One of the productions at Santa Fe Opera this summer was a double bill of Mozart's The Impresario and Stravinsky's The Nightingale. The former concerns an opera company director who has to deal with dueling sopranos vying for a role. The Santa Fe treatment reworked the story into a late 1910's update, with the impresario renamed Yuri Yussupovich (and very loosely based on Serge Diaghilev), and trying to keep his struggling company afloat. Near the end, with the dueling singers trying to one-up each other for increased salary ('I am the reigning prima donna'), Yuri finally blows his top and tells them all that this kind of sniping is exactly why he's sick of the game and why he wants out; he's retiring to a quiet life in the country, he's done, and you can all go (#*$& yourselves. The singers protest and try to stop Yuri, but no luck, as he's ready to walk out the door. The company manager then stops the show with this line of dialogue, with the words well spaced out:
"Yuri; legends .... don't ... quit."
Of course, as in any feel-good (kind of) story, Yuri turns around from the door, and everyone buries their differences to get the show going (which turns out to be
The Nightingale). This line came to mind when I was reading a story in the
NYT this week about San Diego Opera, which went through a near-death roller-coaster ride earlier this year. More below the flip....
That line from Otto to Yuri is obviously in the tradition of self-motivational cliché mantras like "Winners don't quit, and quitters don't win". Admittedly, sometimes in life, it actually is better to quit, when wasting resources on a hopeless task seems pointless, if naïvely admirable. However, with SDO, on the surface (and I'm sure that I don't know the 1/10 of it), they didn't appear to be in a situation where quitting was needed. The NYT story from this week is at this link, from Adam Nagourney, where he notes the earlier story pithily:
"Five months ago, the opera company here appeared on the brink of extinction after its board of directors, responding to the dismal economic and attendance news confronting opera companies from New York to San Francisco, voted overwhelmingly to close down after 49 years."
However, here's the catch, as Nagourney quotes Keith Fisher, SDO's new chief operating officer:
"There were many people who were confused as to why the board would close the company with zero debt and a record of artistic development.”
Please note especially the words "zero debt". The decision to close SDO lock, stock and barrel so suddenly was a shock to the wider US opera community, beyond the San Diego cultural community. Speaking as an outsider who admittedly has never seen any SDO productions, I can understand that attendance might not have been optimal, or donors were feeling skittish. That's a problem with a lot of opera companies around the US, nothing new there. In fact, that was the case with SDO, as
this earlier article by Nagourney on the plight of SDO notes. It quotes the past SDO board chairman, Karen S. Cohn:
"[Donizetti's] Elixir of Love, which got great reviews, still sold just 68 percent. Lowest in our history. It was just devastating for us.
Even if we sold out, the tickets are only covering 38 percent of the cost. Our donors are passing away; I don’t know if people are not being raised with opera in the United States any longer, but we are not selling out the operas anymore. Not even close."
That's a fair, and worrisome assessment, about audience status with SDO. But it's another to leap from that immediately into shutting everything down with no warning.
As Nagourney noted in his later article, the wider community reacted rather surprisingly, in a good way:
"An unlikely coalition - opera buffs, labor unions, community leaders caught off guard by the threat of the company’s collapse and worried about the damage it would do to San Diego’s civic reputation - formed a rescue mission. Their efforts reversed the shutdown vote and rebuked the old guard, as the group’s members sought to prove that opera could still thrive not only here but also across the country. A fund-raising campaign that was kicked off in response to the vote to close the opera brought in $2.23 million, a sign of community support at a time when many old-line backers had drifted away."
Cohn is clearly one of the "old-line backers" who "had drifted away". The image that one might have of her, if you toggle between Nagourney's earlier and later articles, takes a sudden shift, at least IMHO, from mildly sympathetic to deeply unsympathetic. In the later article, she's made clear where she stands, from her vote to close down the opera to this statement quoted in Nagourney's article about the new people who are trying to save SDO:
"I cannot support what is going on. This is a group of people who are not focusing on going forward. They are focusing on ruining people who spent 31 years doing wonderful things for San Diego. I don’t want to ruin their chance of going forward, but I don’t appreciate how they have handled this.”
Her attitude continues further in the article:
'Ms. Cohn said it was too soon to tell whether the new board had found the formula to keep opera alive here. "The proof will come at the end of the 2015 season,” she said. “They better have some plans for 2016 until new donors start coming in.”
And they had better do it without Ms. Cohn. She said her days of writing checks to the San Diego Opera are over: Don’t look for her in the seats of the Civic Theater next year. “I’m going to Los Angeles, or I’m going to New York,” she said. “Not here.”'
That sounds like a quitter to me, when it comes to trying to help the community locally, and with very haughty attitude to boot. Of course, Cohn's loserness shows how in one sentence, she says that she doesn't want to "ruin" the new leadership's work to salvage SDO, but in another sentence, she won't lift a finger or send a dollar to help. In fact, it does sound as though she almost
does want the new leadership to fail, so that she can say "I told you so".
For clarification, the "people who spent 31 years doing wonderful things for San Diego" that Cohn referred to included the past general director of SDO, Ian Campbell, who held the post for 31 years (pretty impressive, that), until his departure after this whole brouhaha earlier this year. On the 'conspiracy theory' side, Nagourney wrote in his earlier article about the sudden decision to close down:
"There has been no shortage of second-guessing the decision to close, and questioning whether the company did everything it might have - from considering smaller stages that might reduce ticket costs to being more experimental with its programming to attract new audience members. The disclosure of high executive salaries - Mr. Campbell made $489,000 last year, while his former wife, Ann Spira Campbell, who is deputy general director, drew $274,000 - only fanned the anger.
The sudden and mysterious decision to close also fed a storm of rumors that the two were trying to protect any severance payments. The board issued a statement from an independent lawyer saying that they would be treated the same as other opera creditors."
The earlier article quoted Campbell regarding cost-cutting measures to try to preserve SDO:
“We knew the problem was coming. We took rather dramatic action in cutting expenses. Nobody stepped back. We all tried to do what we could. These are the cold, hard facts rather than emotions.”
However, note the later article from Nagourney, who noted that Campbell "did not respond to an email requesting comment". Granted, the absence of evidence is not evidence, legally speaking. But one has to wonder. Regarding cost-cutting measures, the president of the opera 'advocacy organization' Opera America, Marc Scorsa, had some rather pointed words that can easily be aimed at the past SDO board:
"“It’s about moving to more affordable offices, reducing the size of the staff, simplifying the production plans - all things that could have been done by a prior board and leadership, but they chose not to.”
Ouch. In some fairness, Campbell did note that earlier action was taken in the latter portion of his tenure to trim expenses. And who knows how the community would have reacted if Campbel and the board at the time had proposed cutting the company's scale in half at the time. There might have been a firestorm there as well. We'll never know.
Ultimately, for all of Cohn's sour grapes and mean-spirited, vindictive attitude at this time, she is, like it or not, right about raising the point of whether SDO can survive in the coming years, after this emergency. Helping out in a sudden emergency moment, whether it's a hurricane, tornado, or even a sudden opera company closure, is easy, because that's a quick, feel-good fix. Long-term sustainability to keep problems at bay is a lot harder, a lot less glamorous, and a lot more stressful. What will things be like with San Diego Opera in a year, or two years? No idea. Stay tuned (assuming the planet is even in a manageable state by then).
With that, you can observe the standard SNLC protocol, or actually comment on the topic mentioned here (rare thing for an SNLC - typical loser, that 3CM).