Princeton University Press Director Walter Lippincott ’60 Loved Opera

The most dangerous place to be on nights when the Metropolitan Opera was performing was between Walter Lippincott ’60 and his seats.

Lippincott, the longtime director of the Princeton University Press, was also a serious opera buff. Although he eventually became a Met season ticket holder, in younger days he had to settle for standing room tickets and knew that prime spots went quickly. One night, he brought a date. As soon as the doors opened, Lippincott bounded up the stairs. His date tripped. With a glance over his shoulder, Lippincott kept going.

“[A]s everyone knew, the sound wasn’t nearly as good at the back,” his son, Hugh Lippincott ’03, wrote in an obituary, by way of justification. The date eventually caught up, and they enjoyed the opera from a good listening spot. There is no record of whether there was a second date.

As a boy growing up in Philadelphia, Lippincott listened to Gilbert & Sullivan records in his room, but a music class he took as a Princeton sophomore accelerated his enthusiasms. He once attended four performances of the ballet Giselle in a single weekend and was at the Met on the night of March 4, 1960, when baritone Leonard Warren died on stage in the middle of a performance of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. (Maybe that was the most dangerous place to be?)

Lippincott so loved Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier that he named his daughter, Sophie Lippincott Ferrer ’00, after the female lead. Hard to believe, but that was not his only eccentric attachment to the opera. When his friend Rudolph Rauch ’65 told him that he greatly admired soprano Claire Watson in the role of the Marschallin, Lippincott asked, “How are her yah-yahs?” Briefly flummoxed, Rauch suddenly understood. At the end of the opera’s third act, Sophie is caught “canoodling” (Rauch’s word) with Octavian when her father and the Marschallin walk in on them. Rather than scold the lovers, the father sings, “Sind halt aso, die jungen Leut” (“Tis ever so, youth will be youth”) and the Marschallin replies, “Ja ... ja” (“Yes ... yes”).

“For those who love Rosenkavalier, the way she exhales those two notes is not just a gauge of the singer’s understanding of the role, it sums up the whole opera,” Rauch explained at Lippincott’s memorial service. To demonstrate, Lippincott had played for Rauch a mixtape of four sopranos singing just those two “yah-yahs” on different recordings.

In later years, Lippincott would gather a group of 15 to 20 friends to attend opening night of each new performance at the Met. During the intermission, he would poll everyone for their assessments and did not stint in giving his own. The most damning review he could give a conductor was to say, “There’s just no tension!” Friends and family recall seeing Lippincott listening to opera at home, silently waving a baton. He wasn’t keeping the beat, Rauch says. “I think he was drawing a picture of what he was hearing.”

Of course, there was also the world of work. Graduating with a degree in history, Lippincott spent a few unsatisfying years as a banker before turning to publishing. After stints at Harper & Row and Cambridge University Press, he became director of the Cornell University Press. In 1986, Lippincott took over the PUP and remained there until his retirement in 2005. For three decades, the most dangerous place to be in academic publishing was between Walter Lippincott and a good manuscript.

Under his leadership, the PUP published many important works, such as The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions by former Princeton president William Bowen *58 and Derek Bok. PUP even published several bestsellers, including Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller and On Bullshit by Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt. Lippincott doubled the PUP’s output to 200 titles a year, guided its move into digital and on-demand publishing, and opened the press’s first European office, in Oxford.

“Walter Lippincott was the modern Press’s great builder,” former director Peter Dougherty said in a statement on the PUP website. As Lippincott expressed his own philosophy in a 2001 profile in PAW, “If you don’t grow, you shrink.”

Mark F. Bernstein ’83 is PAW’s senior writer.