The news just broke today, as reported by Adam Nagourney in the NYT here:
“The Washington National Opera decided on Friday to move its performances out of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, abandoning the hall where it has played since 1971 in perhaps the largest artistic rebuke yet to [Traitor Drumpf]’s campaign to remake the Kennedy Center in his image.”
Washington National Opera (for convenience here, WNO) has set up a new website here. WNO has also posted a pdf of an official announcement here that reads in part:
“As Washington National Opera begins its 70th anniversary year, the Board and staff have made the difficult decision to seek an end to our 15-year Affiliation Agreement with the Kennedy Center. We will be moving our performances to new venues as we return to operating as a fully independent entity.”
For those who know about the performing arts in general, this move by WNO will be very complicated, to put it mildly. In terms of sheer physical stuff, to give but two examples, you have stage sets and the equipment to move them, plus costumes, along with all the people required to manage both. You also have an orchestra and a chorus to manage. This is along with all the administrative paraphernalia related to the general running of an opera company, regarding day-to-day operations, fund-raising, labor relations, you name it. This kind of physical and organizational move is not one to be decided lightly.
The issue becomes all the more apparent when one wonders: where exactly will the company move to? Nagourney alludes to this concern:
“Opera officials said that new sites in Washington have been lined up but that no leases have been signed. They declined to name those venues.”
Clearly, the WNO administration only wants to announce such agreements when all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed. From reading chit-chat on opera discussion forums, feasible options in the DC area seem few and far-between.
Nagourney also alludes to the idiotic (my word, not Nagourney’s) financial demands by the equally idiotic (again, my words, not Nagourney’s) Richard Grenell regarding his demands for “fiscal responsibility” regarding opera performances at the Kennedy Center:
“Mr. Grenell said he wanted all productions at the Kennedy Center to be revenue neutral, taking in as much money in ticket sales and contributions as they cost to mount. Operas are expensive to produce and are typically not revenue neutral.”
The official announcement from WNO takes pains to be polite to Grenell, since they have to be (unlike pseudonymous bloggers like self the loser), thanking him for fund-raising for “capital repairs, maintenance, and operations”. The tone shifts ever so slightly, however, with the next sentence:
“However, the Center’s current Board and leadership have also established a new business model that is unfortunately at odds with how most not-for-profit opera companies operate.”
The letter goes on:
“In broad terms, ticket sales cover between 30%-60% of the costs of an opera company’s operations, with the balance provided by contributions from individuals, grants, and corporate sponsorships. The current requirement from the Center’s management is for WNO to demonstrate that each production or event is fully underwritten through anticipated ticket sales and secured contributed revenue sources before it can be approved. This is impractical for WNO, since seasons must be conceived and developed well in advance of funding opportunities and the timing of when it is optimal to project revenue from ticket sales.
“While every effort is made to secure this advance leadership funding for future projects, the majority of our individual supporters, grantors, and corporations are not prepared to commit this far ahead.”
It actually is possible for an opera company to operate with a balanced budget. Two such companies that come to mind (and that love to brag about it, if quietly) are Santa Fe Opera and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, which both have long had general managers and staff who’ve long internalized the mindset that the budget must be balanced every fiscal year. (Santa Fe Opera started in 1956 with John Crosby as general director. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis started with Richard Gaddes as general director in 1976, after Gaddes had worked several years at Santa Fe Opera, and brought that Santa Fe mindset to St. Louis. Both are also seasonal opera companies which give concentrated festival seasons over a few weeks in summertime, rather than a more “year-round” format.) But an overall balanced budget for an opera company, or indeed any arts organization, is in terms of an overall fiscal year and for the company as a whole, not from production to production where every show has to be “revenue neutral”. In very broad terms, obviously an opera company has to sell tickets. But in terms of revenue, for US arts organizations and especially for opera companies, the way to get the big bucks isn’t through ticket sales, but through fund-raising. Fund-raising is a 24/7/365 operation that pretty much never stops, and doesn’t operate from show to show. Plus, given the sheer expense of paying all the artists and staff a fair wage for their work, trying to be “revenue neutral” in advance is a fools’ game that an arts organization can’t afford to play. They’ll market like crazy, sell as many tickets as they can, and fund-raise as best as they can, but except for the 20 or so operas that are sure-fire box office (e.g. La boheme, Carmen), it’s impossible to guarantee “revenue neutrality” like that in advance.
Of course, given the most recent horrors perpetrated by and as a result of the current administration, the fate of an opera company is probably the last thing on most people’s minds here. But this new development is part and parcel, if on a much less overtly cruel scale, of what’s going down in the country. The mess leading to this decision by WNO (enabled by 77.5M political fools in November 2024, of course) is obviously not what the WNO leadership triumvirate (general director Timothy O’Leary, artistic director Francesca Zambello, music director Robert Spano) signed up for. This is not the kind of publicity that an arts organization wants, never mind a particularly niche arts organization like an opera company. But things are what they are, and they deserve all the help that they can get for having the guts to make this announcement, and to make this move. Who knows how it will all turn out. I certainly wish WNO all the very best of luck. They’ll need it.
