Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
—JUDY GARLAND, The Wizard of Oz, 1939
Any new CEO must spend time becoming acquainted with the dynamics of the organization he or she is asked to lead. I believe strongly that leadership is a collective endeavor. It is well observed that there is no “I” in the word team. Winning the trust and confidence of my staff colleagues and the trustees at whose pleasure I served was therefore fundamental.
There were three other priorities to attend to in the early months of my tenure as president of Lincoln Center.
First, its governance structure had to be fixed. Lincoln Center consisted of twelve world-class, independent artistic and educational organizations, called constituents, and the parent body. Each possessed its own board of directors, mission, workforce, annual budget, balance sheet, and distinctive methods of operating. Each focused relentlessly on achieving excellence in its art form. Such close attention to perfecting craft works well. It explains why Lincoln Center’s family of cultural organizations is world renowned for producing and presenting the highest quality of performing art and for unsurpassed teaching of the next generation of artists.
The common challenge was identifying ways and means for these proud organizations to work together to achieve objectives beneficial to all. Most often, the individual parts function admirably. But taking fullest advantage of the scope, scale, proximity, and potential synergy of the whole remains a tantalizing and arduous challenge. Collective action requires consensus. At Lincoln Center, there is no central command and control headquarters. The more consequential the issue, the more onerous the task of fashioning agreement.
Second, the economic model that drove Lincoln Center’s operations was simply not adequate for the twenty-first century. Highly dependent on both ticket revenue and annual donations, it needed an overhaul. And the trustees and staff who could offer the necessary intellectual capital to help modernize it had to be identified, recruited, and mobilized.
Third, even as I engaged in my own extensive listening tour to replace suspicion with trust and confusion with clarity, I knew I needed to devise a formula that would jump-start redevelopment.
Assuming the mantle of professional leadership at Lincoln Center during a particularly tumultuous period was daunting. But hardly unique.
I invite those who think of Lincoln Center’s incapacity to direct all of its parts to work together as singularly dysfunctional to consider university presidents. They cope daily with school deans; individual faculty; alumni committed more to a component part of the enterprise than to the whole; and the athletic department, its coaches, and its adherents. The strength of a school’s divisions has its virtues, to be sure. But it also poses a major barrier to timely cooperation and collaboration.
The CEOs of many national organizations, such as the Audubon Society, Planned Parenthood, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the United Way of America, and the American Red Cross, must deal with extremely powerful chapters. Often they prefer to determine their own fate.
Hospital presidents are also beset by parochialism and a diffusion of authority. Ask them about the competition for space; research funds; and reward and recognition between and among the departments of, for example, medicine, surgery, radiology, and cancer.1
So Lincoln Center’s aptitude for dysfunction was not unique, even if it was often on public display.
The heavy and lonely burden of responsibility for overcoming the powerful forces of the status quo helps to explain why so many candidates shy away from accepting tough jobs in forbidding environments. All large nonprofits, in the absence of energetic, purposeful, results-oriented leadership, run the risk of having the centrifugal forces that separate and divide overwhelm the centripetal forces that might pull the parts together. Is it any wonder, then, that nonprofit CEOs of sizable institutions complain of frustration and burnout, and that the average length of stay at the very top of these organizations is only six to seven years?
Changing institutions is hard work. Overcoming the status quo takes time. It requires persistence. The forces of resistance, both active and passive, are strong. Leaders must accumulate influence by understanding the interests of others, gaining their trust, and identifying the common ground that serves all parties. It is forming such a consensus that moves nonprofits (and corporations and nations) forward.
But my concern is not with the plight of the weary and wary CEO. It is with those who often get completely lost in day-to-day organizational struggles and preoccupations: the student, the patient, and the audience member.
The actual performance of private institutions intended to serve the public good often undermines their stated purpose. What in theory should fully deserve government subsidy and philanthropic support may be far less deserving in practice. Frequently, it is only the president and members of the board of directors who can insist on an institutional direction that draws its meaning from the outside in, not the inside out: student-centered learning, patient-centered care, audience-focused arts centers.
IF ACHIEVING FORWARD-LOOKING consensus is the end, the means is the organization, how it is composed, and how it operates.
At Lincoln Center, one important, sweeping reform that could propel progress was to expand the board of trustees numbering forty-three in 2002 and ultimately increasing to eighty over the next decade. The reasons to do so were compelling. Our agenda was ambitious. We aspired to physically transform Lincoln Center. To fix all that was broken. To replace all that was beyond its useful life. To renovate and build new public spaces and artistic facilities. To remove Lincoln Center from its pedestal and have it embrace the cityscape all around it. Concurrently, we wanted all of our programs to continue to flourish. And we hoped to attract many more first-generation Americans to enjoy what Lincoln Center has to offer.
Accomplishing all of this would not only be expensive, it would require expertise from many fields: real estate, finance, law, accounting, engineering, entertainment, hospitality, public relations, advertising, high-tech, and consulting, among others. By expanding the Lincoln Center Board of Directors/Trustees and raising expectations for giving funds and acquiring them from new recruits, we could take a giant step forward in successfully launching a capital campaign. Simultaneously, we could approach our trustees as partners in figuring out how best to address the dozens of challenges and opportunities generated by an enlarged and modernized campus.
By increasing the number of trustees, the board’s nominating and governance committee could also recruit leading hedge fund, private equity, and money-centered bank businessmen and women. We could spread our geographic targets to include trustees hailing from Miami, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as from abroad—Switzerland and China, for example. This expansion would raise the metabolism of the board, diversifying its ranks by age, profession, gender, ethnicity, and location. As a result, the board’s perspective on Lincoln Center would be fresh and holistic.
Of the forty-three trustees I inherited, fourteen were the designees of constituents. They generally viewed the trustee role as protecting and advancing the interests of the resident artistic organization each represented. The natural tendency of those trustees was not to think of Lincoln Center as a whole but about the piece each cared most about. As a consequence, an intense and vocal minority of the board were present to prevent any act that might adversely affect a particular constituent and to advance any act that could strengthen it.
By contrast, any new trustees we recruited would tend to view Lincoln Center as a whole, not just as a landlord and service provider to constituents, but also as an important civic actor in the life of New York City, the cultural capital of the world. Out of this broader view of Lincoln Center as a source of economic development, as a tourist attraction, as an agent for the community of artists and audiences, much would follow. Imaginations would be ignited. The time and attention of trustees and their colleagues would be tapped. And financial support would naturally flow.
The expansion of Lincoln Center’s board enhanced its determination to make an important difference in the life of the city. The institution became less parochial and more broad minded, less narrow in its vision and more enthusiastic about what collectively we might all accomplish.
We could not change the basic structure of Lincoln Center. But we could revolutionize the way the parent body was composed, redefine what was expected of its members, and reconfigure how it operated. No single act did more to advance Lincoln Center’s success during my tenure as president than the board’s approval several times to expand its number, increase the opportunities for trustees to participate in its active governance, and raise the expectations of what new recruits were expected to accomplish.
LITTLE HAS CHANGED over the decades in the way performing arts centers and their component parts—like theaters, or opera companies, or jazz ensembles, or orchestras, or ballet troupes—are financed. While closely examining the operating budgets of Lincoln Center’s constituents after my arrival, I began to wonder what century I was in. And the choice was not, in all respects, between the twentieth and the twenty-first! The famous Russian impresario Sol Hurok would have been completely comfortable with the operating budgets of all the entities of Lincoln Center. Even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would not find them unrecognizable, accustomed as he was to the need to seek out wealthy patrons and attract a fee-paying public.
In essence, the revenue base for these world-class artistic organizations is divided into three parts: ticket revenue, contributed income, and funds generated from endowments.
Given the competition for the discretionary expenditures of most New Yorkers and tourists, there is a limit to how much an institution can charge for a ticket, or as an economist would put it, a narrow range of price elasticity. The marketplace for contributed income is also highly competitive, and many arts organizations have neither the staff nor a board willing or able to raise the funds needed by their organizations. Walking on hot coals barefoot often seems preferable to asking friends and strangers for donations to a worthy cause.
Finally, endowment fund-raising is not frequently or robustly practiced, and the travails of the stock market throughout the decade of the 1990s and into the first few years of the twenty-first century were not kind to this source of revenue.
Meanwhile expenses rise. Unionized labor contracts with high levels of compensation and extraordinarily rigid and costly work rules prevail. Heating, air conditioning, and maintaining and securing public spaces and artistic facilities in a first-class fashion is extremely costly. So, too, are artistic expenses. And at Lincoln Center, it would be difficult to find an advocate for reduced rehearsal time, or skimpy sets, or less than ambitious productions mounted on our stages.
Moreover, in the arts, expecting productivity gains is highly unrealistic. One cannot play Beethoven faster. A chamber music quartet always requires four players.2
This collision between the constrained sources of revenue and spiraling expenses did not bode well for the future of Lincoln Center and its resident artistic organizations. Therefore, I wished to create a new economic model, one that would not only strictly contain administrative expenses, but would also identify and secure reliable new or enhanced sources of net revenue.
In fact, the Lincoln Center board’s finance and new venture committees set as a goal that within three years, at least 50 percent of the $10–12 million of annual ticket revenue would be garnered from these novel or enriched initiatives. We set our minds to exceeding that target and accelerating that timetable.
Tackling this opportunity was a self-imposed challenge. It meant lifting our sights as an organization. It demanded different skills and new learning. Ambition and self-sacrifice were required. We wished to prove that Lincoln Center was neither complacent nor self-satisfied, but rather energetic, tenacious, and hungry.
First, we more than tripled our net revenue from food and beverages in the form of restaurants and catering.
Second, we took full advantage of our resplendent new campus by attracting Channel 13 as a tenant, yielding in excess of $1 million per year, and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, yielding $3.2 million annually, the latter to be divided among Lincoln Center’s constituents.
Third, taking a cue from the transformation of marketing Broadway tickets, Lincoln Center engaged in yield management of its “inventory,” or dynamic pricing. In essence, when demand is high for a given performance, we “rescale the house” to increase the number of high-priced tickets or simply raise prices, always leaving a critical minimum number at an accessible cost for a public that cannot afford the higher range. This practice has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in incremental revenue each year.
Fourth, Lincoln Center introduced a facility fee: first $2.00, then $2.75, and then $3.50 per ticket. Unlike in other New York City venues that imposed such a charge but have in fact offered few if any improvements, the paying public could not fail to notice Lincoln Center’s burgeoning physical transformation. Contrary to the fears of some, not a single objection was lodged. Within two years, virtually every constituent at Lincoln Center introduced its own facility fee on tickets as well.
Fifth, Lincoln Center’s staff began modestly to sell its services to constituents and to lessees in the areas of marketing and sales, customer service, and information technology.
Sixth, Lincoln Center negotiated a contract with John Wiley & Sons for an imprint exclusively devoted to performing arts and carrying our institution’s name and imprimatur. To date, twelve books have been published, and handsome royalties have been generated by them, simultaneously advancing and enriching our mission.3
Seventh, Lincoln Center operates one of the largest underground garages in all of New York City. Being president of Lincoln Center involves understanding how to manage the economics of a huge parking lot and the safety and comfort of tens of thousands of customers who use it. There are early-bird parkers. There are performance parkers. There are parkers who come during the day to shop. There are commuters who park at Lincoln Center and take the subway or a taxi downtown. There are monthly parkers who can’t find a space, or are on a waiting list, at their nearby co-ops or condominiums. And there are employee parkers.
Figuring out the algorithm for how to differentially set prices given all of these uses of the garage was a challenge worth seizing. We needed to maximize revenue and remain consistent with our central mission: to serve paying customers, members of Lincoln Center’s audience. And we needed to leave ample room for my ancient Mercury.
Eighth, as part of Lincoln Center’s physical redevelopment, we took a major risk and built the only freestanding restaurant in Manhattan since Central Park’s Tavern on the Green, called Lincoln Ristorante. With Jonathan Benno, the former chef of Per Se, in the kitchen, and Nick Valenti, the president of the Patina Group, as our partner, this stunning glass structure with a lawn rooftop designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro almost immediately became a campus hangout and watering hole. It serves not only pre- and post-theater diners, but also those who treat it as a destination for the evening. No fewer than one hundred thousand people enjoy lunch or dinner there annually.
The decision to build this restaurant, situated between Avery Fisher Hall and Lincoln Center Theater and facing the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace, featuring an iconic Henry Moore sculpture, was opposed by many constituent trustees and executives. They dwelled on the restaurant’s costs rather than its benefits and pointed to past failed attempts to create commercially viable dining facilities on the campus. Now they clamor for reservations and complain bitterly when their preferred time for lunch or supper, or their favorite table, or the private dining room, is unavailable.
Financially, the restaurant brings Lincoln Center a handsome six-figure annual rent guarantee, plus a percentage of gross sales above certain million-dollar thresholds.
Ninth, plenty of attention was paid to improving annual performance in contributed income. To cite only three of many examples, when I arrived at Lincoln Center in 2002, it held two galas, one in the fall and one in the spring. They typically raised a total of $2–3 million gross. During my years of service, Lincoln Center held ten or more fund-raisers each year, including the Mostly Mozart Gala, American Songbook Gala, David Rubenstein Atrium Gala, Midsummer Night Swing Gala, Fall and Spring Gala, and special events like a celebration in honor of Ralph Lauren featuring Oprah Winfrey.
By 2010 we expected to raise from $9 million to $14 million gross from these gatherings. How much each brings in depends on the nature of the occasion, its content, and the identity of the honoree. Beyond the funds raised from any given benefit, each offers Lincoln Center the chance to befriend guests invited by gala supporters. Many who have become significant individual benefactors to Lincoln Center were first introduced to our work at special celebratory events.
Not only did the board of directors increase in size, but each newcomer was required to contribute $250,000 per year personally or through a publicly held company or privately held firm. It was also expected that within six months to a year of service on the board, a leadership pledge of $3–5 million or more to our capital campaign will be forthcoming. Typically, such pledges are redeemed over three to five years.
In 2002 trustees were contributing an average of about $80,000 annually. In 2014 forty-three trustees gave at the $250,000 level, and the average for the rest was up to $140,000. The net effect of board expansion and raising expectations for trustee giving is an increase of annual support to $20 million each year, compared to $7.9 million in 2002, leaving aside the very generous trustee gifts to the capital and endowment campaign. More than $56 million was raised for the endowment.
A third lucrative source of recurring contributed income funds, Lincoln Center’s largest, is called the Great Performers Circle (GPC). The GPC is ably led by four distinguished Lincoln Center trustees of long standing: Renee Belfer, Bart Friedman, Roy Furman, and Ann Ziff. They, together with staff, have attracted 104 members to this body of supporters. Each contributes $35,000 annually. This donation entitles members to attend three events that take place annually in spectacular private homes or very attractive public spaces.
A sumptuous meal is served. In the most intimate of settings, artists such as Lang Lang, Kelli O’Hara, Emanuel Ax, Laura Benanti, Joshua Bell, and Audra McDonald have performed and mixed and mingled with guests. It is a terrific way for generous supporters of Lincoln Center to become acquainted with great artists and with one another.
The GPC raises about $3.4 million annually. It is as if Lincoln Center enjoyed a 5 percent “draw” on a permanent endowment of $70 million. The membership of the GPC and the sum it raises for Lincoln Center quadrupled between 2001 and 2014. The trustees in turn engage corporations and professional firms with which they are closely associated in the life of Lincoln Center. The institution benefits enormously from that collective, pro bono, intellectual firepower.
Lincoln Center has also benefited greatly from the tenth initiative undertaken, one that has the potential to transform Lincoln Center’s operating budget and the way in which it conceives of its mission in the twenty-first century. It originated with a staff recommendation to establish an institutional consulting practice. Most trustees reacted favorably. They maintained that as the largest, best-known, and most consequential performing arts center in the world, Lincoln Center is frequently called upon to offer advice and guidance to its traditional and new counterparts around the world. Site visits; delegations; technical assistance; and one-on-one counseling of visiting staff, board members, and foundations from the four corners of the earth are virtually an everyday occurrence at Lincoln Center. Key trustees became convinced that the strength of Lincoln Center’s brand and its accumulated knowledge could become an entrée to remunerative consulting.
If one of Lincoln Center’s foremost assets is the combined talent of its incumbent staff, then why not exploit it to improve our institution’s financial performance, to benefit our clients, and to enrich the experience of key employees, eager to tackle new and different assignments? This line of reasoning, in turn, caused us to reflect on whether and how Lincoln Center might help to improve the design and management of arts centers and promote international artistic exchange. For me, such activities fell right smack in the middle of Lincoln Center’s mission. They are part of what it means to be the world’s leading performing arts center in the twenty-first century.
It was this mix of considerations that prompted the board of directors to support my conviction that by entering consultant territory, we could at once further our mission, attract and retain world-class staff, substantially enhance our net revenue, and learn a great deal about ourselves in the bargain.
Lincoln Center Global (LCG) is the name of our consulting practice. A gifted staff member, formerly a Broadway producer and a Harvard Business School (HBS) graduate, Kara Medoff Barnett, led this unprecedented initiative. She performed with distinction. We decided to start small; our first client would be China. Soon afterward, the Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Mitsui & Co., Brown University, the New Orleans Musicians Village, and a performing arts and education center in the Phoenix metropolitan area called Consolari joined the city of Tianjin as LCG clients.
Overall, this major alteration of Lincoln Center’s economic model took time to conceive and to implement, but the framework for its creation started on day one of year one. So did the notion of expanding the board of directors. I also set in motion task forces of trustees and executives from firms like McKinsey and UBS to help me think through how best to acquire federal and state funds to pay for redevelopment and how to maximize rental income from the venues that Lincoln Center owned and operated.
Even higher on my list of priorities was puzzling out what would be contained in the package of incentives that could move constituents from spectator seats to the playing field of redevelopment. What might convert them from opponents or passive bystanders to active participants?
That analytical challenge was sitting out there just waiting to be seized when reality intruded in June 2002. It came in the surprising form of a labor strike by the musicians of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra.
I WAS STARTLED by this sudden development. The Mostly Mozart Festival was a well-known Lincoln Center creation. Its featured ensemble in this widely emulated summer production has always been the Mostly Mozart Orchestra, which consisted of fine freelance musicians who were the best paid in the country. Their demand was not related to pay, or fringe benefits, or working conditions. Rather, they insisted on an outsized role in any decision about the possible dismissal of an existing player deemed by the music director to be performing below par and in the selection of new musicians to fill any vacancies. It appeared that the union players of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra intended to send management a message. But what was it?
Until recently, the Mostly Mozart Orchestra had been conducted by Gerard Schwarz, whose tenure lasted seventeen years. I knew Schwarz very well. In 1978, while I was executive director of the 92nd Street Y, Omus Hirshbein, the resident impresario and my close colleague, created and then nurtured the Y Chamber Symphony. We asked Schwarz to be its maestro. He performed very ably in that role, and as far as I could tell from a distance, he was also successful as the conductor of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra, particularly in his first decade on the job. However, by the time I arrived at Lincoln Center in 2002, Gerry’s contract had not been renewed, and for the summer of 2001 the orchestra played with a series of guest conductors. The musicians anxiously awaited the decision of Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s vice president for programs, about who his successor would be.
Anxiety was mixed with trepidation. The critical reviews of the orchestra in Gerry’s last years had not been favorable, and the orchestra’s audience had begun to erode significantly. Early in its history, the festival ran for seven weeks. Reduced demand for tickets contracted its season to six, then five, and then four weeks. Concern was expressed about whether Moss intended not only to further shorten the already truncated season, but also to dilute the centrality of the orchestra in the festival’s offerings. As an arts presenter, Moss was adept at bringing to Lincoln Center all kinds of excellent chamber ensembles, early music groups, chamber symphonies, vocal artists, and even modern dance troupes to enhance the festival. There were rumors, some of which reached the press, that the orchestra might simply disappear.
The message, then, seemed to be that the musicians of the orchestra wished to protect each other against dismissal and intended to exert control over the selection of future personnel. To me and to Moss, that meant any new conductor’s authority would be diminished even before he or she could raise a baton. This demand seemed untenable. We both examined carefully the contracts of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and other leading American ensembles with their musicians. In some, there was language about management’s obligation to consult with musicians on vacancies or seek the advice of players in a given section of the orchestra. But none of the provisions came even close to the assertion of authority these freelance musicians were insisting upon for the Mostly Mozart Orchestra.
In June 2002 I had been exclusively on the payroll of Lincoln Center for a little more than one month. If the union members thought that a brand-new president might buckle under the pressure of a media frenzy, a disappointed audience, and the cost of a labor action that could not be offset by earned revenue, they had good reason. The chair of the Lincoln Center board, Beverly Sills, advised me to settle on the union’s terms if necessary. Just conjure up some face-saving language for management, she advised. The issue at stake was obscure; no one really understood it, she opined. Why start off your tenure as president by alienating musicians, audiences, and union supporters, including most of the members of the New York City Council?
I held firm. The media pressure did not trouble me. Lincoln Center’s board of directors, while not demonstrably supportive, seemed to be willing to cut the new guy some managerial slack. Whatever the resulting budget deficit, I was certain it could be closed by some more fund-raising hustle. Most important, Jane Moss needed and deserved my support. She was being unfairly scapegoated by elements of the press and reviled by the musicians. I was convinced that her strong track record and excellent intentions for the future of the Mostly Mozart Festival and for its orchestra fully merited my support. Moss needed the running room to rebuild and renew this festival. Being pushed around by musicians understandably concerned about their own future was no way to start that process.
We both wanted our soon-to-be-named music director to enjoy the full prerogatives of a maestro. The musicians of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra needed to be reshaped into a proud, energetic, fully engaged ensemble. That would take time and money. Scheduling extra rehearsals. Retaining world-renowned feature guest artists. Programming crowd pleasers and challenging repertoire. Encouraging the orchestra to learn from brilliant guest conductors. None of this could happen with a new maestro hobbled by a labor agreement that clouded the issue of who was in charge.
After several weeks of frenzied activity, including union demonstrations around Lincoln Center’s campus, it became clear that neither the media nor the public were very sympathetic to the musicians’ case. Two days after what was to have been the start of the season, the musicians in effect capitulated. They asked us to commence the Mostly Mozart Festival orchestral concerts about one week late. By then, opportunities for single ticket sales had diminished, and some important guest artists had changed their plans. By then, the opportunity for a buoyant opening had come and gone. We held fast to our position. The festival would carry on that summer, but without any Mostly Mozart Orchestra offerings. We were sure that the union musicians would be a lot more careful in the future about attempting to interfere with the prerogatives of management.
The rest is contemporary history. Jane Moss announced the appointment of the French maestro Louis Langrée. He is a conductor with a special flair for the music of Mozart. Engaging, energetic, and upbeat, he is a nonconfrontational leader possessed of a light personal touch, and he proved to be an inspired choice. As we had promised him and ourselves, Lincoln Center invested more time, energy, and resources in the festival than ever before.
Langrée developed a close working relationship with Moss. He was handpicked after Jane saw him perform in Europe. From the beginning, he was well received by the musicians. They rehearsed much more together. Langrée instilled in them a sense of pride and musicianship. He maintained very high standards. They responded by playing well, not only for him but for guest conductors who were going places: Yannick Nézet-Séguin (soon thereafter, selected to conduct the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and to become the maestro of the Philadelphia Orchestra), Osmo Vanska (conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra), and Pablo Heras-Casado (also bound to conduct at the Met and to become the music director of the St. Luke’s Orchestra). They played with special guest artists who were at the pinnacle of their careers: Stephanie Blythe, Susanna Phillips, Renee Fleming, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Emanuel Ax, Leif Ove-Andsnes, Pierre Laurent-Aimard, Yo-Yo Ma, Alisa Weilerstein, and Martin Frost, among many others. And they performed not only the classical repertory, but also works of living composers, like Golijov, Adams, and Saariaho.
After some of the concerts in Avery Fisher Hall, a 2,700-seat venue, Moss would invite solo artists or trios and quartets to perform at 10:30 p.m. in the 240-seat, nightclub-like setting of the Kaplan Penthouse overlooking the Hudson River. In that candlelit, romantic venue, the age of the audience plummeted; hemlines rose; backpacks were unloaded; and music acquired spellbinding intimacy, proximity, and immediacy.
While the orchestra remained the centerpiece of the festival, it was surrounded by innovation. For the first time in its history, the Mostly Mozart Festival offered staged operas, among them Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, both performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted and directed by Ivan Fischer; The Flowering Tree, a new opera by John Adams, directed by Peter Sellars; Mozart’s Laide, also directed by Sellars; Il Re Pastore, directed by Mark Lamos; and a revival of Jonathan Miller’s Cosi fan Tutte.
Contemporaneous with such offerings were performances by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, the Tallis Scholars, Gidon Kremer’s Kremerara Baltica, the Leipzig String Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
A mainstay of the festival has been the Mark Morris Dance Company. It has performed L’Allegro Il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Dido Aeneas, and as a world premiere, Mozart Dances, among other pieces.
These are all expensive initiatives and actions. They required even more ambitious fund-raising. I enjoyed taking the lead in rallying the staff and board to acquire for Lincoln Center new and generous supporters.
What Jane Moss accomplished with the Mostly Mozart Festival was and remains astounding. She built on the basic idea of celebrating Mozart’s brilliance, but construed that undertaking broadly and imaginatively. Who influenced Mozart, and which composers and musicians were most influenced by him? How is his work reflected in the music, the visual art, and the literature of his time? To what extent was Mozart the product of his own environment and extensive travel, and in what degree did he transcend them? How does Mozart’s work influence today’s musicians and composers? What mixture of nature and nurture accounts for his genius? These are some of the probing and fascinating questions that animated Moss’s brilliant programming choices.
In working closely with Louis Langrée, classicism and innovation were viewed as entirely compatible. Mozart’s music was enhanced and its essence revealed, not negated or superseded, by incorporating the music of other composers, dead and alive, into the festival. Adding different performing groups and programming elements into the festival also enlivened this summer tradition.
The ubiquity, consistency, and constancy of elaborate praise for the Mostly Mozart Festival was gratifying. While each critic was partial to his or her favorite features of this four-week cornucopia of events, what they seemed to share was respect. They held in high regard the fact that it was ideas that animated the festival, well-articulated points of view. One might take issue with some of them, but their worthiness as organizing principles was undeniable.
Peter Davies at New York Magazine, Justin Davidson at Newsday, Alex Ross at the New Yorker, and that New York Times cadre of critics—Anthony Tommasini, Allan Kozinn, James R. Oestreich, Alastair Macaulay, Steve Smith, and Zachary Wolfe, among others—wrote admiringly about what Langrée and Moss were accomplishing. Striking a theme that found echoes in all of their commentary, on August 5, 2004, the New York Times concert review read:
What a difference a director makes.
Youthful, limber, technically accomplished, full of ideas and seemingly tireless, Mr. Langrée has revitalized the Festival’s orchestra . . . just two summers after the players went out on strike.
As a result of Lincoln Center’s capital campaign, Jane received a special honor. The position she held became the Ehrenkranz Artistic Director of Lincoln Center. Louis Langrée was similarly recognized; he became the Renée and Robert Belfer Music Director of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra. These are the first positions ever to be endowed at Lincoln Center. In recognition of the publicly and critically acclaimed artistic reawakening of this beloved festival, these tributes were greeted with enthusiasm by colleagues, commentators, and audience members.
In the late summer of 2013 many of those musicians who had participated in that job action eleven years earlier asked to see me for lunch. They were joined by those who had accepted positions with the Mostly Mozart Orchestra after 2002. They offered me modest tokens of appreciation and genuine words of thanks. I told them how proud I was of what they had accomplished together. In return they recognized that without my energetic commitment, none of them could have enjoyed the artistic camaraderie and the critical praise that was now theirs to treasure.
In a whisper, I asked Jane whether she had a tissue handy.
THE SUSPENSION OF 2002 performances of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra was not the only instance of union friction at Lincoln Center with which I had to deal. Another occurred two years later.
I was told that James (Jimmy) Claffey, the notoriously brusque and tough-minded president of the New York Chapter of IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), otherwise known as the stagehands’ union, was intent on unilaterally asserting union jurisdiction for the first time over an event that Lincoln Center had mounted free to the public during each winter holiday season for years.
Lincoln Center organized a half hour of live outdoor entertainment that culminated in a holiday tree-lighting ceremony. It was held in December on Josie Robertson Plaza and on the surrounding balconies and porticos of the Metropolitan Opera, Avery Fisher Hall, and what was then known as the New York State Theater. Opera singers from the Met; dancers from the New York City Ballet; students from the School of American Ballet trained to perform in the Nutcracker; musicians from the New York Philharmonic and from Jazz at Lincoln Center; and jugglers, aerialists, and clowns from the Big Apple Circus all performed for no fee to an enchanted audience of children and their families that numbered as many as ten thousand. Organized by the Business Improvement District (BID), stores along Broadway, Columbus, and Amsterdam Avenues offered free refreshments and merchandise.
This event proved so enjoyable and visually arresting that the local ABC television station decided to broadcast it from 5:30 to 6:00 p.m. throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It received very high viewership.
Sure enough, three hours before the television program was due to start, Claffey called to say, “We want that work on the plaza or we will picket and shut you down.”
I reminded him that Lincoln Center’s collectively bargained contract excluded IATSE jurisdiction over events offered free to the public in our outdoor spaces. I also mentioned that I would be present at this holiday event. At that time, I would be delighted to explain to the news media that the very best-paid union members in the world had taken it upon themselves to prevent a free event from being seen by tens of thousands live and on television as it had been for the last four years.
Lincoln Center simply could not afford to continue this joyful holiday celebration if union costs amounting to several hundreds of thousands of dollars were suddenly imposed, in violation of our existing contract.
This show would not be stopped by him, and I was not going to be threatened. There was heat under my collar.
Literally minutes after Claffey hung up, a member of the New York City Council, Christine Quinn, who was later elected speaker of that legislative body, called. She asked why the stagehands were being barred from Lincoln Center’s campus. I patiently told her that there was no more unionized cultural complex in the world than Lincoln Center, but that the jurisdiction of the stagehands did not extend to Josie Robertson Plaza or our other public spaces for events that are free to the public. I asked her whether she had read or been briefed about Lincoln Center’s contract with IATSE, or whether she was aware that the workers on whose behalf she was calling earned on average $250,000 annually. She dissembled.
Ignorant of these and other facts, Quinn was simply doing Claffey’s bidding. She seemed flummoxed by my questions.
Politicians who are handmaidens of special interests—be they unions, real estate developers, retailers, or Wall Street lobbyists—do a disservice to the general public and to the office they hold.
I thanked her for calling.
The show went on as planned, without a hitch. Claffey’s threat did not work. And Christine Quinn, hardly known as a supporter of the performing arts, was not heard from again.