Boards and Other
Well-Meaning Obstacles

An opera company is run not by performers, not by production artists, not by impresarios — but rather by a board of directors. That is the legal fact. Consisting of volunteers from the local community, the board is ultimately responsible for management, finances, and artistic standards. In my time, I had the pleasure (and occasional displeasure) of working with four different boards representing three different systems. I am a veteran. And I’ve got the scars to prove it.

I was first introduced to board workings in Switzerland, at Zurich Opera and later at Geneva Opera. It was, for the most part, a gentle introduction. Board membership in Switzerland, and indeed most of Europe, is more or less an honorific. You will find people from prominent families, civic leaders, local celebrities, and the like. Personal wealth is not really a criterion for membership because financial considerations are usually minor — after all, in this part of the world tax revenue covers most of an opera company’s expenses. During my years in Switzerland, board duties rarely consisted of more than rubberstamping budgets and showing up at the theatre in formal wear. I found my board members to be quite urbane and well mannered. That might be changing, as financial stresses oblige European arts organizations to adopt a bit of the American fundraising model. My only hope is that they will look more toward Canada than the United States. Read on.

When I became general director of the Canadian Opera Company I had to adjust to a new way of doing things. While arts organizations in Canada are well supported by municipal, provincial, and national revenue streams, the board must still undertake substantial fundraising and serious fiscal oversight. Board membership was an honour, surely, but it was desirable to nominate people who had pertinent skills and, yes, financial means.

Boards in Switzerland and Canada had a few things in common. Everyone was conscientious about serving the community and upholding cultural standards. The making of art was paramount. Artists were held in high regard. And when it came to the day-to-day running of things, they engaged the best professional managers they could find, supported them selflessly, and otherwise stayed out of the way.

I was in for a shock when I got to San Francisco Opera. To begin with, there was the size. In Switzerland, boards had about ten to twelve members. In Canada it was about forty-five. A board numbering over a hundred awaited me in San Francisco. If it worked, however, who could complain? Alas, I quickly learned that U.S. boards in general tend be problematic. With steep annual fundraising goals a chronic concern, personal wealth is a primary consideration; sometimes it seems as if it’s the only consideration. Almost all board members are extremely affluent, and expected to write big cheques. And so the thinking I found in San Francisco was: more board members means more big cheques. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but all too often it leads to an atmosphere of self-interest. To begin with, many people joined because they felt peer pressure. Once they joined, they treated the company as if it was a plaything, or a tool for networking with the rich and powerful. I can’t tell you how many board members I encountered who didn’t know or even like opera, and, startlingly, more than a few contributed either nothing or only a fraction of what they should have. Then there were the “committees.” In Canada I had become accustomed to a small number of very focused, very efficient board committees. In San Francisco, I discovered a laundry list of committees, most of which accomplished nothing. It seemed to be a way, rather, of staking out territory and defending turf. Walking into those first board meetings was like walking into a Balkan war. Art and community certainly didn’t come first. And needless to say, artists — indeed, almost everyone outside of a very insular world of privilege — were looked down upon.

The relationship between a board and the general director is like a marriage: there must be respect, consistency, and understanding. You have to be able to work together. Opera is a collaboration between performers and theatre professionals onstage, and just as much a collaboration between professional managers and board members offstage. But at San Francisco Opera, I was often treated not as a professional but as a kind of lackey. I wasn’t alone. Early on I discovered that board meetings were secretive: senior managers had been barred for years. One of my first actions was to change that. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, but it created a minor scandal. So did my push to have the board downsized and to consolidate the committee structure, both of which I managed to accomplish. Along the way I gained a few very valuable allies as well as a number of critics, one of whom growled at me in exasperation, “You’re just as bad as Terry McEwen [my predecessor], but at least he told good stories.”

All too often I had to work with directors who didn’t know as much as they thought they did. Allow me to present Exhibit A. In the early 1990s, San Francisco Opera faced a crippling financial crisis. I attended several emergency board meetings to explore solutions. At one such meeting, one of the directors — a swaggering, high-powered executive from a Silicon Valley firm — stood up proudly to announce that he had come up with a way to fix our problem. Oozing condescension, as if pointing out the most obvious thing in the world, he laid out his proposal. “All of these operas, they’re too long,” he pontificated. “We need to make them shorter. Shorter performances mean lower costs. It’s as easy as that.” Bemused, he looked around the table and added, “I don’t understand why you haven’t figured this out yet.” When pressed for a bit of explanation, he huffed, “What’s to explain? You say this opera [referring to La Bohème] has four acts, right? So cut an act. Our costs go down twenty-five percent. Get it? Easy. Or this one,” he continued, referring to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. “Look at how long these acts are! Instead of doing the whole thing in one night, let’s split up the acts, one per night. Then we charge the same ticket price for each night. Instead of one opera on one night, we have one opera over three nights. Let me do the math for you: that means triple the ticket income for one show. Easy.” We spent a good part of the meeting trying to explain just why this wasn’t feasible, let alone rational. Eventually he gave up on us, shaking his head as if he felt sorry to be surrounded by lesser beings who didn’t possess his mastery of the business world. Incidentally, Robert Commanday, San Francisco’s most prominent music critic, got wind of that little episode and wrote a newspaper column in which he asked readers to submit their suggestions for acts to be omitted from the coming season’s operas.

Make no mistake about it: some board members were knowledgeable and magnanimous. It’s just that they were woefully outnumbered, and probably long suffering. Frankly, I clung to them for dear life. Without at least a few “good guys” to support me, I never would have made it.

One surreal experience perfectly illustrated the dichotomy between the two kinds of board members. The wife of a particularly intractable board member, one of only two who would later vote against extending my contract, decided to give a dinner in my honour. This would have been nice except that she had, up to that point, been nothing but antagonistic — in fact, a royal pain in everyone’s derriere, not just mine. More than a few people referred to her as the “Wicked Witch of the West.” I couldn’t imagine why she wanted to do something nice for me, but I think her real motivation was to make herself look good. It was quite the affair, a collegiate-like mixer for the upper crust. Of course I went — the company needed money from everyone in the room, and I had to play nice. Call it diplomacy or hypocrisy, but it’s a part of the job. At one point, the Wicked Witch got up to make a speech, showering me with all kinds of bizarre plaudits. Another board member — one of the good guys — leaned back in his chair to whisper in my ear. “Lotfi,” he drawled playfully, “you’re not buying this shit, are you?” It was just what I needed to hear, a reminder that I had real friends and allies, if only a handful.

Grace Bumbry in Macbeth at San Francisco Opera, 1967.
Photo by Hank Kranzler.

While San Francisco Opera faced serious problems — an opera house severely damaged by a mammoth earthquake, a strike-shortened season, and a serious economic downturn, to name a few — I often found myself having to do battle over the most trivial of matters. For some reason, opening night always seemed to be foremost in the minds of many board members. In this regard, in fact, I had to contend not just with the company’s board, but also with an auxiliary organization, the Opera Guild. Comprised almost exclusively of socialites whose burning interest was haute couture, the Guild raised a lot of money — but also spent a lot, mostly on parties for themselves. I understand things have changed for the better in recent years, but that wasn’t my experience.

Most of the complaints about opening night left me speechless. San Francisco Opera’s most legendary opening night occurred in 1983, with a performance of Otello. Carlo Cossutta was supposed to sing the title role, and when he became indisposed, Plácido Domingo flew across the country to save the day. The performance started three and a half hours late, but the atmosphere was electric and festive. It didn’t hurt that the crowd passed the time by bellying up to the bar. After that moment, a number of board members repeatedly belittled opening nights under my watch. “Lotfi, you have never given us the kind of excitement we had with Otello,” one was fond of saying. Apparently she was miffed that I didn’t create chaos and opportunities for imbibing!

In 1993 my poor wife Midge found herself cornered by a Guild member at the local supermarket. “Tell your husband,” she was told, “to please not give us opening nights with operas that we can’t even pronounce!” This fancy lady was upset because I had programmed Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani. The next season I planned something that was recognizable but still didn’t go over well: Verdi’s Macbeth. “It’s such a downer,” one Guild member remarked to me indignantly. Critics of my opening nights would meet their Waterloo in 2003–04 (I had long since retired) when the season opener was Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All. After sitting through that slumberfest, a board member who contributed $100,000 for the production actually asked for his money back.

Once, as I prepared to do battle over opening-night preparations, I addressed a planning committee of board and Guild members with a unique proposal. “This year you will see something new and exciting,” I declared. “We will have an evening comprised entirely of intermissions from the great operas.” I expected laughter but saw only a roomful of eyes staring back at me in rapt attention. “Er, we’ll start with a long intermission. Perhaps the one from Götterdämmerung,” I continued, smiling broadly. Looking around, I was shocked to see that I was being taken seriously. “Then a short intermission, from Così fan tutte for example.” Surely by now everyone would have caught on to the joke, but no — I could see the wheels turning in some people’s heads as they calculated the prospective drinking time. “I thought about the intermission from Salome, but there isn’t one. Perhaps we could commission an intermission. Stewart Wallace is probably free.” By this point people were laughing.

Perhaps my appraisal of San Francisco Opera’s board seems harsh. But the fact is its members had tremendous responsibility, and painfully few members truly appreciated that. The ones that did were as precious as gold. It’s not widely understood just how close the company came to the brink of extinction in the 1990s, and still less how pivotal a role just a handful of board members played. Without those allies my job would have been impossible. And the fate of the company could easily have gone the other way.

These days, alas, you don’t need to look very far to find arts organizations in trouble. And in far too many cases you will find boards behaving badly. Recently a San Francisco Bay Area ballet company exceeded all bounds of decency by firing its artistic director, apparently at the behest of a board member who supplies most of the company’s contributed income. To add to the crime, the company has laid claim to all of the artistic director’s creations — to be reprised in future seasons by a low-paid répétiteur. Imagine that. A great artist spends a lifetime creating tremendous art — only to have it treated like so much bargain-bin merchandise, all, it seems, for the aggrandizement of a board member whose wealth is so important to the very existence of the company that no one dares stand up and say no.

Even the fabled New York City Opera — the launching pad for many an American artist, and one of the nation’s most influential companies — is facing an unnecessary demise. Should that happen, an autopsy will reveal the primary reason: a board of directors overcome by hubris and incapacity. A board that was so profligate that it wasted tens of millions on a theatre it would never inhabit and a general director who would never take the reins. A board so colourless that it decided to shut down the company for over a year rather than figure out a way to continue producing for its community. Should the company fail, the real price will be paid by artists deprived of work and audiences deprived of a cultural treasure. And the blame will rightfully be placed at the feet of its board of directors.

At this point, you may find yourself thinking that I could write a book on this subject. You’d be right. And I just may.