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• 4 • The Swiss Connection D r. Herbert Graf, who had brought me to Zurich, was one of the seminal figures in twentieth-century opera. His father, Dr. Max Graf, a pupil of Eduard Hanslick and Anton Bruckner, was a distinguished musicologist and educator, as well as one of the leading music critics in Vienna. Herbert Graf grew up surrounded by the most distinguished musicians and scholars of that halcyon era in the Austrian capital, including one contact that came in very handy early on in his life. At the age of four, Herbert was walking in the park with the family’s maid when he witnessed a horse collapse while trying to pull a heavy load. He ultimately developed a terrible fear of leaving the house, convinced that one of the thousands of horses transporting people and goods up and down the streets of the city would do him harm. His worried father approached a member of his social circle, Dr. Sigmund Freud, who suggested the child see him once and then have analytic sessions with his own father, these to be reported to the doctor for therapeutic consultation . The results of the successful therapy were eventually written up in a famous paper entitled “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy,” in which young Herbert made scientific history under the pseudonym “Hänschen” (Little Hans). Clearly, Dr. Freud knew his stuff, because the child was completely cured and while still a very young man was selected to serve as assistant to the eminent theatrical director Max Reinhardt. After early engagements , he joined the staff at the opera in Frankfurt, where, at the age of only twenty-seven, he staged the world premiere of Von heute auf morgen, by Arnold Schoenberg, a composer his father had championed. Forced to leave Germany, he directed opera in Philadelphia in 1934 and 1935. In 1936, after a brief sojourn in Austria, where he worked at 62 } l o t f i m a n s o u r i the Salzburg Festival, he joined the production staff at the Metropolitan Opera. He remained there until 1960, with frequent forays to other places, among them, the revivified Salzburg Festival, where he staged legendary all-star productions of Otello and Don Giovanni in the early 1950s, while helping the postwar Vienna State Opera get back on its feet. Also a distinguished pedagogue, he taught on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia from 1950 to 1960. On November 29, 1948, his Otello production at the Metropolitan, conducted by Fritz Busch and starring Ramón Vinay, Licia Albanese, and Leonard Warren, opened the 1948–49 season at that theater, while concurrently becoming the first live opera performance ever televised in the United States. In the course of his long career, he worked with just about everybody who was anybody in the opera world, including conductors like Busch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Arturo Toscanini, with direct links to the great artists of the past. In this sense, he was something like a bridge: heir to traditions passed down from century to century, then mentor to new generations. Because of his contributions, many ideas about style and practice so central to making opera what it is, and what it can be, have survived to this day to be passed along to future generations. For all of this, the man had not an iota of egotism. Unlike so many others in this profession, he was kind and unpretentious. I knew him about as well as anyone, and yet I learned many of the impressive details of his life only after his death. In fact, it wasn’t until 2008 that I found out that his godfather had been Gustav Mahler. Many of the artists who worked with him recall the universality of his background and knowledge, a fact Hans Hotter once summed up by saying simply, “Graf—there was a stage director who could read and understand music!” I could not begin a chapter about my professional career in Europe without saying something about the remarkable man who made it all possible . Someday, somebody should write a full-scale biography of him. In the 1960s, the Zurich Opera was a repertory house with a resident ensemble: orchestra, chorus, and ballet, along with the necessary technical departments. The season began in September and concluded at the end of June—something still unheard of the in United States, even in New York. For all of this...

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