After a year-long “public participation program,” last September, a professional survey sponsored by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts revealed the following bit of information: “as many people know about lincoln center as know about the great pyramids.” This comparative statistic was presented in the September 23 issue of the Performing Arts, one of the numerous publications which the Lincoln Center office puts out. Left unanswered, however, was the question: What is it that people know about Lincoln Center?
There are many facets to this vast project which is now being developed in New York City—and surely destined to have a major impact not only on the cultural life of the city but on the cultural life of the nation as well. There is a good deal which still remains unknown about the project’s various monetary resources, the real estate transactions its development has involved, and its potential effect, not only on the neighborhood of the West Side of New York where it is being erected, but on the architecture of the city as a whole.
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which, according to present plans, will be completed around 1964, hopes to bring together a major part of New York’s various performing arts into one super-organization, on an area of fourteen acres. Lincoln Center’s officials have envisioned their plan as creating a single formidable “culture symbol” for the entire country; issuing a preliminary statement of aims, the directors declared: “Lincoln Center will stand as a symbol of America’s cultural maturity, affirming for the . . . world our nation’s faith in the life of the spirit.” Over a million handsomely designed book covers, for use by high school students, carry the message that “Lincoln Center will make our city the capitol of the performing arts just as the United Nations makes it a capitol for world affairs.” Yet in all this euphoric anticipation, the question of what effect such a concentration might have on the vitality of the arts themselves has received surprisingly little attention. Surely, the importance of this question goes almost without saying. Here I propose to discuss what—as things look now—would seem to be the likely results which Lincoln Center will bring forth so far as the musical arts of the city of New York are concerned—and therefore, to a certain extent, the musical life of the whole country.
When it opens, Lincoln Center will comprise the following organizations: the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the City Center of Music and Drama, the Juilliard School of Music, the High School of Music and Art, the School of Performing Arts, the New York Public Library’s Music Division and Music Library. In general, these organizations will have their own facilities—auditoriums, storage space, rehearsal rooms. In addition, one of Juilliard’s halls will be used for chamber and solo recitals, and Philharmonic Hall will serve to house visiting orchestras from other cities and from abroad. (The summertime schedule of events may shift the popular open-air Lewisohn Stadium Concerts to the Center’s Philharmonic Hall, which will have removable seats for “Pops” concerts; and the Guggenheim Band Shell in Damrosch Park—in Lincoln Center—will probably take under its auspices the Goldman Band Concerts now given on the Mall in Central Park.) Although the constituent organizations will of course always have first call on their own auditoriums, Lincoln Center intends to book any particular hall whenever the primary tenant is not using it. “In this way,” the 1959 Progress Report states, “the Center will be able to plan wisely the total of musical and art services to be presented in the several halls of the Center.”
The advantages of belonging to Lincoln Center will, obviously, be varied and numerous. Each hall is to have near-perfect acoustics1 and air-conditioning. For the further pleasure and convenience of patrons, performers, and students, there will be spacious lounges, lovely gardens, promenades, terraces, roomy elevators, connecting ramps between buildings, fountains, snack bars; ingeniously designed wheel chairs will be available for disabled music lovers. Every hall will boast seats measuring between 22 and 24 inches wide.2 The Philharmonic’s great hall will be equipped with a movable apron that can be used in at least four different ways: as an elevator to bring up grand pianos; or, sunk part way down, as a pit for small orchestras; or, resting at floor level, to accommodate extra seats; or, raised to stage level, to provide an additional ten feet of stage space whenever it is needed. The Met will have four push-button stages and a “theater-box” for tourists: its removable glass wall and a speaker system to pipe in the sounds will allow the curious visitor who passes through during the day to see and hear the performers practicing—undisturbed.
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The Juilliard School of music, now situated in the Morningside Heights section of New York City, and which has for fifty-six years functioned as one of the country’s great musical conservatories, will be the major institution in a vast educational compound to include also the New York City’s High School of Music and Art, and School of Performing Arts. Harold Schonberg, music critic for the New York Times, recently has said that if he were a Juilliard student he would be “delirious with joy at the opportunity of being right next to the musicians of Lincoln Center—being able to attend rehearsals and learn how things are done professionally, not theoretically,”
The desire to create a “culture symbol,” to provide each hall with television equipment so that millions of people can look in from coast to coast, to establish for New York City the prestige that the Center will thus bring to it, are all part of the vision of the people at the offices of Lincoln Center. The Center is taking full responsibility for raising the money to turn this vision into reality, It has bought the land, hired the architects, employed the lawyers, chosen the consultants, conducted the acoustical tests, measured bottoms, and suffered through all of the big and little conflicts that naturally occur when experts and committees of experts are at work. The Center will serve as landlord, leasing halls to the constituent organizations (and renting them out when they are not being used); and it will also do the general housekeeping, But “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”—this is the motto of Lincoln Center, and it is meant to indicate that each member organization will retain its autonomy. Beyond assuming “continuity and financial stability,” no group is asked to sacrifice anything—in the way of artistic integrity, educational values, or public service, On top of all this, the First Progress Report states that Lincoln Center will “pass on to the constituents any benefits of large-scale, year-round operation and of the Center’s tax exemption.” To most of the musical organizations that have joined Lincoln Center, resigned as they were to an existence of comparative penury, all these advantages, and the talk of “benefits,” must surely sound like a miracle from a more efficient, more organized, and much richer world than the one to which they had quite inured themselves.
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Shortly after its inception in 1955, Lincoln Center announced its decision to include in its project drama and dance, as well as music. An Advisory Council, consisting of several very distinguished men and women in the field of the dance, was formed to establish a theater for “Dance and Operetta.” In the April 1958 issue of Dance Magazine, Walter Terry speculated at length as to which New York company would be fortunate enough to be picked. The choice finally fell upon the New York City Ballet; and it is a choice that begins to suggest some of the unanticipated consequences that may result from the creation of Lincoln Center, The City Ballet is part of the City Center of Music and Drama, an organization formed by Mayor LaGuardia in the early 40’s to offer the people of New York tasteful artistic productions at popular prices. The opera company was its first unit, and the Center gradually acquired ballet, drama, and light opera groups, The question now is—in the move of the ballet company to Lincoln Center, which of the other groups will live and which will die?
The answer is by no means clear. One of the public relations men at Lincoln Center seemed quite startled to hear that the City Center even had an opera company. “All of the opera is to be in the Met,” he said, On the other hand, the Women’s Guild for the New York City Opera is now trying to raise $20,000 to provide the company with a new production when, in fact, “it opens at Lincoln Center”; informal statements from several members of the City Center’s board of directors—to the effect that “we move only as a group, as an entity”—lead these ladies to believe that their activities are entirely justified. Somewhere between these contradictory predictions of things to come is a fairly casual comment by William Schuman, president of the Juilliard School of Music and a member of the Lincoln Center Council (which should be distinguished from the Lincoln Center Board of Directors, the Lincoln Center Officers, and the Lincoln Center Committee Chairman); “It is possible that there may be some opera in that building [the City Center’s “Dance and Operetta” hall] and some operetta at the Met. As for maintaining a separate [opera] company in the Dance theater . . . ?”—a comment that leaves the whole situation quite unresolved.
But if New York is to lose the City Center’s opera company, what would such a loss mean? A little over a mile away, downtown, from where the City Center now stands is the Metropolitan Opera House, whose patrons can afford high prices but whose stage is rarely graced by either indigenous or new European works. The Met’s uncharacteristic commitment to perform a new opera by Gian-Carlo Menotti in 1963 is—characteristically—a well-protected venture, for the management will have an opportunity to see the opera and to study its critical and box-office response when it is performed next year in several European houses. On the other hand, the New York City Opera during the last few seasons has produced not only over a dozen American operas and such challenging contemporary “international” pieces as Dallapiccola’s Prisoner, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Eck’s Inspector General, and Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, but it has also proved to be the sole company in New York City that provides new ideas in performing the standard repetory and an opera house for patrons who cannot afford luxury prices. The purpose and philosophy of these two professional opera companies—the Met’s and the City’s—are obviously different. But if both were to be ensconced at Lincoln Center, it is not hard to understand why the Metropolitan might not care to look through its graceful arches and see the New York City Opera, with its current $3.95 top, staring at it from across the plaza.3
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Northwest of the City Center on its present location is the Juilliard School of Music, the city’s largest conservatory and certainly one of the greatest in the world. At Lincoln Center, it will offer its usual symphonic and choral concerts, chamber and solo recitals, new and repertory works in the fields of the dance, chamber music, and full-scale operas. To all this it will add performances of the spoken drama, for the conservatory plans now to be a training school for the repertory theater. It has also decided to discard its undergraduate school, and consequently all these numerous activities will be undertaken with considerably less than half of its present student body. Under conditions of such pressures, it seems unrealistic to expect from Juilliard any great amount of risky, pioneering effort in the field of the lyric theater—particularly in view of the school’s productions during the last fifteen or so years. Since 1945, of over seventy operas which the school has produced—in class, seminar, or as full-dress productions—only two have been written by American composers. In short, the New York City Opera would seem to be indispensable: separated from the Met and Juilliard by several miles, with an operatic philosophy of its own and with its own board of directors, it has served both American composers and the city well.
Yet if the entire City Center—its ballet, opera, and “light opera” companies—moves to Lincoln Center, the conflict that would seem to inhere in the principle of constituent autonomy plus Lincoln Center’s super-organizational control may then become evident. If, as seems likely, Lincoln Center’s board of directors is motivated primarily by the desire to please its wealthier, more generous trustees—those by chance who happen to support the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard conservatory—and motivated as well by its rule regarding individual “continuity and financial stability,” it may certainly decide to do without the City Center’s opera company. This prophecy is not so speculative that it cannot be spelled out a little. Lincoln Center could supplement the New York City Ballet with visiting troupes like the Bolshoi Ballet, England’s Royal Ballet, and the Royal Danish Ballet, and it would present, on its own, such “operettas” as Brigadoon and Finian’s Rainbow. (I have it on good authority that the name “Theater for Dance and Operetta” does not refer to such gems as Mozart’s Schauspieldirektor or Rossini’s L’inganno felice; this genre is too limited to name even half a house after it.) In the process of transferring the City Center from its present location to Lincoln Center, the people of New York will not only lose 510 seats but the city may also lose its only source of experimental and inexpensive opera. And finally, of course, the whole country will suffer from the loss.
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When Lincoln Center decided to include within its fourteen acres an “educational institution for training in the arts,” it first asked Columbia University, in 1955, to join. For over half a century Columbia has had a distinguished music department which offers undergraduate courses in theory, history, literature, and applied music—and graduate courses in musicology and composition; and for many years now, the university has been trying to raise funds to build an art center where the classroom work can be shown to the rest of the university. Yet when Lincoln Center asked Columbia to transfer the performance work of its music department, the university refused—and without any dissenting voice among its faculty.
One reason for its refusal was the Center’s inconvenient location: students of the humanities would have had to travel almost three miles to take a course in music. The more significant considerations, however, were outlined by Douglas Moore, chairman of the Music Department and MacDowell Professor of Music (as well as a noted composer in his own right). Mr. Moore believes that “University performances are free from certain pressures which limit experimentation in the professional market, and it is perhaps better to keep the two separate”; that while “failure should be one’s frequent companion in an educational institution,” it is unpalatable in a public, commercial world; and, finally that student performers should serve their own artistic and intellectual communities, and not be placed in an isolated fourteen acres of the city, several hundred yards from the Metropolitan. There was no disagreement at Columbia with Mr. Moore on any of these points.
Columbia having said no, Lincoln Center then invited the Juilliard School of Music to come in. Juilliard officials studied the project carefully for a year and a half. On February 7, 1957, the school accepted. The directors of the school and the trustees of the Juilliard Musical Foundation thereupon agreed to make two major changes in the school’s operation when it became part of the Center: (1) to train only advanced students; and (2) to include, among its courses, training in drama along with music and dance.
The first of these decisions will affect something like 700 students. In January of this year, Juilliard had 1,563 students. Of these, 691 were in the regular graduate division (which encompasses both music and dance), 169 were in the extension division, and 703 were in Juilliard’s preparatory school. A Lincoln Center-Juilliard press release lists the new criteria for acceptance: “The students will be those giving promise of becoming leaders in their respective branches of the art as performing musicians, actors, dancers; as composers, playwrights, choreographers; as stage directors, designers for the theater; and as artist-teachers in this field.”
The number of students to be enrolled finally is still undecided, but there is no doubt that those in the preparatory and probably many in the extension divisions will be forced to study elsewhere. The same press release states that “although there will undoubtedly be a number of exceptions involving younger students, it is anticipated that in general the student body will be in the eighteen to twenty-eight age range.” (Composers, according to William Schuman, will most likely be in the twenty-five to thirty-five age range.)
Mr. Schuman is aware of the “serious void” that these changes will create, but is “optimistic of rescuing the preparatory division.” He hopes to preserve both the faculty and student body in a separate institution to come into being somewhere near Lincoln Center—but not under the auspices of Juilliard. If that should prove impossible, Mr. Schuman believes that in any event training in the performing arts has already advanced to the point where “preparatory education can really be left in the hands of others.”
Juilliard’s emphasis, then, will be on the practical, working situation. Early training for the young composer, the gifted child, the youthful dancer will be sacrificed by one of America’s leading conservatories of music. As opposed to this loss, the gain is peculiarly American: technique and polish. But there are other losses as well—more subtle ones—and Mr. Schuman (who is also a distinguished and well-known composer) seems to recognize them. He speaks with pride of the fact that Juilliard has had no public relations department; he sees no reason for anyone’s serving as mediator in his communications. He also refers to the large number of the school’s musical offerings to which the press is not invited because of the special nature of the work done in a conservatory. He tells of his personal dissatisfaction with the part played by Juilliard in the Omnibus program on Lincoln Center presented on television on January 1, 1961—attributing the school’s poor showing to the last-minute notification from the Center’s main office. Mr. Schuman must know, then, that in a few short years he will be in something very like a large fishbowl, placed conspicuously on a table made of travertine marble, stared at continually and curiously by tourists and critics alike. Thus, in the circumstances of Columbia’s rejection and Juilliard’s acceptance, there has been revealed another element of what it is that the musical world in New York City will lose as soon as Lincoln Center is completed—the nurturing quiet that the academy provides.
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The decision to include a library-museum has been the last in the plans of Lincoln Center, which have come to encompass a “trilogy of education, creative scholarship, and performance.”
The New York City Public Library system contains two music branches. (There is also a fairly new department for circulating records.) One of the two branches, called the Music Division, is a research library located in the main building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street; the other, the Music Library, housed in a separate building on East 58th Street, circulates musical scores and books about music. As of now, the decision is to move both of these branches eventually to Lincoln Center.4
The Music Division is one of the finest research libraries in the world. Its holdings of scores, manuscripts, books, and micro-films have been collected over a period of years for the benefit of the interested student of music. Precisely for this reason, Paul Henry Lang, professor of Musicology at Columbia University, devoted a fairly lengthy column in the New York Herald Tribune to plead that the decision to move the library be reversed. Its holdings, he said, were not collected for professionals in an opera company, symphony orchestra, or conservatory. Mr. Lang quite rightly went on to point out that musical scholarship always straddles at least two fields. If the scholar is concerned with troubador music, it is obvious that he must also have French literary and historic references at hand. The same overlap occurs in studying the German song, Italian cantata, English ballad opera, any of the Renaissance madrigals, and all of church music. But Lincoln Center would house only a music library. Mr. Lang wondered what could possibly “be gained by this costly transfer of a great research library into an empire devoted exclusively to the cultivation of music readily available in print. . . ?”
The operating procedures of the second music branch, the Music Library, are quite different, but the purpose is essentially the same: public service. Demands for material are directly related to the programs being performed in the city. When Handel’s Messiah is scheduled for Carnegie Hall, the library is deluged with requests for the score; otherwise, it is rarely asked for. When the Philharmonic is performing Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in D Minor, then private teachers throughout the area (as well as those working in music schools and conservatories) assign the Vivaldi. But will this be possible when the Music Library is transferred? It seems right to suppose that if Leonard Bernstein, say, wanted fifteen copies of Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in D Minor, the scores would be more readily available to him than to some student who had to first get to the Center by subway. Will the Lincoln Center library, in other words, be able to serve a wider public than the professional Lincoln Center “neighborhood”?
A rather interesting reason seems to lie behind the transfer of the Music Library and the Music Division to Lincoln Center. If all the Center had wanted was an excellent library, it already had one. Any university or conservatory would envy Juilliard’s magnificent library—and, after all, only a small fraction of Juilliard’s student body will be there to use it in 1964. Without the two city libraries, however, a tourist coming through Lincoln Center during the day might See only an empty concert hall, an empty opera house, an empty dance theater, an empty chamber music hall.5 Of course, tourists will, if they wish, be able to see a variety of groups practicing. But several officials seemed to feel that the Center should be represented by something in its “finished” state. If what at least a dozen people attached to Lincoln Center have told me is true—that the men and women who visit Radio City today will include Lincoln Center on their tours tomorrow—then such tourists should be given as much as possible to “see.” This is the reasoning, it seems, which has led to the inclusion of “creative scholarship”—that is, New York City’s two public libraries devoted to music—in the trilogy of Lincoln Center’s musical complex.
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* * *
Her life has been sold for an old man’s
gold,
She’s a bird in a gilded cage.
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Lincoln Center may be built of glass and travertine marble, but gold will also be there—and is naturally bound to make a difference to the trustees, the directors, the administrators. For it is the trustees, directors, administrators, and real estate dealers who are responsible for this new center which will “affirm for the entire world our nation’s faith in the life of the spirit.” In truth, between the anonymous committees somewhere, remote and authoritarian, and the men and women who daily will be performing or teaching at Lincoln Center, or providing a variety of other services, there has been remarkably little communication.
For example, the head librarians of neither the Music Division nor the Music Library were consulted about changing locations. One was informed personally of the decision; the other only read about the move in the newspaper. Moreover, since the press issued the original notices, the librarians have heard little more.
The history of Lincoln Center contains other such examples of gaps in communication. On December 12, 1958, William Schuman advocated the merger of the High School of Music and Art with the School of Performing Arts (two public high schools in New York) in a “logical location next to Lincoln Center”—so that the students of these schools might benefit from the activities at the Center. The proposal was announced in the press (somewhat later because of a newspaper strike), and by now the merger has gone through; the schools will eventually be moved to the Lincoln Center area. Yet until the merger—and possibly since then—neither of the principals of the two schools heard about these plans from any source other than the press. Neither of them has received any communication either from Lincoln Center or the New York City Board of Education. One principal told me that if I wanted information about the merger I should refer to a recent article written by Harold Schonberg in the New York Times Magazine, for that was where he had received all of his information and he assumed that Mr. Schonberg had been in touch with someone who knew. The other gentleman said: “Everything about Lincoln Center is so nebulous. What I hear is through the grapevine, hearsay, rumor.” The principals, librarians, performers—few of them have been asked for their opinions.
At the same time, it is also true that those people who are in charge of the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts seem to have had very little involvement in any of the arts. The New York Herald Tribune, announcing the appointment of General Maxwell Taylor as president of Lincoln Center, stated quite specifically that the General had “never been known as a patron of the arts.” A public relations official has said that General Taylor’s chief credential was that of being chairman of Mexican Light and Power, “the largest private enterprise in Mexico.” (General Taylor is, of course, the retired Army Chief of Staff.) It would be more than a little naive to think that a man with such administrative experience—or a man like Colonel William Powers, now the executive director of the construction of Lincoln Center, and best known for his construction of “housing, warehouses, bridges, dams, and operational military installations such as the first Bomarc Guided Missile Installation at Maguire Air Force Base”—that such men have nothing to contribute to the building of a complicated, expensive project like the Center. They have their special talents, surely. But it also seems more than a little perturbing that, amid all the plans—no one telephoned the principal of the High School of Music and Art.
In December, shortly after the National Cultural Center in Washington issued an elaborate report concerning “America’s cultural needs,” Professor Lang of Columbia, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, argued that the trustees of the Washington Center, like those of Lincoln Center, had been imprisoned by the net of concepts they had themselves engineered. He concluded: “The sheer weight of steel and concrete stands in the way of the artistic and social implications. Such a basic error would not have been made had [these plans] been entrusted to persons more familiar with the problems of culture and readier and hardier in their search for truth.”
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As a reporter searches for the truth about Lincoln Center, questions abound. Why, to ask a small question, is this complex of education, creative scholarship, and performance to be called “Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts” rather than “Lincoln Center for Music, Drama, and Dance”? And why has the Met been placed so conspicuously in the very center of the Center, with its great imposing tower? Why, too, is the Met’s the only auditorium which has had its seating capacity increased and been able to retain even its “boxes”? (Some ladies who work for and attend the Philharmonic regularly are quite unhappy that Lincoln Center took away their boxes. “Mezzanines,” one has said, “are for the movies.”) All of these and other questions begin to be answered if one recognizes that what underlies the whole project of Lincoln Center—all of its activities—is the adulation of the performer, which has been symbolized in America’s musical culture by the deification of the prima donna.
On the Omnibus program devoted to Lincoln Center previously mentioned, Wallace K. Harrison, the Center’s chief architect, commented that the Center would be a place “where a child can come and meet all of the great artists of the world.” Of course this hardly means that the child will see Stravinsky lolling on the plaza benches or Hindemith grabbing a quick hamburger. But the child may, on the other hand, see Rise Stevens jump into a taxi with her television make-up still on. Lincoln Center’s artist will be the interpreter, the virtuoso; it is this symbol which places severe limits on the Center’s cultural significance. Is it unreasonable to worry about the effect of this attitude upon the youngsters of the High School of Music and Art and on the climate of the musical life of the country in general? Mr. Harrison’s expectations to one side, wouldn’t this overemphasis on the glamorous world of performance tend to turn students away from other aspects of musical expression—particularly composition?
Music in this country has always been treated as a sport, or a contest in high fidelity. Van Cliburn reigns, while Roger Sessions is hardly known. The architect for the Center’s Philharmonic Hall, Max Abromovitz, recognized this implicitly when he gave his reasons for using glass walls: “Having people on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out is an exciting kind of game.” Mr. Abromovitz hopes the glass will be part of the “pageantry of the hall as audiences converge upon it.” Like many others at Lincoln Center, Mr. Abromovitz seems not to have realized that the pageantry of glass and the maximum reverberation time of a tone finally has very little to do with one’s love of music and with the essential beauty of it.
When James Johnson Sweeney recently resigned as the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, the growth of fine arts was not critically foreshortened by the actions of either the museum or Mr. Sweeney, whatever the particular issues involved—for there are other museums and other directors. But when Lincoln Center was conceived, its planners assumed that there would be little musical activity in New York outside of it. If this were to be the case, the people of New York City would be the immediate sufferers. For if the musical activity in the three and a half blocks that go to make up Lincoln Center is geared to the principle of “continuity and financial stability,” to the taste of nationwide TV, to tourists, and to the glorification of the star, then the entire musical life of the nation will suffer accordingly. Technique and polish can be guaranteed where there is plenty of money; vitality needs more care.
It might be well to glance at what once happened: during the baroque era, the singer was the thing. Opera died then; and it took a popular, middle-class form of the lyric theater to breathe life into it again. It seems to me that the one workable response to Lincoln Center is an off-Lincoln Center—which will act for music as off-Broadway does for the theater. Perhaps one should think about finding a really unusual neighborhood in New York, far away from the new center of things in the West Sixties. Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue might be a good place to start, in a building like—well, like Carnegie Hall.
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1 After many months of studying thirty of the world’s greatest halls, several “chief accoustical consultants” hired by the Center decided that 700,000 cubic feet was the optimum number of cubic feet for a hall and that the optimum reverberation time—that is, the time it takes for a sound to decay into inaudibility—was between 1.8 and 2 seconds. This information is related in a film, Design for Music, which recounts in detail the acoustical research and preparation by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. The Public Relations department estimates that the film will be seen by over 5,000,000 people.
2 A serious study of seat widths was made by the American Seating Company, public seating consultant to Lincoln Center. R. L. Knowland, its representative, found that Americans have become so accustomed to sitting in front of their television sets that they demand the same kind of ease and comfort in an auditorium. (La Scala’s seats, for Milan’s lovers of opera, measure 18 inches in width.)
3 The projected top for the new City Center Theater at Lincoln Center is tentatively set at $4.95. This is still a far cry from the tentative $13.00 top for the Met.
4 It is a fact worth noting—though, of course, difficult to assess—that several people, trustees simultaneously of the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, are also on the Lincoln Center board of directors.
5 Guided tours are being planned. A great room beneath the central plaza will be the meeting place; its walls will be decorated with bronze plaques bearing the names of those who contributed money to Lincoln Center.
