They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (27 page)

Tommasini was right about the sound, but dead wrong in his conclusion. What would have helped the New York City Opera more were generous benefactors, an enlarged and committed board, and a company truly dedicated to living within its means. These are all matters to which Tommasini paid little heed.

When the New York City Opera surprisingly announced that it was moving out of Lincoln Center, Tommasini declared, “I am all for the City Opera’s leaving Lincoln Center.” This he wrote less than four months after calling the Koch Theater’s acoustics significantly improved and observing that “nothing will help City Opera more.” No diligent
reader could reconcile these strongly held but diametrically opposite points of view.

In supporting the New York City Opera’s decision to leave Lincoln Center, Tommasini found himself in sharp disagreement with no fewer than 120 of opera’s most important figures. They had crafted a letter beseeching the New York City Opera to reconsider. Placido Domingo, José Carreras, Sherrill Milnes, Samuel Ramey, Hal Prince, and Frederica Von Stada all were among those who signed their names to that missive. It declared that “to lose City Opera as a vital part of the Lincoln Center family would be felt as a personal loss to each and every one of us, as well as to this great city, and we find it unnecessary and unacceptable.”
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That letter accused management of “dismembering the City Opera, piece by piece, person by person.” It was filled with anger, even fury.

The authors knew what Tommasini did not. A nomadic opera troupe would lose its identity and in fact would quickly become a company in name only, utilizing freelance orchestras, choruses, and soloists in multiple locations for extremely short runs all over the five boroughs.

For years, Tommasini paid little attention to what it took to run a serious performing arts institution. Earned income, contributed income, cost controls, and responsible budgeting appeared to be of little interest to him. He seemed consumed by the artistic properties he wished to see performed in New York, whatever the costs, whatever the risks. His cheerleading for the New York City Opera to take on more elaborate and expensive programming in the face of its financial meltdown was quixotic.

At almost every point of critical decision for the Opera, Tommasini’s advice was well intentioned but misguided, his track record unerringly wrong. In a February 9, 2009,
New York Times
online interview, “Talk to the Newsroom: Chief Classical Music Critic,” he had admitted: “I can’t balance a check book or even organize my desk, let alone run anything.” Such self-awareness is laudable, but it did not deter Tommasini from offering many opinions early and often on the City Opera’s future as an artistic organization.

With America and Wall Street reeling from the 2008 banking meltdown and with the deepest recession since the Great Depression
looming, Tommasini seemed to be living in a world of his own. He was preoccupied with preparing a personal bucket list of artistic preferences, cast in the guise of offering helpful advice to a tottering New York City Opera. Here is what Tommasini wrote on July 4, 2009, offering his recipe for the New York City Opera’s success:

Yet now more than ever, [the New York City Opera] should be bold. Maybe the new Director will adopt some of Mr. Mortier’s more intriguing ideas, like importing the haunting English National Opera productions of Britten’s “Death in Venice,” which starred Ian Bostridge as Aschenbach, one of the hottest tickets in London in 2007. And how about the new staging of Philip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach,” with which Mr. Mortier wanted to inaugurate the renovated Koch Theater. And please, New York must finally have a production of Messiaen’s visionary “St. Francois D’Assise,” another Mortier promise. The Met is not about to take on this five hour spiritual epic. Go to it, people’s opera.

The New York City Opera had determined that it couldn’t afford Mortier’s extravagant opera adventures. They were simply too expensive. So Tommasini had an idea. Why not mount them without Mr. Mortier?

The Met Opera finds it imprudent to produce
St. Francois D’Assise
, so why not prevail upon a financially hemorrhaging New York City Opera instead?

Tommasini was perhaps the most prolific and unrealistic commentator to offer his views regularly on the affairs of the New York City Opera right up to and even following its disappearance. Alas, he was not alone among respected critics in offering unhelpful advice that seemed almost “drive by” in character. Alex Ross, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic at the
New Yorker
, was also capable of volunteering guidance that at times bordered on the tangential, even the frivolous.
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Ignoring the fast-approaching day of reckoning, some still hoped for the best. As late as July 16, 2011, the
New York Times
editorial board continued to harbor and perpetuate the illusion that the revival of the New York City Opera was possible.

The New York City Opera can no longer afford to be what it once was, and the overwhelming reason was bad management. In the past five years . . . the Opera has overspent its budget and reached into its endowment while underselling its tickets.

. . . Now what is left under George Steel—a roving troupe with a sharply reduced schedule—is a ghost of the Opera’s former creative self.

. . . We hope Mr. Steel can begin to rebuild what has been lost.

The best one can observe about such an opinion is that it embodied the triumph of sentiment over reality.

Writing a moving and foreboding plea for the
New York Times
Op-Ed page of June 7, 2011, Julius Rudel, the general director and principal conductor of the New York City Opera from 1957 to 1979, had refused to don rose-colored glasses. After first acknowledging Lincoln Center as the place that solidified the New York City Opera as the town’s other opera company, he then offered a fervent request and a forlorn prediction:

Once before, in 1956, City Opera faced the threat of bankruptcy, but instead of retrenching and cutting, the Board boldly moved forward, securing the financing we needed to stabilize the company and then grow. The current board must reconsider its decision and demonstrate the commitment and vision its predecessors had.

If the board and management of City Opera cannot finance, produce, and support all seasons of new works and standard operas in interesting productions with first rate casts, as we once did, they should be replaced.

Less than six months later, the New York City Opera declared bankruptcy. It performed
Anna Nicole
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, while publicly announcing that it could not go on as an operating entity without the emergency infusion of $7 million, or two-thirds of its $10.5 million operating budget, by the end of September 2012. No one stepped forward with that kind of financial rescue.

Only twenty months earlier, Chuck Wall, a retired general counsel of Phillip Morris, who had been a member of the board of directors of the New York City Opera since 2001, had taken over as chair, on January 1, 2011. As with much about the New York City Opera, his election was too little and too late. Even the generosity of Mr. Wall, who had donated almost $3 million over two seasons, reportedly more than the rest of the entire board of directors, did not matter in the end. It was all for naught. Leaving Lincoln Center to become an itinerant company was the final act of desperation.

Lest there be any doubt that the captain of the sinking ship had truly lost touch with reality, George Steel gave the New York City Opera’s final epitaph during a
New York Magazine
interview, published on October 2, 2013. It was headlined “George Steel on Trying to Save City Opera: ‘It Almost Worked.’”

It almost worked? Steel somehow reminded me of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. When he was asked to describe the economic condition of the Soviet Union, he replied: “If you allow me one word, I’d say ‘good.’ If you allow me three words, I’d say ‘not so good.’”

“It almost worked.” That’s three words.

The fantasies of an inexperienced chief executive in over his head remained intact until the very end. So did the embittered realism of maestro Rudel. At the age of ninety-two, he was very upset and disconcerted. He allowed himself these moving few words on a “real operatic tragedy”: “I would not have thought in my wildest dreams that I would outlive the opera company.”
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May the New York City Opera rest in peace. And may those who lost their jobs and their dreams forgive others who held the company in trust for service to artists and audiences. We all deserve to be very upset with the powers that were. Sacred fiduciary duties were not honored. Accountability for the disappearance of a cultural jewel in New York City’s crown was nowhere to be found.

Had the search for a new space outside Lincoln Center, driven by supposed severe acoustical deficiencies, been largely unnecessary? Was Mortier’s conviction that there was nothing fatal to the future of the New York City Opera in its staying put at the David H. Koch Theater correct? It surely seemed so.

In any event, the New York City Opera’s leaderless condition, combined with a prolonged period of being unable to perform, accelerated its loss of audience and deepened its sense of drift and crisis.

Pulitzer Prize winner Manuela Hoelterhoff, the executive director of arts and culture for Bloomberg News, published a number of reflections on the damage done to the careers of artists and technical staff and to their financial condition. For them, the consequences of poor governance and mismanagement could not have been more tangible:

Raiding the endowment was a suicidal thing to do. The Board made reckless decisions without thinking of the lives of artists they were ruining. [The Opera’s musicians, singers, and stagehands] don’t have trust funds. Most don’t have pensions. They have nothing but their memories. It makes me angry that there’s no accountability.
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I stand second to none in my distress about the saga of the New York City Opera’s downfall. Its fate was not determined by market forces, or by its location at Lincoln Center, or by proximity to the Metropolitan Opera. These are excuses and scapegoats, not causes of the New York City Opera’s demise.

Its misfortune was largely self-inflicted. A suicide, not a homicide. A reckless disregard of Governance and Management 101.

The coroner’s report told the tale accurately.

T
HE ECONOMIST
J
OSEPH
S
CHUMPETER
developed the idea of “creative destruction.” He argued that in a free market, there will always be enterprises that weaken and fail while others grow and thrive. The disappearance of a useful, and even noble, entity is never a pretty sight, but what replaces it can be a surprising delight. We mourn the self-destruction of a beloved organization like the New York City Opera. We could not so easily have anticipated what was about to emerge in its stead, with remarkable speed.

W
HILE THE
N
EW
Y
ORK
City Opera was disappearing, expressions of concern mounted about the economic viability of the David H. Koch Theater. It had lost not only an anchor rent-paying tenant, but also a
cost-sharing partner to the New York City Ballet in paying the overhead expenses of maintaining and operating this mammoth hall.

I was not at all concerned. Here is what I told journalists on background.

Now that the New York City Opera has left the David H. Koch Theater, it can become the leading dance house in the world. The void left will be filled with this nation’s and the world’s greatest dance companies delighted by the opportunity to perform much more regularly in New York City and at Lincoln Center.

Expect this new opportunity to be seized by the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet of London, the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky and the San Francisco Ballet, among many others. Americans will no longer need to leave their hometown to see a favorite world-class dance ensemble.

Concern about the impact of the Opera’s dissolution on the New York City Ballet was not unwarranted. In the program and fiscal year 2009/2010, the Ballet experienced one of its worst box offices in over two decades, and its operating deficit ballooned to $8.5 million on a roughly $60 million budget.

The board of directors was alarmed. John Vogelstein, a founding partner of the firm Warburg Pincus, was about to pass the baton as chair to Jay Fishman, the CEO of Travelers Life Insurance. But before doing so, Vogelstein was bound and determined to fill the vacancy in the post of executive director with a highly qualified professional. Indeed, the leading candidate would be offered the opportunity to join ballet master in chief Peter Martins in reporting directly to the board of directors.

Such a decision, a first in the history of the New York City Ballet, signaled the board’s deep concern about the management of operations, from marketing and sales of tickets to customer service, from hall maintenance to auditorium and adjacent space rental, from properly scaling the house to freshening the New York City Ballet’s image, and from foundation and corporate fund-raising to major gifts and special events. For an executive director to be accountable directly to the board of directors, along with Peter Martins, was a radical change.

Peter Martins, in his twenty-fifth year as the ballet master in chief and in his forty-seventh year with the company overall, was stretched thin. He needed a collaborator, one in whom he could confide and whom he could totally trust. No one for a moment misunderstood that if Martins was unhappy with the executive director selection, this scheme of dual reports to the board would not work. But all agreed that a shake-up was in order, especially in the aftermath of New York City Opera’s departure from Lincoln Center. Concern about an already poor operating performance, which could worsen in light of that recent development, was prevalent.