ON THE MUSICAL SCENE: With a Bing and a Whimper

and for the treatment of opera as a complex and serious art. This is a shocking statement. But more shocking is the fact that under the Bing regime the Met has become one of the dullest and least enterprising of major opera houses. The last forty years have marked a brilliant experimental period in operatic history. Opera has reacted against and mastered to its own use serial music, the film, novel modes of sound. As if in protest against the inhumanities of our technology and politics, the human voice has reasserted itself as the eminent carrier of musical in-