A Death Foretold and a Turnaround Unheralded
AUTOPSY REPORT ON THE DEATH OF THE NEW YORK CITY OPERA
Office of the Medical Examiner
| Symptomatology and Clinical History: | attention deficit disorder; severe hearing and listening deficiencies; sudden wanderlust bordering on edifice complex; low self-esteem; steady audience decline; poor relations with closest neighbor; many months of program suspension and shrinkage; patient given to flights of fancy and magical thinking |
| Causes of Death: | succession of self-inflicted wounds; severe case of governance failure; poor succession planning, resulting in flawed decisions on CEO selection; trustees too few and too disengaged; charitable contributions wanting; budgets out of balance; endowment shrinking; patient living beyond means; displacement and uprootedness |
| Contributing Factors: | owner of the David H. Koch Theater aka the City of New York; music critics as cheerleaders and enablers |
Institutions are rarely murdered; they meet their end by suicide. They are not strangled by their natural environment while vigorous; they die because they have outlived their usefulness, or fail to do the work that the world wants done.
—DR. A. LAWRENCE LOWELL, President, Harvard University, Inaugural Address, October 6, 1909
The New York City Opera vanished. On October 1, 2013, it declared bankruptcy. A victim of governance failure and management ineptitude, its death was completely avoidable. The cultural capital of the world can easily accommodate two full-time and full-fledged opera companies. Metropolitan-area audiences are substantial enough. Donors are ample and generous enough. Tourism is plentiful. And yet the New York City Opera is no more.
The early signs of serious problems can be found not so much in its programming and even less in its home at Lincoln Center, the New York State Theater. Yet critics prattled endlessly about Paul Kellogg’s, then Gerard Mortier’s, and finally George Steel’s choice of repertoire, as if some perfect formula could be devised that would, once and for all, satisfy their aesthetic preferences and draw ample audiences. Attractive, compelling productions are utterly necessary, but hardly sufficient, to maintain and sustain a healthy opera company. For the enterprise that Mayor La Guardia was reputed to have called “The People’s Opera,” much more was needed.
Meanwhile, beginning in 2002 Paul Kellogg complained publicly and repeatedly that the house acoustics were not fit for opera. The New York State Theater was built to choreographer and founder of the New York City Ballet George Balanchine’s specifications. They required that the footsteps of dancers hardly be heard, a muffled condition supposedly incompatible with a hall acoustically fit for the human voice.
This point of view drove Beverly Sills to utter distraction. Sills had been one of the New York City Opera’s biggest stars throughout the 1960s and 1970s. After retiring in 1979 from a singing career that brought her global recognition, she took over as the company’s general manager, a post she held for a decade. Kellogg was her successor once removed, and his comments set off a flourish of rhetorical questions she regularly posed to me in confidence.
How could it be, she asked, that an opera company performing in the very space with supposedly poor acoustics could also be closely associated with the rise to worldwide prominence, not just of herself, but also of Placido Domingo, Norman Treigle, Phyllis Curton, Beverly Wolff, Samuel Ramey, and Catherine Malfitano, among many others? What did Kellogg know about acoustical deficiencies that such stars and musical directors, maestros like Julius Rudel and George Manahan, did not? This company was born in 1943, and it had sustained itself at Lincoln Center for almost four decades. And why did Kellogg assume that existing deficiencies, such as they may be (no hall is perfect), could not be addressed by remedial measures to improve the acoustics?
Besides, didn’t Kellogg appreciate that the baroque and chamber operas he regularly transferred from Glimmerglass (a summer opera company he also directed, located in Cooperstown, New York) took productions from a nine-hundred-seat hall to the twenty-seven-hundred-seat New York State Theater? Naturally, these programs were likely to be inappropriate for that much larger space, acoustically and otherwise.
Sills’s unvarnished view was regularly communicated to me, but in far less temperate language.
While there was much controversy about Kellogg’s contention, there was little debate about its consequences.
Audiences listened—to him. If the New York State Theater was not good enough for the New York City Opera to perform in, why should opera-going audience members part with good money and time to buy tickets and see performances, or at least as many as in prior seasons? Persistent declines in attendance started in 2002. No other resident artistic organization at Lincoln Center experienced such severe and sustained reductions at the box office.
Although a dubious proposition at best, if the house that Balanchine built was truly an ill fit for the New York City Opera, then it followed that the search for a new space should be pursued with vigor and as a high priority. With all of the energy the staff and board of the New York City Opera could muster, months were spent investigating the World Trade Center site in the hope, no doubt, of securing a new hall with substantial federal, state, and local subsidies.
That offer was never tendered, as the city struggled, without success, to have instead the Drawing Center, the Signature Theater, and the Joyce Theater occupy a Frank Gehry–designed, multifunctional space. Twelve years later and counting, the question of whether there will be any resident companies in a Ground Zero arts facility and what may be presented there artistically remains unresolved. Why the City of New York encouraged the Opera to spend so much effort investigating and then applying to occupy this downtown site remains a complete mystery.
The New York City Opera, disappointed that the local community near Ground Zero found its offerings less to its liking than other arts fare, then turned its attention to a private developer, who had purchased what came to be called the American Red Cross parcel, on 67th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Its footprint was large enough to house not only an upscale all-glass rental apartment complex, but also a modern opera house. Its proximity to Lincoln Center’s sixteen-acre campus meant that, at least in theory, the New York City Opera could remain a constituent, with all the associated benefits.
Actually, the Opera requested of Lincoln Center some estimate of how often it might rent the new facilities for its own presentations, just as it was doing in Jazz at Lincoln Center venues at Columbus Circle and just as it continued to do when the New York State Theater was available for events offered by the Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival.
The time and resources expended by architects; theater designers; city and state officials, appointed and elected; private developers; engineers; community boards; and trustees to engage in sufficient due diligence on both the Ground Zero and American Red Cross sites was considerable. The regular operations of the New York City Opera suffered as a result of this huge distraction.
Audiences diminished. Operating deficits grew. Staff morale suffered. Uncertainty about the company’s future hung in the air like a brooding presence.
Where would it be located? Who would lead it? What was to be its raison d’être?
On April 27, 2006, the New York Times reported:
The New York City Opera is close to a deal to build a concert hall in the base of a new apartment building planned for the former American Red Cross site near Lincoln Center.
“They’re very close to making a deal; it all looks very good,” said Martin J. Oppenheimer, a Vice Chairman of New York City Opera. “The City is very supportive. Lincoln Center was very supportive.”
I was astonished. The City of New York had not advanced a financial commitment to the project. No private parties had stepped forward with pledges of monetary support. How could the New York City Opera possibly afford a $300 million capital construction bill? How could it possibly manage to pay for the substantially higher operating cost it would incur post-construction, when operations would begin? After all, this very company had recorded an operating deficit of $3.3 million in 2002, $6.3 million in 2003, $3.9 million in 2004, $5.6 million in 2005, and nearly $3 million in 2006.
Looking for a new home? How, pray tell, board of directors, could the New York City Opera possibly afford one? When asked this question, individual trustees responded with blank faces or assumed that Susan Baker, as board chair, or others close to her knew the answer.
Two months later, on July 4, 2006, this headline appeared in the New York Times: “High Hopes Frustrated, City Opera Stays Put—Is the Long Quest for a New Theater Scaring Away Customers?” The “very close to a deal” with the developer A & R. Kalimian Realty had fallen through.
Publicly, the firm stated that incorporating an opera house into the condominium project would be too complex and potentially would be delayed for years, given a likely extensive public approval process. Privately, the Kalimian family expressed little confidence that the New York City Opera could raise the needed funds and become a financially sound, reliable anchor tenant.
At the same time it was generally known that Paul Kellogg, the general and artistic director of the New York City Opera, would retire in June 2007, the decision having been publicly disclosed on September 15, 2005.
Kellogg’s announcement gave the board members of the New York City Opera almost two years to find a successor. They inexplicably selected Gerard Mortier, a Belgian impresario. He was unfamiliar with three key elements of running the New York City Opera: earned income (marketing and selling largely unsubsidized tickets), contributed income (raising funds from corporations, foundations, and individuals), and reporting to a board of directors that would determine policy. All of his professional life, Mortier had operated in the European way. National and municipal governments supported opera, with very generous sums. He had hardly ever raised funds in the private sector or fretted about the state of the box office. If he worried at all, it was about maintaining good relations with public benefactors—the ministers of culture.
How could the New York City Opera Board of Directors assume that at the age of sixty-five, Mortier would suddenly develop these new skills? Why did the search committee have confidence that his well-known flamboyant temperament would be transformed so that he could manage compatible relationships with the board and successfully solicit private funds and offer affordable programs that would attract paying audiences? What could the search committee members have been thinking? There was simply no evidence in Mortier’s considerable work history that suggested he could meet these challenges.
Perhaps the search committee hoped that the selection of Mortier would generate excitement and signal the arrival of cutting-edge, avant-garde, artistic adventurism. If so, it seemed to others, to revert to a sports metaphor, that Mortier’s selection was a fourth-quarter artistic Hail Mary pass.
As Justin Davidson put it in New York Magazine on November 24, 2008, after Mortier was selected,
some opera watchers warned that he would blaze through a couple of groundbreaking but financially disastrous seasons, then retire back to Europe, leaving the company covered in ash. They were too optimistic.
Mortier made his exit even before his entrance; when the budget he wanted failed to materialize, he walked away, leaving the New York City Opera with a stack of visionary plans and the specter of a Lehman Brothers–like future.
Mortier contended that he had been promised an annual budget of $60 million, a number he claimed was explicitly specified in his written contract. But the board was prepared to provide “only” $36 million, not nearly enough for the innovative productions he wished to finance. Indeed, Mortier noted that the smallest opera company in France enjoyed an operating budget in excess of what he was being offered. The Paris Opera alone, which he had been running, was blessed with a budget of $300 million, half of which came straight from national coffers.
How could the New York City Opera, after pursuing two different sites to build a new opera house without securing substantial pledges for either of them, then promise to increase its budget by some $24 million, only to renege?
The conclusion of this sorry episode was neatly captured by Heidi Waleson in the Wall Street Journal on November 11, 2008. She minced no words:
In the end, the whole affair was a remarkable act of hubris. To summarily jettison an opera company’s history, completely alter its artistic and audience profile, and redesign its funding structure without having identified sources of capital beforehand seems like an exercise in wishful thinking and a highly irresponsible act.
City Opera is an essential public institution with a valuable history. Boards are supposed to take that trust seriously, but this one was blinded by a shiny new toy. Like financial engineers with an outsized appetite for risk, but little understanding of it, they are now left with the shell of a company. It’s time for a change in governance, a bailout, and a restructuring. Rescue is needed. City Opera is too valuable to lose.
It cannot be said that the trustees of the New York City Opera failed to be openly taken to task and warned. The press was hardly alone in its assessment of the abject performance of the board of directors. Its many acts of omission and commission were cause for anger and dismay all over Lincoln Center’s campus.
THERE IS MORE to this grim epitaph. On August 13, 2008, George Steel was appointed the general director of the Dallas Opera after serving for eleven years as the executive director of the Miller Theater at Columbia University. The choice of Mr. Steel was somewhat of a surprise, as he had no experience running an opera house, and as the Dallas Opera’s budget, at $12 million, was four times that of the Miller Theater. Yet only five months later, the New York City Opera, by now in a state of utter turmoil, announced that George Steel would come back from Dallas, where he had just moved, to become its general manager and artistic director.
The Miller Theater housed 688 seats. Its audience consisted largely of students. The price of admission was not much more than the cost of a movie ticket. It was heavily subsidized by its owner, Columbia University. It encompassed no separate governance structure, such as a board of directors. It demanded very little private sector fund-raising.
Steel was credited with imaginative contemporary and early music programming, but the New York City Opera’s challenge was several orders of magnitude larger and more formidable than running the Miller Theater. The David H. Koch Theater contained twenty-seven hundred seats, four times more than the Miller Theater. The Opera’s budget was a minimum of ten times larger than that of the Miller Theater. I was reminded of Karl Marx’s observation that a difference of degree, if large enough, becomes a difference in kind. In moving Steel from either the Miller Theater or the Dallas Opera, it is an understatement to suggest that the search committee of the New York City Opera had chosen someone about to encounter a difference in kind. The selection was nothing short of stupefying.
Satisfying the formidable private funding requirements of the Opera was an utter necessity of the post. Steel had never before confronted anything like it. The New York City Opera also came with a board of directors, and its general director would need to engage it in the context of the whole environment of Lincoln Center, a complex entity. And not least, the New York City Ballet shared the David H. Koch Theater as its home.
If it is true that good fences make for good neighbors, it is also the case that no fences are to be found in this building for which Phillip Johnson was the architect. The Opera and the Ballet quarreled incessantly over matters like scheduling, cleaning, insurance, security, catering, cost sharing, and much, much more. For example, live music played well is integral to beautiful dance making. Kellogg’s complaint about acoustics at the New York State Theater could adversely affect not only the New York City Opera, but potentially the New York City Ballet as well. Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief, was said to be livid. He felt strongly that Kellogg was speaking out of turn.
Around Lincoln Center, my colleagues were deeply disturbed by the embarrassing and very public amateurishness of the New York City Opera board and its leaderless and beleaguered staff.
We wondered why the search committee had not opted for a seasoned expert to replace Mortier, one fully acquainted not only with the art form, but also with the basics of leading and managing a formidable nonprofit enterprise. Just to name two possibilities, there was Francesca Zambello, then the director of the Glimmerglass Opera, who had expressed keen interest. Turned aside, she later added director of the Washington National Opera to her responsibilities. Another highly regarded professional, David Gockley, had been the general director of the Houston Grand Opera from 1972 to 2005 and then assumed a comparable post at the San Francisco Opera.
There were others inside Lincoln Center who could also have been excellent candidates. Two hardened, well-regarded veterans reported to me. One was Nigel Redden, the director of the Lincoln Center Festival and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, who at one point in his career served as the director of the Santa Fe Opera. He is a superb professional. Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s vice president for programs, was the other. She had built an excellent curatorial track record and had won the respect of artists, critics, audiences, and professional peers. Apparently, neither was seriously considered.
The interregna tolerated by the City Opera board between CEOs was also mystifying. The vacuum left after Paul Kellogg’s announced resignation and Mortier’s on-again, off-again arrival, and the second vacuum as the Opera considered who would step into the stubbornly vacant post, were both extremely damaging.
Each resident artistic organization at Lincoln Center takes pride in its autonomy. Lincoln Center is careful to offer advice and support only when a member of its artistic family asks or when irreversible damage threatens.
After consulting with the chair of Lincoln Center’s board, Frank Bennack, I decided to act. I asked Joseph Polisi, the president of The Juilliard School, and Adrian Ellis, the executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, to join me in meeting with George Steel as soon as possible after his appointment.
Our purpose was to ask leading questions and to help Steel think about how best to address his major challenges. Polisi had been the president of Juilliard for over two decades, and Ellis, prior to assuming his post at Jazz at Lincoln Center, had founded a successful strategic consulting firm focused on arts organizations. They were highly qualified to join me in offering good counsel.
We met with Steel for some two hours of intense conversation, after which I offered to draft a paper for him and his chair, Susan Baker. If the New York City Opera was going to disappear while I was Lincoln Center’s president, it would not be because I had failed to offer my best, uninhibited, and frank advice.
The paper was entitled “The New York City Opera: A Road to Recovery.” It pulled no punches. It characterized the Opera’s situation as a crisis and called for a revitalized and expanded board of directors, beginning with the resignation and replacement of Susan Baker. It made the strong case to reduce, contain, and control costs immediately. It called for the development of a serious three-year operating plan and business model. It suggested ways and means to raise substantial funds and to begin to repair the damage to relationships with key opera stakeholders.
The report also contained a serious and generous offer of Lincoln Center support.1
I had sent along an advance copy to my colleagues for comment and then to George Steel in case he thought some changes were in order before he showed it to Susan Baker. It was important that she have the chance to examine the white paper and think about it as soon as possible. We then arranged to meet with Baker and Frank Bennack for a thorough review of the document.
All of us gathered in my office some weeks later. There, it quickly became clear that Steel had not shared the paper with Susan at all. It even seemed that Steel himself had never read it!
No wonder I had not heard back from him about the paper before our meeting.
Accordingly, it fell to me that afternoon to talk both the beleaguered board chair and the CEO of the New York City Opera through the document. While I spoke, Susan Baker was seething, realizing that her very competence was being called into question. Steel’s face was completely blank, as if he now recognized that not giving the paper so much as a cursory look was a colossal error of judgment.
At the end of a very difficult hour and a half, I could tell that Baker was livid.
As she and Steel departed, my mind wandered to the subject of how this disaster in the making could have been avoided. In the life of many professions and institutions, there are solemn moments of declared intent and resolve. For physicians, the Hippocratic oath. For lawyers, fealty to statutes and to judicial rulings. For public officeholders, an inviolable promise to uphold the Constitution.
In nonprofit institutions, such a dignified rite of passage occurs when one is formally elected to the board of directors. And yet seldom is such an occasion accompanied by an articulated pledge of any kind.
Just imagine if Susan Baker and her fellow New York City Opera trustees were expected to affirm their institutional commitment upon election before all of their assembled peers with something like the following oath:
As a trustee, I pledge to participate actively in the governance of the New York City Opera. As such, I will take care to look closely after the selection of a Chief Executive Officer, to regularly monitor the CEO’s performance in office, and to carefully review both the organization’s financial affairs and the discharge of its artistic mission.
I recognize that the Opera requires financially supportive trustees, and I will offer generous contributions, consistent with my means. I shall also encourage friends, colleagues, and associates to donate funds.
In executing my responsibilities, I will first and foremost consider the best interests of the institution in its service to audiences and artists. I will not hesitate to voice my view if either my fellow trustees or senior management appear to be straying from the path of fiscal and programmatic solvency in pursuit of the New York City Opera’s clearly stated mission.
Would an oath of this kind help to set a peer-driven expectation of responsible governance? Surely it would allow a well-disciplined nominating and governance committee to review the conduct of every trustee and judge the adequacy of his or her financial and service contributions. Come to think of it, this idea of a statement of initiation that all newly inducted trustees would be required to avow might well work for any or all nonprofit institutions.
My reverie about what might have been did not last for long. Soon after our meeting, Susan Baker called Frank Bennack and gave him a piece of her mind about my effrontery. But our conversation had not been about me or her. It was about the future of a precious forty-seven-year-old opera company that she and her board colleagues held in trust for artists and audiences. It was about an imperiled institution well on its way to collapse unless drastic action was taken quickly, as in there was not a moment to lose.
As painful as it may have been for Baker to hear from me behind closed doors about the condition of the Opera and the need for her to part company with it, how much more painful must it have been to read the headline and opening paragraphs in a Pogrebin article in the New York Times on June 18, 2009, shortly after our tense session:
If nonprofit cultural organizations were run like corporations—in which chief executives are at least, in principle, held accountable for financial performance—then the Chairwoman of New York City Opera, Susan L. Baker, might well be out of a job.
During Ms. Baker’s tenure, City Opera has raided its endowment—which now stands at $16 million, down from $57 million when she was appointed in December, 2003—to pay off debts and cover operating expenses. The practice, known as endowment invasion, requires approval from the State Attorney General’s Office and the State Court of Appeals and is widely considered a last resort for any arts institution.
. . . During the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, the company’s revenue from ticket sales, donations, and investments fell 23% to $30.9 million, while expenses increased 11% to $44.2 million, amounting to a loss of $11.3 million.
This was the state of affairs that George Steel inherited. Even so, he could have worked much more quickly and effectively to expand the board of directors and to build on the New York City Opera’s good name and goodwill. New Yorkers love an underdog. Donors and ticket buyers would need to be convinced that the New York City Opera now knew what it was about, financially and artistically; that it possessed the energy, the will, and the stamina to recover; and that it would reach out to its friends and allies in doing so. Nothing emerged from months of Mr. Steel’s tenure to instill confidence in the organization’s future. Indeed, in his first full year as director, Mr. Steel presided over a $5.9 million deficit, hardly a source of encouragement.
As I watched in sadness Steel’s flailing performance, I was certain of two things: Lincoln Center had not been called upon for help until it was too late to matter, and for the New York City Opera, it was all over. An accumulation of poor decisions had taken their full toll. The die had been cast.
FROM APRIL 20, 2008, until November 5, 2009, for almost eighteen months, no New York City Opera performances were held while the David H. Koch Theater was being renovated. The new hall was hailed, most of all by Steel himself, not just because the space was more comfortable to be in, center aisles having been created in its orchestra, but because the removal of carpeting, the replacement of seat covers, the creation of a stage lift for the orchestra, and the various uses of acoustic shells, among other measures, appeared to have improved its sound. Critics, musicians, and audiences all said so.
Then Steel, having elaborately praised the renovation of his organization’s newly modernized artistic home, suddenly announced on May 20, 2011 that the New York City Opera would leave Lincoln Center forever and perform at various places around New York City: City Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and El Museo Del Barrio, for starters. It would, in itinerant fashion, “go to where the people were.” Well, five million of those people who love the performing arts were at Lincoln Center every year, the very place City Opera was leaving. By Steel’s calculation, the costs of operating at Lincoln Center were higher than the brand equity of staying in place. The likelihood that Lincoln Center’s cachet and prominence would have less appeal to donors than a “now you see me, now you don’t” vagabond company was apparently his best guess.
No one followed the New York City Opera’s fortunes more closely than Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of the New York Times. He writes with nuance and texture. His prolific reviews have taught me much. Attentive New Yorkers pay heed to the paper of record, and his voice is an influential one.
How disappointing then, that his running critique was so inconsistent, so incomplete, and ultimately unhelpful, even whimsical. Tommasini contributed to the magical thinking that seemed to permeate the New York City Opera’s decision making. He supported the City Opera’s quest for a new home seemingly without considering its financial consequences or its adverse impact on the company’s artistic productions. He was in a very small minority that welcomed the Mortier appointment. He offered an almost Panglossian view of George Steel’s selection and of the Opera’s future with Steel at the helm.
On November 30, 2009, in “Better Acoustics in Koch Theater Give City Opera a Much Needed Boost,” he argued that the “acoustical improvements to the Koch Theater are real and encouraging, and nothing will help City Opera more.”
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.”2
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.3
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.”4
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.5
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.
THE ECONOMIST JOSEPH SCHUMPETER 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.
WHILE THE NEW YORK 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.
Vogelstein called during the search process and asked me to be candid about a leading candidate for the job. Her name was Kathy Brown. To my mind, Brown was close to a perfect choice. She loved dance as an art form. She adored the New York City Ballet as an institution. She had been, for a seven-year period, its major gifts fund-raiser, and as such knew her way around the board, the important individual benefactors, the repertoire, and the institution’s leading figures, not least Peter Martins. She had held a similar post at the New York Public Library and had enjoyed a successful run there. During that stint, I tried hard to recruit her to become the development director of the IRC while I was the president, a change of field that did not engage Brown’s interest.
Instead, she joined Jazz at Lincoln Center’s staff, moving from being its superb head of development at a critical early stage in the life of this fledgling institution to become its executive director. From that post, she was wooed to be the chief operating officer of WNYC, the largest and most successful radio station in the National Public Radio network.
Quite unlike Mortier or Steel, here was a professional with truly relevant experience, and then some. Familiarity with trustees and a temperament to relate well to them. Experience in all dimensions of fund-raising. A close student of the New York City Ballet—its programs, its dancers, its rhythms, and its routines. Someone who knew her way around the operations of a complex house, including some difficult unions that had been the beneficiaries of years of sweetheart deals. Most of all, Kathy Brown admired Peter Martins and genuinely empathized with his huge job. It included not only artistic direction of America’s largest ballet company, but also oversight of a closely related nonprofit, the School of American Ballet, directed with skill and finesse by Marjorie Van derCook. SAB is also a substantial operation, with its own operating budget nearing $12 million. Kathy understood Martins. His workload, operating style, personality, and pace of decision making.
She was appointed executive director of the New York City Ballet in mid-December 2009. Positive change was not long in coming. Much of what should go up, rose: trustee contributions, foundation and corporate support, ticket income in a completely rescaled house, rental revenue, morale, and favorable press coverage.
Most of what should go down, declined: head count, marketing expenses as a percentage of earned income, and complaints from patrons and licensees.
Sooner than even I had thought possible, dance companies flocked to perform in the David H. Koch Theater, either as renters or enjoying the good fortune of being presented. The Nederland Dance Theatre. The Paris Opera Ballet. The Alvin Ailey Dance Company. The San Francisco Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre for its fall season (the late spring to early summer run would remain at the Metropolitan Opera House). The Mark Morris Dance Company. The Paul Taylor Dance Company. The Bolshoi Ballet.
As predicted, dance enthusiasts within hailing distance of the David H. Koch Theater were deliriously happy. Only the airlines and City Center were disappointed. The former is now less used by dance mavens traveling around the world. The latter had previously housed Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, and ABT and had to bid them good-bye.
By the time I departed Lincoln Center and less than four years after Brown arrived, the New York City Ballet’s budget had improved from that significant $8.5 million deficit to a modest surplus. A fund-raising campaign to strengthen the company’s balance sheet and to finance additional capital improvements was well along in the planning stages. Touring of the company as a whole and in a nimble, lower cost version had been reinvigorated. And experiments in digital media, including putting some ballet performances in movie theaters, were in advanced stages of planning.
In reflecting on the speed of this remarkable turnaround, I was reminded of a remark of Lenin’s that I had first come across many years ago while in graduate school: “Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen.”
Kathy Brown would be the first to acknowledge that what was accomplished so rapidly resulted from team effort. But high-performing teams need skilled leaders. In Brown, the board of the New York City Ballet found a smart, savvy, hardworking, and utterly likable chief executive.
THE OPERA AND THE BALLET, occupants of the same home, dealt with their challenges very differently. The Opera engaged in escapism and avoidance of its central challenges. The basic blocking and tackling of a successful organization was ignored, as a search for a new home diverted energy and attention from hard and unyielding realities.
The board of directors of the Opera did not insist on a budget in which expenses and revenues were in balance, nor engage in a vigorous debate about the identity of future executive leadership. Its members contributed financially far less than most were capable of offering and far less than what the Opera needed.
At the Ballet, the lesson to be learned is that the quality of trustees and management matter. If they are clear about their respective roles and responsibilities, and if all agree on the challenges to be seized, an organization can turn around and recover quickly. From 2008 to 2010, the Ballet was in an institutional funk, its finances in the red, its audiences eroding.
What changed? Not the market for classical dance, not Mr. Balanchine’s and Mr. Robbins’s choreography, not even the principal dancers, very much. What changed was the energy, determination, and persistence of sound and purposefully led management and trustees, working together, asking one another for improved performance. What changed was the establishment of a new fall season and improved marketing, as reflected in better box office results. What changed was disciplined trustee monitoring of operations, the establishment of clear benchmarks to be met, and the increasing generosity of the board, with many providing annual contributions of $100,000 or more.
The contrast in board and management comportment was stark. The Ballet now thrives. The Opera died. Why?
Yes, Mr. Martins’s choice of the repertoire to be performed, the selection of commissioned work, and the artistry of the New York City Ballet dancers all matter a great deal to the success of the enterprise. Reasonable fans of ballet naturally differ from season to season and decade to decade in their assessment of the company’s performance on the artistic side. But the solidity of the stage on which dance (or music, or theater) is performed depends as much or more on the excellence of management, the effectiveness of trustee oversight, and the size of their benefactions. The New York City Ballet now enjoys first-rate performance in management and governance. It will require continued persistence to maintain that track record.
It is as if all concerned parties had decided to sacrifice on the altar of a cause larger than themselves. At the New York City Ballet, the board and staff might just as well have taken that solemn oath of the kind I had imagined. Its key commitments were being honored rather than ignored or violated. The trustees of the New York City Ballet held themselves accountable for the fiscal and artistic health of the organization.