Music: Backstage at the Met

Most Americans, forever fascinated by the backstage know-how of the movies,TV, the theater or the circus, know little about how an opera is staged. It is actually an extraordinary exercise in skill, timing and logistics, far more involved than play production. Many opera plots include supernatural happenings and require complicated equipment; what is more, everything from magic fireworks to the basso's whiskers must move according to the music. Technically, one of the most demanding operas is Gounod's Faust, which opened the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. Last week Faust had its 317th Met performance, a matinee.

The Met is an old and barely adequate house. What it lacks in convenience it must make up with backstage savvy, proudly displayed by a crew of 152 electricians, carpenters ("grips"), prop men, et al. Best place from which to watch them at work is 44 feet above the stage, in the gloom of a narrow fly gallery. There, about lunchtime, Electrician Charlie Suhren started setting the lights for the first scene. As soon as his job was done, Charlie retired to a remote eyrie high in the cathedral vault of the stage, where he played solitaire until it was time to reset the lights for the next scene.

12 Noon. Almost all the cast and chorus are in the house, scattered through four floors of dressing rooms, getting into costumes, making up, vocalizing.

12:30. Carpenters and stagehands check in. Others have already hung all the drops (painted linen) in proper order, ready to be lifted or lowered. The newcomers go to work on the first-scene set, Faust's study.

12:45. Executive Production Manager David Pardoll adjusts a carnation in his lapel, leaves his tiny first-floor office and goes to his regular post in the wings.

12:50. The setting for Faust's gloomy study is in place. Books are piled on the desk and a large armchair has been carefully placed so that it screens an open trapdoor from the view of the audience.

12:52. A short, stooped man carrying a vocal score sits down quietly beside Pardoll. His name is Antonio Dell'Orefice, and he is one of the Met's seven "maestros"—unobtrusive musicians of clerklike appearance whose job it is to follow the score and cue curtains, entrances, exits.

12:55. Master Mechanic Louis Edson looks over the stage set and okays it. General Manager Rudolf Bing marches purposefully across the stage but speaks to no one. Faust (Tenor Thomas Hayward) steps out of the elevator from his third-floor dressing room, looking uncomfortable in his heavy overcoat and old-man's false forehead and wig. Chief Electrician Rudolph Kutner checks with his assistant, stationed at a control panel in the hooded apron box next to the prompter's box.

12:57. Faust checks his props, takes his seat by the fireplace, opens a book on his lap. Backstage voices are hushed. In the darkness behind the study, the set for Scene 2 is all ready to be pulled into place: three sideshow stalls, a circular bandstand, the entrance to the Bacchus Inn. The chorus files in and Chorus Master Walter Taussig mounts a stepladder that is steadied by a stagehand. When he reaches eye level with a small hole in the canvas sidewall of Faust's study—through which he will be able to watch the conductor—Taussig opens his score, focuses a battery light on it and waits.