Opera Boston Bites the Dust
Company Dies Over Puny Half Mil Deficit
By: David Bonetti - 12/26/2011
A scene from this year’s production of Beatrice et Benedict.
Opera Boston, the smaller of Boston’s two small opera companies, is going out of business at the end of the year according to the Boston Globe. In a Dec. 24 front-page piece, arts reporter Geoff Edgers wrote that the reason given was that the company, which has a budget of $2.5 million, could not erase a $500,000 budget deficit.
The story seems to be about more than the relatively small amount of money. Edgers cited conflict within the company’s leadership. There have been recent resignations from the board of directors and six of the 17-member board did not appear for the vote to dissolve the company. Edgers reported that Randolph Fuller, one of the company’s founders, slammed down the phone when Edgers called him to discuss what was happening to the company.
Edgers quoted Stephen M. Weiner, one of the board members who had resigned, to the effect that longtime board members were reluctant to give new members room to work on the company’s financial problems.
Opera Boston was founded in 2003 and in a short time achieved a national reputation for creating probing productions of new and rarely done operas. Zhou Long’s “Madame White Snake,” which Opera Boston commissioned and produced, won a Pulitzer Prize for music this year.
Globe music critic Jeremy Eichler called the company’s death a “major loss” for the city’s music scene. “Opera Boston had a run that lasted less than a decade, but it accomplished more in that time, and took more important artistic risks, than regional companies twice its age and with more than twice its budget,” he wrote. He went on to list some of its remarkable achievements: Thomas Ades’s “Powder Her Face,” John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” Peter Eotvos’s “Angels in America,” Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and Hindemith’s “Cardillac.”
Yes, it is a sad day for opera in Boston. But it is not a good time across the land for organizations presenting classical music. In the Dec. 25 New York Times, Daniel J. Wakin reported that during 2011 the Syracuse, Utica and New Mexico symphonies folded, that the Louisville Orchestra suspended its fall season, that the Philadelphia Orchestra – now that’s a biggie - sought bankruptcy protection, and that the New York City Opera – once the fourth largest company in the country – cut its budget by two thirds and moved out of its longtime Lincoln Center home. The company has called in a mediator to work out pay and work schedules with its orchestra and chorus. A lot of other companies, especially in the Midwest and the South, are hanging on by a prayer.
In Edgers’s piece, Esther Nelson, director of Boston Lyric Opera, the city’s surviving company, said that Boston is a difficult place to raise money, citing the lack of corporate and philanthropic foundations. One has to wonder if she is blind. Has she not noted the phenomenal success of local museums including the ICA, the MFA, the Peabody-Essex Museum and even the Gardner Museum to raise money during the past decade – considerably more than a billion dollars, which puts Opera Boston’s piddling deficit, the cost of a house in blue collar Dorchester, in perspective?
The problem lay with the performing arts, specifically those devoted to classical music. Today’s plutocrats are lavishing money on museums to a degree unseen since the days of the last robber barons. Those original masters of the universe, fanatics for Beethoven and Wagner, also funded our great musical organizations, but today, while their successors still find it socially and intellectually advantageous to buy art and support institutions that confirm their taste, they might be more interested in Beyonce than Beethoven. That changing taste is a problem all music-presenting organizations have to confront – don’t blame the lack of cultural philanthropy.
It’s even more of a problem when the petty egos of local prima donnas get in the way of an organization’s smooth functioning. I don’t know if he is a good guy or a bad guy in the current drama, but Fuller’s telephonic hissy fit – if Edgers is to be believed - does not speak of an emotional maturity necessary to guide arts organizations. (Fuller is Opera Boston’s president emeritus – at least until Dec. 31.) In my experience observing cultural organizations in Boston, San Francisco and St. Louis over the past 30 years, I have seen that it is often the smaller organizations where the biggest dramas plays out. If you don’t have enough money to be a player at the BSO, then Opera Boston can get your money and obsessive attention. And if you don’t get your way there, well, it’s the highway, even if that means taking the organization with you.
Opera Boston had its artistic limitations as well as its financial problems. The 2010-2011 season, the only one I experienced, was profoundly provincial in the worst sense of the word. It opened with a truly disastrous production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” It continued with a soporific production of Hindemith’s “Cardillac” –sometimes there’s a reason works languish – led by baritone Sanford Sylan who sang with exquisite subtlety but who was so Zen-ed out he seemed not to realize that he was in a stage production and needed to act, and it ended with a cheesy production of a Donizetti rarity, “Maria Padilla,” which was saved only by the brilliant singing of Barbara Quintilliani. This season opened well with a stylish, well-sung production of Berlioz’s “Beatrice et Benedict,” but the company had a long way to go in my experience to merit the reputation it enjoyed abroad.
Now it won’t get that chance.
But despite the despairing tones in the Globe, I suspect that the Opera Boston saga is not over. Company music director and general idea man Gil Rose has not suddenly run out of his good ideas. Those newer board members whose participation was rejected now have an opportunity to move forward if they can muster the energy. They could merge their resources with Boston Lyric Opera, perhaps funding an extra production a year that would reflect Opera Boston’s taste and legacy. Or they could move to the Boston Early Music Festival, which has a better record producing opera than either of the local companies, to support additional productions there. Or, depending on who controls the rights, they might remount some of Opera Boston’s past triumphs. Since they owned their productions, which they did not share with other companies, the sets and costumes must exist somewhere. Wouldn’t you like to see its Pultizer Prize winning “Madame White Snake”? Not to mention its “The Nose,” “Nixon in China,” or “Powder Her Face”? Most companies repeat past productions, both their successes and failures, why shouldn’t Opera Boston?
All the talk about Boston not embracing opera is a lot of hooey. True, it lacks a major house like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, but those huge barns can be problems in themselves. Let me tell you about some of the horrors of banality the San Francisco Opera put on in order to fill its 4,000 seats every night. Boston has followed a different model in presenting opera. It’s often been so fragile that it all falls apart for a while - which is a considerable problem for sure - but then the forces reconfigure. But I wouldn’t trade the often transcendent experiences Sarah Caldwell offered for all – well, most of – the run-of-the-mill evenings spent at the San Francisco Opera, or the Met for that matter. This could be the beginning of something rather than the end.