The sad news was announced last week that the New York City Opera is canceling its 2013-14 season and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Or, I guess I should say, what was left of one of this country's great opera companies.
The demise of any arts organization, especially one as feisty but esteemed as the NYCO, is a loss for all of us. And Lord knows we've had too many such losses over the last few years.
Long known as New York's antidote to the staid Metropolitan Opera, NYCO was always a champion of American works and young American artists. At the same time, it offered fresh takes on the old standards.
Perhaps the company's greatest legacy to the world of opera is the use of supertitles. When introduced with the strong endorsement of its general director, Beverly Sills, in 1983, supertitles -- projecting a translation above the stage of the text being sung -- were a controversial novelty. Now, there is almost no opera house in the world that doesn't use them in some form. And they can largely be credited with the resurgence in opera's popularity after their debut.
The many problems that plagued New York City Opera, leading to last week's announcement, were to a great extent the result of a string of bungled efforts by its top management to keep the company afloat.
In 2006, the NYCO board hired Gerard Mortier, who ran the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera, to be general manager and artistic director. Here was a guy who was very comfortable using Europe's generous government funding to mount radical modern operas or the kind of nonsensical versions of standard works that more sensible operagoers might call "Eurotrash."
And now he was in charge of a company that always had to run on a shoestring. As the financial crisis hit, the board pared its promise of $60 million to mount a 2009-10 season of all-20th century works down to $36 million. So he quit.
The NYCO then turned to a dark horse -- a fellow who had just taken his first job running an opera company a few weeks earlier -- to lead the company, with the economy in almost full collapse. The dark horse was George Steel, who was at the time general director of the Dallas Opera.
In his brief tenure in Dallas, Steel managed to piss off just about every constituency that could have made him a success -- the board, major donors, the artists and musicians, the staff -- so no one was actually sad to see him go, and so quickly!
By all accounts, Steel apparently took the same tack in New York. He put his well-honed arrogance to use alienating everyone involved in this storied institution. And, having no clue how to keep a struggling New York City Opera afloat in tough times, he began to dismantle it, ensuring the company's doom. It was the one thing George Steel was singularly capable of doing.
And so, tragically ...
"La commedia è finita!"
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