Music: Music Man for the Met

The Metropolitan Opera is first and foremost a singers' house, or what the managers on 57th Street like to call a bella voce theater. Its basic operating premise is that what counts is glorious singing. The only trouble is that no amount of fine vocalizing will make an opera like Otello or Wozzeck work without a steady, compelling baton on the podium. Yet it is difficult to get, let alone keep, good conductors in a house where singing stars have virtual veto power over their maestros. As a result, good conducting has been almost as elusive at the Met as good ballet.

Now all that seems to be changing. In the same week that retiring General Manager Rudolf Bing was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, his chosen successor Goeran Gentele (TIME, Dec. 21, 1970) announced that Conductor Rafael Kubelik would join him at the Met (in 1973-74) as the first music director in the company's 88-year history. Both the job and the man are sure to have a great effect on the Met's future. The new music director will have an equal voice in every phase of the Met's artistic operations.

Kubelik was born in 1914 near Prague. He first caught the public eye as piano accompanist for his father Jan Kubelik, the noted Czech violinist, but he comes to his present job after international success as a guest conductor and a long career as a music director of the Czech Philharmonic, the Brno Opera House, Britain's Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and, most recently, the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Munich.

As Kubelik's many Deutsche Grammophon recordings (notably Janacek and Mahler) show, he has brought the Bavarian orchestra to unprecedented polish by combining a Bohemian exuberance with the best kind of Germanic restraint and architectural proportion. Both should be most useful at the Met.