In this installment (see this post for an introduction to the series), the roulette wheel landed on Winthrop Sargeant’s 1978 Profile on Glynn Ross. This was very much the sort of Profile that I was hoping for when I started this project: an interesting subject previously unknown to me.

Ross was the director of the Seattle Opera starting in the 1960s, and he did a lot to popularize the form in the northwestern metropolis by using unconventional promotional techniques and generally being smart about his task. It was his policy to perform all operas in the original language and in English, an idea that shouldn’t be as rare as it apparently is. He was also very shrewd about attracting established stars to remote and (then) unfashionable Washington State for single productions. On this, Sargeant quotes Ross: “An artist wants four things: one, a chance to do something that requires the best of his abilities; two, the opportunity to grow by singing different roles; three, prestige; and four, a paycheck.”

Ross staged the first American production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle that didn’t take place at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a production that helped establish Seattle as a major center of Wagner interest. He used colorful slogans directed at the new wave of youthful customers, such as “La Bohème: Six old-time hippies in Paris,” “Roméo et Juliette: Two kids in trouble, real trouble, with their families,” and (cue bad-pun grimace) “Get Ahead with Salome.” In 1971, just a couple years after it was written, the Seattle Opera was the first reputable opera house to stage The Who’s Tommy, with Bette Midler in a leading role, a detail the magazine omits. (In a perfect world, we’d have some YouTube footage of that production!) In baseball, the analogous figure would be Bill Veeck, roughly.

Sargeant’s work here is a reminder of how conservative the form can sometimes be, which is not a criticism. The Profile starts by establishing the subject’s Profile-worthiness and then segues to the subject’s background, relying a good deal on lengthy quotation from the subject. It’s not “exciting,” but it does the job.

Reading the Profile, it’s difficult not to think of Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met since 2006 and a New Yorker Conference attendee in 2008. Gelb has been phenomenally successful in finding new audiences for Met productions, and his main weapons have been the appearance of filmed versions of current productions in our nation’s multiplexes and fresh thinking on the nature of those productions, both in their selection and in the emphasis on accessability. A quick search at Google suggests that not too many people have suggested the parallels between Ross and Gelb, but they seem pretty obvious to me (not that I’d be aware of any other similar figures).