They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (25 page)

                
Institutions are rarely murdered; they meet their end by suicide. They are not strangled by their natural environment while vigorous; they die because they have outlived their usefulness, or fail to do the work that the world wants done.

                    
—DR. A. LAWRENCE LOWELL, President, Harvard University, Inaugural Address, October 6, 1909

T
he New York City Opera vanished. On October 1, 2013, it declared bankruptcy. A victim of governance failure and management ineptitude, its death was completely avoidable. The cultural capital of the world can easily accommodate two full-time and full-fledged opera companies. Metropolitan-area audiences are substantial enough. Donors are ample and generous enough. Tourism is plentiful. And yet the New York City Opera is no more.

The early signs of serious problems can be found not so much in its programming and even less in its home at Lincoln Center, the New York State Theater. Yet critics prattled endlessly about Paul Kellogg’s, then Gerard Mortier’s, and finally George Steel’s choice of repertoire, as if some perfect formula could be devised that would, once and for all, satisfy their aesthetic preferences and draw ample audiences. Attractive, compelling productions are utterly necessary, but hardly sufficient, to maintain and sustain a healthy opera company. For the enterprise that Mayor La Guardia was reputed to have called “The People’s Opera,” much more was needed.

Meanwhile, beginning in 2002 Paul Kellogg complained publicly and repeatedly that the house acoustics were not fit for opera. The New York State Theater was built to choreographer and founder of the New York City Ballet George Balanchine’s specifications. They required that the footsteps of dancers hardly be heard, a muffled condition supposedly incompatible with a hall acoustically fit for the human voice.

This point of view drove Beverly Sills to utter distraction. Sills had been one of the New York City Opera’s biggest stars throughout the 1960s and 1970s. After retiring in 1979 from a singing career that brought her global recognition, she took over as the company’s general
manager, a post she held for a decade. Kellogg was her successor once removed, and his comments set off a flourish of rhetorical questions she regularly posed to me in confidence.

How could it be, she asked, that an opera company performing in the very space with supposedly poor acoustics could also be closely associated with the rise to worldwide prominence, not just of herself, but also of Placido Domingo, Norman Treigle, Phyllis Curton, Beverly Wolff, Samuel Ramey, and Catherine Malfitano, among many others? What did Kellogg know about acoustical deficiencies that such stars and musical directors, maestros like Julius Rudel and George Manahan, did not? This company was born in 1943, and it had sustained itself at Lincoln Center for almost four decades. And why did Kellogg assume that existing deficiencies, such as they may be (no hall is perfect), could not be addressed by remedial measures to improve the acoustics?

Besides, didn’t Kellogg appreciate that the baroque and chamber operas he regularly transferred from Glimmerglass (a summer opera company he also directed, located in Cooperstown, New York) took productions from a nine-hundred-seat hall to the twenty-seven-hundred-seat New York State Theater? Naturally, these programs were likely to be inappropriate for that much larger space, acoustically and otherwise.

Sills’s unvarnished view was regularly communicated to me, but in far less temperate language.

While there was much controversy about Kellogg’s contention, there was little debate about its consequences.

Audiences listened—to him. If the New York State Theater was not good enough for the New York City Opera to perform in, why should opera-going audience members part with good money and time to buy tickets and see performances, or at least as many as in prior seasons? Persistent declines in attendance started in 2002. No other resident artistic organization at Lincoln Center experienced such severe and sustained reductions at the box office.

Although a dubious proposition at best, if the house that Balanchine built was truly an ill fit for the New York City Opera, then it followed that the search for a new space should be pursued with vigor and as a high priority. With all of the energy the staff and board of the New York City Opera could muster, months were spent investigating the
World Trade Center site in the hope, no doubt, of securing a new hall with substantial federal, state, and local subsidies.

That offer was never tendered, as the city struggled, without success, to have instead the Drawing Center, the Signature Theater, and the Joyce Theater occupy a Frank Gehry–designed, multifunctional space. Twelve years later and counting, the question of whether there will be any resident companies in a Ground Zero arts facility and what may be presented there artistically remains unresolved. Why the City of New York encouraged the Opera to spend so much effort investigating and then applying to occupy this downtown site remains a complete mystery.

The New York City Opera, disappointed that the local community near Ground Zero found its offerings less to its liking than other arts fare, then turned its attention to a private developer, who had purchased what came to be called the American Red Cross parcel, on 67th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Its footprint was large enough to house not only an upscale all-glass rental apartment complex, but also a modern opera house. Its proximity to Lincoln Center’s sixteen-acre campus meant that, at least in theory, the New York City Opera could remain a constituent, with all the associated benefits.

Actually, the Opera requested of Lincoln Center some estimate of how often it might rent the new facilities for its own presentations, just as it was doing in Jazz at Lincoln Center venues at Columbus Circle and just as it continued to do when the New York State Theater was available for events offered by the Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival.

The time and resources expended by architects; theater designers; city and state officials, appointed and elected; private developers; engineers; community boards; and trustees to engage in sufficient due diligence on both the Ground Zero and American Red Cross sites was considerable. The regular operations of the New York City Opera suffered as a result of this huge distraction.

Audiences diminished. Operating deficits grew. Staff morale suffered. Uncertainty about the company’s future hung in the air like a brooding presence.

Where would it be located? Who would lead it? What was to be its raison d’être?

On April 27, 2006, the
New York Times
reported:

The New York City Opera is close to a deal to build a concert hall in the base of a new apartment building planned for the former American Red Cross site near Lincoln Center.

“They’re very close to making a deal; it all looks very good,” said Martin J. Oppenheimer, a Vice Chairman of New York City Opera. “The City is very supportive. Lincoln Center was very supportive.”

I was astonished. The City of New York had not advanced a financial commitment to the project. No private parties had stepped forward with pledges of monetary support. How could the New York City Opera possibly afford a $300 million capital construction bill? How could it possibly manage to pay for the substantially higher operating cost it would incur post-construction, when operations would begin? After all, this very company had recorded an operating deficit of $3.3 million in 2002, $6.3 million in 2003, $3.9 million in 2004, $5.6 million in 2005, and nearly $3 million in 2006.

Looking for a new home? How, pray tell, board of directors, could the New York City Opera possibly afford one? When asked this question, individual trustees responded with blank faces or assumed that Susan Baker, as board chair, or others close to her knew the answer.

Two months later, on July 4, 2006, this headline appeared in the
New York Times
: “High Hopes Frustrated, City Opera Stays Put—Is the Long Quest for a New Theater Scaring Away Customers?” The “very close to a deal” with the developer A & R. Kalimian Realty had fallen through.

Publicly, the firm stated that incorporating an opera house into the condominium project would be too complex and potentially would be delayed for years, given a likely extensive public approval process. Privately, the Kalimian family expressed little confidence that the New York City Opera could raise the needed funds and become a financially sound, reliable anchor tenant.

At the same time it was generally known that Paul Kellogg, the general and artistic director of the New York City Opera, would retire in June 2007, the decision having been publicly disclosed on September 15, 2005.

Kellogg’s announcement gave the board members of the New York City Opera almost two years to find a successor. They inexplicably selected Gerard Mortier, a Belgian impresario. He was unfamiliar with three key elements of running the New York City Opera: earned income (marketing and selling largely unsubsidized tickets), contributed income (raising funds from corporations, foundations, and individuals), and reporting to a board of directors that would determine policy. All of his professional life, Mortier had operated in the European way. National and municipal governments supported opera, with very generous sums. He had hardly ever raised funds in the private sector or fretted about the state of the box office. If he worried at all, it was about maintaining good relations with public benefactors—the ministers of culture.

How could the New York City Opera Board of Directors assume that at the age of sixty-five, Mortier would suddenly develop these new skills? Why did the search committee have confidence that his well-known flamboyant temperament would be transformed so that he could manage compatible relationships with the board
and
successfully solicit private funds
and
offer affordable programs that would attract paying audiences? What could the search committee members have been thinking? There was simply no evidence in Mortier’s considerable work history that suggested he could meet these challenges.

Perhaps the search committee hoped that the selection of Mortier would generate excitement and signal the arrival of cutting-edge, avant-garde, artistic adventurism. If so, it seemed to others, to revert to a sports metaphor, that Mortier’s selection was a fourth-quarter artistic Hail Mary pass.

As Justin Davidson put it in
New York Magazine
on November 24, 2008, after Mortier was selected,

some opera watchers warned that he would blaze through a couple of groundbreaking but financially disastrous seasons, then retire back to Europe, leaving the company covered in ash. They were too optimistic.

Mortier made his exit even before his entrance; when the budget he wanted failed to materialize, he walked away, leaving the New
York City Opera with a stack of visionary plans and the specter of a Lehman Brothers–like future.

Mortier contended that he had been promised an annual budget of $60 million, a number he claimed was explicitly specified in his written contract. But the board was prepared to provide “only” $36 million, not nearly enough for the innovative productions he wished to finance. Indeed, Mortier noted that the smallest opera company in France enjoyed an operating budget in excess of what he was being offered. The Paris Opera alone, which he had been running, was blessed with a budget of $300 million, half of which came straight from national coffers.

How could the New York City Opera, after pursuing two different sites to build a new opera house without securing substantial pledges for either of them, then promise to increase its budget by some $24 million, only to renege?

The conclusion of this sorry episode was neatly captured by Heidi Waleson in the
Wall Street Journal
on November 11, 2008. She minced no words:

In the end, the whole affair was a remarkable act of hubris. To summarily jettison an opera company’s history, completely alter its artistic and audience profile, and redesign its funding structure without having identified sources of capital beforehand seems like an exercise in wishful thinking and a highly irresponsible act.

City Opera is an essential public institution with a valuable history. Boards are supposed to take that trust seriously, but this one was blinded by a shiny new toy. Like financial engineers with an outsized appetite for risk, but little understanding of it, they are now left with the shell of a company. It’s time for a change in governance, a bailout, and a restructuring. Rescue is needed. City Opera is too valuable to lose.

It cannot be said that the trustees of the New York City Opera failed to be openly taken to task and warned. The press was hardly alone in its assessment of the abject performance of the board of directors. Its
many acts of omission and commission were cause for anger and dismay all over Lincoln Center’s campus.

T
HERE IS MORE
to this grim epitaph. On August 13, 2008, George Steel was appointed the general director of the Dallas Opera after serving for eleven years as the executive director of the Miller Theater at Columbia University. The choice of Mr. Steel was somewhat of a surprise, as he had no experience running an opera house, and as the Dallas Opera’s budget, at $12 million, was four times that of the Miller Theater. Yet only five months later, the New York City Opera, by now in a state of utter turmoil, announced that George Steel would come back from Dallas, where he had just moved, to become its general manager and artistic director.

The Miller Theater housed 688 seats. Its audience consisted largely of students. The price of admission was not much more than the cost of a movie ticket. It was heavily subsidized by its owner, Columbia University. It encompassed no separate governance structure, such as a board of directors. It demanded very little private sector fund-raising.