Customer Reviews

Behind the Gold Curtain: Fifty Years in the Metropolitan Opera

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"Behind the Gold Curtain" is an interesting exposé of life below the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, and it's a shame the author died before he could finish it. David Berkowitz spent fifty years as a violist in the Met orchestra pit, and he had many more tales to tell, and at least one more conductor (James Levine) to critique. Unfortunately, he passed away from lymphoma in 1989.

From some of the flattering remarks he made about Levine, I believe Berkowitz was going to give the current conductor of the Metropolitan Opera a thumbs-up. However that was not chiseled in stone. The Met violist critiqued the technique and personality of many a conductor, both famous and obscure. Two of his favorites (both for their musicianship and for their professional treatment of the orchestra) were Leonard Bernstein and Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Although he despised Herbert Von Karajan's Nazi background, Berkowitz felt he was the best Wagnerian conductor he had ever worked under. He regretted that Von Karajan fell into a dispute with Rudolph Bing, the Met's General Manager, and left after directing only two out of the four operas in Wagner's Ring Cycle.

The members of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra would probably have picked Fritz Reiner as their least popular conductor. For many years, the musicians conspired to keep him out of the Met, for his reputation and rumors of his conducting style had filtered out of Pittsburg:

"I must explain too that Reiner often used a very short baton and if you sat at the rear of the orchestra, it looked like a toothpick, especially to the bass players who were strung out at the rear of the orchestra pit...There is a famous story about a bass player in the Pittsburg Symphony who came in to rehearsal with a telescope on a stand which he focused on Reiner's baton. Reiner stopped the rehearsal and said, `Young man, what are you doing?' The bassist answered, `Maestro, I brought the telescope to see your beat better.' Reiner was furious and dismissed him on the spot."

Reiner finally did spend several years at the Met, and Berkowitz judged him to be quite a gentleman---at least compared to his fellow-maestro, George Szell!

Anecdotes abound concerning the musicians who shared the orchestra pit with Berkowitz (oboists in particular seemed to him to be a very strange breed), and he also tells stories about the singers who trod (some more heavily than others) the stage above them.

"Behind the Gold Curtain" is most especially the autobiography of a fine musician who spent fifty years with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and who struggled to keep his family fed and clothed through the Great Depression, the war years, and the inflationary years following the war. Berkowitz supplemented his Met income by selling insurance and playing at summer festivals. One of his pit-mates bet on horses.

Benefits accumulated very gradually until by the time Berkowitz retired, the Met musicians were finally earning salaries and benefits on par with other world-class orchestras. It was a long, hard struggle especially during the Bing years, and Berkowitz was proud of the part he played in obtaining a better living for himself and his fellow-musicians.

Speaking of struggles, the author also complains that there were no women in the Met's orchestra pit (except for a pair of harpists) until the Metropolitan Opera started to hold blind auditions. Once the aspiring musicians were concealed from the judges (the conductor and a committee of orchestra members) and had to be judged on the merit of their playing, "this was the beginning of the influx of female musicians [into the Met Orchestra]." He was especially proud of the fact that his own daughter, Phebe Berkowitz became the Metropolitan Opera's Executive Stage Director.

My only regret is that David Berkowitz didn't live long enough to complete his story about "a period particularly dear to his heart---the era of James Levine as Musical Director [of the Metropolitan Opera]."