Settlement at the Met

"I think it's quite evident that we can look forward to another Met season."

That quiet remark by Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg last week confirmed what much of the Metropolitan Opera's New York public had assumed all along: that the gold curtain would rise on schedule. After an angry salary dispute that had simmered for months, the Met management and the musicians' Local 802 agreed to submit their dispute to "binding arbitration"--with Goldberg as the arbitrator.

Though the public tended to take all the huffing and puffing lightly, fact was that the Met season was in more jeopardy than either management or musicians had originally anticipated. Local 802 President Alfred J. Manuti had lost control of the negotiations. The union demand for a whopping $98-a-week increase in base pay came originally from a nine-man committee made up, according to Met musicians, of "the most radical members of the orchestra." (The committee had made such impossible demands in an RCA Victor recording contract in 1959 that RCA was forced to drop its Record-of-the-Month recordings with the Met, causing -the musicians to lose $1,000 a year apiece.) The union itself, said orchestra members, stood "aghast" at the committee's proposals. But most of the musicians seemed convinced that management would capitulate rather than cancel the season and jeopardize its eagerly awaited 1964 move to a new opera house in Lincoln Center.

The Met's moves during the weeks of dramatic wrangling were equally confused. In midsummer, its labor problems still unresolved, management's top men were pointedly out of town--autocratic General Manager Rudolf Bing in Europe and Opera Association President Anthony Bliss in Montana. And while Bing was in Italy, contemptuously dismissing Goldberg's offer to intervene (it would not help, he said, "a bit"), Bliss graciously accepted it.

As both sides prepared their briefs for a mid-month meeting with Secretary Goldberg, it was clear that General Manager Rudolf Bing's image of authority had been weakened. But the Met had survived the crisis, had lost only one singer and the season would open on schedule on Oct. 23 with Leontyne Price in Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. It was unlikely that either management or musicians, whatever the possible payoff, would ever walk so near the brink of a canceled season again.

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