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Article: The Opera Innovator; Nobody Put on Arias Like Met Impresario Sir Rudolf Bing
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- September 4, 1997
- Author:
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Sir Rudolf Bing, who served as the general manager of New
York's Metropolitan Opera from 1950 to 1972, was an impresario right
out of Central Casting.
Bing, who died Tuesday at the age of 95, was a quick, elegant,
supremely self-assured Viennese autocrat who rarely ventured out
without his bowler hat and umbrella. Deeply conservative and proudly
Eurocentric in his tastes, Bing nevertheless led America's most
prestigious -- and probably best -- opera company through an era of
seismic change.
He displaced the Met from its home of 83 years -- a luxurious
auditorium hidden within an undistinguished building at the corner
of 39th Street and Broadway -- and moved the troupe uptown to its ...