Rudolf Bing
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Bing was credited with ushering the Met into the modern era during his tenure as general manager from 1950 to 1972, including breaking the company's racial barrier by bringing in Leontyne Price in 1953 and Marian Anderson in 1955.
"(Bing) revolutionized the way the company's productions looked by bringing to the Met the world's greatest directors and designers," Joseph Volpe, the opera's current general manager, said in a statement.
The acerbic Bing clashed frequently with critics and performers, including world famous conductor Georg Szell and star soprano Maria Callas.
Bing supervised every detail of the operas, from repertoire to the choice of conductors and singers, the design of the sets and the stitching of the costumes.
A naturalized Brit born in Vienna, Austria, Bing was appointed general manager of the Met in 1950 after making his name as artistic director of the Edinburgh annual arts festival and manager of the Glyndebourne Opera in Britain.
After his retirement in 1972, critics still argued about the quality of his achievements, but all agreed that his time at the Met had been spectacular.
He attracted the greatest collection of singers that any opera house could command --- performers including Callas, Joan Sutherland and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and conductors such as Georg Solti, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan.
Rudolf Franz Joseph Bing was born Jan. 9, 1902, to a prominent business family. He briefly harbored ambitions to be a singer, but economic hardship after World War I forced him to take a job in a bookstore.
The store began operating as a concert agency, giving Bing an entree into the musical world. He then worked in a number of provincial German theaters and operas.
Driven out of Germany by the Nazis, Bing went to England and from 1935 to 1949 was general manager of the Glyndebourne Opera, a privately owned opera house in rural Sussex.
He also took over the artistic directorship of the Edinburgh Festival from 1947 to 1949, building it virtually from scratch to one of Europe's premier festivals.
Bing kept his British citizenship when he moved to the U.S. Queen Elizabeth awarded him a knighthood in 1971 for his services to opera. He supervised the Met's move to the Lincoln Center in 1966 and presided over numerous triumphant productions, especially of Verdi, Wagner and Strauss.
In the 1980s, Bing began suffering from Alzheimer's disease. His condition deteriorated when his wife, Nina, died in 1983.
He began writing large checks to Carroll Douglass, an impoverished one-time heiress 37 years his junior who had been hospitalized three times for psychiatric reasons. They married in 1987, but two years later the union was annulled because Bing had no recollection of it.
Bing's court-appointed guardian and longtime friend, Paul Guth, had him declared legally incompetent and froze his assets of about $900,000. He lived his last years at a nursing home.
