a low ebb, the board offered him the top job.

“I only expected to be here a short time and I’m still here 36 years later,” he says, “so I still have to go and do that other thing.’” He’s serious about “that other thing” too. He will be 60 this year but has no plans to retire and no desire to leave the city he loves. He lectures on leadership at Stern College, but his real aim – and I think he means it – is to get his friend (and fellow opera lover) Rudolph Giuliani, the city’s mayor, to let him clean up New York’s schools.

“I said to the mayor, you had a $10bn budget to fix the city’s schools but they’re all falling apart and we’ve spent the $10bn. I said give me that job, give me the $10bn and I’ll fix these schools one way or another, though there’ll be some hell to pay. That would be a fun thing to do – you could make a difference.’

Back in 1964, Volpe knew a lot more about carpentry than opera. “When I first came, other than my grandmother playing the same record of Cavalleria Rusticana, I wasn’t really that familiar with opera. It was not a love at that point. I can recall Birgit Nilsson singing Turandot at a dress rehearsal, it was the first time I had heard her and that was the start of my interest. My love of opera developed from there, but it came in stages.”

Many critics would argue that there is a downside to Volpe’s big-is-beautiful world view: the Met’s conservatism. Too many ancient productions, endlessly revived self-conscious starriness in the casting. a pandering to the populist tastes of its audience, a reluctance to give designers their head. Volpe accepts that financial prudence will sometimes dictate a large slice of popular programming, and that his personal tastes in the standard repertoire are traditional, but he argues that the Met is not just an operatic mausoleum.

“We’re criticised for being a museum,” he says, “but if you look at what we’ve produced in the past 10 years you’ll find we’ve done a lot of new pieces and we are as adventurous as any company in the world. The difference is that I keep an eye on the bottom line and we break even. But if we do the standard repertoire – Tosca, Traviata, Turandot, Boheme – these productions are going to be traditional because that’s what our audience wants. We can’t afford to spend over $2m on a production of La Traviata and throw it out the next year.”

Volpe is famously authoritarian and had a much publicised run-in with Kathleen Battle in 1994, which led to the soprano being fired. “It was an unavoidable incident,” says Volpe. “My job is to support singers, not to go round firing them, but I had to sack Kathy Battle because of the way she was behaving. It isn’t something I enjoyed doing. Her agent said to me, ‘In your obituary it will say that you fired Kathy Battle.’ My response was, ‘Yes, you’re right, and probably more people will come to the funeral.’ “

Is he as tough as his reputation suggests? “I can be hard, but I’m fair. Many people stay away from me. People ask ‘Do you have trouble with prima donnas?’ I don’t really, because maybe they think I’m a bigger prima donna than they are. I am really very reasonable – as long as you agree with me.’ (He says this with a laugh and I think it’s meant as a joke, but Battle and Angela Gheorghiu, who also had a spat with him recently that led to him putting on her understudy, might not see the funny side.)

How many performances does he attend these days? Does he virtually live in the house, as Bing was reputed to? “I used to be here five or six nights a week,” he says, “but now I have to be more selective. I’ll be here for the opening of every opera, and I’ll come for a cast change, but these days I won’t come every night. How many Aidas can one see? We did 18 one year. There comes a time when you just can’t see another Rigoletto.” Maybe some time soon the Met will lose its master. New York’s school system will be quaking.

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