The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera

1 “BE PATIENT” My maternal grandmother, Marianna Cavallaro, spoke no English, and whenever she came to babysit for me and my sisters while our parents were out, she’d go over to a shelf in the living room, take down a record album, and say to me in Italian, “Joey, put this on.” I was only five or six, and carrying the bulky volume of 78s over to the Victrola wasn’t easy. But I liked climbing up on a stool, removing a shiny black disc from its sleeve, hearing it plop into place, and then positioning the needle in the groove. My grandmother always sat in the same place—an armchair with a straight back that made it impossible to slouch. She wanted me to sit nearby on the sofa, perfectly still. But I hated sitting still. Once the music started and my grandmother closed her eyes, I slid down to the floor, leaned against the sofa, and imagined myself somewhere else. The music was always the same—Mascagni’s one-act operaCavalleria Rusticana, which is set in a Sicilian village like the one from which my grandmother had come to America, not long after the opera was written, at the turn of the century. Nobody told me that this was “opera.” Even if anyone had, I wouldn’t have paid attention. This music belonged to my grandmother. It made her happy. She always insisted on listening to the whole album—there were perhaps eight or ten discs—and she never fell asleep. I guess she picked that particular chair so she wouldn’t miss a note. I couldn’t fall asleep either. Before I knew it, the needle had reached the center of the disc, the loud, scratchy voices had stopped, and my grandmother was saying quietly in Italian, “Change the record, Joey.” Looking back, I find it interesting that my grandmother never asked my older sister, Joan, to participate in those musical séances—this was a job only for me. Was she sending me a message? Was this how it all began? The thought that I could one day run The Metropolitan Opera first crossed my mind when Rudolf Bing retired as general manager in 1972. At the time, I was still only master carpenter, in charge of the seventy or eighty men who set up and dismantled The Met’s stage for every performance. I’d wrestled with budgets. I’d demonstrated a knack for learning quickly on the job. I was good at solving problems and handling emergencies. I felt I knew better than anyone how The Met worked, mechanically and logistically. The Met is the biggest performing arts institution in the world. Every year it presents some 240 performances of thirty or so different operas, each with an international cast and elaborate sets. It employs more than two thousand people and has annual operating expenses of more than $220 million. To keep it going requires not just the muscle and the know-how of carpenters, stagehands, painters, designers, electricians, and prop men, but also the skills of musicians, singers, vocal coaches, dancers, ballet masters, stage directors, conductors, artistic administrators, marketing and publicity people, and the efforts of The Met’s board of directors, which raises the funds to pay for what the box office doesn’t. In 1972, I didn’t really understand how many of those jobs were done. Nor did I have the slightest idea how Rudolf Bing had managed to coordinate everyone during the two decades he’d been in charge. Still, I thought that the top job at The Met—which means the top job in the opera world—was not out of reach. I felt that in some mysterious sense I’d been chosen by Rudolf Bing himself. Not that he ever hinted as much. He was too