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The Rudel era, well people talk about the Rudel era. In a way, to me, the entire history
of City Opera up until right now is, in a sense, the Rudel era. And that's because
Julius Rudel was, in a sense, one of the founding -- the founding fathers of New York City
Opera. He has been with New York City Opera since it was a twinkle in Mayor LaGuardia's
eye I guess. He was -- in 1943, when the company was first conceived, if you will,
Rudel had just graduated from Mannes. He had been born, of course, in Vienna and he
came over here, I think, when he was about 17, and went to the Mannes School of Music,
and had just graduated and had heard about the fact that there was going to be a new
opera company formed at City Center, this opera company for the people, that everyone
could afford to go to. And he was looking for a job. He was looking for his first
job out of school so he apparently wandered in and was hired on the spot and played the
first set of auditions that New York City Opera ever had. And so he was there from
the very, very beginning and he started, sort of, really entry level at the lowest possible
rung of the hierarchy. But in 1944 City Opera opened its doors and, I think if I'm
right, by the second season of New York City Opera he was making his conducting debut at
the age of something like 23. He conducted a performance of the Gypsy Baron. And then,
in addition to being a coach repetiteur and a conductor on the house roster, that he started
to take on a series of administrative jobs, scheduling and being the right hand man of
the general director and so on and so forth. And, you know, he sort of grew up with New
York City Opera. He came in there at the beginning of his career and right at the beginning
of New York City Opera's career and they kind of grew up together. And then of course
he became general director in 1957, and I think that's an amazing story of how that
happened because it was a time -- it was, I think, in 1956 that New York City Opera
had been through a series of very short term general directors and was all -- having a
period of great, great difficulty financially, artistically. And the chances for its survival
even were in question. And so what happened was the board at City Opera was considering,
to fill the position of general director, all kinds of very famous fancy established
conductors of the day, but the City Opera staff and the artists had a different idea.
They marched into the board and they said, "Our next general director should be Julius
Rudel because this guy knows how to run the place. Basically he's been running the place.
He's a great conductor. He is a total man of the theater. And he understands how to
run this place like nobody else. And here we have this young guy sitting right here,
36 years old or something like that, and why should we go and search out of our doors when
we've got the right guy right here." And God bless them, that board listened, and they
hired Julius Rudel as a general director. And after a year's hiatus, New York City Opera
opened again in 1957. And the rest is history, that really the Rudel era was a -- certainly
a golden era at City Opera. And it spanned 25 years. He is the longest tenured general
director we ever had. And the amazing things -- I mean that was -- I think the first years
of City Opera, from 1944 until 1957 when Maestro Rudel took over, were sort of, you know, the
infancy, the childhood of City Opera, and many great things were done. But I feel
that probably more than anybody else, Maestro Rudel defined the company. It -- he became
something more in that -- in the Rudel era than this populous alternative to the Met
that you could afford tickets to. He really, you know, I don't want to say he didn't impose
a profile, he sort of teased the company's profile out of itself. I think he understood
the strengths of City Opera and what City Opera could do well and what City Opera could
do better than anybody else. And he played to its strengths because he understood them.
So, you know, he brought in directors who could get the best out of singers. It was
starting to be apparent that young American singers were amazingly versatile and grew
up with a tradition seeing and -- films and theater, a tradition of acting that they could
bring. He understood that there were American composers out there who were really ready
to contribute to American culture and write operas. And of course one of the most amazing
things of the Rudel era were the Ford Foundation grants. There were three subsidized seasons
of American opera under Rudel and also something like 11 commissions of American operas.
And I don't think we have ever seen anything in any American opera since then of such magnitude,
that support and nurturing of American opera. And a lot of very notable American operas
came out of it, The Crucible, Lizzie Borden, you know. Gosh, just so many things, The
Good Soldier Schweik. Oh, on and on, you know. And we began -- New York City Opera
then began to have a profile as a company that promoted American artists not just on
stage, but, you know, not just interpreters but creators. And if you talk to any of
the composers that were around then they tell you New York City Opera was the only place,
the only place you could hope to have an American opera produced. And, you know, something
like oh, a full -- over a third of our repertory, which now is way over 200. It's about, you
know, 250 or so operas, way over a third of that are American works. And this really
all started -- for all intents and purposes it started in earnest in the Rudel era.
So there was, you know, the populism, the emphasis on American singers and American
operas. There was the sense of theatricality. There was the first embraces of technology.
Our first telecast, 1976, the Ballad of Baby Doe, he was the host. He was the general
director, you know. And he made several recordings with the New York City Opera orchestra
and chorus. There was Silver Lake and there was -- oh, of course Giulio Cesare. That
reminds me, when you talk about the Rudel era, first of all, that's when City Opera
moved to Lincoln Center, in 1966. And also, that was the year of Giulio Cesare. Maestro
Rudel basically jump started the American revival Handel opera. That has really blossomed
in recent decades at New York City Opera and elsewhere, but that's another gift, I think,
that stems from the Rudel era that City Opera has given the U.S., is the Handel repertory.
There were so many things. I mean it was during the Rudel era that New York City Opera
really became the company that all of the other regional opera companies looked to for
innovation. What new things were -- was the City Opera doing. You know, and the
face of opera in this country today would not be what it is at all without the Rudel
era and New York City Opera. The reason I say that it extends until now, the Rudel
era, is that I believe that even after he left in 1981, after a quarter century as the
general director, and of course years before that working at City Opera since it's founding,
he remained a huge influence. So many of the things that he had begun became company
traditions and flourished, and many of the artists still at City Opera maintained a relation
with -- relationship with Maestro Rudel as he was conducting all over the world, all
over Europe, at the Met, everywhere. And I think one of the most spectacular things
that has happened at New York City Opera in my time there, is in 1966 he returned to the
City Opera podium, conducted Cosi Fan Tutte. Now he had conducted the City Opera premier
of Cosi Fan Tutte in the 1950s with this legendary cast of Phyllis Curtin, Frances Bible, Judith
Raskin, Donald Graham, John Alexander, and James Pease. I mean that's an A team.
That's an opera A team. And he returned in 2006 to conduct this new production of
Cosi. And it was a time at City Opera that it was just -- people were walking on air.
First of all the music making was on such a high level. The orchestra played like
you, you know, I mean we have a pretty great orchestra but the way they played for Rudel
was really nothing short of amazing. And the singers, the way the singers sang, the
music making, he just lifted it up to such an incredibly high level. And also just
to have him walking around the halls. You felt like when he walked through the stage
door, when Maestro Rudel walked through our stage door, it was like here's our entire
history walking the halls. And, you know, to be able to experience that was just so
inspiring, I think, to everybody. And also, another thing he did, and this is something
that the Rudel era was renown for as well, is making stars. And, you know, of course
that famous Giulio Cesare not only brought Handel to America for all intents and purposes,
but it made a star of Beverly Sills and Norman Treigle, who also are real emblems of City
Opera and what it's all about. And, you know, Rudel, he always had that eye for --
and ear for not only a great voice but a great American singing actor, and he trusted
his intuition, you know. He had a feeling that yes, this person is really world class,
is really gonna make it. And he gave people chances. I remember Tatiana Troyanos telling
me a story about when she was a young unknown singer just fresh out of Julliard, and she
was hired to do some small roles at City Opera in the early 60s before she went to Europe
and became a star. And she said she was covering the role of Jocasta in Oedipus Rex.
And someone else was singing it but during a stage rehearsal she was sitting out in the
house observing, as a cover does, and Rudel, you know, things weren't going well on stage
and Maestro Rudel wasn't happy. And he turned around and looked out into the house and said,
"Troyanos, come up here." And so she went and she was well prepared. She sang Jocasta
and that was that. And she sang the role and that really was probably the first really
big thing that she did at City Opera before she went to Europe and became a star. And
I -- we, those of us now at City Opera, we saw that happen in 2006 because the woman
who was supposed to sing Fiordiligi unfortunately had to miss a lot of rehearsals, and ultimately
cancelled because she was under the weather. She had to have some surgery. And of course,
you know, everybody went into a panic. Oh my gosh, this new production, Maestro Rudel's
conducting, what, you know, Fiordiligi's don't grow on trees, what are we gonna do. And
Maestro Rudel just said, "Well, you know, this cover is really good." It's Juliana
Di Giacomo, who is already creating quite a stir in the opera world, and I'm sure is
going to be a very renown, very, very busy leading lady. But he said, you know, "This
young lady, she's, you know, perfectly, you know, she's a perfectly wonderful Fiordiligi.
Let's put her on," you know. And it's -- that old instinct of his kicked in. And
here's Rudel back at City Opera anointing the next -- I mean this young present generation
of American singers, anointing one, and it was just -- it was thrilling.Well the answer
to that is he didn't always. I mean for instance in the case of the Ford Foundation
grants, those three glorious seasons of all American opera, can you imagine any opera
company doing a complete season of American opera, now? Or any time? Well he did that
with the blessed help of the Ford Foundation. But the thing -- and, you know, commissioning
those eleven American operas, adding that to the repertory. The answer to that is
-- the big thing that a lot of people don't know about these Ford Foundation years is
a lot of times the seats were not terribly filled, but thank goodness we had the support
of the Ford Foundation and -- but sometimes, you know, Maestro Rudel just -- he had such
conviction and he knew that he needed to do this, New York needed it, City Opera needed
to do this. And, you know, the result is, years later there are some of those operas
that he premiered, and those American operas that he put on. Now when we put on The Ballad
of Baby Doe or if we were to put on The Crucible or now, you know, we're reviving Esther, you
know, audiences will come because now these things are legendary. They have a history.
They have a track record. They have a sort of a cache to them. So he was so prescient.
He understood that, you know, in a certain way he was putting things on not just for
today but for tomorrow. And that, to me, is the sign of just a visionary leader, a
type of leader of which there are so few. A very -- what a brave man but what a smart
man, absolutely. But then of course he also had a sense of things that were really gonna
be blockbusters, like who else would have thought that putting on a Handel opera in
1966 that anybody would come to that, anybody would care about it. But he put that on
with this amazing cast headed by Beverly Sills and Norman Treigle. And it became like this
runaway hit and, as you know, made them stars and made Handel viable on stage again. They
recorded it. And so that was, you know, he took a flier on that one. He went out
on a limb and it paid off, you know. He got it produced beautifully so that it was
really colorful and theatrical. It was -- he felt that -- he believed in the piece,
he believed in Handel opera, and he said, "All I have to do is show the public, you
know. We have to show them Handel produced well. They'll get it, you know." And they
did, and that's grown, and similarly with the sort of other rediscoveries, Die tote
Stadt, Mefistofele, all those operas which were really unknown. Not only the new American
operas but the pieces from the 19th century, early 20th century repertory that he just
believed in, or the new -- the other thing he did was to add pieces, the newest pieces
coming from Europe, the important things that were coming over. I mean they did the American
premier of The Fiery Angel by Prokofiev, the first -- the New York Stage premier of The
Dialogues of the Carmelites, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, He just knew these are great operas,
New York needs to see them and hear them, and I believe in them. And most of the time
the proof was in the pudding. I mean, you know, of course there were those things that
did not succeed, but what we remember are the operas that -- and the performers that
really -- that Maestro Rudel really put on the map. And there are so many you can't
even begin to list them.Well in extolling Julius Rudel as a visionary intendant administrator,
you know, we can't forget that he really, I believe, is one of the great conductors
of the 20th, and now the 21st, century, Ôcause he's still going strong. He is just --
he's -- it's hard to put into words what makes him a great conductor but he is just one of
those guys that knows how music goes. You trust him. He has complete authority in
the orchestra pit because he's just -- he is filled with music. I mean I guess there's
no other better way that I can say it, is that you just have the sense when you're watching
him conduct that he knows how it goes, he just -- he conducts, also, with great nuance.
I think that he challenges our orchestra, certainly from what I witnessed during Cosi.
He challenges our orchestra to play with a kind of nuance that I think is revelatory
even to them. I think after a performance of Cosi that they may -- I hope they went
home feeling really good about themselves because I think he challenges them to go beyond
what they thought they could. And the singers, too, on stage, absolutely. He -- one of
the great things about Rudel, this is one of the great lost arts of opera which I really
hope comes back, is that he's one of those old fashioned maestros that, you know, he
sits down and coaches the singers himself. He works with them, which is just amazing.
I mean usually the -- what happens in the opera world today is that the singers have
coachings with the very fine repetituers of the opera house, and then the conductor comes
jetting in at the last minute for tech week and they work with the conductor. But to
have -- to sit down in a practice room with the guy who's gonna conduct the show and have
him, you know, lead you through the music and, you know, that the prima donna and the
maestro are working together to hammer out the interpretation of this particular leading
role, is something all too rare today. But boy does it show in a performance. It really
does. And that was one of -- another thing that was so exciting, to see singers like
Juliana Di Giacomo and Kyle Pfortmiller, you know, these fabulous young American singers
having that experience of working with this man who was around when our company was founded,
and who has worked with all the greats and, you know, has built our history and has, you
know, and just has so much music in him. And they are getting the direct benefit of
that. And I know they felt that very deeply and it so much showed in their performances.
The emphasis on the young American singers, you know, and spotting the talent and having
confidence in your sense of being a star maker, being, you know, being able to parse out who
among all these young American singers are the standouts. And then there's the same
thing with composers, who's gonna be a really great American theatrical voice among composers,
and anointing them with commission. So everything that the Americanness of the company, the
New Yorkiness of the company, the willingness to embrace new theater styles and new theater
technologies, and also the nurturing. It's not just throwing these kids on stage but
it's really the kind of bringing them up and nurturing the young singers, which I feel
is something that we're actually getting back to now in a very serious way. All of these
things -- and City Opera standing as an innovator among American regional opera companies, these
were things that really were established by Rudel, so just every day that City Opera wakes
up in the morning and takes a breath, it's Rudel's legacy. It's the extension of the
Rudel era, really.