Arts Impresario. He served as General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York. Raised in Manhattan in a family of wealth and high social position, he attended Millbrook School, but failed to graduate, and never attended college. Drawn to music, he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, who bluntly told him "You have no talent", and suggested he become an impresario. He took a $15 per week job as a page at NBC, but left to join the Army Air Corps, where he spent WWII flying C-47s in the China-Burma-India theater. After the war, he returned to NBC, and married his first wife Elizabeth (deceased 1993), a daughter of the Steinway piano family. In 1953, he joined Columbia Artists Management, where he served as tour manager for Jascha Heifetz. He was later to become Vice President in charge of the Classical and Theatre divisions of Columbia Records, overseeing recordings by Van Cliburn, George Szell, Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein, and others. Mr. Chapin was vice president of programing at Lincoln Center from 1964 until 1969. In 1972, he was, for the first time, forced to assume the "lead role": he had been hired as assistant to Goeran Gentele, the new General Manager of the Metropolitan...a month into his tenure, Mr. Gentele was killed in a car wreck. Offered the job, Mr. Chapin was to see an increase in ticket sales, and the engagement of notable American singers. Still, there was strife with the board of directors, and complaining about his artistic and casting decisions. He left when Tony Bliss was hired "over his head" in 1975, and became dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts. From 1994 to 2001, he served as cultural arts commissioner of New York City, often bearing critisism for his enforcement of Mayor Giuliani's decisions. Mr. Chapin died after being ill since a heart attack in 2005. Of his work he once said: "If you know you don't have talent yourself, you try to acquire the talent of recognizing talent in others".