Dropping the (White) Gloves in a Met Duel
They don't want to talk about this, but the members of the grand old Metropolitan Opera Club -- maybe you've seen them in their boxes in the Dress Circle, always dressed in black tie or white -- have been having some problems with management at the Met.
The problems, which Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Met, does not wish to discuss either, concern the group's little-known on-site club house: an elegantly appointed private room with drinking and dining facilities on the fourth level, which one reaches via a discreetly hidden elevator. (Walk beyond the box office to a short corridor beside the gift shop and take a left.)
Club members, most speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, say that the Met has demanded a stiff increase in fees for their clubhouse, which really annoys them, as their club is 108 years old and they feel they have been there financially for the tough times.
They say that the Met wants to open the room not just to anybody, of course, but to wealthy patrons. Private dining space is scarce in the opera house, and the club room, which can seat 100 and overlooks the reflecting pond to the north, is a treasure.
They say -- and this has distressed many of them mightily -- that the black tie requirement could be dropped.
And they report that when negotiations between the Met and the club got heated at the end of the season last spring, the club's on-site staff members were denied access to the building to perform clerical duties. Informed of that several months later at their annual dinner in September, members were appalled.
'It was a negotiating ploy of the Metropolitan Opera Association,' said Cecil S. Ashdown, a longtime member, using the Met's formal name. 'They figured they'd get our attention and they did. We thought we in the club were gentlemen; we're not used to these sort of street tactics, gutter tactics.'
Paul M. Montrone, president of the Metropolitan Opera Association, did not return two calls. Peter Clark, a Met spokesman, said that Mr. Volpe would comment only if officers of the club did so first. Dr. Peter J. Linden, the club president, did not return five phone calls, made to his home, office and the club. Although the lockout was apparently brief, the memories linger.
'It was just absurd,' said one disgruntled club member. 'You don't treat major donors that way, and the club is a major donor. Not in terms of Vilar. Alberto Vilar, the largest opera donor in the world, he just gave $25 million.'
The Opera Club's contributions?
'Half a million dollars a year,' the member said. 'They should be nice to us. There has not been a year as far back as I can remember when the club has not made a significant contribution.'
A few words about the membership.
'You can say the club is about 300 people who are passionate about an art form and unbelievably knowledgeable who will sometimes brave a blizzard, a horrible rainstorm, to show up in black tie to see the seventh performance of 'Traviata' in two months.'
'Maybe the Wagner Society has that,' the member added, 'but it is maybe just about Wagner.'
Historically the Opera Club, whose members are nicknamed the Penguins because of their fondness for white tie and who reserve their group of boxes Monday through Friday evenings and for Saturday matinees, has played an important financial role at the Met. During the Depression and later when the Metropolitan could not fill the house, the club's guaranteed block of 60 seats was important. It contributed the signature muted-gold curtain that drapes the stage, and it has helped underwrite performances.
Now, with the house at more than 90 percent capacity and an abundance of wealthy donors, some members say the club is no longer valued by Met management. Their room, however, is. When entertaining, Met management must set up on the Grand Tier or co-opt the Grand Tier Restaurant, which is normally open to the public, or the Belmont Room of the Opera Guild, an organization that raises money for the Met.
The club's arrangement with the Met had been informal. It does not have a lease. Mr. Ashdown, who was formerly on the club's board, said that members make a contribution to the Met each year and close their deals with 'a gentleman's handshake.'
Last winter, things changed.
There was a special meeting, said one member who attended, at which club members were told that their $500,000 contribution to the Met was considered unsatisfactory and had to be increased by a substantial sum.
As negotiations proceeded, there was a dispute about whether the often sizable contributions that club members make directly to the Met -- which earn them mentions in the opera program -- could be counted toward the club's contribution. In the spring, negotiations are said to have broken down.
Ultimately, the club raised mandatory contributions to the Met from approximately $500 to $2,000 a member. (There is an additional $3,000 fee for membership and the use of the club's boxes.) Mr. Ashdown said that not all members are wealthy, and that the price increase caused several to drop out.
It is not easy to be a member of the Opera Club, holding fast to another era's civilities. The dress code is often ridiculed.
'It's absurd,' one high-ranking Met staff member said.
He recalled an Opera Club Ball held on the Grand Tier in 1998 in which Carlos Saúl Menem, then president of Argentina, was honored. 'The invitation said 'White tie with decorations if convenient,' ' he said, laughing.
Originally called the Vaudeville Club, the Opera Club was begun when a group of bon vivants formed an all-male club for after-theater entertaining. Searching for quarters in 1892, they found rooms in the old Metropolitan Opera House at 39th Street and Broadway, which had been closed after a fire. Stanford White, a charter member, designed the club with 25-foot ceilings, gilt-edged mirrors, boxes and a small stage where the men put on their own entertainment, often bawdy.
When the opera house reopened in 1893, the members took a large box on the Grand Tier, seating 60, with a private corridor connecting it to the club. And over the years the stories piled up.
According to club lore, when Enrico Caruso was arrested in 1906 for pinching a woman's behind in the Central Park monkey house, the Metropolitan Opera Club bailed him out.
In one of the most fabled of its fund-raising balls of the 30's, 'A Romantic Pageant of the Second Empire,' according to Town & Country magazine, the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia came as her grandmother, Empress Marie, wife of Czar Alexander II.
When the opera moved to Lincoln Center in 1966, the members chose boxes with an obstructed view to be near their dining quarters. 'Terrible seats,' said Alfred F. Hubay, a former box office manager of the Met, but the members wanted to retain the feeling of the old house.
White tie is now just a Monday evening tradition. Women are allowed as members. The box has 34 seats, stage left. One has to walk through a public space to get to the club, which has the modern look of the opera house, although there is a chandelier and a small bust of the prewar tenor Giovanni Martinelli at the bar.
Mr. Ashdown, who is optimistic about a happy resolution to the imbroglio, still calls the situation 'amorphous.'
'The club can't put out billing for the new season until it's resolved,' he said. 'We can't bill if you don't know if you're going to be there.'
Feelings about opening the club and losing the room's black tie requirement are mixed.
'We resent it,' said the disgruntled member who spoke of Mr. Vilar's donation. 'If the Opera Club is turned into merely a place to park wealthy people who might or might not really enjoy opera, the character of the club will change.'
And the dress code?
'That is a part of who we are, and it makes us who we are. Life has become so informal that it's a last bastion, one of the last bastions of decorum and style.'
Others are more sanguine.
'I myself wouldn't care if the patrons came in mufti, because we would have black tie on and would be going to our club boxes,' Mr. Ashdown said. 'I'd be wearing a real operatic uniform.'
Thus, he attended a recent Monday evening performance of 'Nabucco' in white tie. Thus, the next night, at 'La Bohème,' about two dozen members, mostly male, were in their boxes in black tie, as conspicuous as any other endangered species, old birds of a bygone New York, holding up their side.
At intermission, they walked briskly past those patrons sipping Champagne from plastic flutes to the privacy of their club. When a would-be interloper, after identifying herself as a reporter, asked if a gentleman might show her the room, he declined.