Ray Bayles wrote:

>As a former Classical Radio station manager, I had some experience with
>this... We were not allowed to rebroadcast the Met at other times
>either, but it was not because of Texaco, we were told.  Rather it was
>either the union or the administration at the Met... We too would have
>continued the broadcasts with some flexibility...  There were large
>numbers of stations that dropped live opera because of conflicts with
>Car Talk... and neither program would budge.  It was my impression that
>there were simple power and control issues with Car Talk, and Union
>issues at the Met.

Funny, they recently moved Car Talk on our public radio station to Sunday
mornings at 10.

As I recall, the Met, or Texaco, has behaved w/ arbitrary contrariness in
the past.  Long after stereo became the norm, it insisted on broadcasting
the operas in mono saying (would you believe?) that if Beethoven didn't
hear (sic) the music in stereo, it wasn't necessary for us to hear it that
way.

Brushing aside the observation that Beethoven is an unfortunate choice of
musician about whom to describe how he "heard" anything, if there one form
in which neither Beethoven nor his contemporaries would have heard any
music (which would have been live performances) it would have been mono
from a point source.

Walter Meyer