Rudolf Bing served as general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera for more than two decades, and built a formidable reputation along the way. But few realize that Bing almost ditched his career in opera before even getting to the Met: “In Berlin I was asked to find sopranos who would be willing to sing Isolde and God knows what else at a fee of three hundred marks a month — and I would then have to choose among some eighty screaming wretches… I hated the job with a vengeance.”