Rudolph Bing
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Sir Rudolph Bing (January 9, 1902 – September 2, 1997) was an Austrian-born opera impresario. Bing was General Manager of the New York Metropolitan Opera from 1950-1972.
Born Rudolf Franz Joseph Bing in Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire to a well-to-do and musical family (his father was an industrialist,) Bing studied at the University of Vienna and as a young man worked in theatrical and concert agencies. In 1927 he went to Berlin, Germany and subsequently served as general manager of opera houses in that city and in Darmstadt.
It was in Berlin that he married a Russian ballerina.
In 1934, with the rise of Nazi Germany, the Bings moved to Great Britain where, in 1946 he became a naturalised British subject. There he helped to found the Glyndebourne Festival and, after the war, organized the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
In 1949 he went to the United States, to become general manager of the Metropolitan the following year. During his long and triumphant tenure, he opened the house to African-Americans, with Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price as the most prominent examples. He also supervised the move of the old Metropolitan to its new quarters in Lincoln Center. His administration was, by any account, one of the great eras of Metropolitan Opera.
Knighted in 1971; Bing wrote two books, 5000 Nights at the Opera and A Knight at the Opera. He died of respiratory failure in Yonkers, New York (some sources indicated The Bronx, New York), at the age of 95 at a Jewish old-age home.
[Widowed from his lovely wife Nina and without other family, Bing suffered for many years from Alzheimer's disease and was the protagonist of a well publicised cause célèbre when a reputedly unbalanced lady married him and took him to the Caribbean. Eventually an American court declared him incompetent and annulled the marriage. Noted soprano Roberta Peters and others arranged for him to be admitted to a well-known, model nursing home in Riverdale, The Bronx, NYC, where he eventually died.
If it is indeed true that Bing came from a Jewish background, he certainly does not mention the fact at all in either of his autobiographical books.]
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