Sign-off for the old Met

by Jackson, Paul

For more than sixty-five years, the weekly Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera have brought performances from one of the world's great opera companies to millions of listeners. Covering the period from the beginning of the Rudolf Bing era to the destruction of the old Met in 1966, the new volume surveys two hundred broadcasts featuring luminaries inherited from the Johnson regime (Flagstad, Milanov, Albanese, Steber, Stevens, Bjorling, Di Stefano, Tucker, Warren) and Bing recruits (De Los Angeles, Della Casa, Tebaldi, Nilsson, Price, Sutherland, Crespin, Siepi, Bergonzi, Vickers, Corelli), under the leadership of such great conductors as Fritz Reiner, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Georg Solti. As in Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1931-1950, the author uses unpublished documents and letters from the Metropolitan Opera Archives to tell behind-the-scenes stories of the players involved.