MN Opera at 60: Uncut Interludes and Bonus Content

MN OPERA AT 60: UNCUT

INTERLUDES AND BONUS CONTENT

MICHAEL ANTHONY

CONCERNING KEVIN SMITH

Minnesota Opera almost folded in the summer of 1982. The entire staff, with the exception of two people, was laid off for the month of June. One of the two was Peter Myers, managing director of the company’s touring arm, the Midwest Opera Theater & School, which, because it had its own funding sources, was immune from the financial frailties of the larger company. The other was Kevin Smith, a rock ‘n’ roll songwriter from California who had been hired the previous September as a production stage manager and had recently been promoted to the position of operations manager.

“I have a lot of memories of that summer,” said Peter. “The company was hanging by a thread. Every day the mail would arrive and there would be a stack of bills three inches high. We had to go through a triage to decide which ones to pay first. It was a mess. I was talking one day with Sandy Bemis, the board chairman, whom I had known for many years. He was asking my advice. I said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t let Kevin Smith get away. He’s really sharp. He understands things and he’s dedicated. If you can keep only one person on salary, that’s the guy.”

Kevin kept his job and in a little less than five years was running the company. “Everything I know about running an arts organization I learned on the job,” Kevin said. “I had no training for this. I was a piano major in college. I hadn’t done any management. I didn’t know anything about fundraising or accounting. I hadn’t had a math class since my sophomore year in high school. In fact,

one of the reasons I went to college was I knew if I focused on liberal arts, I wouldn’t have to take math.”

Kevin grew up in West Covina, twenty miles east of Los Angeles. He knew he wasn’t good enough to make a career as a classical pianist, so he and a high school friend started kicking around in Los Angeles as a songwriting team, trying to sell their songs and playing in hotel lounges. One day, en route to Los Angeles from the San Joaquin Valley during a dust storm, the band’s van was rear-ended by a semi-truck and everyone was injured. The band’s singer broke her back but eventually recovered.

“That was a signal to me that my rock ‘n’ roll days were at an end. I was twenty-five,” Kevin said. “I had no idea what to do with myself.” He hitchhiked north to Santa Barbara, where he stayed with friends and began playing piano for dance classes and helping build sets for the opera productions at Lotte Lehmann Hall at the university there.

“I thought, ‘Opera’s kind of a cool thing,’ and so I went in that direction.” The school didn’t offer a degree in opera, so Kevin entered a master’s program in conducting, even though he claims he’s a “terrible” conductor, being left-handed. Then things began to happen. In 1975 he got a grant to be an intern on a production at the Virginia Opera, which offered him a job as stage manager for the following year. He took the job and dropped out of the master’s program, then returned to Los Angeles and waited tables for a year

to save money. Then, accompanied by his new wife, Lynn Carsten, he moved to New York to freelance as a stage manager. It took him a year to get his first paying job, a summer gig at Glimmerglass Opera, the festival in Cooperstown, New York. At his next job, at Hinsdale, a tiny opera company in Chicago, the director there, Richard Hudson, who had been Wesley Balk’s assistant at Minnesota Opera, told Kevin that Minnesota Opera was looking for a production stage manager, and would he be interested? The answer was yes. So Kevin took the train to Minneapolis, where he was interviewed by Dolores Johnson, the company’s general manager. She offered him the job, he took it, and that autumn Kevin and Lynn packed up everything in a U-Haul and moved to Minneapolis. He started work in September of 1981.

“Really, the greatest moment of my professional life will always be the meeting I had with Sandy Bemis and Frank Soroff, the company president, in May or June of 1982. This was when they sat down with me and asked me to remain on a full-time basis. All I had was a seasonal job as a stage manager. I was thirty-one, and it was the first time I had been offered a full-time job with benefits. I thought, ‘My God, this is unbelievable.’ It was the most exciting thing in my life because I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. This was the time when they let everyone go but kept a couple of us around to try to hold things together until they could move the company out of its hole. When I arrived in Minnesota, I had no idea about the company’s financial and artistic situation.

They were a mess for all kinds of reasons. But I didn’t know that. And then when I was asked to stay, it was, like, ‘Wow! This is great. I just moved here and now I’ve got a real job,’ and as far as I knew, this was a step up.”

In December 1982, Ed Corn came aboard as general director and promoted Kevin to company manager. “I wasn’t sure what a company manager did,” Kevin said, “but basically I was still on the production side, whereas Ed was an artistic and executive type. So I found myself doing anything and everything.”

Then Ed named Kevin general manager, a title he held for three years. Meanwhile, Kevin said, “Ed kept threatening to quit, and after the seventh or eighth time hearing that, the board got tired of it and said to him, ‘Okay.’ And then they said to me, ‘Kevin, you seem to be able to run the organization.’ At that point, I had been doing budgets and had gotten generally involved with the company. But they didn’t feel—and appropriately so—that I was ready for prime time as far as actually running an organization, particularly from an external point of view: fundraising, community relations, all that. So they brought in Paul Parker, who had just retired from General Mills, and for a very token amount of money he became the president of the company, and after about six months he realized he didn’t know anything about managing an arts organization, and he thought that I could do it. So he became a mentor through that transition, and a year or two later he transferred from what was

essentially a staff member to a board member, and then I became the head of the staff. I became general director in ’86.”

Under Kevin’s leadership, Minnesota Opera prospered. There were crises, to be sure, but by the time Kevin retired in 2011, the company had grown from three to five productions a year, attendance had doubled, and the annual budget increased to $9 million from $1.5 million. Assets rose from a minus $36,000 to a plus $28.8 million. Among his other accomplishments was the creation of the company’s Opera Center in the warehouse district of Minneapolis, which brought about a consolidation of technical and administrative space as well as rehearsal facilities. Kevin was instrumental, too, in the creation of the Arts Partnership, a collaboration with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Schubert Club, and the Ordway Center that brought an end to the scheduling conflicts that had plagued these organizations since the Ordway opened and that had more than once prompted the opera company to seriously contemplate leaving the Ordway for some other facility.

During these years—and for a considerable time after his retirement—Kevin chaired and served on numerous opera and musical theater panels at the National Endowment for the Arts and was a board member of the American Arts Alliance. He served as board chair of Opera America from 1997 to 2001 and in later years ran that organization’s professional development program while acting as a management consultant to opera

companies around the country. In 2012 he received the Ordway Center’s Sally Award for Commitment, which recognizes lifetime achievement, contribution, and leadership in Minnesota arts and culture.

Three other factors contributed to the company’s growing success during Kevin’s reign. One was the restructuring of the board in 1992, which chiefly meant reducing its membership. “It wasn’t a strong board. I was shocked when I got here,” Kevin said. “The company had a great reputation nationally. When I saw the production facilities—they were building the scenery for ‘Black River’ when I visited. I looked around and thought, ‘Wow! This is like a fully professional opera company.’ Most opera companies in the United States are not. They assemble things from here and there. But here they were actually conceiving them and building them. But when I got here, this place, I found out, nobody knew about it, at least not locally.”

One way to bring the company to life, maybe the only way, was to retool the board. And it wasn’t easy. Kevin did a governance review. At the time the board consisted of forty voting members and forty associates. This was brought down to a single board of thirty. “I met with every one of those people,” Kevin said. “Everybody understood the problem. There were some disappointed people, but no one was angry. They realized that it had to be done. And that’s when people like Ken Dayton and Tom McBurney and Dan Kunin, the people who populated the boards of the other major arts organizations, joined our

board. Then, all of a sudden, although we weren’t really big, we had power and focus. And that was a big turning point for Minnesota Opera.”

A second factor contributing to the company’s success during these years was the creation of what the soprano Brenda Harris called the “dream team,” which is to say Kevin and Dale Johnson. Both, it could be said, grew into their jobs after relatively modest beginnings. Kevin started in 1981 as a production stage manager; Dale arrived three years later as a rehearsal pianist and vocal coach and became artistic director in 1994. Between 1994 and 2011, when Kevin retired, just two months before his sixtieth birthday, these two, Smith and Johnson, were the pillars of the company, and when one was removed, the structure lost its balance and fell. In the space of just three years, the board hired two replacements for Kevin, both of whom were quickly let go amid growing deficits, staff desertions and a mood of nervous despair that afflicted the company until 2016 when a forty-three-year-old former operatic baritone named Ryan Taylor, exuding an aura of calm competence, grabbed the wheel of the sinking ship and charted a new course that seemed capable of avoiding dangerous waters.

What the company put onto the Ordway stage during these years reflected little or none of the administrative disarray. The repertoire, which had been planned some years ahead, sustained a balance of standard works and new operas, most of them interestingly

produced. Even so, this was a chaotic time, Dale said. “I had my sights set on keeping my head down and trying to do the best artistic work that I could do. Kevin had taken care of the institutional side of the company: the fund-raising, the governance, all that stuff. We were very well-defined, Kevin and I. And then that all began to fall apart.”

After he left the opera company, Kevin began a more leisurely schedule of mentoring groups and opera companies on how to survive in the opera world and sustain growth. He was a consultant at Arizona Opera during the months that Ryan Taylor was preparing to take the top job with that company. He ran Opera America’s professional development program for several years, this man who claimed he had never read a book on leadership or management. “My best advice to people,” he said, “concerned the fact that everyone would complain about all kinds of things but mostly about their board. ‘Oh, my board doesn’t raise any money.’ ‘They’re hard to work with.’ My advice was always: you get the board you deserve. In other words, if you can’t work with these people, develop another board or go someplace else, but don’t just sit there and bitch about it all day long. Don’t be a victim.’”

A surprise came in May of 2014 when the Minnesota Orchestra announced that the successor to the departing president and CEO would be Kevin Smith. Even though it was an interim position, this was a bold move for Kevin, who was forsaking retirement and taking on the most difficult reclamation proj-

ect in the American orchestra world: putting the orchestra back on its feet after a devastating two-year labor/management war that included a sixteen-month lock-out.

And yet by the end of 2015, it was clear that the orchestra’s new president was doing a good job. By then, Kevin had secured significant new donations and had balanced the budget. He had engineered a level of harmony between the orchestra and its board, signed new contracts with the musicians and their music director, Osmo Vänskä, and, in an impressive coup, arranged for the Minnesotans to be the first American orchestra to tour Cuba after President Obama moved to restore diplomatic ties. While he was in Cuba in May of 2015, Kevin told the New York Times, “This trip has galvanized the organization and given everybody a sense of excitement and adventure and confidence that we can do anything.”

On Labor Day weekend, 2018, Kevin passed the torch of leadership to Michelle Miller Burns, who had been an executive with the Dallas Symphony. Just a month earlier the orchestra had returned from another historic trip, this one to South Africa. On leaving the orchestra, Kevin and his wife moved to New Jersey.

Kevin is one of the few arts managers qualified to answer the question: how does running an opera company differ from managing an orchestra? Seated in his office at the Minnesota Orchestra in the spring of 2018, just a few months before he retired, Kevin

said he had more authority at Minnesota Opera than he did at the orchestra.

With an ensemble of eighty or more musicians and a music director, there’s a shared responsibility, he said. “Plus, there’s a big board and staff. This is a big, powerful organization, and you don’t manage it through authority. I have authority over the staff, but I don’t behave like an authoritarian. I can make personnel decisions. I can hire and fire. But I don’t really have authority over the musicians. They can call me the boss, and in an employment sense I am, but their employment is governed by a master agreement with the union. Whereas, I was, like, in control at the opera company. Even Dale reported to me. I dealt with the board for certain things, but it’s a smaller organization, and I had more authority to make decisions as to how it went, whereas here that authority is spread over all kinds of people. But, by design, it’s a partnership with the music director. And Osmo [Vänskä] has been very democratic in the way he has shared among the musicians, the staff and with me in making artistic decisions. It’s been a nice, fun partnership. So I don’t go around proclaiming things. I can’t in the way that I could have at the opera company.”

Colleagues and friends speak about Kevin’s ease and sensitivity in dealing with others, and that surely was another factor in his success at Minnesota Opera. “Kevin has real people skills,” said board member Lucy Rosenberry Jones. “He’s personable. I remember saying to one of the orchestra

musicians, ‘Oh, you have Kevin Smith now. That’s wonderful.’ He said, ‘Kevin takes the time and talks to the musicians. No one ever talks to us.’ I think that was a factor at Minnesota Opera, too, because he was good with board members, good with the staff and good at fund-raising.”

Brenda Harris, the company’s leading soprano in the 1990s and 2000s, recalled a lunch meeting with Kevin during the run of her first big role, the title part in Armida. “Kevin said, ‘Hey, Brenda, can I take you to lunch?’ I said, ‘Sure, that would be awesome.’ So we went to lunch, and the purpose of the lunch was he wanted me to tell him what was important to singers. What did I like about the company and what could they do better? How was housing and how do you feel about the rehearsal schedule and all kinds of things. I thought, ‘Wow, here is the general director of the company taking me to lunch to find out what they can do to make the artists happier. Right away, I wanted to work here some more.’”

It’s not widely known, but Kevin almost left Minnesota in 1999 to take the top position at the Dallas Opera. While he interviewed for the position, he withdrew before they made a final decision, as he realized he didn’t want to move to Texas.

As a final thought, these considerations of options pursued and relinquished, of roads taken and not taken, we need not rule out the possibility that had Kevin and his songwriting partner continued plugging away at

it back in the mid-’70s, had they kept on entertaining the folks at some of the more up-scale Holiday Inns in southern California, had they been able to enjoy just the tiniest stroke of luck and not been jack-knifed by that erratic semi-truck coming out of the San Joaquin Valley, surely these two talented and deserving youngsters might have hit it big, pushing the much less talented Simon and Garfunkel off the charts, and becoming big stars beloved by millions, their songs having long ago reached the status of Golden Oldies.

Or maybe not.

COSTUMES BY BAKKOM

Here’s good solid advice: If you’ve got a hole in your favorite pair of pants or a shirt that no longer fits, don’t go to a costume designer or draper. They are, without doubt, virtuosi with a needle and thread. But they don’t do regular, run-of-the-mill alterations. That’s not their thing. If your clothes need repair, go to a tailor or a seamstress or, better still, throw those old clothes away.

“Of course, we were constantly altering costumes,” said Gail Bakkom, costumer extraordinaire. “But that was different. That was for a show. My husband said he had to sew his own buttons on if he ever wanted them workable. I was very lax about my alterations for him, sometimes taking a month to do a simple task. Once I left Jackson Graves where I did alterations for almost a year, I was done with that kind of sewing.”

Gail is one of the area’s most revered costume designers. She learned her craft at the Guthrie Theater in its earliest years and later worked as Costume Shop Director at the Front Street theater in Memphis and served as Director of Costumes at the University of New Mexico. Closer to home she was Costume Shop Director at Heartland Productions in Marshall, Minnesota, and the Minnesota Dance Theater in Minneapolis. But it is at Minnesota Opera, where she worked off and on for forty years, that her legend burns brightest, going all the way back to the Center Opera days and her introduction to the company, the 1966 production of The Good Soldier Schweik. Robert Israel designed the production, but Gail did every-

thing else. She shopped, she made patterns, she sewed, she did fittings, plus, she managed the budget, which, if she remembers right, came to about $200. At the other end of the cost spectrum was the 1994 production of Turandot, a visual extravaganza that required nearly one hundred costumes at a cost of between $80,000 and $100,000. Anna Oliver designed the costumes. Gail was costume shop manager.

Bakkom cautions: A big budget doesn’t necessarily mean a better show. “I think that when you don’t have so much money, you have to be more creative,” she said. “For Schweik, it was mostly long underwear and dyed lab coats and then a few specialty pieces. One of them I remember so distinctly. Bob drew a picture of a woman in a blue dress with little feathers because she was supposed to be a bird. And then he drew her with an extended bustle that ended with wheels at the bottom, and somehow we made it happen.”

In the final tally, Gail designed costumes for eighteen mainstage productions and seven touring shows, and from 1979, when she returned to the company, until 2006, when she retired, she worked on every show in just about every capacity: shop director, designer, draper, seamstress, stitcher, budget calculator. (Drapers create the patterns and then cut the actual fabric. Someone else in the costume department stitches it together.)

“I always considered myself first a manager and then a designer,” she said.

At full force, the costume shop, with Gail in charge, was a busy place. “Well, there was myself and my assistant, and we both created,” Gail said. “I created costumes and she did hats and footwear and some dying. And then we had three or four drapers, and each draper had two assistants. And then sometimes we had to over-hire which, in the case of Turandot, we definitely had to. But the budget was even harder with a co-production because if we went over in expense, we would have to make it up because there was a contract.”

Gail’s first design was for The Village Singer, an opera by Stephen Paulus with a libretto by Michael Dennis Browne that was staged at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium in 1982. Based on a story by Mary Wilkins Freeman, the opera tells of an aging church choir singer at the turn of the century who, to her dismay, is asked to give up her position as soloist.” Wesley (Balk) asked me to do that production,” Gail said. “I felt very comfortable doing it. I liked the research that went into it. I like doing research. And the time period is a nice one to work on. Barbara Brandt sang the main role and was very good.”

Occasionally, a show wouldn’t be quite ready on opening night. There was the Emperor’s costume, for instance, in that same production of Turandot. For three nights into the run of the show, Gail worked on the costume. “The Emperor was supposed to be way up in the sky,” she said. “I would crawl up there when I got to the theater and work on it. It wasn’t finished until the third performance,

but the audience couldn’t see it because it was so high up. And I had to finish it because the entire production—sets and costumes—was leaving shortly to go to another company.”

And then there are the inevitable crises and emergencies that occur during the run of a show. Some can be anticipated. Brenda Harris, for instance, had a killer costume change in the 2000 production of Semiramide. She had exactly ninety seconds backstage to get out of one elaborate costume and into another, and yet she made it every night.

Other crises can’t be anticipated. Gail was backstage at the Ordway one night during the run of the famous 1991 Carmen starring Denyce Graves. Act two had just started when Gail heard the kind of announcement no one in the costume business wants to hear: “Wardrobe to stage immediately with a thread and needle.” Gail ran. As she recalls it, “Denyce had on a very tight pair of leopard skin pants, and the zipper in the back had broken. So I was there stitching it up so she could go on. She made it.”

Then there was the case of the crumbling kimonos. This concerns the 2004 production of Madame Butterfly, for which the designer, David Woolard, insisted on having the kimonos hand-painted by a company in New York. “The thing was they had to be steamed before the fabric could be shipped to us,” Gail said. “So we got this fabric and we started working with it and it started falling apart in our hands. So I contacted David immediate9

ly, and he talked to the company, and there were three different processors, and one of them did something wrong. Some chemical had been added that wasn’t supposed to be there. And so they re-did it all and, I mean, we just barely got it done in time because the fabric was so late in getting to us.”

The task of putting together an opera production usually starts with the director, who comes up with a concept and then consults with the set designer. Between them, they establish the look of the production and the individual scenes, and then, as Gail sees it, it’s the costume designer’s job to fit his or her ideas into what’s been established. “So there’s not usually an argument,” she said, “unless it’s where the director designs the whole thing. But I did occasionally have, not real difficulties, but differences with lighting designers. I remember one time where the lighting design changed the color of the costumes, and it was not pleasing. And I couldn’t do anything about it. We were already in dress rehearsal, and he didn’t want to change the lighting design.”

Gail’s last show for Minnesota Opera was Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, presented at the Ordway in 2006, forty years after her debut with the company. Costume design changed during these years, she said, from a focus on historical accuracy to something more conceptual.

“The Guthrie theory of costuming was always to do what the designer wanted, but most designers were interested in reproducing the

period as truly as they could within the concept of the play as the director saw it. That doesn’t mean it’s always set in the historic period, but whatever period it’s in should be historically accurate. This is not something the set designer has to worry about, but it’s a major concern for the costume designers and the costume department. But in opera now we’re seeing much more conceptual work, which is interesting because that’s where Center Opera started. A lot of it today is trying to get at the germ of the piece rather than the decoration.”

It was during her two years at the Guthrie that Gail met and married James Bakkom, who was then beginning his ten-year reign as prop master and artist-in-residence at the Guthrie. In later years he became a renowned painter. Their fifty-four-year marriage ended with his death in 2020 of Parkinson’s disease.

She loved working at Minnesota Opera. The part of the job she didn’t love was budgeting.

“The budgeting was always a bear,” she said, “because we had so much aspiration and not ever enough money to do what we really wanted to do. But I really miss the people I worked with.”

Since leaving Minnesota Opera, Gail has devoted much of her time to Minnesota Quilts, an organization devoted to preserving and encouraging quilting in all its manifestations.

EQUITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION

“Minnesota Opera’s vision and mission is to sing every story and to change lives by bringing together artists, audiences and community, advancing the art for today and future generations.”

–Excerpt from MN Opera’s Diversity Charter, 2020

We aim to inspire hope, empower all voices and strengthen bonds between people of all backgrounds and identities. To this end, Minnesota Opera commits itself to continuously work to become an anti-racist and anti-oppressive organization. We acknowledge that along our journey, our culture and the world around us are constantly evolving. We will inevitably make mistakes. We choose to accept that reality and will humbly begin again in order to lean into this practice.

Since the summer of 2020 cultural institutions around the country have made changes as the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd drew attention to racial inequities in virtually every corner of the arts world. Minnesota Opera had been formulating its Diversity Charter for quite some time. The board approved it on May 28, just three days after George Floyd was killed. “And now,” said Theresa Murray, vice president, administration and board relations, “a lot of other companies— opera companies and other nonprofits—have come to us, asking ‘How did you do it and was it a challenge to get the support of the board?’ For us, the board was behind it the whole way, which was terrific.”

The effort goes back to 2016, the year Ryan Taylor became company president and general director and when, later that year, Rocky Jones came aboard as equity, diversity, and inclusion director. At that time the board was writing a new mission statement about bringing artists and community together, said Jones. “The board had the forethought to realize that unless we get younger people, people of color, and just a wider swath of the community into our spaces to enjoy our programming, both the education programs and the mainstage productions, we wouldn’t be living up to that mission.”

The first step was the creation of a task force of staff and board members who would come up with recommendations based on what other companies had done to diversify their audiences, staff, and artists. What they found was that a number of dance companies and theater ensembles were engaged in that pursuit but very few opera companies had attempted it. It became obvious that Minnesota Opera would be breaking new ground.

One of the task force’s first recommendation was the creation of a Staff Diversity Council which would, every year, either create or revise the company’s Diversity Charter. It then set goals and benchmarks for the following year. Julia Gallagher, Lab and special projects director, chaired the Diversity Council for its first two years, and Jones took over that position in 2019. It was the first diversity committee in the entire opera field.

“What we want to do,” he said, “is create spaces of authentic belonging for people who want to come in, enjoy our programming and feel that they can be themselves, that we are opening our doors and making these inclusive spaces for our entire community. If we’re going to call ourselves Minnesota Opera, then we have a responsibility to represent all Minnesotans.”

Even so, of all the performing arts, opera is probably the one most resistant to change. Its audiences and donors skew disproportionately older, whiter and wealthier. Though Minnesota Opera has a history unprecedented among North American companies of presenting and commissioning new works, its donor pool typically favors the old chestnuts performed as they always have been performed.

Jones remains optimistic about change. “You hear a lot of traditionalists say this is what opera has to be, these museum pieces that are behind glass. I don’t believe that,” he said. “I believe we can expand the art form to create a new kind of opera. We have this incredible moment right now, especially here in Minnesota, where we’re living at the epicenter of a global movement for racial justice. Besides, opera is not going to survive if we keep doing the same things the same way. It doesn’t mean that we’re never going to do a traditional staging of La Boheme ever again. I’m sure we’ll do that and, hopefully, that will be a breath of fresh air to the opera purists.”

It was this focus on diversity and inclusion, on creating new works for new audiences, that drew Lani Willis back to Minnesota Opera. Willis was marketing and communications director when she left the company in 2014, having started in 1998. She returned in February of 2021, taking the title of vice president, advancement.

“We’re looking at how we can do this work in an anti-racist, anti-oppressive manner,” she said. “That is now the daily conversation at Minnesota Opera. I remember years ago a demographer with a lot of local data came and talked to us and the board about how the demographics of the state were shifting and what were the implications of that for an organization like Minnesota Opera.

“At the time, it wasn’t on people’s minds why we would want to find a way for everyone in Minnesota to find what we do relevant and meaningful. It was like, ‘We get that. A lot of immigrants are coming in, but for most of the people coming in, it won’t be until the second generation that they will have the resources to participate in something like this.’

“It was a very different conversation,” she said. “Now the conversation is, ‘Let’s sing every story.’ This is our vision statement. But what does that mean? How do you make authentic, reciprocal relationships with communities that have been outside of this art form? How do you create new expressions of opera that don’t reject where we’ve been and its origins in Renaissance Italy? How do you

expand that tradition so that it reflects the stories, the experiences, the creative ideas, the artistry of people who aren’t white?

“When I heard these questions being asked, I thought, ‘Oh, man, I could be a part of that.’ People might say, ‘You’re doing this in opera? You’re dealing with anti-racism and anti-oppression in opera? You’re trying to figure out how an opera company comes back in a relevant way to a community post-pandemic and post-George Floyd, into this racial reckoning that we’re having right now?’ My answer is, ‘Yes. We have an opportunity to say, ‘This is a really relevant art form, dammit!’

“So I felt very drawn back, and when I say ‘drawn back,’ it’s to a company where I have deep roots and a deep sense of affection and pride. I was there for sixteen years, but I was really coming back to a new company.”

Among the facets of Minnesota Opera’s new EDI initiatives is a podcast called The Score that presents new shows every other Monday and is available on the company’s website. The format is a conversation about opera and classical music seen through an anti-racist, anti-oppressive lens. Rocky Jones and two others on the staff act as hosts: Lee Bynum, vice-president, impact, and Paige Reynolds, civic engagement manager. The idea is to amplify the voices of those in the field who are pushing the boundaries of what opera is, who it is for and how it can transform communities.

Among recent developments in this area is the elimination of fees for the company’s education. Fees for digital operas were paywhat-you-can. “We’re trying to incorporate the idea of inclusive marketing,” Jones said. This means creating programming that will attract younger people, people of color, or LGBTQ+ people as well as making the company’s venues more physically available spaces.

“It seems obvious to me that as we continue into the twenty-first century, this is a new movement,” Jones said, “and we’ve got to get onboard with it or else we’re going to be left in the dust.”

ROBERT ISRAEL’S DESIGNS

One of Martin Friedman’s favorite stories is how Robert Israel came to be a set designer. Friedman, director of the Walker Art Center, knew and admired the work of Israel, a twenty-six-year-old painter from Detroit who was an instructor at the Minneapolis School of Art. This was an artist who might bring something special to a Center Opera production, Friedman thought. He especially liked Israel’s cartoon-like drawings in which organic sexual shapes seemed to collide and merge. He called Israel, who invited him to visit his studio and look at his drawings. Israel lived in a one-room apartment with an adjacent studio on the ground floor of an old mansion on Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Friedman drove over there and knocked on Israel’s door and heard “Come in.” The door was stuck. “Push hard,” Israel hollered. Friedman pushed and then saw that a stack of LP records was leaning against the door. Entering the apartment, he saw stacks of records all over the place, all of them opera recordings, and there was opera music playing on a phonograph. They chatted for a while, then Friedman asked Israel if he had ever considered designing for the stage. “Why would I want to do that?” Israel asked. “Why not?” said Friedman, who told Israel about Walker’s commissioning of artists to design opera productions; perhaps he would like to discuss it with the company’s leaders. A few days later Israel met with John Ludwig and Wesley Balk.

The result of that meeting in 1964 was Israel’s memorable design for the Center Opera production of Robert Kurka’s bitter anti-war

opera The Good Soldier Schweik. Israel was soon given the title of resident designer, and in the next few years he designed four more productions for Center Opera and several others during the Minnesota Opera era.

Israel’s career as a costume and set designer, begun when Martin Friedman knocked on his door one afternoon in St. Paul, has taken on a scope and variety that no crystal ball would have predicted. Now in his eighties, Israel is today one of the world’s most respected designers for theater and opera. His work has been seen at the Lincoln Center Theater, the Metropolitan Opera, the National Operas in London and Tokyo, the Paris Opera, the Vienna State Opera, and many others. His costume drawings reside in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and he has designed the world premieres of four operas by Philip Glass. He is the former chairman of the Theater Department at the University of California Los Angeles and professor emeritus of UCLA Design Media Arts Department.

Israel has lived in Los Angeles since 1982. He is married to the food critic and author Martha Shulman, daughter of the revered humorist Max Shulman, who was born in St. Paul. Speaking by phone from his home in May 2020, Israel reminisced about his Center Opera days. Were it not for the Covid epidemic, he would have been in France working on the premiere of a set of six songs by Philip Glass. Under the circumstances, like everyone else, he was grounded.

Minnesota Opera: What was your first impression of John Ludwig and Wesley Balk on that day in 1964?

Israel: Boy, well, my first impression was: I don’t know what I’m doing. My second impression was: these people know a lot more about theater and opera than I do, though I had listened to a lot of opera. It was kind of a way of escaping my upper-class Jewish background in Detroit. I wanted to get away. It started with a benign La Boheme and morphed into Parsifal. I loved what I was listening to. I just sunk into it. And I had friends who listened to it, too, the “Ring” cycle and Parsifal, stuff you wouldn’t imagine a sixteenyear-old would listen to in Detroit. I knew the operas, but I didn’t know anything about designing them. So I met John and Wes. I was impressed and wary. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I really grew to respect and, I guess, love them for giving me that wonderful chance. But the first few things I designed scared the hell out of me.

MICHAEL ANTHONY (MA): Even so, there was nothing timid about your earliest work.

Israel: Yes, there was nothing timid. But what I became conscious of is that because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, I just went ahead and did what I thought I should do, which was much different than what was taught at places like Yale, which told you how things were supposed to be. So, while it wasn’t timid, I didn’t know what it was to be timid. I just did it. When we started I didn’t know upstage from downstage. I’m serious.

Since then, I’m amazed that working in Europe, stage left and stage right are different depending on the country you’re in.

MA: But the critical reaction was really positive. Here’s Raymond Ericson in the New York Times: “The group works in the ambience of an art museum and a repertory theater, so it is thought nothing to bring in a twenty-six-year-old art teacher, Robert Israel, to design its sets and costumes. And given the Elizabethan thrust stage of the Guthrie Theater, wholly inimical to opera, H. Wesley Balk is forced to find original molds for the stage direction. German expressionism of the 1920s was a natural element of the production style, but it never degenerated into a matter of style alone. It serves purely theatrical and expressive ends. Whites, blacks and touches of blood red were virtually the only colors onstage. Mr. Israel clothed his psychiatrists in slimy, slick, black nylon, created a twelve-foot tall police official with a black and white striped robe flowing majestically to the floor. Enormous red crosses obscured the doctor’s eyes. White makeup depersonalized all the players, except Schweik, the ‘common man’ hero.” Now that’s real appreciation, it seems to me.

Israel: Yeah, I don’t remember the specifics of the criticism, but I remember being incredibly flattered at this level of respect—and relieved. I had studied the art of the twentieth century, and I knew the difference between German expressionism and whatever else was the style. And, of course, Schweik was about the war and about whether he

was conscious or unconscious about what he was doing. But that was all I knew. And I have to tell you, Wes was a great teacher. He didn’t treat me like a student, and so I was able to do a lot that just came to me naturally. He used it, and he used it wonderfully.

MA: It seems to me that these twelve-foot figures are dream-like. They express Schweik’s fears. He’s Everyman, and everyone’s bigger than he is. It makes perfect sense to me that it would look like that.

Israel: Yes, that’s what I felt. Plus, I knew that on the Guthrie stage they would seem even bigger.

MA: The following year you designed To Hellas, six short operas on ancient Greek themes, mostly making fun of the characters and the situations. Here’s Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, then the most important music critic in the country: “Robert Israel, assisted by James Bakkom, was responsible for the designs and costumes, and H. Wesley Balk was the director. These two bright young men were irreverent and funny, really funny.” Is it possible that with these pot bellies and baggy long johns the characters were wearing, you were alluding to burlesque comedy—a broad style that used to be called baggy-pants?

Israel: I wasn’t thinking about it, but it’s there, sure. There’s always stuff that people find that’s not conscious but is definitely there, and I like that. I don’t like it when artists say, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s wrong.” In other words,

if it’s any good, it’s going to be pregnant not only with the artist’s meaning but with specific meaning for the person who’s looking at it or hearing it.

MA: The Sunday after the Times review ran, Harold Schonberg wrote a column on the opera and the company that produced it. He said, “And as the operas are totally modern, there was no aesthetic wrench in it. Everything fit. Everything worked. To show that irreverence and spoof are not the only arrows in that particular bow, the production of Socrates was marked by restraint and a quiet dance-like lyricism of exceeding loveliness and sensitivity.”

Israel: That was a hard piece to do. I was always worried whether the audience would get it. It has a monochromatic monotone to it. It’s a really wonderful piece, but the audience has to sit still for it.

MA: By then, the fourth season, you had been named Director of Design. And for that season Martin brought in Robert Indiana to design The Mother of Us All. And that, too, went over big. Here’s Vern Sutton, who appeared in major roles in many of your productions, Schweik and Punch among them. He spoke appreciatively last year about your work. He said, “Bob never approached stage design from a logical, conventional point of view; nor did he ever give audiences or singers what they expected.” Vern said the costumes had a simplicity that made them accessible to the audience but also allowed the singers wearing them to move about

freely, though there were exceptions, he said with a laugh. One young soprano’s costume was a large white box. She felt like she was wearing a stove, she said, but she got used to it. Does that resonate with you?

Israel: (laughing) Yeah, it scares me.

MA: The next production sounds beautiful. It was Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You had pillows or balloons onstage.

Israel: Yeah, they were big pillow-like balloons that we sprayed with detergent—not to drink, by the way. And when the ultraviolet light was put on them they glowed, and they made the stage a kind of ethereal place. And Wes used that. The pillows were gently pushed into the moat around the stage, leaving the stage bare. It was beautiful to see that transformation.

MA: From the Romantic glow of A Midsummer Night’s Dream you moved a year later to the harsh surrealism of Punch and Judy by Harrison Birtwistle. Your design for that opera was much admired—and continues to be. What were you trying to get at with that design?

Israel: All the characters there seem to be slightly psychotic. You can never trust them. I suppose people aren’t slightly psychotic. They’re either psychotic or they aren’t. There was a craziness and a violence we wanted to put on the stage. I would design the costumes, then bring them to Wes, and he and I would sit down and talk about the charac-

ters. Some would stay the way they were and some were revised because Wes wanted to do this or that. It was a wonderful, pleasant experience working with him. I absorbed a lot of what he was saying, and none of it seemed to restrict me. It just made me think in a creative way.

MA: You were in and out of New York during this later period. In the 1974—75 season you did Eight Songs for a Mad King by Peter Maxwell Davies with Vern Sutton in the title role, surely one of Vern’s most impressive performances.

Israel: Vern was wonderful. He’s quite a performer.

MA: By then you had designed five productions for Center Opera, soon to be Minnesota Opera, and a few shows elsewhere. Your work was widely praised. Was there a point during these years where you said to yourself, “I wouldn’t have guessed it, but this is working for me. I want to do this kind of work perhaps for the rest of my life. Or did this realization come on gradually?

Israel: It came on gradually. I didn’t know what would become of it. I was offered a couple of things to do that weren’t in Minneapolis. But I never thought I was going to be a stage designer. I just became one. I learned on the job.

MA: What was it like working with Wes?

ROBERT ISRAEL’S DESIGNS

Israel: With Wes, it was never only one way. We just kind of moved together. “What would happen if you did this?” he would say. Or “Oh, I like it that way.” “Could this happen?” It was always a collaboration rather than a dictatorship.

MA: Looking back at the Center Opera years, there seems to have been a playfulness to the productions and the creation of them and an element of surprise.

Israel: Yeah, I can see that on the part of the audience, for sure. But it wasn’t in my mind to surprise anyone. It was just to do the work, to make it look the way I thought it would be right – or one of the ways it would be right.

MA: You talk in a lecture that’s on YouTube about the value of bringing people in from other disciplines, which is what Center Opera was doing. There is some precedent for it—the Diaghilev-Stravinsky ballets, the Satie-Picasso Parade and, of course, the Kroll Opera in Berlin in the ‘30s—but not much. Interesting and productive though it was, the Center Opera collaborative format hasn’t been picked up by other companies.

Israel: That’s right, and I think it’s a big mistake. People have become specialists, as if they were doctors dividing up the body and becoming experts in their own little bailiwicks. We’re going through a very political time in the theater. But it seems stale to me. I talk to people and they go to opera or theater as if it were something that they had to do rather than something they’re really

excited about and that’s going to surprise them in some way. Most of it doesn’t excite me. I don’t expect to be surprised because everyone knows the way it should be, and so that’s the way it is.

MA: I wonder if the low budget you had in those years was a constraint or an opportunity to be really creative. The budget, by the way, for the first season was right around $42,000. You could buy a season ticket for seven bucks. What did they pay you that first season?

Israel: I don’t remember what it was. It wasn’t very much. I was happy to take the money, but I wasn’t doing it for the money. I taught at the School of Art until the last year I was there.

MA: A final question: To what extent were the unique accomplishments of Center Opera the product of a group of especially creative individuals but also of the ‘60s, a decade of experimentation, of adventure, of the breaking of boundaries? Could this have happened had these individuals gotten together at some other period or era or decade?

Israel: I think both are correct. I think it was a product of the ‘60s. I don’t think it could happen today. We’re so institutionalized, and things cost so much. I think we were a product of the time, and we were fortunate enough to make sense. I’ll say it again. John and Wes were fabulous, just fabulous.

SILENT NIGHT

Dale Johnson, Minnesota Opera’s artistic director for more than two decades, often did his serious listening to music on the CD player in his car while driving. On one occasion, in 2007, the music he heard was so compelling he had to pull over to the side of the road to hear the rest of it. It was the Symphony No. 2 by Kevin Puts, a young American composer from St. Louis who was then living in New York. “If a CD grabs my attention during rush hour, I take note of it,” Johnson said. He knew that Puts had never written an opera, but concluded that “he knows how to build tension into music, and that’s a key.”

Johnson had been looking for a follow-up to The Grapes of Wrath, an operatic version of the John Steinbeck novel that the company premiered to wide acclaim the previous winter. Now he was convinced that he had a good idea: an opera based on a French film he had seen recently on DVD, Joyeux Noel (“Merry Christmas”) by Christian Carion that won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2005. The film tells the true story of the “Christmas Truce,” when, during the first year of World War One, on Christmas Eve, 1914, some 100,000 German, French, English and Scottish soldiers threw down their weapons, climbed out of their trenches and made the frightening walk across noman’s-land, where they mingled with their enemies, exchanging food and souvenirs, sang carols and, at one point, played a game of soccer, the Germans beating the English three to two. In some places along the Western Front, the truce lasted through Christmas

Day, thereby allowing the troops to carry their dead comrades back across the lines for burial. Fighting immediately resumed, continuing until 1918 and leaving some nine million soldiers dead. The cease-fire, unsanctioned and unplanned, wasn’t reported until a week later, first in the New York Times and then throughout Europe, and has largely been ignored in histories of the Great War. However, two books on the truce were published during the first decade of this century, increasing awareness of the subject, and the subsequent film presumably provoked even more interest.

Johnson called Puts and asked him to get a copy of Joyeux Noel, and then he called a librettist he knew, Mark Campbell, and asked him to listen to some of Puts’s music. Both were impressed. Puts liked the movie, and Campbell gave a thumbs-up to the music he heard. “Kevin’s music is dramatic,” Campbell said. “Many composers write brilliant symphonies, but don’t know how to compose an opera.”

Puts and Campbell, who also lives in New York, met, found each other compatible and said yes to the project. Work began in the spring of 2009, the libretto, as always, coming first. The decision had been made to adapt Carion’s screenplay rather than start from scratch, and this caused concern, since the contract gave Northwest, the company that owned the film, the right to approve the libretto. “This made me scared,” Campbell said, “because I had made changes, dropping some characters and adding some humor.

But they were fantastic. They not only approved it, they seemed to understand that certain changes had to be made to make the story stage-worthy.”

It’s not an easy story to tell. Beside the large number of characters and languages that need to be sorted out, the biggest problem was that the climax, which is normally near the end of a script or a screenplay, occurs early in the story. The truce is the climax. Campbell’s solution was to put the ceasefire at the end of the first act, while hinting that the truce is fragile and that therefore the second act will be full of complications. “It was when I finished the first act that I discovered what this story is really about,” he said. “It’s about how can you continue the nasty business of war when you know who your enemy is?”

Within a few months, Campbell sent Puts a finished text. “I was so excited when I got the libretto that my hands were shaking,” Puts said, “and then I realized I had no idea what to write.” He went to his piano later that day and envisioned the first scene in the libretto, an opera house in Germany, and he began to sing in the style of Mozart. “Suddenly, I was singing lines that were classical in an Italian vein,” he said. “And from there I just went from scene to scene. It all seemed easy and logical. We had a harder time with the second act.”

The production was tested in three workshops. The creative team at that point consisted of Puts, Campbell, and Johnson along

with the director, Eric Simonson, who, as he did with Grapes of Wrath, had a hand in shaping the work. Puts described the workshops as a luxury. “I revised like crazy after each workshop,” he said. “We had a lot of time with the singers and the orchestra. I’m not used to that. Usually, you show up four days before the premiere, you have three rehearsals and you can’t make any significant changes. It’s agony.”

Eric Simonson said, “This was an exciting project because it was Kevin’s first opera, and he did such a fantastic job. You listen to the music for the first time, and you expect something good. But when you really listen to it, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really moving, and I understand it and I connect with it.’

“Most of the changes came right after the libretto was written, even before the workshops, and that’s typical. For instance, Marc had written the end of act one. What happens, they’re all kneeling, and they say this prayer out in no-man’s-land, all the Germans together, the French and the English. At the end of the act, Marc had written simply that they all stand up and go to their separate bunkers. And I thought, ‘We need something to get the audience back into the theater, and that isn’t a dramatic or suspenseful ending.’ So I suggested, and Kevin like the idea, that Anna, the opera singer, finishes the song and off in the distance we hear bombs. They had declared peace, but the war goes on. The all look up, and you see their faces lit up as the bombs are exploding, and then the lights slowly fade. That’s one example

of a moment that was shaped by a collaboration even before the music was written. Then when we went into the first workshop, we did things like extending the street chorus and a bunch of other things. And then when we got into rehearsal, they gave us an extra week, and the rehearsals were difficult because it was a new opera. There were, like, thirty scene shifts, and I was dealing with this enormous revolve onstage, getting that to work. Kevin and Dale were understandably nervous. The rehearsals were tense, but we finally opened, and everyone liked it.”

Initial reviews were enthusiastic, and the opera has continued earning praise as it takes up residence in various cities. “One could only marvel at Puts’s multi-layered orchestral score, which turned on a dime from battle scenes—a cacophony of dissonances, edgy intervals and machine-gun soundsˆto moments of serene, lyrical beauty,” Janelle Gelfand remarked on Cincinnati.com.

Campbell said he hopes that Silent Night will come to be associated with Christmas as Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors has become so identified, or, in his words, becoming The Nutcracker of the opera world. The opera, he said, “has a message about war and how horrible it is. Maybe it can reach people and say, ‘Stop doing this.’ I hope we can influence history in some way.”

As it happened, Silent Night remained very much alive in the years after its premiere. A big boost came unexpectedly in April 2012, when the opera was awarded the Pulitzer

Prize for music. In 2013 the original production was broadcast on PBS. It was estimated that more people saw that broadcast than had seen all the Minnesota Opera productions since the company was founded in 1963. By 2019 no fewer than twenty opera companies had staged the opera, among them the San Jose Opera and the Wexford Opera Festival in Ireland. In addition, the San Francisco Symphony commissioned from Puts a new orchestral suite based on the opera. The opera had quickly moved to becoming a part of the repertoire, which doesn’t happen often.

On winning the Pulitzer, Puts said in 2015, “I’m definitely being treated in a different way, and that’s odd.” He laughed. “I’m writing the same music I wrote before. But I do think the prize helped get the opera around.”

Knowing he had a winning team on his hands, Dale Johnson soon commissioned Puts and Campbell to collaborate on another work, The Manchurian Candidate, the political thriller by Richard Condon that was adapted for the screen in a much-admired movie starring Frank Sinatra that was released in 1962. “I think Kevin Puts is perhaps the greatest opera composer of his generation,” Johnson said. “It’s because he understands what doesn’t work. He will sit there in a workshop and watch and then say, ‘I gotta fix this’ before anybody else says anything. It would be things like, ‘Oh, the trombones are too loud’ or ‘The singers are covered by the strings.’ He wants to make it right.”

Puts recalled first hearing that Silent Night had won the Pulitzer. “I got a call from a friend on an April afternoon. Another friend left a message: ‘Congratulations, man.’ Then I called the other number. It was the Associated Press. By then I guess it was on the Pulitzer website.”

Campbell heard about it in the office of the ad agency where he was then working. “I was refreshing my email, and there was a call from the publisher of Silent Night. Then I saw the email: ‘Silent Night Wins Pulitzer Prize.’ I yelled out loud. People came running in. They thought something bad had happened.”

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Without doubt, the event of the decade for Minnesota Opera was the premiere of The Grapes of Wrath, an opera based on John Steinbeck’s classic novel about the Joad family’s struggle to find work and maintain dignity in the orchards of California. As the composer of the work, Ricky Ian Gordon, recalled it, the origin of the opera goes back to a day in New York City in 2000 when he was walking down the street with his neighbor and collaborator, Michael Korie.

“By the way,” Gordon said to Korie, “I want you to think about The Grapes of Wrath as an opera.” “You’re crazy,” said Korie. “It can’t be done. It’s too big.”

Some months later, during a rainy night at the Millay Arts Center in upstate New York, Korie began rereading Steinbeck’s novel. The Grapes of Wrath had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939, was made the following year into a revered film by John Ford, and had been put on the stage in a version by Frank Galati in 1988. Korie noticed two things right away. Steinbeck told his story of the Joad family, migrant workers fleeing the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma during the Depression, in three sections, which could be the three acts of an opera; also, that the descriptive chapters that Steinbeck wrote in his own voice could be sung onstage by a chorus.

With those thoughts in mind, Korie told Gordon that this was a project they should work on, and their source, Korie thought, should be the novel rather than the movie or the play. One scene convinced him. “It was the

part where Uncle John, who is quiet and taciturn through much of the book, suddenly erupts and sends the dead baby, Rosasharn’s stillborn child, down the flooded river to go into all the towns and let them see its face and lay there and rot. I said to myself, ‘If this opera could unabashedly do the same thing in the opera house to all these people paying $150 a ticket, that is, wake them up to realize this isn’t just a musical experience. It’s about us today, so that at the end they don’t just say, ‘Where shall we go for cheesecake and coffee?’ but, in fact, are too bothered to talk, then this would be a success.”

And indeed, The Grapes of Wrath, which took nearly ten years to bring to life, turned out to be a rousing success, both a critical success and, if the standing ovation the work received at its premiere was any indication, a hit with audiences. The opera was recorded and later broadcast nationally on public television. Other companies have performed it, and a new, shorter two-act version that Gordon helped put together is likely to reach even more audiences.

Patrick Dewane, the company’s development director during the years the opera was being created and financed, recalled seeing the opera in its entirety for the first time at the final dress rehearsal with a small audience of mostly staff people at the Ordway in March 2007. “The opera starts with this fanfare,” he said. “And I thought. ‘Well, that sounds very Coplandesque,’ and then it just unfolds with the set design and the costumes. And when it came to the end of the act, when Andy

Wilkowske’s character, Noah, kills himself, basically to save the others—I’m going to tear up right now thinking about itˆand then the mother sings that song about the innocent child, and then the lights go down and then come back up and we were all looking at each other like, holy shit, this is really something. We’re not just kidding ourselves about how fun this has been and, oh, wouldn’t it be great if this turned out to be the Great American Opera? And then two nights later, the audience saw it and went crazy for it.”

Born in 1956 in Oceanside, New York, Gordon made his mark initially in the theater and as a composer of Broadway-style songs. He was often included in a group viewed as the “next wave” of composers (after Stephen Sondheim) whose work might forge a middle ground between opera and Broadway, others being Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, and Jason Robert Brown. Gordon has been the most prolific of them. Echoes of Gershwin and Kern can be heard in the opera as well as the vernacular idioms of the 1930s: boogie-woogie, stride piano, and swing. When the work was announced Gordon named Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Kern’s Show Boat as models for what he hoped would be the style of the opera. The impact of The Grapes of Wrath on Minnesota Opera was to renew the company’s dedication to the commissioning of new works, a dedication expressed in the creation the following year of its New Works Initiative. The opera’s impact on Gordon was to enlarge the scope of his work and propel him to the front rank of

opera composers.

“My whole life changed with that opera,” Gordon said in an interview in 2021. “By the time I finished the opera and it had been staged in Minnesota, I was another person. I had never written anything that big, and it was so mind-blowing. I said yes to it with complete terror in my soul. Writing it took hold of me. It gripped me for five years. And I just think it’s so beautiful. I’m so proud of that opera. I’m so grateful that I got the opportunity to set that magnificent, heartbreaking text to music.”

When The Grapes of Wrath was premiered, the man who staged it and acted as dramaturg, Eric Simonson, had been living with the story for nearly two decades. As a longtime member of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, he was in the first production of Frank Galati’s stage version of the Steinbeck book, which opened in Chicago, then moved to Broadway and London. Playing small roles in the production, he heard it every night for six months and so, when Dale Johnson, Minnesota Opera’s artistic director, hatched the idea of an opera on The Grapes of Wrath, he asked Simonson about it, knowing his connection to the play. Both knew that other composers had sought permission from the Steinbeck estate to make an opera out of the book but had been turned down. Simonson, however, had gotten to know Steinbeck’s widow, Elaine, his third wife (Steinbeck died in 1968), so he called Elaine, who said, “That sounds like a great idea. Call my lawyers.”

Events began to move, in Simonson’s words, “at a glacial pace.” Johnson, knowing and liking Gordon’s songs, named Gordon as the project’s composer, after which for about two years lawyers from the estate went to every concert of Gordon’s music they could to evaluate his music. The lawyers finally said yes, and Gordon brought Korie into the project.

Once he had Korie’s libretto in hand, Gordon began composing. Instead of writing it from the first note to the last, he searched through the libretto, looking for what he called “hot spots.” “I was trying to find places where my heart would bloom and then write those things first,” he said. “So you put that together. You have five arias, right? It’s like you have five stones, and each one of those stones contains ten motives, and that becomes your platform. You start building the piece from the previous platform you made. It’s different with each opera, but after Grapes I had a sense of how to be an architect and create a building.”

Indeed, by 2021, Gordon, a busy musical architect, had composed fifteen operas, two of which, Intimate Apparel and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, were scheduled to be premiered in New York in January 2022. As he spoke, he was completing a memoir that would be published in the autumn of 2022.

Once a first draft was finished, the team— Gordon, Korie, Simonson and Johnson—began a series of workshops, putting the show on its feet, as they say. The first big change

was cutting out the spoken dialogue, creating an opera rather than a musical play or a piece of music theater. “It was the first thing we both learned,” Gordon said, “which is that opera singers act with their voice. And I don’t think it’s an insult to say, very often, as soon as you ask singers to speak on a stage, the wind goes right out of the balloon. It’s not because they’re bad. It’s because they haven’t been taught to project with their speaking voice with the same intensity that they project with their singing voices. So after the first workshop I went home and everywhere in the score where there was spoken text, I set it to music. And it was hard because the opera was so big. We could only workshop one act at a time.”

The production was the biggest and most expensive (about $1.5 million) in the company’s history. Ruth and John Huss, longtime arts patrons in the Twin Cities, provided the start-up capital for the commission. Ameriprise Financial served as the national sponsor, and other funding came from the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, and Utah Symphony & Opera, acting as co-commissioners, and both the Pittsburgh Opera and Houston Grand Opera, co-producers.

Rehearsals began in mid-January 2007. As Patrick recalled it, “The success of Grapes reinvented the company, and Ricky’s boundless enthusiasm and love played no small part in that success. Ricky, Michael Korie and Eric Simonson showed up the first day of rehearsal, hell-bent on creating the Great American

Opera. The building vibrated with their energy. Just about everyone on the staff was some sort of musician, and we all got caught up in their mission. Lani Willis, the PR person, created all sorts of wonderful events in the community, and the three never said no to anything. I would have to say that without Ricky’s talent and enthusiasm we would not have had the momentum and confidence we had.”

Gordon recalled: “We went everywhere in Minnesota, and we would see our posters on buses and trucks far away from Minneapolis. I would go everywhere and play and sing the opera. I did these presentations where I would have the whole opera scrolling by in my Finale file on a movie screen, and I would stand in front of it and sing with a microphone. I felt we had made something bigger than ourselves, and people needed to know about it.” Gordon, Korie and two cast members sang a number from the opera on “A Prairie Home Companion” the second weekend of the run.

Opening night wasn’t quite sold out. But the remaining performances played to full houses. Jane Confer, who was then board chairman, saw the production on opening night. “Grapes of Wrath changed my whole perspective on opera,” she said. “I was one of those who had fallen comfortably into the ten Italian operas and how many ways can you do them idea. “Grapes of Wrath brought me to my knees. Every time I see Andy Wilkowske, I say, ‘You broke my heart with that scene.’ This is where he takes his own life.”

Asked what it is that keeps this story alive, Simonson said, “I think it’s that Steinbeck drew from a mythic source, the bible: crossing the desert, Rose of Sharon (Rosasharn) is the Madonna, Jim Casey (the preacher turned union organizer) with the initials J. C., is Jesus Christ, and Tom Joad is Doubting Thomas. It’s about transformation, about the collective soul in all of us.”

Allan Moyer designed the multimedia production, one of the most complicated Minnesota Opera ever mounted. Playing the part of the truck that heroically carries the Joads all the way to California was an authentic 1929 Ford that the company’s prop master, Dean Hawthorn, found for sale in Ann Arbor. Doug Varone, who staged the previous season’s Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, choreographed the show, and Brian Leerhuber, a young baritone originally from Los Angeles, sang the role of Tom Joad, the excon who is the opera’s central character, a part played by Henry Fonda in the film and by Gary Sinise in the play.

Speaking during a rehearsal break, Leerhuber said he had no trouble identifying with Tom. “Young American males are all on the same kind of quest as Tom’s to find our path, which is a different world than our parents promised it would be.” The big moment for Tom comes at the end, he said, when he has to say goodbye to his mother and accept responsibility to help his fellow men and to become a union organizer. It is here that he delivers the “I’ll be there,” speech, perhaps the book’s most famous lines, much

expanded by Gordon and Korie. “Both of us have trouble just reading through it without breaking down,” he said, his partner in the scene being Deanne Meek as Ma Joad. Tom’s words: “I’ll be ever’where, wherever you look, wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there . . . I’ll be there in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. And when our folks eat the stuff they raise and live in the house they build, why, I’ll be there.”

The production moved on to Utah in the spring of 2007 and then to Pittsburgh and Houston. The Tulsa Opera turned it down, apparently because of the way Steinbeck portrays the Depression-era migrants and the tyranny they suffer at the hands of the West Coast fruit growers. Steinbeck: “Children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from the orange.” A year after the book was published, the Library Board of East St. Louis ordered the librarian to burn the three copies that the library owned.

In 2010 the Collegiate Chorale of New York City and its director James Bagwell asked Gordon and Korie to fashion a two-act concert version of the opera. The work was premiered at Carnegie Hall on March 22 of that year. Ted Sperling conducted the chorale, the American Symphony Orchestra and a roster of prominent soloists from the opera and musical theater world, including Nathan Gunn (Tom Joad), Victoria Clark (Ma Joad), Christine Ebersole (Mae, a tough-talking

waitress at a truck stop), Elizabeth Futral (Rosasharn), Matthew Worth (her husband, Connie), and Peter Halvorson, who had sung the role of Pa Joad in the premiere. In an especially thoughtful touch, Jane Fonda, whose father had played Tom Joad in the 1940 film, served as narrator.

“I would say that was the most exciting and happy night of my life, only equaled by the opening night of Grapes in 2007,” Gordon said, because of Jane Fonda. “She did it, she said, for her father. It was an incredible night. The chorus was spectacular. There were two hundred singers. And Wendell Harrington did the incredible projections. The standing ovation we got at the end would be hard to forget. My partner, Kevin, wrote the narration. The way the excerpts were offset by Jane’s beautiful and committed narration—I mean, the first time we rehearsed, she said the words, “A young Tom Joad” and began to cry.”

The original production of the opera in Minnesota was unique. The entire opera, which ran nearly four hours, and its staging, with thirty scene changes, was elaborate and expensive. “That was when opera companies still had money,” Gordon said. “But every time it was done after that, it was cut or changed.” The solution was a new two-act version, a rethinking of the work devised by Gordon, Korie, and James Robinson, who staged it at the Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2017. What exists now are two authorized versions, the big three-act version first presented at the Ordway in 2007 and the

smaller one premiered a decade later in St. Louis. “It’s better for a company to do the new version than the first one with all those random cuts that were driving me crazy,” said Gordon.

The many versions of The Grapes of Wrath— the book, the movie, the play, the two operas—tell a story that seems never to lose relevance. In the book Steinbeck says, “In the West there was a panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified. They said, ‘These goddamn Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re desperate, sexual maniacs. We can’t have them in our schools. They’re strangers. How’d you like to have your sister go out with one of them?’”

Responding to that quotation, Gordon said, “The tragedy of The Grapes of Wrath is there hasn’t been a day since it was written that it wasn’t earth-shatteringly relevant. It’s about the refugee crisis right now, you know, separating children from their families. And it’s not just in America. It’s everywhere. The world is one big refugee crisis of people trying to escape a bad situation going towards one they think is better, but it usually turns out to be worse. That’s where we are in the world right now.”

LUMINARY ARTS CENTER

Historians might say it was Manifest Destiny that in 2019 Minnesota Opera bought the building next door to its home in the North Loop of Minneapolis, a building with a long and storied history called The Lab Theater.

The Lab Theater is a 6,000 square foot stone box with a thirty-foot ceiling that was carved out of the foundation of one of the historic Itaska warehouses situated along the Mississippi River. Designed and developed for the Guthrie Theater as a laboratory for new works, The Lab served as the Guthrie’s second stage until the completion of its new theater complex in 2006. Since then, under the guidance of executive producer Mary Kelley Leer, The Lab Theater became a busy and versatile stage for both emerging and established performing artists in theater, music, dance, cabaret, fashion and even burlesque.

The purchase of The Lab from the Leers— Mary and her husband Chuck, who had acquired the property in 2006—is expected to expand Minnesota Opera’s educational programming and its development of new work for the stage while enlarging its audience and continuing as a venue for use by performing artists in the Twin Cities and possibly touring organizations as well.

“The Lab could be for Minnesota Opera what it was for the Guthrie, which is an incubation space and a place to try new operas,” said Mary Leer. “Minnesota Opera has got to reach out to new audiences, and they’re not going to do it at the Ordway, necessarily.

They’ve got to start building and trying new things to reach those new audiences, and I think The Lab will provide them with that kind of opportunity.”

An additional reason for the purchase was the growing realization that if The Lab went on the open market, it likely would have become a five-story apartment building in a neighborhood, especially along First Street, that was already over-populated with apartment and condominium buildings.

Ryan Taylor, president and general director of Minnesota Opera said, “Given the landscape of where we were pre-COVID in the Twin Cities, watching the market churn down on small theaters here and the lack of performing spaces, coupled with the venues that were rapidly being shuttered, yet another apartment building next door didn’t seem like it was good for anybody. So I felt that there was an understanding of the sort of human value of the property and what it has meant to the Twin Cities, having been a part of the Guthrie and then run by Chuck and Mary.”

The building, put up as a warehouse in 1886, was no more than a shell by the 1980s, which was when Chuck Leer was asked by a group of investors to look at this broken-down warehouse on First Street and figure out what to do with it. “So in 1987,” Chuck said, “I walked into this shell, this carcass of a building that became The Lab, and then I asked Mary to take a look at it.”

Mary recalled, “Chuck said I needed to come over and see this hole in the ground that he had found. There were, literally, two lightbulbs hanging in the ceiling, and it was dank in there. We began having a conversation, and I said to Chuck, ‘Start backing away from me, and as we backed apart from each other in this hundred-foot-long row, we could hear each other perfectly. And I said, ‘The acoustics in here are magical. This should be a theater.’”

They discussed whether the popular theater/nightclub that Mary was running at that time, Ruby’s Cabaret on Third Avenue N., might find a new home at this as yet undeveloped facility, but it didn’t seem to be a good fit. What Mary did know was that Garland Wright, the Guthrie’s new artistic director, was looking for a second stage, not so much for shows but as a laboratory for development of plays.

”We brought Garland over one day in late spring,” said Chuck. “I’ll never forget the look in his eye. He loved it. The result was a kind of harmonic conversion between our vision of a theater and Garland’s aspirations for a second stage.”

They broke ground in March of 1988 and in eight months the theater was done. Chuck: “It cost us $600,000 to turn this carcass into a state-of-the-art stone box theater.” Mary said, “The plan was to bring actors into this raw space and work on a piece from the beginning. The goal was more developmental. For Garland, having an audience was not

part of his plan, which is why there’s this funk-a-doodle little box office.”

(A little-known historical fact: Mary and Chuck actually thought that Theater de la Jeune Lune, the French theater in Minneapolis, would take possession of what became The Lab. Dominique Serrand, one of the Jeune Lune founders, had seen the facility and was interested. Chuck: “We never imagined that the Guthrie would fall in love with it. Jeune Lune could have had it, except that it was summertime. We were rapidly approaching August and, of course, everyone in Paris goes on vacation in August. So they left the country, went back to Paris, and in the meantime, our real estate partnership ended up doing a deal with the Guthrie.”)

As it turned out, the Guthrie Lab did become a performance space. Its first presentation, the JoAnne Akalaitis staging of Genet’s The Screens, was a blockbuster. Jack Kroll of Newsweek saw it and proclaimed it the most important work in the American theater in twenty-five years. Among other memorable shows was a production of Hamlet in military dress and a beautifully staged production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

The owners gave the Guthrie a five-year lease on The Lab with a five-year option to buy. “We believed that over that period of time, the Guthrie would buy the space from us,” Chuck said. “And we invited them to do that because we figured, as a tenant, they paid a lot of money in real estate taxes because you only get an exemption if you own

the place. As it turned out, they rented it for 18 years. They never bought it, which we found curious.”

In 1990, two years after The Lab opened, Minnesota Opera moved into its new home next door, a four-story building they named the Opera Center, at 620 N. First St., for which Chuck was development consultant. For the opera company this was a major a relief, as the company’s administration offices were in downtown St. Paul and the costume shop and storage in Minneapolis, which meant the shows were rehearsed wherever possible. The Opera Center consolidated all these activities. Minnesota Opera, with Chuck’s help, raised $5 million for the project, which, as it turned out, didn’t cost quite so much. The remainder was used to pay off debts.

The Lab, which Mary ran from 2006 to 2019 (with an extension to 2021) was a rousing success, the result of business acumen mixed with artistic flair and receptivity. Mary ran it as a for-profit business. “It was an ideal partnership between our real estate group and Mary as a theater manager,” said Chuck. The deal was signed on a napkin in a restaurant.

“I didn’t want to have to raise money to do what I did, and I didn’t want to deal with a board of directors,” Mary said. “I wanted the individual companies to raise money for their own seasons. I wanted to provide everything that they couldn’t themselves provide. They would produce their art and I would take care of running the building and managing the box office. All they had to do was come

in, set their lights, do their sound and tech, and run their show, and I was there to support them. And sometimes I produced shows of my own, but really, it was meant to be a rental house but with the cooperation of someone who knew their business. The Lab opened when Jeune Lune closed, and why did it close? Because they had this monster building that they didn’t know how to manage.”

Among the most memorable shows at The Lab during Mary’s era was a set of performances of Orff’s Carmina Burana by the Minnesota Dance Theater and the Minnesota Chorale with live video of the dancers and singers projected onto the back wall. The Lab also became the place to see the Moving Company, an inventive theatrical troupe, and in later years a parade of hip-hop performers and young African-American dancers.

“There was this mix of cultures,” Mary said, “and, all of a sudden, we had this young audience of all colors and descriptions coming to The Lab. And then we had the burlesque festival with all those wacky folks, and it was just . . . I loved it all, and I loved engendering new work.”

Minnesota Opera bought The Lab for $1.8 million. One of the terms was that Mary would continue to operate it until the end of 2019 to give the opera company time to raise the money to remodel the building. The lease-back arrangement was extended to June 1, 2020, and then finally to June 1 of the following year, a date that signaled the end

of an era in local theater history. To acknowledge the end of that era, and the passing of the baton to Minnesota Opera, the Leers on a certain warm night in May of 2021 threw a stupendous party at the Lab for an invited audience that included Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and featured performances by many of the singers, dancers and actors for whom The Lab had become a home.

Renovation, budgeted at $5.6 million, began almost immediately in June of 2021 and would be, as defined by Julia Gallagher, Minnesota Opera’s Lab and special projects director, extensive. “But as we’ve designed it and as we’re looking at it,” Julia said in the autumn of 2021, “we aren’t building it to be an opera space but to be a flexible performance space, of which one of those types of performance is opera. This gives the company a different footprint than it has had in the past.”

Among the changes and additions: a reworking of the lobby, re-doing of the dressing rooms and green room, new seating platforms and new seats, a new floor and a freight lift at the back of the building that hadn’t been there before. Occupancy will be 350. Seating, depending on the configuration, will be 200 to 225 seats.

“We’re not getting rid of the beautiful brick walls,” Julia said. “The sense of the space will change a bit, but we’re trying not to lose what made the space special and trying to keep a similar vibe, albeit a little more polished.”

Plans were for construction to be completed in March of 2022 and for rentals to be available in June. “The Lab is such a different space than the Ordway, and it gives us opportunities in audience development and programming. The sort of work that plays well at the Ordway isn’t the same that plays well at The Lab. Smaller, more intimate works, more experimental—chamber operas—would work at The Lab. And tickets will be cheaper than at the Ordway.” Julia will be stepping into the managerial role that Mary had.

One of the quirks of this history is that there really is an element of Manifest Destiny concerning the two neighboring buildings and a certain secret passageway. Chuck Leer tells the story: “After the Guthrie’s first five years in The Lab, and they hadn’t exercised their right to buy it, Kevin Smith said to me, ‘Okay, Chuck, if they don’t buy it, how about me? I want to buy it.’ Because it’s connected, right? Kevin and I joked about this when The Lab was under construction, and we actually built into the wall of The Lab a passageway into the Opera Center. I think that tells us something.”

“I have high expectations of The Lab,” said former board chair Brent von Ohlen. “It’s an interesting direction to go in because it’s a different kind of space, and it should draw a different kind of public. It’s smaller and will— hopefully—cost less, and it’s a neighborhood full of young people, with lots of bars and restaurants. It will give the company some flexibility about what it puts on and how it puts them on.”

THIS IS RYAN TAYLOR

For Ryan Taylor, the cancellation of two productions due to COVID-19 and all the heartache that went with it during the week of March 9, 2020, were, he said, the darkest moments of his life. The context had made it seem even more disturbing. He had returned Sunday, the 8th, from Phoenix, where he had learned that an “exceptionally close friend,” the former board chair of Arizona Opera, was fatally ill. Two nights later he attended the funeral in Chicago of another close friend who had died from cancer.

He returned to Minneapolis on Wednesday and at noon the next day he spoke to the musicians of the opera orchestra, who were rehearsing Edward Tulane, the opera that was to be premiered in nine days. It was thought at that time that rehearsals and performances of Edward Tulane would proceed as planned but that the season finale, Don Giovanni, might be affected. However, it became apparent that Edward Tulane would have to be canceled.

“That was a pretty rough moment,” Taylor said, recalling the experience some months later. “I had to visit Paola Prestini and Mark Campbell, who had created Edward. I went to their hotel. I had to give them the news first, and the worst part was, I had to ask for their help. I said, ‘I’ve got to talk to the rest of the creators and artists tonight, and if you don’t feel that you can help me I will understand that, but I will ask you not to come because I think the only thing that would be worse than me telling everyone that we’re going to postpone would be to see you all

shattered, which I’m sure you are. So I need to know if you want to take some time and would like to help me help everyone else with this transition.’ They both very generously said, ‘We’re going to take some time to cry about this now and then we’re going to come over tonight and help everyone else.’ I could not have been more grateful to them. I also had to ask the cast that night, ‘Please don’t post anything on social media. We need to be careful about how we let our audience know this information, and we’ll talk to your managers tomorrow. And, by the way, we will try to pay you, but we don’t know if we can.’

“There was an awful lot of shared trust and fear and respect, and I think that was my least favorite day or series of days. And thanks to our board, this is a company that has the wherewithal and the resources to think strategically and has the time to really formulate ideas and objectives and then follow through with a plan of execution.”

Taylor’s calm demeanor—his zen leadership style, as it has been described—was one of the qualities that impressed the search committee back in 2015 when Ryan was a candidate for the company’s top position, and it is the quality that has been most appreciated during the COVID crisis.

Former board chair Bernt von Ohlen served on the search committee. “One of Ryan’s strengths,” he said, “one that he demonstrated during the pandemic, was his ability to maintain a steady hand in a crisis when things are either really difficult or when there’s no

blueprint for how to handle a situation. He proved to be very good at keeping things going and keeping focused.”

“Ryan’s calm, cool and collected,” said Eric Broker, the company’s marketing and communications director. “He’s impossible to excite or make angry. He’s such a southern gentleman. He makes space for people to lead and to really own their expertise and contribute.”

It might have been otherwise, and often is.

In 1994, with a degree in music history from Sewanee: The University of the South in his breast pocket, Taylor moved back home to Atlanta. The son of a certified financial planner, Taylor came from a family of three brothers and a sister in which everybody sang often but not professionally. The first job he was offered right out of college was to sing in the chorus of the Atlanta Opera. A college friend had sent the company a tape of a solo Taylor had sung in church. Someone from the company called him, offering him the job. Taylor’s first question was, “Does it pay anything?” The answer was, “Barely enough to cover your parking.” Ryan said, “Great. I’ll take it.” He figured he would wait tables and tend bar for a year and then start law school.

One of the regular patrons of the restaurant where he worked, a real estate salesman, said to him, “You have a real talent with people, and that’s what sales is. I think you’re doing yourself a disservice by selling steak

and bottles of wine. You ought to be doing something that’s a higher ticket item like cars or houses or boats.”

That much said, the customer referred Taylor to the State Board of Realtors and helped him get his first certification as a realtor in Georgia. He soon got his first real estate job and found out rather quickly that he was good at it. He began to think he could sell real estate for the rest of his life. A dilemma soon emerged, though, the first of several that over the next two decades would change his life, depending on which door he chose and what was behind it. The leaders at the Atlanta Opera said to him, “You should be an opera singer. Our chorus is great, but you actually have a set of marketable skills that you could make use of.”

Here he was, in his early twenties, making serious money selling houses and commercial buildings. He should give that up? He sought out the family’s oracle, his maternal grandfather, who said to him, “If you can really sing opera, that’s Olympic. That’s something that very few people will ever have the chance to do because it requires not only commitment and some training, but it requires that you have a physiology that will allow you to produce that sound. The combination is rare. If you don’t try it, you’re always going to wonder if you could have done it.”

He quit wondering and that year, 1995, enrolled in the graduate program in vocal performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, receiving his degree two years later.

His first big career step came in 2000 when he was accepted into Minnesota Opera’s Resident Artists Program for the 2000–01 season. During that season he made what he considers his mainstage debut singing the part of Ping, the Grand Chancellor in the James Robinson production of Turandot. He returned to the Ordway in 2004 to sing the role of Sharpless in Colin Graham’s production of Madame Butterfly, which he described as one of the top two or three experiences of his entire life.

Graham, a practicing Buddhist with a deep familiarity with Asian culture, asked Taylor to do an exercise: to write out all of Puccini’s stage directions for Sharpless who, in contrast to the feckless Pinkerton, feels sympathy for Cio-Cio-San, the teenage geisha whom Pinkerton abandons. Taylor wrote them out.

As Taylor recalled it, “Colin asked me, ‘What did you learn?’ I said, ‘I learned that Sharpless is in love with Butterfly.’ He nodded and said, ‘What kind of love?’ I said, ‘I don’t know yet.’ I finally decided that he loves her, not romantically, but as a child, as if she were his daughter. Maybe he had a daughter he had left at home when he went into the service. Looking at it that way, the stage directions made sense: ‘Sharpless says this in a phrase, sobbing through tears.’ It’s his daughter he’s thinking of. With Colin directing, that whole experience was magical.”

In the next several years, Taylor sang some thirty roles with various opera companies

around the country. Among the great baritone villains, he played Scarpia in Tosca, telling a friend, “I know what’s good about him, and I can play him without judging him.” But he passed on Don Giovanni, saying “The character doesn’t change, and I couldn’t find anything redeeming about him.” On the other hand, he negotiated vigorously with the management of Fort Worth Opera for the relatively small part of Owen Hart, the father of one of the murder victims in Dead Man Walking. He was attracted by the emotional complexity of the role and by the impact the opera might have in a pro-death-penalty state such as Texas.

In 2008, while performing in a production of La Traviata at a music festival in Maine, Taylor got a call from a colleague asking if he would be interested in taking charge of the Berkshire Opera Company, a small outfit in Massachusetts that was in financial trouble. Taylor had hired this colleague for the Southeastern Festival of Song, a small festival that he and the mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala had been running in Atlanta since 2004. “Our boss just left, and I think you’d be a really great boss,” the colleague said. “Do you want to take this on?”

Taylor laughed and said, “I’m a singer. I don’t run opera companies.” The response was, “Yeah, but it’s about skills and I think you have the skills. Promise me you’ll think about it.” Taylor said, “Okay.”

That evening at the cabin where the Traviata cast was staying, Taylor made a list of

everything he had sung since high school. Then he made a list on the other side of the page of everything he had helped produce or administer. There were eighty-eight items on the list as a singer and thirty-four things on the list as a producer or administrator. Then he ran down the lists and if he remembered having a great time, he put a checkmark next to it. When he finished the list of eightyeight things where he had sung, he found seven that he would do again. And in the production list, he found thirty-one of the thirty-four that had been awesome.

His friends looked at the lists and asked what he was doing. “I’m just deciding to stop singing,” he said. They said, “But we have a show tomorrow.” He said, “I’m not quitting tomorrow.” But he did call his manager and say, “I want to keep Dead Man Walking on the books because that’s a project I have some interest in, but I’m pulling out of almost everything else, and I’m going to apply for this job.”

This is a story that has valleys as well as hills. Taylor got the job and within ten months the Berkshire Opera Company went belly-up. The Berkshire Eagle reported in January 2009, that the company had laid off its entire staff, had emptied its website and closed its office. Plagued by the nationwide falloff in arts support after the 9/11 attacks as well as the death of three generous donors in 2006 followed by the recession of 2008, the company did manage in 2008 to mount a five-performance run of The Marriage of Figaro while making, according to one ob-

server, “death-rattle noises,” and facing increasingly dim prospects of survival.

Wisely, Taylor moved on and for the next three years served concurrently as artist manager and public relations director for ADA Artist Management in New York and as manager of community development in the administration of the Wolf Trap Opera Company in Washington, D. C. In January of 2012, he became director of artistic administration for Arizona Opera, a position similar to that held at Minnesota Opera at that time by Dale Johnson, whom Taylor would eventually replace.

Then the pace began to pick up. Just fifteen months after Taylor started his job in Arizona, the company’s managing director, Scott Altman, resigned abruptly, leaving behind $4.2 million in debt. The board appointed Taylor interim managing director, and his path then crossed with that of Kevin Smith who, in his post-Minnesota Opera period, was consulting with opera companies under the aegis of Opera America.

Smith sent Taylor an email, saying “If I can be helpful in any way, let me know.” Smith said, “Ryan got back to me and said, ‘Jeez, I’ve never done this before. This is a big step.’ Plus, they were in bad shape, financially, and they had fired their general director. So they hired me, and I was a consultant for six months or so. I flew down there regularly and worked with Ryan and the board, and I helped them raise money and did a lot of things. It was the sort of thing I had

been doing in those years between 2011 and 2014, between the opera company and the orchestra.”

“There’s a certain amount of knowledge you have to have—in life and in running an opera company—and Ryan had most of it,” Smith said. “He had worked with a number of companies. He had been in administration. He had been a singer. He had been an agent. He had done budgeting and fund-raising. He had done a lot of that stuff, but when you’re in a crisis, as they were, you have to make things happen and make them happen quickly. I don’t know that I taught him or anyone else anything profound. I know it took me about ten years running Minnesota Opera to basically figure things out because I started out with absolutely no background in all this. I mean, Ryan walked into his job with much more experience than I had. I was a music major. I didn’t know anything about business or fund-raising or community relations.”

Taylor’s first order of business in Arizona was a million-dollar fundraising campaign to address the immediate debt crisis. When that was successful, he was offered the top job on a permanent basis. Perhaps his biggest artistic innovation, announced in October 2014, was the company’s Arizona Bold campaign, a four-year plan to produce new works that would expand the company’s repertoire beyond the standard operas that engage most opera companies most of the time. The idea was also to foster works that were relevant to the people of Arizona as a way of expanding the audience, aiming

especially at the area’s Latino community , 40 percent of the population of Phoenix. Arizona Bold was launched with five performances of Cruzar la Cara de la Luna by Jose Martinez and Leonard Foglia, a bilingual one-act billed as the world’s first mariachi opera. Other works followed, among them Arizona Lady, a comic opera by the Hungarian composer Emmerich Kalman, and in 2017, the company’s first commission, Riders of the Purple Sage, an opera based on the famous Zane Grey novel with music by Craig Bohmler and libretto by Steven Mark Kohn. The good news on the financial front was that as of June 30, 2015, the company had paid off all its interest-bearing debt and declared surpluses of $1.2 million and $520,000 in the fiscal years 2013 and 1014.

This is the kind of good news that search committees love to hear. The search committee in this case consisted of five board members of Minnesota Opera plus two ex-officio members, board chair Jim Johnson and vice chair Margaret Wurtele, who in the summer of 2015 began looking for a new president to replace the interim president, Nina Archabal. According to Jim, he and Margaret were bent on keeping the search committee small because, in their view, large search committees are more likely to make bad decisions, an example being the committee of fifteen or so members that in 2011 selected Allan Naplan to replace Kevin Smith, a choice that would soon be widely derided. It was alleged that the members of such a large group seldom got together because they couldn’t agree on a time to meet, and, with that in mind,

Jim passed a resolution saying that no one could be on a search committee for Minnesota Opera more than once.

“And then these old chestnut people,” Johnson said, “the fifteen who think they run the opera company, started saying, ‘Well, these people can’t possibly do a search because they don’t know enough about the history of Minnesota Opera,’ and I said, ‘Well, we’re going to trust these five people—and we did. And we really lucked out with the person we got as chair of the committee, Bernt von Ohlen.”

“We were under time pressure,” said von Ohlen, a retired lawyer who lives part time in Berlin, “and so at the beginning we scheduled a lot of meetings. But when you have a small group that’s really committed, you can get a lot accomplished.”

An additional pressure on the committee— and the organization as a whole—was that this time they were looking for a single leader, an executive who also filled the role of artistic director—an intendant, in the European tradition—whereas, for its entire history, Minnesota Opera had relied on a pair of leaders, an executive director and an artistic director. These roles, since 1994, had been filled by Kevin Smith and Dale Johnson.

The search consultant, Catherine French, supplied the committee with about two dozen names, and this list was eventually pared down to three, one of whom was Ryan Taylor. When Taylor got the call from the commit-

tee, he was ambivalent. He retained great affection for Minnesota Opera and the cities it exists in. “At the same time,” he said, “I was building the company that I thought I really wanted to work for in Arizona. So when Minnesota called and asked for an in-person interview, I thought, ‘I’m flattered and I will at least go and have a conversation with them, maybe as a courtesy.’”

Then came the interview. “Ryan gave an interview that absolutely blew us away,” said Johnson. “He started by saying he’d never applied for a job before. Boy, that gets your attention. He meant that people had sought him out for the various jobs he’d held.”

“Within thirty minutes,” Taylor said, “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Shit. Now I want to work here because this board was engaged in a human way.’ It was exactly what I remembered as an artist and why I had an affection for the place and the company. And I still find that extraordinary, which isn’t to say there weren’t really fantastic people in Arizona, too, but the shared sense of value and the fact that they were so confident of the value of the company was so exciting to me. Walking away from that interview, I felt the way you feel on what you hope was a really good first date.”

“When you’re doing these searches,” von Ohlen said, “you obviously want everything along with lots of years of experience. But the thing we were struck by is how much Ryan had accomplished in his years at Arizona Opera. He had come in not as the CEO,

and in short order, he was promoted. And he did a lot during that time. That went a long way in assuring us what he was capable of.”

When the committee decided that Taylor was their choice, they followed the protocol, which starts with a recommendation to the board. If the board approves the choice, which it did, unanimously, the offer is made to the candidate by the recruiter—Catherine French. Then both von Ohlen and Johnson called Taylor and gave him the news. Taylor said he had decided at that point to accept the offer but before signing a contract he wanted to talk to the board chair at Arizona Opera, Bob Tancer, and his wife Shoshana, who had become close friends.

“I felt I owed them something rather than have it simply be a fait accompli,“ Taylor said. “So I went over to visit with them. It felt like I was breaking up with a family. I get a little emotional just thinking about it. I’m not someone who keeps his emotions to himself most of the time. Shoshana did say, ‘Everything happens for a reason, this is a lovely opportunity, and we will be fine.’”

Ryan Taylor’s appointment was publicly announced on Jan. 14, 2016. He didn’t take office until May 7 because he wanted to finish the season in Arizona, and so he commuted back and forth during those months. Jim Johnson, who was due to step down as board chair June 30, gave Taylor several assignments for his first year as president. One was to re-structure the administration and staff. Another was to figure out Dale

Johnson’s role for the near future.

“The company did not have an easy time after Kevin Smith retired,” said Taylor.

Part of it was that he and Dale had worked so closely together for so long. Many felt like this was an institution that would ‘run itself’, and you could just bring in someone else to be the new Kevin Smith. They tried that several times, and it didn’t go well. The last time, while Nina was interim president, the board actually took some time to talk to Dale and said, ‘We’ve been thinking about the split leadership model, and we feel that we should have someone who understands the art but who can also manage the business.

I think Dale agreed with the board. So the job, when I answered their call to apply for this position, was explained to me that they were putting Kevin’s and Dale’s roles into one job and that we were not going to have an artistic director. The president and general director would manage both the business and the artistic functions of the company. So that is the job to which I applied and was invited to participate in with the company.

So when I started, Dale kind of said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said, ‘Well, there are things that require my attention on the business side first, so I need you to just keep doing your job.’ He also told me that there was a period where he thought he wanted to imagine his retirement, and so I had sort of a running clock on how long he would be available to us and what would make sense.

So, does the company have an artistic director? Not in title, but that is my function.

In the summer of 2018 Dale Johnson assumed the title of Creative Advisor to the President, which meant consulting on repertoire, continuing to develop new works and locating talent, and then he eventually retired. His contributions to Minnesota Opera cannot be over-stated.

Taylor’s first five years at the helm of Minnesota Opera were both calming and transformative, at least until the COVID crisis took hold and dropped the curtain on every live show on the planet. Finances were stabilized, a new team was assembled, and the company re-branded itself, articulating a new mission and image.

Eric Broker, director of marketing and communications, said: “The whole period between Kevin Smith and Ryan [Taylor] was this ongoing regime change that normally is a moment and then two years later it sort of resolves. Whereas for us, it lasted eight years. It was chaos. There was nothing there. There was no infrastructure in place. All that had to be rebuilt by Ryan and the new team. And now we’re better than ever in terms of financial systems and IT and back-end data infrastructure. All that has been totally transformed in the last five years.”

Five years in, the board’s approval of Ryan remained fervent. Susan Boren, former board chair, said: “Ryan is one of the best natural leaders I have seen in the not-for-profit

sector. He understands the craft. He was a performer. But he is also an incredibly fine leader, and he understood immediately what the pluses and minuses of Dale being there were. He was able to form a relationship with Dale that allowed him to help Dale leave gracefully at the right time. And Ryan has brought not only incredible sensitivity and vision for the opera company, but his performance during COVID has been extraordinary.”

Bernt von Ohlen, former board chair, said: “He’s a successful fundraiser, which never hurts, and he’s a good communicator. It’s easy to talk with him. He’s clear about what’s going on, what he considers important, what he wants to work on, where the focus should be.”

Jim Johnson, former board chair, said: “He understands how to lead an organization, and I think he has a very nice style. It’s not heavy-handed, but he gets people to do what he wants.”

Theresa Murray, vice President, administration and board relations, said: “He has that gentle way. He’s very affable. You can laugh with him, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously most of the time. And he’s relatively unflappable. You don’t hear him getting angry and yelling.”

Lani Willis, vice president, advancement, said: “We’re going through a lot right now. There’s a pandemic. It’s a constant reinventing of wheels and making plans and chang-

ing them, and it’s exhausting. But the peers that I have the privilege of working with on the leadership team are an extraordinary bunch of people. This is a team that is dedicated to working together in a way that I hadn’t experienced before, which doesn’t mean it’s easy and that there’s no friction. But there’s a level of collaboration that is a hallmark of Ryan’s leadership.”

Karen Bachman, former board chair, said: “He’s very clear and he knows where he wants to go and where he thinks the company needs to go, but he does it in a way that makes people feel comfortable and that they have been brought along. I watched his decision-making early on. He’s very open about it, very inclusive, very direct. We went through some growing pains, but I think he’s doing great. I’m a big fan.”

Chip Emery, former board chair, said: “Ryan has that inherent leadership style. He could do well in any occupation. He’s a natural leader. He pulls his staff together.”

Margaret Wurtele, former board chair, said: “He looks like a teddy bear. And he loves his dachshund named Oliver who wears bow ties like he does. He loves to cook. Loves his family. He’s the kind of guy who gets into baking bread, and he’ll bring a loaf over and leave it on your doorstep. He keeps his friends forever – decades. Anybody he was involved with in his previous jobs, they’re still friends. He gets people’s trust. Some managers fall back on their power to make things happen their way, whereas Ryan’s al-

ways been braver, more courageous in the sense that he will throw it open to more of a group decision on things.”

Could there be a silver lining to the COVID epidemic? It’s Margaret Wurtele’s story.

“Ryan said to me, apropos of the epidemic, “This is an opportunity for us, a big opportunity.’ I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Because we can retract. These companies, it’s always like, “How much are we going to increase next year—and the next year and the next year?”’

“Ryan has the view that this company has been to some degree trapped in this format of five major productions every year at the Ordway, which is so expensive and so hard. He said, ‘We should be more nimble, more flexible. We need to do some smaller things. We need to be spending less,’

“You could argue that any opera company needs a strong, dominant artistic presence. Maybe that was Dale,” said Wurtele. “But maybe that’s not so appropriate for our time because we’re seeking a more diversely appealing repertoire, and you’re not going to get that with one person’s artistic vision. As Ryan sees it, you get input from different places and kick stuff around and discuss its appeal and who’s going to be in it or who’s going to direct it.”

Stay tuned for the future.

TOUR STORIES

A troupe of strolling players are we,

Not stars like LB Mayer’s are we

But just a simple band

That roams around the land

Dispensing follderall frivolity

—Cole Porter

It seems largely forgotten nowadays how much touring the company did in its early years and how well received those tours were. Alan Rich in New York Magazine described productions of The Mother of us All and Faust Counter Faust that the company, still calling itself Center Opera, presented at Hunter College in New York City in the summer of 1971, calling them “among the most theatrically dazzling experiences I’ve ever witnessed.”

This troupe of strolling players, along with a tech crew and a handful of musicians, hit the road with some frequency that year, bringing its avant-garde productions to San Francisco in early April as part of the Spring Opera Theater of the San Francisco Opera. “Sharp, nervy and interesting,” said the San Francisco Examiner of Faust Counter Faust, director Wesley Balk’s update (with John Gassner as co-author) of the Faust legend as set in a madhouse. Faust was definitely “the furthest out” of the works in the Spring Opera sea-

son, said the critic of the Examiner. Herbert Kupferberg of the National Observer called Faust a “brilliant, audacious piece of work, and it gets an electrifying production from Center Opera’s energetic young performers.” Audience reaction, though, was mixed. John Ludwig reported that one first-nighter stood and booed loudly during the curtain call.

In May of that year, with a $4,000 grant from the Minnesota State Arts Council in its pocket, the company performed in eight Minnesota cities and then, two months later, took off for the East Coast, opening July 20 at the Lake George Opera Festival in Glens Falls, New York, and then playing three nights at the end of the month at the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts just outside Washington, D.C. Then it was four nights at Hunter College in New York City, followed by a two-nighter at the Ambler Music Festival at Temple University in Philadelphia. All these peregrinations were aided by a $7,500 grant from the National Opera Institute, which enabled the company to expand its plans for Faust in the area of experimental techniques and lighting and sound. The tour extended the company’s year to forty-one weeks, making it one of only three opera companies able to keep singers and staff on salaries for that length of time.

Critical reaction ran to extremes. Paul Hume praised the Minnesotans as “One of the most perfectly disciplined troupes to be seen on any dramatic stage,” while Irving Lowens at the Washington Star called Faust an “insuf-

ferably pretentious bore.” Lowens, it should be noted, placed some of the blame for the evening’s failure on the venue itself, where “planes, cars and vast distances” continually broke “what few magic spells the players managed to weave.” As for the alternate production, the Thomson-Stein opera, The Mother of us All, Donal Henahan’s thumbs up in the New York Times was typical: “The sprightly little Minneapolis troupe performed the opera with great wit and panache Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at Hunter College Assembly Hall.” Balk had restaged the work, first seen at the Guthrie Theater in 1967, making it more dreamlike and surreal than the earlier version, which had been designed as a colorful, Fourth of July pageant. Balk’s new staging, with a smaller cast of just eight singers and a more portable set, was designed for touring, though it opened with five performances at the Center Village Theater in Minneapolis.

In 1972 the company presented performances in several cities of Dominick Argento’s Postcard From Morocco, which had premiered in Minneapolis the year before. After performances at the Benedicta Arts Center in St. Joseph, Minnesota, the company traveled to Texas, playing dates in both Houston and Galveston, and then finished with a return visit to the Lake George Opera Festival .The critic for the newspaper in Lake George was especially impressed with the performance by soprano Sarita Roche, who sang the role she created, “The Lady with the Hand Mirror.”

“Miss Roche,” said the critic, “is not one of those ‘bird’ lyrics but a lyric soprano with

razor-sharp cutting edge in the voice, which is put to good use dramatically.”

In addition, there were performances of Postcard in Chicago in 1971 and a trip some months later to Kansas City to do the much admired Conrad Susa opera Transformations. The Chicago Postcard was a disaster, more or less. The two performances were given in the 6,000-seat Chicago Auditorium before an intrepid audience of about three hundred. According to the critic for Chicago Today, people “left in droves” during the show, which was especially awkward since Postcard is performed without an intermission.

Six years later the cast of Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, a work premiered at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium in the spring of 1976, traveled to Baltimore, Poe’s hometown and the setting for the opera.

Not long ago three old friends, veteran travelers, all of them—Janis Hardy, Vern Sutton, and Gale Sharpe—spent an afternoon at Janis’s house reminiscing about their days as members of Minnesota Opera. Vern Sutton, a prominent singer, educator, and stage director, performed in Center Opera’s debut production in 1964 of Dominick Argento’s A Masque of Angels, and he didn’t say farewell to the company until twenty-one years later, again in a new work of Argento’s, Casanova’s Homecoming.

Janis Hardy, a much-admired mezzo-soprano and teacher, performed in more than twenty

Minnesota Opera productions from 1970 to 1987. A frequent collaborator with Sutton, she made radio history when she sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” in a special trio arrangement with the revered canine warbler Freckles the Dog.

Gale Sharpe worked for the company from 1969 to 1980 in a bevy of positions: secretary, production coordinator, business manager, company manager and den mother on the company tours. It has been said that if you really want to know where the bodies are buried, ask Gale.

Sipping cold Frappucino and hot tea with lemon—a singer’s drink—these three friends and colleagues of more than forty years shared memories of what it was like to work in a feisty avant-garde opera company in the Twin Cities in the ‘60s and ‘70s. They hoped also to correct a few of what they consider to be misapprehensions that have built up over the years concerning the company’s history. Much laughter and even a few tears ensued.

The talk turned to touring.

Janis Hardy: When we were in San Francisco with Faust Counter Faust there was pushing and shoving on opening night. People were furious. More conventional opera goers were livid. Other people loved it.

Gale Sharpe: Spring Opera asked for it even before it opened here. Kurt Herbert Adler, the head of the company, called John Ludwig and said, “We’d like you to come and be

a part of our Spring Opera.”

JH: Faust Counter Faust was Wesley‘s concept. It was about someone going through psychotherapy. That’s when Vern walked onstage in his diaper.

Vern Sutton: I would describe it as a tender maid’s bikini. I was backstage in San Francisco when the stagehands were unpacking the costumes. When they pulled out my little outfit, one of them said, “And whose costume is this?” I said, “The leading man’s. And they went, “Ohhh. They’re gonna talk about this one.

Minnesota Opera: Gale, would you tell us the famous, suspense-filled tale of what happened at Lake George?

GS: We were in Lake George doing The Mother of Us All. We had a couple of cars. Philip, Wesley, Sarita, and Barbara went downtown to do some shopping. When they finished and got back in the car, the first thing that Philip noticed was that his score was gone. It was the only one of its kind, and he was very upset. They drove back to the school where we were performing and called the police. We told them the score was missing and that there would be a reward. Later, after dinner, I got back in the car and said, “This isn’t our car.” They said, “Sure it is. It’s the one we drove over here.” I said, “It’s not the one we rented.” It turned out that Wesley had, in fact, gotten into the wrong car, and it was just a coincidence that our keys fit the other car. We drove back downtown, and there was our car. So I called the police

again and said, “Did anyone report a stolen car?’ They said “Yes,” I said, “We just solved two of your crimes.”

MA: While we’re on the subject of mishaps on the road, we hope Janis will tell us about her injury in Houston.

JH: We were doing Postcard, and I was in this scene with Barry Busse. He was supposed to punch me. It was a stage punch. I said to him, “Barry, you’re getting so far away from me, no one believes this punch anymore. You’ve got to come in closer.” So he did, and just before he swung, I stuck my face out and he really smashed me. Not only was my nose bloody, but he had ruptured some blood vessels.

VS: We were all horrified.

JH: The funny thing was at that point in the show I’m supposed to go up to everybody onstage and get sympathy. Each of them would see me and go . . . “Woawww.” And Philip was onstage conducting. The tempos took a real dive there for a moment.

GS: That got a lot of attention in the news.

JH: That’s because there was a newspaper convention in town, and so my injury became a little blurb at the end of news reports because it was on the police roll: “Opera Singer Gets Punched in the Nose.” And this went all over the country. People were sending me notes. Actually, what happened the night my nose was broken was Gale called and asked

for a police escort to get us to the hospital because there was a big traffic jam at this outdoor amphitheater nearby. So the plan was that Wesley would follow the police car to get us out of there. Gale jumped into the police car and everyone got excited because they thought she was the person who was injured. So they took off with their siren going, leaving Wesley and me in the lurch. As a result Gale and the police got to the hospital an hour before we did.

The company resumed touring in the winter of 1978–79 but with a new concept, a company devoted solely to touring. Donizetti’s oneact comic opera Viva La Mama was the debut production of this new company called the Minnesota Opera Touring Ensemble, which performed that winter in numerous towns in Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota. Richard Hudson, a Balk protégé, officiated as the company’s producer, manager, and director while Jere Lantz served as music director. The young cast was drawn from the company’s Opera Studio. Encouraged by the company’s success that first season, the project continued a year later with Gregory Sandow’s version of A Christmas Carol. But by then the company had expanded and, under its new director, Peter Myers, became the Midwest Opera Theater and School. A St. Paul native, Myers joined Minnesota Opera in 1975 and held several positions with the company. He had become intrigued with the idea of opera tours.

Peter Myers recalled, “This was a time, the late ‘70s, when opera companies were hit-

ting the road. Houston Grand Opera and San Francisco Opera—New York City Opera as well—had formed their own touring companies: smaller-scale productions usually with pianos and younger singers. They had formed their own non-profits because the National Endowment for the Arts had opened a new funding category for touring companies, but to get the money they had to be independent companies. So Midwest Opera Theater and School was formed as a legal entity.”

To learn how such a company works, Myers visited the Texas Opera Theater in Houston, interviewing people and observing the mechanics of a successful touring company. On returning home, he presented a proposition to general manager Dolores Johnson: if the company would provide use of the costume and scenery shops and would release him from his other jobs, he would raise his own salary and secure the funding. Dolores liked the idea and passed it on to the board, which approved it. Hudson was to be stage director and artistic director and Jere Lantz would continue as music director. Myers would seek the bookings, organize the tours, do the PR and raise funds. Myers, Lantz, and Hudson held auditions in New York every year, but most of the roles were cast locally, usually out of the Opera Studio.

Typically, the tours offered two fully staged productions over a period of six weeks from late September to mid-November, and this was usually repeated in the spring, along with a six-week residency tour to eighteen Min-

nesota communities and a composer-in-residence program. (One year two composers went into six Minnesota schools to work with students on the creation and production of their own original operetta.) The ensemble numbered about fifteen people—tech crew, musicians, singers, and Myers, who came along on all the tours. They traveled with a couple of vans and a twenty-four-foot Ryder rental truck for the sets, which were specially designed for the tours. Normally the venues were at a high school, a college, or a civic theater. The company received a grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts each year. The annual budget came to about $350,000.

Gary Briggle, a tenor who joined the Opera Studio in 1975 right out of college (St. Olaf), toured with the company for five years. Gary recalled: “Talk about opportunities. We did a nine-person 3 Penny Opera. We did an adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro called Figaro in the Courtroom, which allowed us to do scenes out-of-order in a courtroom setting. And I directed several productions, including The Magic Flute. So for me the chief motivation behind Midwest Opera Theater was theater experience along with audience development and education. We would stay in a university town for four or five days, teaching all day and then performing at night.”

Occasionally, of course, things went wrong. Peter Myers recalled a production in 1983 of the comic opera Don Pasquale:

We had a perfect Don Pasquale, a singer named Rush Tully. He nailed the role. But we didn’t have the money for understudies, so we just traveled on a wing and a prayer, basically. And we were lucky until one day in the middle of the tour, Rush got very, very sick from food poisoning and was out of commission for many days. There were dates coming up, and one of them we were able to push back, but there were a lot of others we had to fulfill, and we simply couldn’t perform. This was probably the most stressful thing I ever experienced. We consulted with Minnesota Opera and others around the country, saying, who knows this particular translation of Don Pasquale? Finally, through the network, we found this guy, Carl Glaum. He had done the role and in the same translation. I got him on the phone. ‘Are you able to come to Minneapolis, like, tomorrow?’ He was, and he flew right to where we were performing, in Wisconsin somewhere. All he had time for was a walk-through before the show. Well, he did the role beautifully. The cast sort of moved him around the stage. Afterward he said, ‘I can’t believe what I just did.’ I said, ‘Neither can I, but I’m sure thankful you did.’

Perhaps the oddest on-the-road story, one that continues to be recounted among theatrical cognoscenti in various backstage dressing rooms and pool halls—wherever actors raise a glass and reminisce—took place fifty years ago at Hunter College in New York City. A well-dressed audience, having heard enticing reports of a boldly experimental theatrical troupe from faraway and frozen Minneapolis, was gathered in the school’s

auditorium eager to see this nervy re-telling of the Faust legend, a sly multimedia piece, a quasi-opera with large resonances titled Faust Counter Faust. Vern Sutton, a tenor of most singular capability, played the central character, John Faust. He tells what really happened:

The thing about that role is I never left the stage. In fact, I had to be onstage when the theater opened, lying under a sheet. Then they would come onstage and give me an injection after the theater had opened and the audience got settled. The injection revives me and then we do the first half. And then I collapse, and I’m on the floor. They cover me up and go out for the intermission. So I’m just lying there on the floor. People seeing it at the Guthrie would say to each other, ‘Is he really asleep?’ Then they would come back and revive me again, and we would do the second act. It was a challenging role. The problem at Hunter was I had to dress in the gym and walk through the halls to get to the stage, which I did, and a guard stopped me. Here I was, wearing nothing but a tiny bikini walking barefoot down the hall of the college building. He was going to arrest me. Gale had to come and save me. I kept saying to the guard, ‘I’m in the show.’ He said, ‘Sure you are.’

WESLEY BALK

Wesley Balk, whose bold, restless spirit defined Minnesota Opera In the company’s first two decades and whose innovative methods of training singer-actors have influenced generations of performers, died at the veteran’s home in Minneapolis the morning of March 21, 2003. The cause of death was complications of Parkinson’s disease. Balk was seventy.

Born in St. Paul and educated at Bemidji State College and the Yale School of Drama, Balk directed more than sixty productions for Minnesota Opera, of which he became artistic director in 1965, when the company was Center Opera. He staged more than a dozen productions at the University of Minnesota, where he was a professor of theater arts from 1966 to 1993. Through the years his work was seen at the New York City Opera, San Francisco Opera, and the Santa Fe Opera, among others. In 1982, he received the Award for Service to American Opera from the National Opera Institute. To those who knew him and worked with him, Balk was charismatic, inspiring, relentless, daunting, stubborn, playful, provocative, enigmatic, single-minded, brilliant—and that was just the first impression. He had enemies as well as friends; he seemed to thrive on both. He loved limericks as much as he loved Shakespeare and Mozart.

His last years were sad ones. He learned to cope with Parkinson’s disease, which surfaced in 1984, and until 2002 remained active as director of performer development for the New Music-Theater Ensemble, headed

by his protégé Ben Krywosz. Balk’s memory and techniques continue each summer in the Wesley Balk Opera/Music Theater Institute founded in 1978. (The “H” in H. Wesley Balk, the name Balk sometimes preferred, stood for Howard.)

“Wes was a true hero to me, a theatrical genius,” said baritone James McKeel, a composer and a professor of music at St. Olaf College who performed with Minnesota Opera off and on from 1976 to 1994. “Working with Wes was like working with a perfect blend of Robert Altman and David Lynch. He had such a fiercely original vision for productions and performance style but was also very collaborative in the moment. For me he was always a dream director because he welcomed you in the process and took you on an adventure.”

The company’s Opera Studio, aimed at the training of young singer-actors, gained momentum in the mid-’70s, and gradually began to draw more of Balk’s focus until, by the mid-’80s, training and education were his major activities. In June 1976, the Studio received a grant of $128,000 from the Bush Foundation. A year earlier, a young tenor, Gary Briggle, who had just graduated from St. Olaf College, was asked by Charles Fullmer to audition for the Studio, which he did, and he was accepted into the program.

The experience changed his life, Briggle said:

It was clear that we were going to be guinea pigs in Wesley’s examination of the skills

employed by the best singing-actors in the business—Maria Callas, Teresa Stratas. What was it that made these artists so sublime? Wesley was trying to devise exercises that took apart all those skills: singing, acting, movement or, as he came to talk about it later, the face, the voice, the body, all of them expressive modes, as he called them. This had never been done before. No one had ever in an analytical way taken the watch apart, looked at all the pieces, cleaned them up, then put them back together to create the complete singer-actor. And that meant, in addition to being cast in small roles and ensembles in all the operas that season, which we were paid to do, we were in class from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon.

I remember Wesley said to me at my firstyear evaluation, ‘You know, Gary, I’ll never be able to do as much for you as a teacher or a friend if you don’t take me down off this pedestal you have me on.’ It was true. He was on a pedestal. He was the master, the guru. He was charismatic. He looked at me with that Mephistophelian goatee and eyebrows, and he let me know that he meant every word he said about doing this work, and he meant to give me the tools to do it.

James McKeel, like Gary, started out as a member of the Studio. “The sense of ‘play’ in the Studio was so important,” McKeel said. “To take opera singers, who need a lot of technical grounding, and to unleash them emotionally, dramatically and comically was very liberating. They even arranged for us

to have Alexander Technique sessions to align our bodies and loosen up. It was amazing to see twenty-, thirty- and forty-yearold people suddenly so relaxed that they would burst into tears or become aroused or break into uncontrollable laughter. Every adult needs this.”

Dan Dressen, tenor, associate provost and professor of music at St. Olaf College, performed with Minnesota Opera and the New Music-Theater Ensemble (and the later Nautilus Music-Theater) from 1981 to 2010. “There has never been a director who worked with individual singers and actors to develop character and technique and expressivity the way Wesley did,” Dressen said. “That’s what Wesley’s strength was: digging down into the human level of a person on stage. He became the go-to person back in the late ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. And I continue to use his books in my teaching at St. Olaf.”

Balk said he kept encountering damaged singers. He wrote about it in the August 1990 issue of the New York Opera Newsletter. “They were damaged in the sense of being so traumatized judgmentally, and so afraid of exploring and opening to new experiences, I was horrified,” Balk wrote. “They were giving about 25 percent of what they were capable of. I became more and more aware that we have a wide epidemic of judgmental, destructive, controlling ways of working. They’re so locked up that they literally can’t move their faces at first. Eliminating that tension is an important first step. It’s a self-acceptance issue. At its worst, it’s say-

ing, ‘I’m not good enough the way I am, so I have to do something extra to be this model performer.’ That we have to change, and gradually we did change it for many singers.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Balk, a thirty-two-year-old graduate student on leave from Yale University, became a star in the opera world practically overnight in January of 1965 when he made his debut with the Center Opera production of Karl Orff’s satiric fable The Wise Woman and the King. TIME magazine devoted a full page to the show, describing it as “one of the most engaging productions of the US opera season.” The opera’s resounding success is due in large measure, it said, “to the brilliantly imaginative staging of H. Wesley Balk, who views the fable as a discourse on spiritual realities, which run from earthy paganism to ethereal mysticism and back again, with lots of love, lust, violence and cruelty in between.”

Job offers quickly appeared, one of them from New York City Opera director Julius Rudel to stage Wise Woman at the summer festival in Mt. Kisco, New York, and another to direct Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio at the City Opera in the fall of 1966. Balk completed his doctoral dissertation that year, The Meaning of Music in the Mozart Operas: Its Dramatic Realization by the Stage Director, and was offered an assistant professorship at the University of California, which he turned down in favor of a similar position in the theater department of the University of Minnesota. By then, John Ludwig, manager of Center Opera, had named Balk resident

director of the young company.

Balk said at the time he took the teaching position because the Center Opera job didn’t pay enough to live on. The course he put together right away, titled Acting for the Lyric Stage, was hard to get into, recalled Brian Ann Zoccola, an actress and writer now living in Los Angeles. “I remember how important it was to get into that class,” she said. “You had to be a graduate student, which I wasn’t. I followed Wes around everywhere on campus and kept pleading with him to let me in, and finally he did. I learned more in that class than in any other acting class I’ve ever taken because he used music and movement to get to the core of a role.”

Praise for Balk’s work continued when the company went on the road. Donal Henahan of the New York Times wrote of Balk’s staging of The Mother Of Us All, “H. Wesley Balk’s direction, wittily contemporary and yet not offensively ‘with it,’ scored triumph upon triumph in underlining the sense of score and text.”

Not everyone was impressed. The loudest of Balk’s detractors was the composer Dominick Argento, who thought Balk’s stagings over-emphasized dramatic values at the expense of music. He didn’t like the Center Opera productions, all of which Balk directed, and he seemed irked whenever they were reviewed favorably, especially by out-of-town critics. And so, in 1971, when plans were made for the company to give the premiere of Argento’s Postcard from Mo-

rocco, the composer asked that someone else be the director. Recalling the event in 2018, Argento said, “By then I had developed such an animus toward Balk that I made it a condition that I would have my old director, John Olon-Scrymgeour, direct it.” In the end, John Donahue, who wrote the libretto, staged the opera.

Philip Brunelle, who became music director in 1968, a position he held for seventeen years, thought similarly. “Wesley was a very strong person,” Brunelle said in an interview in 2017. “Working with him, you had to be equally strong or else you’d be just run over like a truck. The big challenge for me was to say, ’Wesley, staging is really important, but you know what? So is singing.’”

Balk always claimed that he tried to keep drama and music in balance. Most opera productions, he said, lack sensitivity either to music or to theater. People who worked with Balk or studied with him at the University of Minnesota and other places noted how sensitive he was to music, a quality not shared with many stage directors. It might be remembered that opera production had been largely a musical phenomenon for a couple of centuries—a concert in costumeˆso that careful attention to dramatic values, a trend just getting started In Europe and the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, might have been thought unusual. By most accounts, the singing voices during the first few years of Center Opera were not of a high caliber. Reviewing the 1967 production of The Mother of us All, Harold Schonberg of

the New York Times wrote that the quality of the singing “ranges from good to downright amateurish.” What impressed critics, local and otherwise, besides the wild and crazy designs, were the dramatic values, the meticulous staging (an hour of rehearsal for each minute in performance, they claimed), and the physical freedom the singers displayed. All told, it was the sheer improbability of this whole enterprise hidden away in the frozen Upper Midwest that intrigued audiences and impressed visitors. It wasn’t the voices that impressed them, though by the early ’70s they were improving.

The other complaint about Balk, one seldom acknowledged, at least not publicly, was the frequent casting of his wife, Barbara Brandt, in most of the dramatic soprano roles from the late ’60s to the early ’80s. Perhaps this was the inevitable result of the ensemble system, whereby a group of singers is hired for the season, extra roles being hired out individually. Brunelle said he mentioned it to Balk on one occasion, saying that Barbara was sometimes cast in roles she wasn’t suited for. “He got furious with me. ‘Oh, I would never,’ he said, ‘never think of Barbara for a role she wasn’t suited for.’ Oh, yes, he would.”

The stories about Barbara onstage and the many mishaps that plagued her are legion. They could fill a slim volume. No one, however, denied her talent, the sheer beauty of her voice, or the intense commitment she brought to a role. “I idolized her,” said Janis Hardy. “I was about ten years younger than she. I’ll never forget her singing in Faust

Counter Faust. I wept every night. It was glorious, the way she sang those high pianissimos. She was electrifying.”

According to Barbara’s son, Gean Halstead, Barbara was aware of occasional grumblings in the company over the fact that Balk cast her in most of the main soprano roles. “My mother was very sensitive about that,” Gean said. “She would take notes from Wesley, but sometimes it was tough for her, trying not to get too bent out of shape if he was critical of her. Wesley seemed almost immune to it, though I think he was less immune to it later. In my view, he did pay attention to what people said. Both Wesley and Barbara in their later years referred to their work with Minnesota Opera as their biggest moments in life, and that’s what they wanted to be known for.”

Barbara and Wesley met in 1965 when she won the Minnesota Metropolitan Opera auditions. Though both were married at the time, a romance developed. They eventually separated from their spouses and were married in 1968. Gean’s father was given custody of the three children, Gean and his two sisters, who then moved in with their father, who had remarried and was living in northern Minnesota. As time went on, Gean’s visits to Minneapolis during holidays and in the summer to spend time with his mother and Wesley became more frequent, and so when he was fifteen, both families agreed that Gean would be happier if he moved in permanently with Barbara and Wesley. He did so and eventually graduated from West

High in Minneapolis and took a degree in music at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

Gean was asked: when someone says the name Wes Balk, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? “A dramatic influence,” he said, “a mentor and an amazing man. He was a positive influence on so many people. I remember so many times, there would be, like, a flat tire or something would break in the house, he would say, ‘It’s just money’ or ‘It’s just time.’ He would dismiss things that other people saw as roadblocks to life. Even when he got Parkinson’s later, he said, ‘You know, I’ll get through it,” and he started writing limericks and dancing. His whole journey with Parkinson’s was amazing.”

Gean still maintains a close relationship with his father, who was ninety-one in 2021. He considered Wesley to be his stepfather. “And Wes had several different chapters with my mother, through singing and new age healing.” he said. “And they traveled through Europe together in a van doing new age-type things. They got divorced and remarried. They had a tumultuous life together. I got to work on librettos with my mother for her roles. And people like Conrad Susa and Bob Israel would come by and I would hear the logistics of what they were working on. For Wesley, it was always about wanting something unique. He wanted to create something fresh.”

By the early ’80s Wesley was losing interest in Minnesota Opera’s mainstage productions.

The repertoire was turning traditional, which he didn’t care about, and even more so when the Metropolitan Opera tour ended in 1986. Wesley turned to his other great interest, the training of singers, which engaged him for the rest of his life. “He thought that would be his legacy,” Gean said. “The focus would be on the artform itself rather than on production and on the politics of it that had started to take over.”

Wesley spent a year in New York City teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, then returned to Minneapolis where he continued on the faculty at the University of Minnesota until 1993 and also working with the New Music-Theater Ensemble. Starting in the 1980s Barbara devoted herself to new age therapies, most notably the radiance technique—an energy-balancing process, as Gean described it—and for a while maintained a studio in New York City.

They were a glamorous and brilliant and eccentric couple: Wesley and Barbara. At their peak—probably the ’70s, the Minnesota Opera years—they were local stars. They could light up a room. Wesley’s career, of course, extended way beyond the Twin Cities, and his influence lives on. What sustained their mystique well beyond the ’70s was that no one was sure where they were or what they were doing. It was all rumor and wild surmise: Barbara was down-and-out in Florida, Wesley was learning to levitate. Barbara changed her last name to Aurora. (That one was true.) We finally have Gean to tell us what really happened.

The two of them bought a beach-front condo in St. Pete’s in Florida in the late ’70s, maybe the early ’80s. There was a question of how this could work financially. Then a hurricane came through and wiped out the beach. The property values dropped 40 percent. So they both lost the property, and in the process the marriage got lost, too. And so they went their separate ways, and there was quite a lot of bitterness between them for a while. At that time I was living in New York, but I visited them both regularly, and it was only later that my mother, well, the Radiance business was running down. It wasn’t as lucrative as it had been. And then Wes’s Parkinson’s came into play. And that was a struggle. But over time, in about ten years, they remarried. But it was more a marriage of convenience. They were actually taking care of one another, and at the end that didn’t work very well, either. And Wesley married another person in between those times. He had a lot of relationships throughout his career.

Barbara Aurora (Brandt) died of natural causes on January 30, 2022, at a long-term care residence in Minneapolis just a few days shy of her 86th birthday. Gean briefly pursued a career in music and is now director of information technology at a restaurant chain in the Twin Cities.

Wesley’s Parkinson’s surfaced in 1984. He dealt with it with courage, fortitude ,and wit. And he continued working with the Nautilus New Music-Theater Ensemble up until a year before he died.

WESLEY BALK

Gary Briggle recalled Balks final years:

It was heartbreaking for us to see Wesley steadily diminished by his disease, and yet he made himself kind of a—for want of a better word—lab guinea pig for possible techniques, surgeries, drugs, and they took a terrible toll on him. Some of the things were botched, and they damaged him and made it worse. And some things gave him periods of respite. Wesley danced with Parkinson’s for many years and outlived all of the predictions of doctors who said, ‘OH, you won’t live five years.’ Well, he went on and on and on. I brought him to Lyric Opera Cleveland in ’98 to teach a week of master classes with my apprentices, and you wouldn’t believe it. I would pick him up in the morning, and he was, literally, infirm in his bed. We would get breakfast and then start classes around one o’clock in the afternoon, and by that time he had rallied in such a dazzling way that he captivated twelve young artists just like he had captivated me in 1975 for three hours at a time. And then he was spent. But he would rise to any opportunity to see a human being fulfill and exceed their potential. And, you know, Wesley was a complicated man. When I first met him he was an intimidating guru, and I think he sort of enjoyed that. But within a decade he had begun to dismantle the ego part of it. And part of his spiritual journey was to leave his ego out of the equation as a teacher and as a human being. It was quite a transformation. He seemed so unburdened when he began to face the power of ego and all that. He didn’t require it. I knew it gave him joy to be, as they say, the kinder, gentler

Wesley that he really was in his later life.

Four of Balk’s books remain in print: The Complete Singer-Actor, Performing Power, The Radiant Performer, and The Dramatization of 365 Days. Are the books Balk’s chief legacy?” It seems they continue to be used in the training of singers.

Gary Briggle said: “Wherever I direct across the country, whether the singers are in their late ’30s or late ’40s or late ’50s, I always acknowledge what Wesley taught me, and what I love is the lightbulb joy and excitement that goes on when people say, ‘You studied with Wesley Balk?’ I’m always moved and grateful to say, ‘Yes, I did. I sang with him. I studied with him. And I got my Masters at the University when he was head of the acting department. He was my friend and my mentor.’ And they go off speaking fluent Balk.”

On the evening of May 19, 2003, just two months after Wesley died, about one hundred and fifty friends, students, colleagues, and family members gathered at Rarig Center at the University of Minnesota for a party in Wesley’s honor titled A Celebration of Life. “Wesley asked for this before he died and stressed that it be a celebration not of him but of life,” said Ben Krywosz, a protégé and colleague of Wesley’s and a devoted friend for more than twenty years. People chatted for an hour at a reception, then moved to the Rarig Theater for a program of music and stories with Charles Nolte, the playwright and teacher, acting as master of ceremo-

nies. To start if off, soprano Jennifer Baldwin Peden, mezzo-soprano Christina Baldwin and baritone Bradley Greenwald, with Sonja Thompson at the piano, sang a favorite of Wesley’s, the “Farewell Trio,” from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (“May breezes blow lightly . . . As we say farewell”). Many stories were told, some funny, some sad.

“Wesley was a seeker,” Krywosz told the audience. “To him, the new was always better than the old, the innovative more interesting than the traditional, the unpredictable more engaging than the known.” Krywosz recalled a lunch in 1986 at Calhoun Square with Wesley and music director Ann Baltz. They had just wrapped up the summer Institute. “Afterwards, we were headed back to the parking lot,” said Krywosz. “In order to get there, we had to go up to the second floor. So Ann and I dutifully mounted the up escalator, only to turn around and see Wesley valiantly running up the down escalator, laughing triumphantly. Of course, he was met at the top of the stairs by a clueless young security guard, who chastised him for his transgression. Wesley just laughed, and that was his relationship to the opera field: he was always running up the down escalator.”

The evening ended with the entire audience singing “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide: “You taught us well / But now you’re gone / You’ve left us on our own. / So let us try, / Before we die, / To make ourselves a home.”

Wesley’s own words were quoted on the back page of the program: “I offer my deepest love and gratitude that each of you have been in my life in a deep and loving part of my journey. What a great adventure you and I have had, and what a privilege it has been to have known and loved you all.”

WESLEY

NEW WORKS INITIATIVE

In 2007, on the Monday after the final performance of The Grapes of Wrath, Patrick Dewane walked into company president Kevin Smith’s office and said, “So what’s next? We’re really good at this.”

As Minnesota Opera’s development director and chief fundraiser, Patrick Dewane had played a large part in raising the money to commission and produce this new opera which, by all measures, had been a rousing success and had brought a new enthusiasm and energy to a company that had built its reputation on doing new and unusual work. But that was then. The company’s last commission was Bok Choy Variations in 1995, more than a decade ago. In some eyes, Minnesota Opera had turned into yet another regional opera company, unsurprising and bland, churning out the same old standard rep for the benefit of the same ever-aging audience eager to show off their new outfits on opening night and trying desperately to stay awake.

Two things had energized Dewane. One was the success of The Grapes of Wrath. The other was a decade-long series begun in 1990 at the Chicago Lyric Opera titled “Toward the Twenty-first Century.” Conceived by Lyric Opera’s general manager Ardis Krainik, the program was to include two twentieth-century operas each season: ten by American composers and ten by Europeans, with newly commissioned works along the way. Krainik chose Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe to kick off the series in October of 1990, a work Minnesota Opera

premiered in 1976.

“I told Kevin [Smith] we can’t wait another ten years to do a new opera,” Dewane said. “That’s when I mentioned Ardis’s ‘Toward the Twenty-first Century.’ She created that program in response to heat from the field about the big companies just giving work to dead composers. And I also pushed for a fund for digital distribution because it annoyed me that the Met was using twenty-first-century technology to distribute nineteenth-century opera. My vision was to take it a step further: to distribute twenty-first-century opera with twenty-first-century technology and to focus on living composers for a change.”

Kevin Smith talked to artistic director Dale Johnson about Patrick’s idea. Both of them liked it, as did various staff members and board chair Jane Confer. “Jane was absolutely the right person to be board chair at the time because she embraced it,” Dewane said.

“Well, I was probably in their camp to begin with,” Jane Confer said, “because of how successful Grapes of Wrath had been, and I felt there were other stories and other opportunities out there that we could make an equally strong impact with. I mean, the company had done some really fine work the past few years. They were well chosen and well cast, but they weren’t new. I thought it was time to change that.”

“Besides, it was in our roots,” Dwane said. “We played on that in our fundraising with the Mellon Foundation and the Seaver Insti-

tute in Los Angeles and the National Endowment for the Arts and the others. This is in our DNA. The company was founded in 1963 with a new work” (Argento’s The Masque of Angels).

With Smith’s go-ahead, Dewane formed a committee that would oversee the project, which was to be called OperaWorks, a title soon changed to the more sober New Works Initiative. Tom McBurney was the committee chair. The plan called for three commissioned works and four revivals of important recent operas, one each year. The original funding goal was $5 million, which quickly became $5.5 million, then $7 million. Dewane made the case to Kevin Smith that if the New Works committee raised $7 million, then none of the money for these new works would have to come out of the company’s budget. Should that happen, it likely would mean eliminating one of the mainstage productions that had been scheduled, dropping from five productions to four.

“Bear in mind, this planning was taking place at the time of the ’08 market crash,” said Dewane, who then offered an intricate metaphor. “I said, ‘Kevin, we can’t have a healthy flea and a sick dog.’ I explained. ‘The company is the dog. The New Works Initiative is the flea. We want the flea to pay its own way, not to be a parasite on the company.”

The first installment, unveiled at the Ordway Feb. 28, 2009, was a flea from England, the American premiere of The Adventures of Pinocchio by Jonathan Dove, a work of con-

siderable charm with a libretto by Alasdair Middleton, cleverly staged by Martin Duncan with imaginative sets and costumes by Francis O’Connor. Pinocchio wasn’t a blockbuster in the manner of The Grapes of Wrath, but it was an enjoyable work, and Dove’s score was full of pungent effects and happy surprises.

“The real burn on the money is commissioning and then developing the work,” Dewane said, “because then you’re flying in all the people. You’re putting them up. They’re workshopping it, and then there’s the rehearsals and everything. In the case of Pinocchio, most of that was paid for by the Brits. But then we had to pay the co-production fee.” The set was designed and built in England, then shipped to Minnesota.

Having the money in hand before even the commissions were handed out was a circumstance almost unheard of in the American opera world. It relieved the New Works team, including Dale Johnson and Kevin Smith, of any anxiety about whether they could pay for the works they had already commissioned and had begun developing. Seated in his office one afternoon, Johnson reflected on the problem.

Opera in this country has been stymied because rather than having the freedom that, let’s say, the Esterhazys had in Haydn’s day, we’ve been hampered by having to fundraise so much that the creation stagnated. So when we came up with this, and it was really the brainchild of Kevin and Patrick, what if we were to say, ‘We’re going to raise

a pile of money. What would you do with it?’ That’s how it got started. And it was inspired by the fact that it took so long for us to get Grapes of Wrath off the ground. And that, at the same time makes you less cautious. If you have the money, then you can actually invest.

In other words, with the money in hand, you can take chances. “You can think,” Dale said. “And that’s why, instead of investing in seven new operas, I thought it was important not only for us but for other companies to revive operas that have been done and then went away. Casanova, which I think is one of the great pieces, why isn’t anybody doing it? So we decided to do it. Same thing with Valentino and Wuthering Heights, which I think is a terrific opera. They all just went away. I thought it was important for us as an opera company to invest in our own history.”

In July 2014, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave Minnesota Opera a grant of $750,000 to support upcoming commissions of three works, The Manchurian Candidate, The Shining, and Dinner at Eight. The gift, which was planned to stretch over three years, completed fundraising for the company’s $7 million New Works Initiative. Marc Campbell would write the libretto for all three works.

In an interview in 2018, Kevin Smith described the process in creating new works. ”Dale’s job was to come up with artistic plans, which included repertoire and new works,” he said. “And when it came to new

works, he would formulate a series of ideas, like, I’m really interested in this book or this subject. He would talk about that and then about composers and librettists and all those things. He took the lead on all that stuff. That was his job as artistic director. We did work together on those things, but we were really working off his ideas, and I think he came up with some really good ones. I give him tremendous credit for that. But we still had to be together on those things. We had to raise money and we had to produce them. I was out there looking for co-producers and dealing with rights. But it was a collaborative process. Even so, he took the lead on it, and generally, I supported him, unless there was a reason not to.”

Margaret Wurtele replaced Tom McBurney as chair of the New Works Initiative committee in 2009. Wurtele recalled first hearing an aria from Silent Night. “I’ll never forget it,” she said. “We had a gathering at Garrison Keillor’s house, and Kevin Puts was there and a singer who sang an aria from the opera. It was about a soldier sitting in the trenches writing home about the people who had been killed. It was the most beautiful piece, and he sang it so well. It was the first time Kevin had written for the human voice, which is amazing, and then he won the Pulitzer. And Mark has done other works for Minnesota Opera.”

“As far as the New Works Initiative, it was really Dale’s baby,” Wurtele continued. “He was the artistic director. At our meetings, he would bring maybe four or five ideas he

was exploring or getting the rights to. And we would react to it. I mean, if the committee had said, ‘We think that’s a terrible idea,’ would he have done it? Probably not. But we were there mainly to raise money. The people on the committee had either contributed or were likely to contribute. And for the first round we raised $7 million that went into these pieces. So it was an education for the people on the committee, a fascinating education. We were entirely supportive. We gave our opinions—he could feel from us how things would be received—but it was very much his thing.”

SHERILL MILNES

Sherrill Milnes, surely the most respected Verdi baritone of his generation, took a walk on the wild side in 1998, singing the role of Ajax, a crooked oil baron in the American composer George Antheil’s darkly satiric opera Transatlantic, which was given its American premiere that year by Minnesota Opera.

Speaking by phone from Savannah, Georgia, where in the summer of 2021 he was teaching and running a music festival, Milnes, an energetic eighty-six, reminisced about his experience doing Transatlantic and about his years performing at Northrop Auditorium as part of the annual Metropolitan Opera tours.

The plan in 1998 was for the production to travel to the New York City Opera after its run in St. Paul. But the move never happened. It was rumored that City Opera ran out of money.

Milnes: Yeah, that’s weird. But then Antheil himself was weird. Transatlantic was premiered in Frankfurt, Germany in, I believe, 1930. Even though it was critical of the American election system, Hitler thought it was too American and so [Antheil] killed it. Antheil was born in New Jersey. They say he used to put a pistol on his piano when he was playing a recital to keep the audience quiet. He was a little cuckoo and his music is a little cuckoo.

“It’s an interesting piece. Certainly the story’s interesting. I got to play an obvious bad guy. Often baritones are bad guys in opera or at least are perceived as bad guys. This was

a cigar-smoking wealthy guy who throws money around just to sway elections, And so it was realistic in that regard, certainly more realistic than Trovatore or Traviata.

“Some of Antheil’s writing I found beautiful and interesting. In other parts of the score he is so dissonant, and so I made some changes. There were lots of minor 2nds. I would have a D-natural, and someone else would have a D-flat, and we would have to hold those notes, which was fatiguing on the throat and the brain. Mr. Antheil wasn’t around. So I made the changes on my own, which made life a little bit easier. He knew instruments, but he didn’t know the voice so well.

Minnesota Opera: Was this hard to learn?

Milnes: It was difficult, but I’m used to that. I play a lot of instruments.

MA: Was Ajax the Donald Trump of the 1930s?

Milnes: We’re not supposed to talk about religion or politics, but, in a manner of speaking, yes. He was a cigar-smoking boss. Of course, I couldn’t light the thing onstage, so I chewed on it and flicked off ashes that weren’t there.

MA: You were associated with the Met from 1965 to 1997 and you did many roles on the tour, probably the most memorable being the title role in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.

Milnes: Yes, Boccanegra was a great expe-

rience. I remember the steps backstage at Northrop going up to the dressing rooms. I enjoyed the tours. Since I was a lead singer, they would fly me in and out. If I was singing a role, they would fly me in the day before. For me it was easy, whereas for the crew on those productions, like the stagehands, they worked 24/7. I did that when I was in college in Des Moines. The Met used to come in and do two performances. I worked on some of those shows, moving sets around. The first time I saw George London, not knowing that I would get to know him later in life, he was in his Scarpia wig with the white powder. I was thrilled.

Milnes is currently a professor emeritus in voice at Northwestern University. He continues to give masterclasses, judge competitions, and serve as mentor to new generations of singers. With his wife, Maria Zouves, he co-founded and runs the Sherrill Milnes Voice Programs: the VOICExperience Foundation and the Savannah Voice Festival, which provides training for young performers. Milnes and his wife live in Florida.

“Did I ever tell you about Hiram and Peanuts?”

Barbara Field, Minnesota’s foremost playwright, was seated in her condominium in St. Louis Park on a sunny afternoon in July 2020, reminiscing about her collaboration with the composer Hiram Titus on an opera titled Rosina that Minnesota Opera premiered in 1980.

“Hiram’s father was an artist, though often not very fruitfully employed,” Barbara said. “His good friend was Charles Schulz who, of course, created Peanuts. If you look at Schroeder playing the piano, it’s Hiram. Hiram had a big head, just like his father, and there he is at the piano.”

Hiram and Barbara had both worked at the Children’s Theater, where Hiram was composer-in-residence, and at the Guthrie, where, from 1974 to 1981, Barbara was literary manager. Both were prolific. Hiram, who died in 2013 of complications from Parkinson’s disease, was an accomplished pianist who composed scores for theater, film, television, dance and even theme parks. Barbara has written award-winning adaptations and original plays and continues her writing career at the age of eighty-seven. At the Guthrie they had worked together on Pantagleize and A Christmas Carol, but never on an opera.

“Hiram said, ‘Let’s write an opera,’” Barbara recalled, “and I said, ‘Sure.’ And all of a sudden money appeared. Some rich dudes came up with $10,000, of which I got two- or

three thousand, which was fine. It would never have occurred to me to write an opera.”

She thought about the operas she liked. She loved Mozart, and she loved Beaumarchais, whose plays were the basis for two operatic masterpieces, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and its sequel, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, two comic tales of sexual intrigue with political overtones. She thought about the famous characters in these operas—the irrepressible teenager Cherubino, the lecherous Count Almaviva and his long-suffering wife, the Countess, whom we first encounter in The Barber as Rosina. And she pondered the question: Who are these characters, really, and where would they be a year later?

“Well, we know at the end that the Count’s going to betray her again,” Barbara said. “And, actually, off-stage, he does betray her. So I thought: when we see her again, she has run off with Cherubino, who has left the army, and they’re living in Madrid in abject poverty, and they have a baby. He has become a painter, and all he paints is her. . . .

[Then] the Count, in disguise, comes hunting for the Countess. Disguise is what comedy’s all about. He wants her back. And, of course, right away, she sees through the disguise.”

In the end Rosina has to decide. Should she remain in Madrid with her young boyfriend, having to put up with increasingly diminished circumstances, giving up everything for love? Or should she take the baby with her, return to her husband, and resume a life that will be comfortable? Barbara chose

Door Number Two. Her Rosina opts for practicality—or let’s call it reality—rather than romance. In Barbara’s view the decision moved Rosina into the twentieth century.

“So she goes back to her husband,” Barbara said. “She knows that Cherubino is a kid and that he’ll fall for the next chick he sees. She makes the utterly practical decision that says life here might be fun, but it’s not going to get any better. Plus, by that time, she’s got her husband’s number, and I think she controls him now. So while it’s not ‘happily ever after,’ it isn’t ‘unhappily ever after’ either.”

The actual writing went quickly. “It was almost astonishing,” Barbara recalled. “I was a working girl. I was still at the Guthrie at that time. I would say I wrote it in a couple of months.”

Hiram’s music went quickly, too. The result from these two theater craftsmen was a work of substance—an opera about time, about aging and choice, filled with the autumnal moods and themes of Der Rosenkavalier. Hiram’s score occasionally evokes the melodic style of that Richard Strauss masterpiece, as well as a range of idioms from Mozart (the recitatives with harpsichord) to Stravinsky—the neoclassic, motoric rhythms of the orchestral writing in the opening scene. There is a Verdi-like duet for tenor and baritone and an attractive aria for the Count that might have come from Kismet. It seemed on opening night that certain dramatic moments in the story needed more specific characterization in the music, and yet Hi-

ram’s extensive theater-music background was so often apparent. He sets scenes capably and he knows how to cast language so that it can be understood, and he has an obvious gift for the ear-catching melodic line. “[Hiram] was very gifted,” said Field, “and a perfect Schroeder.”

First operas are rarely as successful as this one. It didn’t hurt that veteran designer Jack Barkla created a beautifully detailed set for the production, giving Rosina and Cherubino’s garret a kind of tattered Dickensian look. James Waters’ costumes added additional character to the show, which opened April 26, 1980, at the Guthrie Theater. The attractive and capable cast included soprano Sharon Daniels, who made Rosina’s plight as dignified and plausible as possible—though she was not totally secure vocally on opening night—while tenor Evan Bortnick was an ardent Cherubino with a firmly intoned, effortless lyric-tenor voice. Appearing in his thirty-ninth Minnesota Opera production, tenor Vern Sutton easily captured the funny side of Mendoza, the art dealer. Robert Orth was an imposing Almaviva.

Barbara described the creation of her first opera as “a marvelous experience.” And she called Wesley Balk, who staged the production “a perfect collaborator.” “And I loved Philip Brunelle, the music director,” she said. “He’s talented and benevolent.”

The versatile baritone James McKeel has had the rare privilege of playing the Count in both The Marriage of Figaro and Rosina,

both with the touring company. “I loved the characters and story in Rosina,” McKeel said. “It’s both moving and hilarious. By the time we get to this chapter in the life of the Count and the Countess, after she has left him and shacked up with Cherubino, the Count is truly repentant, a broken but still wily man who will do anything to get her back.”

Given its success in Minneapolis, it’s not surprising that Rosina has had a life. Minnesota Opera’s touring company took it on the road the following season, and since then there have been at least six productions, one at Cleveland Lyric and another at the Starlight in Milwaukee.

Barbara Field died of complications from a stroke Feb. 21, 2021.

SAINT PAUL OPERA AND THE MYTH OF THE MERGER

All was not calm at a certain conference room at the College of St. Catherine on the chilly morning of January 29, 1975. The board chairman of the St. Paul Opera Company had called an emergency meeting. A financial crisis was exploding and most of the board members—important men in town—didn’t know anything about it.

“I think we can become a great national force,” said one.

“Are you kidding?” said another. “We’re flat broke. We’re $300,000 in the hole. That’s why we laid off the staff last month and closed the office.”

“It’s impossible for anything to be put on this summer,” said a third, referring to the company’s 1975 season, which had already been announced. Four operas were to be presented at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium starting in June.

“But it’s hard to raise funds if we don’t have a season,” said one.

“The Jerome Foundation will give us $20,000 if we present a full season,” said another.

“If only some godfather were to show up in the next two or three weeks,” said a man in a wistful tone.

Somebody made a motion to cancel the season, and the motion passed. The decision to cancel was made without an opinion from George Schaefer, the company’s general

manager. Schaefer wasn’t at the meeting, which was strange. One board member speculated that he had resigned. Another said he had “unofficially” resigned. A third thought there had been a formal resignation.

Edward Clapp, the company’s financial vice president, said in an interview before the meeting, “The St. Paul Opera is definitely having financial problems, but this company has been having financial problems for forty-two years.” In 1969, St. Paul city officials ruled that the Civic Center Authority, which manages the St. Paul Auditorium, would only accept cash in advance from the opera company when it rented the auditorium for its productions. According to the Civic Center Authority the opera company hadn’t paid rent for two seasons and owed the Authority $34,000.

Clapp said the company hadn’t signed contracts with performers or directors, which it usually does in December, and this was because the company hadn’t received any contributions from its usual funding sources. Normally, they receive that money in September or October, Clapp said. The company had made nearly one hundred applications for funds from foundations and individuals and had received only one answer, and that was “No,” Clapp said.

The company is broke, Clapp said, laughing, “We call it dynamic insolvency.”

According to board members, Schaefer, the manager, had anticipated receiving a large

grant from the Gramma Fisher Foundation to help pay for the 1975 season and, with that in mind, he asked several board members to co-sign a short-term bank loan for $50,000 to cover expenses until the Fisher grant came in. But the grant fell through.

“So all of those notes were called,” said Alvina O’Brien in 2018. Elvina’s husband Thomond was one of the board members who co-signed the loan, as was Thomond’s brother Terence, who was board vice-president. “Everybody who had good will for St. Paul Opera did it,” O’Brien said, with a tone of disgust. Clearly this was a sour memory she had lived with for nearly five decades. “It was a lot of money, and they still owed more money,” she said. “The company had exhausted both the pocketbooks and the good will of their most established supporters. That was $50,000 out of our pockets.”

O’Brien blamed Schaefer for the fiasco. “He was kind of bigger than life,” she said. “He was smart. He loved music. He loved opera. He was serious about what he was trying to do. He had a certain air of ‘I know what I’m doing and if you’ll just listen to me and do it everything will be alright.’ He had a lot of presence. He could get people to like him. He could make you believe almost anything. When it came to money he would say, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

It was obvious, nonetheless, that Schaefer hadn’t communicated well with board members, many of whom didn’t know the company was in arrears. And he handled the

crisis badly, first by not attending the crucial board meeting on January 29 and then by being coy about his resignation. He told the Minneapolis Tribune that he had announced “officially” that he would resign after the 1975 season and that he had not been informed that the season had been canceled.

Prior to joining St. Paul Opera in 1968, Schaefer was executive director of the St. Paul Council of Arts and Science. His goal, he said at the time, was to professionalize the St. Paul Civic Opera Association, which had been putting on operas and operettas and musical comedies on an amateur or semi-professional basis in various St. Paul venues since 1933. Before the end of 1968, Schaefer and the board dropped the word “civic” from the organization’s title, thereby giving birth to the short-lived St. Paul Opera Association, which presented just four summer seasons, 1971–74, and then died. “They had a few good summers, but they never made enough money,” Alvina said.

Camilla Heller played principal cello in a number of the St. Paul Opera productions, including Wagner’s Siegfried, which was the last production the company ever did. “I remember that summer so well,” she said, “because all our checks were bouncing.”

We were doing the productions in repertory, rehearsing during the day and playing at night. I’ll never forget the last show. Joe Longo, the clarinetist, being Italian, loved opera. We were in the basement of O’Shaughnessy. Everybody was madder than heck because

our paychecks were no good. So Joe stood up on a chair and said, ‘Listen up, gang. Last show tomorrow night. They’re sold out. We’re not playing until we’re paid in cash.’ Everybody went ‘Yaaaa!’ So, by George, the last show, the manager of the company showed up and went up to the lighting booth carrying a large briefcase. Each player followed him up to the lighting booth and got paid in cash.’ So we played the show, and that was the end of St. Paul Opera.

The board passed two additional resolutions at the January 29 meeting. One was “to continue our existence as an opera company.”

The other vowed “to explore the possibility of a merger or other means of continuing our existence.” The first was a way of acknowledging that the association was obliged legally to pay off its debts before folding. The second is a matter that has been argued about for nearly a half-century.

Was it a merger of the two companies or wasn’t it? Of course, it wasn’t. As Peter Myers of the Minnesota Opera staff told the Minneapolis Tribune in December, 1976, “We hesitate to call it a merger. That implies we’re assuming St. Paul’s indebtedness, which isn’t the case. It’s just that they realized that they couldn’t make it on their own and the community can’t support two opera companies.”

In other words, there was nothing for Minnesota Opera to merge with. St. Paul Opera died on that chilly morning of January 29, 1975, and a year later, the parent organization, the St. Paul Opera Association, having paid off its debts, closed its office and went

to sleep. Forever.

And yet, despite all the evidence, there was no stopping the creeping merger myth. It oozed into the local newspapers—“Two Companies Merge . . .”—into the New York Times, into Opera News and Musical America. The merger myth persisted because people wanted it to be true. It sounded good and funders liked the idea. A St. Paul Opera board member said the Bush Foundation told him “some doors could reopen if there were a merger.” In December 1975 the St. Paul Foundation offered St. Paul Opera $100,000 to be awarded if and when it merged with Minnesota Opera.

O’Brien never bought it, and she’s still steamed. “It was sold as a merger, which gave St. Paul people who had supported St. Paul Opera and the Civic Opera before it, a little comfort,” she said. “And then to watch Minnesota Opera persist in counting its years from the beginning of Center Opera indicated that they don’t see it as a merger at all. I wish they’d stop that.”

What happened was that fifteen or so board members of the deceased St. Paul Opera were invited onto the Minnesota Opera board as a good will gesture in the vein of hands across the border and also in the hope that, again, additional funding sources might appear.

Kevin Smith, former president and general manager of Minnesota Opera, said, “It wasn’t a merger. It was an acquisition. I have this

theory that there’s no such thing as a merger. There are only acquisitions. When do people actually, equally, merge? Northwest merges with Delta. Guess what? Delta takes over Northwest. Do you see Northwest anywhere? So that’s what happened here. You had a bankrupt company, so there wasn’t actually much to acquire, though I had their manager George Schaefer’s desk. Somehow we ended up with some furniture and some props and things.”

SUCCESSION BLUES

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon attributed much of the tumult and misrule of the empire’s later years to the lack of a clear-cut, agreed-upon line of succession. Who will replace the Emperor? Let’s go to war and find out.

Opera companies rarely resort to bloodshed when a new CEO has to be named. It’s more a matter of frequent committee meetings along with intuitions and calculations aimed at finding the right person, someone with ability whose skills and sensitivities are a perfect—or almost perfect—match for what needs to be done. It’s guesswork, and sometimes people guess wrong.

On May 12, 2010, when fifty-nine-year-old Kevin Smith announced he would retire as president and managing director of Minnesota Opera, a company he had been a part of for twenty-nine years—twenty-three of them in his current position—a tremor was felt in the warehouse district of Minneapolis. A small cloud of dust rose and slowly floated back down onto the sidewalk in front of the Opera Center on First Street, a four-story building that had been the company’s home since 1990, a comfortable old structure with exposed wooden beams that, on occasion, when the spirit moved him, Kevin would dust with a vacuum sweeper, having climbed up near the ceiling, walking carefully and without a net, proving, as he once said, how much he loved the building.

The question, of course, was who would replace Kevin, who had said he would re-

main on the job until his successor had been named. Given his longevity riding in this particular saddle and given that his name and that of Minnesota Opera were by now firmly intertwined and given, finally, that the company had risen to considerable success and renown under his leadership, it was thought that finding a replacement for Kevin, though definitely a challenge, was not entirely impossible.

And indeed, on November 11, 2010, board chair Chip Emery, speaking for the company, announced that an “extraordinary talent,” thirty-eight-year-old Allan Naplan, a singer and composer who had been for the past six years general director of the Madison Opera in Wisconsin, was the new president and general director of Minnesota Opera. Naplan, whom Emery predicted would become “an exceptional asset to the Twin Cities arts community,” would take office March 1 of the following year.

On March 21, 2012, one year and twenty-one days after Naplan took office, the company announced that he had resigned. No details were given except a brief statement from Emery, saying that Naplan’s decision was “personal and I have to respect his decision to move on.” The accompanying announcement was that Kevin Ramach, who had been the company’s production director the past six years, would replace Naplan as interim managing director. On July 25, dropping the word “interim” from the title, the company named Ramach president and general director. And then on November 20, 2014, some

two-and-a-half years later, Ramach resigned. In a statement released by the company, Ramach said he felt that his strong suit had always been the creative end of the business and that he often felt “removed” from that kind of activity in his role as general director. Nina Archabal, former director of the Minnesota Historical Society, was named interim president. A search for a permanent new president was immediately launched. Ryan Taylor was named to that position some eighteen months later.

These years, 2011 to 2016, proved to be difficult for the company. One prominent board member said that the company almost “went under” during these years. The company’s first serious crisis occurred three decades earlier, in the spring and summer of 1982, when, in order to avoid bankruptcy, the company, for the month of June, laid off nearly the entire staff, retaining the services of just two of its employees, Peter Myers, who ran the company’s tours, and a young Kevin Smith, who had been hired the previous November as production stage manager. The company’s second crisis was this one, a crisis of leadership that began with the resignation—or perhaps with the appointment—of Allan Naplan. At the time, little was said publicly about these matters. What follows, in their own words, are the recollections of some of the key players. It will be seen that they don’t always agree with one another.

Chip Emery, former board chair:

Going under is unlikely. It wasn’t a money issue. It was a leadership issue, which can turn into money issues, obviously. But I was a part of the group that was chartered to find a replacement for Kevin. And we did. And we had a number of good candidates. We had the number-two or number-three guy at the Chicago Lyric who I thought was the best candidate. But he was a little old, and we wanted someone younger. So Allan Naplan rose to the top, and the group finally recommended him to the board. I was not in favor of it, but it was four to one or something like that.

And so we hired him, and we met every week or every other week for his first year to help him in. And we knew the biggest issue would be that he’s replacing the incumbent. Kevin had been there for twenty-five years and Dale about the same time. They were Frick and Frack together. Kevin had the production side and Dale the artistic side. And they would argue. They would get into big shouting matches with each other on which operas they were going to do. Dale always had grandiose aims and I’m the one with the checkbook. And in the end, Kevin always won. One, because he was the managing director, and two, he could deal with Dale in such a way that said maybe we could do that one in a year or two.

Well, it became obvious after a while that Allan wasn’t making much progress in being accepted. Why was that? His management

style was most of it. He would shut his office door and be there all day. He wasn’t a good communicator, and he didn’t come across to big donors. He was a micromanager. He had come from a place where he did everything himself. He wrote the tickets. He answered the mail. And now he was stepping up to the next level, and he just never made that transition. He didn’t have confidence in his own skills. I think what he really wanted was for the general manager and the artistic director jobs combined, so he could make the artistic decisions, and there was no way that Dale was going to give that up.

And so the workplace turned sour and we lost one or two of the senior managers. And I got word through the grapevine that we were going to lose one or two more. It started to be a really difficult scene. So I spent some time roaming around the office asking people how much of this is just noise and the unwillingness of people to accept a new person, and how much of this is the person who’s unable to do this? And I came to the conclusion it was the latter. And the thing is he didn’t know he wasn’t doing well. He had no idea. He was blown away when I told him he had to go. ‘What? What? What?’ he said. This wasn’t an enjoyable task, but I was the leader and I had to do it.

Karen Bachman, former board chair:

My view is that the staff was looking for another Kevin Smith, and no one could be another Kevin Smith. I mean, we wanted

someone to take the company to the next level. And we also wanted someone who was homegrown and part of the company. The board needed, in my view, to be clearer about that and more on top of things. And that’s hard. Boards do their best, and this board, I think, did its best.

Lani Willis, at that time marketing and communications director:

When Kevin left, there was nobody who could have come in and been another Kevin with Dale there. They had had a longstanding and very specific way of collaborating. If you were hired to be president and general director and you had to work with somebody with the title of artistic director, you might not know what that title meant, and at the time, Dale’s title had a specific meaning. My observation was that Allan had a lot more interest in repertoire, season planning and artists. It might have rubbed Dale the wrong way to be told to do things differently. Probably anybody who followed Kevin was going to fail in a year. Allan was really more into details than any of us were accustomed to. Kevin once described his leadership style to me as benign neglect. If you started talking details with Kevin, his eyes would glaze over. He wanted to hear what your big plans were, whereas Allan wanted to see all the different coupon codes that were running for a particular show. They were vastly different styles.

Jim Johnson, former board chair:

I think the staff refused to let Allan be the head because he wasn’t Kevin Smith, and that’s so common. I saw this time and again in my corporate career. When you have a leader who’s been there as long as Kevin was, people think there’s only one way to do things. One of the problems was the committee that selected Allan. It was a group of fourteen or fifteen people for the search. They couldn’t find a day to meet because there were so many people and so many scheduling conflicts, and it went on and on and then the gun was to their head and they had to do something. Allan was not their first choice.

Patrick Dewane, former development director:

I feel bad that it didn’t work out for Allan. He moved his wife and his young family here. He really wanted it to work.

Jane Confer, former board chair:

Allan’s an incredibly talented man. He had so many things to offer. He just was not a match for Minnesota Opera culture. I don’t know how else to say it. He was not a failure by any means. It just wasn’t the right fit.

Susan

Boren, former board chair:

Allan was a dynamic young man. He stepped into a legacy. Kevin Smith was much loved, and Dale was still there. Kevin and Dale had been a very strong partnership. They enabled each other in many ways over the years, which is what people do who work together a long time. And Allan did not have very much management experience. He was a performer. He came out of a small organization.

I was not in a position to second-guess the search committee because I was running the search. My job was to bring forth five candidates. So what I thought about their choice was irrelevant. I do recall that not everyone on the search committee was enthusiastic about Allan. I think some saw his rough edges more than others. But I think once he came into the company, the company itself didn’t do a good job welcoming him on board. I think there was some rejection. It was certainly going to be difficult for Dale to accept anybody but Kevin in the leadership role. It was a lot of different factors. Allan was a very bright, talented man who got in way over his head.

One of the issues for Allan was that he wanted to be artistic director. But the company had a split between the role Kevin played and Dale as artistic director, and they had worked that out over many years. But when Allan came in, he was used to being artistic director.

Kevin Ramach, former president and general director:

I would say of anybody who worked there, I had the best relationship with Allan. It was a painful time. I know it was a painful time for Allan. It was a painful time for a lot of people. Stylistically, Allan wasn’t a great fit for the staff that existed at the time, which doesn’t mean he couldn’t have done a fine job. But I think the changes that probably would have taken place weren’t palatable to the board, as they saw it.

Theresa Murray, at that time director of board relations:

It wasn’t a surprise that Allan left. I had heard enough and seen enough to know that he had lost the confidence of a number of board members. During his tenure, the only one who actually left the company was Patrick Dewane. But with Patrick leaving, it was like a tidal shift in the way Allan was perceived by some of our board members. The next few years is when we started seeing huge numbers of people leaving.

Allan Naplan, former president and general director:

I have mixed feelings about my time in Minnesota. I arrived with great anticipation and optimism and hope that this was going to be my next major career move, that I would raise my family there and enjoy great success

running the company. So for me to exit in a year—I actually did about a season and a half—that wasn’t my game plan; nor was it the organization’s or those who had hired me.

It was a very different structure from what I was used to. I came from the world of general directors, which is to say, where one person is both the executive and the artistic head, and that was not the model that Minnesota had, though that is what they have now. Ryan Taylor is both. And I certainly didn’t walk in with the intention of making changes or with the idea that I wanted to become artistic director.

There was definitely a feeling of loss there because of Kevin’s exit. He was a beloved figure, and I remember younger staff members talking about him being a father figure to them. And now I come in as a young forty-something, a contemporary of theirs or someone even younger. I think ultimately what I had hoped to do wasn’t the right fit for the organizational set-up already in place.

Theresa Murray:

The boat was rocking and so they put Kevin Ramach in on an interim basis. And the great thing about Kevin was he was a known commodity, and he knew the art form. He knew the challenges of budgeting to produce an opera without losing too much money. So there was a little bit of a stabilizing force having Kevin there. Unfortunately,

fundraising was not in his comfort zone, so that made it harder. I mean, you lose your primary fundraiser, Patrick, and then Kevin hires somebody from out of town who was pretty ineffective as a fundraiser. It wasn’t an easy two and a half years.

knew and trusted, a guy who was a good communicator. So Kevin took over, and it turned out that the job was the classic example of the Peter Principle. It was above his level of skill.

Susan Boren:

It was an emergency appointment. Kevin Ramach had been at the company for quite some time but in a very different role. He was in an operations role, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to me because he didn’t have the leadership experience that companies need at that point. But again, you have the Dale factor involved here. It’s a cultural thing when you have as artistic a personality as Dale, who has a stronger role in the company, and so it was going to be difficult for Dale to accept anybody but Kevin in that leadership role.

Chip Emery:

Allan’s departure left us in a bit of a quandary. We now had nobody in charge. So we went to Kevin Ramach as the replacement guy, a guy everybody knew. There were discussions. Should we call him interim? Because Kevin was a production guy and didn’t really know the other side well. But he’d always been well respected and liked at the company. When we announced that Kevin was taking over, there was a great sigh of relief at the company. This was a guy they

He started having difficulty making decisions. He just was not good outside the production area. We needed him to be stronger on budgeting and planning and strategy. And it turned out he couldn’t. We gave him lots of room because we wanted him to be successful. I remember board meetings where there was a lot of angst, people saying, ‘You’ve got to tell him he’s got to do this and this and this.’ ‘Well, we did and he didn’t’ or whatever. So we let him go. And Jim Johnson found the woman who had run the Minnesota Historical Society, Nina Archabal. Nina was a placeholder, a very nice woman but didn’t have any power and didn’t really want any power. She just wanted to be there and help.

Lani Willis:

When Patrick left, it was like the wind went out of the sail. There was no revenue-driving strategy. There wasn’t a vision at the time about what the future would be. Allan didn’t have time to create that. He wasn’t there long enough. It was really hard on the people who lived through those years to weather all the storms. It was tumultuous. Everything felt like an uphill battle. It was very toxic.

Margaret Wurtele, former board chair:

I think they were exhausted, the board, and they thought, ‘If we just promote somebody from within,’ and Kevin Ramach was the most likely person, I guess. But no, he wasn’t right for the job.

Kevin Ramach:

Jim Johnson:

We had a board retreat at a strange location, the Minikahda Club, in June, 2012. At that retreat the board made Kevin the permanent CEO. He had been interim since March. We probably should have gone right into a search for a permanent CEO, but the board had had one search that hadn’t worked, and so you get a little gun shy at that point. So I sat there for two years and realized this is not working. We had deficits both years. They weren’t huge deficits, but still, you can’t run a non-profit on deficits, certainly not two years in a row. And I could see—I took over as chair on July 1, 2014—that Kevin wasn’t going to be able to do it. He’s not a fundraiser nor does he have any background in executive management. But he’s a very decent human being. But he determined he didn’t want to go through this anymore, so I worked with our attorney on an exit agreement, and Kevin signed it without any changes because he wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. The board was very unhappy.

When I left, I felt, on a personal level, I deserved more from certain people, but, on the whole, my main response was that I shouldn’t have taken the job permanently. I thought I could stabilize things, and I thought that was the right thing to do. It wasn’t a job I really wanted, to be perfectly honest. And I think that I let emotions, at the time, get away from me, and I should have thought more about what was best for me. Going through the whole thing with Allan and then the interim leadership and everything else that fell on me, I was happy to get out. And it was hard. That last year, I was also president of the Arts Partnership that we were finishing the campaign on. The building was being finished (the Ordway Concert Hall), and that took a lot of time. And there was all that administrative stuff I had to deal with, which meant raising $7 million a year. That was a challenge and probably something I wasn’t very good at. It was very stressful, that whole time, and so it was a relief when I was no longer doing it. I remember at one point running into a board member who I’m not going to name, who said to me, ‘Well, whatever happens, I’m on your side.’ Until then, I didn’t know we had sides. I thought we all wanted the same thing. I had a very good relationship with Jim Johnson. We came to a resolution, and I was grateful for that relationship. On the other hand, there are people I don’t remember fondly, let’s leave it at that.

*

TALES OF BRUNELLE

In time, notably with the appointment on Jan. 14, 2016, of Ryan Taylor as president and general director, the staff and board of Minnesota Opera stopped singing “The Succession Blues” and put the sheet music in a trunk up in the attic, where it continues to gather dust.

Since leaving Minnesota Opera, both Allan Naplan and Kevin Ramach landed on their feet. Since 2013, Naplan has been executive and producing director of Arizona Musicfest, a concert presenter/producer and music education organization in Phoenix. Ramach is executive director of Artistry Theater and Visual Arts in Bloomington, Minnesota.

In the fall of 1973, preparing for the Minnesota Opera production of John Philip Sousa’s comic operetta El Capitan, Philip Brunelle, who would be conducting the show, visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to examine the orchestration of Sousa’s original 1896 score. According to the library’s rules, he could look at the score, but he couldn’t take it out. The Sousa estate had given someone else the performing rights, which also meant that person would conduct any and all performances of the work. Brunelle looked over the orchestration, which he found to be fairly routine, and decided he could write his own orchestration, which at that point was legal given that the copyright had expired. He was still working on it as the opening night drew near, and he stayed up three nights—nonstop—to finish it. The day he completed it he was scheduled to accompany Vern Sutton at a noontime recital at the Minneapolis Public Library. As Brunelle recalled it, “Vern was in the middle of a song when the chords from the piano began to sound strange and far-out. He looked over at the piano and I was sound asleep while continuing to play. Fortunately, I woke up and we finished the recital.”

Brunelle, a gifted musician and a man of many parts, subscribes to the venerable show-biz axiom that the show must go on. As evidence of that notion it might be recalled that he was scheduled one winter afternoon in 1985 to conduct a rehearsal of the Swedish operetta Animalen at the Ordway Music Theater. As he was walking to the theater carrying an armload of scores,

he stepped on a patch of ice and fell. Not wanting to damage the music, he fell on his side, resulting—not known to him at the time—in several broken ribs. He proceeded into the theater and conducted the rehearsal in considerable pain, after which Lynne Aspnes, the harpist, offered to take him to the hospital. Arriving at Methodist Hospital, the medical people saw his broken ribs, and the nurse said he was lucky he got to the hospital before conducting. Lynne said, “Oh, no, he just conducted a two-hour orchestra rehearsal.” “No,” said the nurse, “that would be impossible in his condition.” Lynne finally convinced her that it happened.

Born in Faribault, Minnesota, in 1943, Philip Brunelle has been a worldwide force in music, especially in the fields of opera and choral music. He started piano lessons at the age of four and at nineteen he became a full-time member of the Minneapolis Symphony as a pianist and a percussionist. In 1969 he founded the successful Plymouth Music Series, now VocalEsence, which to date has commissioned more than 320 works. Brunelle first conducted for Minnesota Opera in 1968, a production of Cosi fan tutti, after which he was named music director, and then co-artistic director with Wesley Balk, a position he held until 1985. During those years, he conducted more than sixty productions, including many premieres. He has conducted operas and orchestras in six continents and has received five honorary doctorates as well as the Michael Korn Founder’s Award, Chorus America’s highest lifetime achievement award.

Seated in a conference room at Plymouth Congregational Church, where he has been choirmaster and organist since 1969, Brunelle reminisced about his seventeen years with Minnesota Opera—the trials and tribulations of a music director in an experimental opera company located in the frozen North. He is a man of seemingly boundless energy who gets along quite well on four or five hours of sleep—sometimes less—and claims he never eats lunch. He has a wicked sense of humor and a keen memory. *

Minnesota Opera: People close to the company have described your relationship with Wesley Balk in various ways, using words such as strained, hostile, contentious or even, on occasion, amiable. What was Wesley like to work with? Was it an equal sharing of ideas? Did you argue a lot? How did the two of you decide on repertoire?

Phillip Brunelle: It was often a fight to have enough time for music rehearsals, and that was a source of friction. I would bring repertoire ideas to him. Some of them he liked; some of them he didn’t. One of our best collaborations, I think, was when he brought me a book of poetry by Anne Sexton titled Transformations. He said, “We need a composer.” I had just gotten to know some choral pieces by Conrad Susa. I didn’t know Conrad at the time, but I thought, “Wow, he would be a good person.” So I found out where he lived, and we had a meeting with him in New York. We asked him to look at this book and

decide whether he could set it to music. He did, and, of course, he wrote this marvelous opera, Transformations. Years later, the story got turned around. Wesley was sure that he had found Conrad. And later, of course, Wesley found out about a book titled The Wisconsin Death Trip, which became Black River.

MA: What would you say was Wesley Balk at his best?

PB: I would say not so much a particular show, but what he did so well was to get singers to become more expressive with their body, so that they didn’t just stand there and sing. He found ways, just working with their arms, let’s say, and also intellectually, to get them to feel that they could be just as expressive bodily as they were vocally. There was no question that he had strong ideas about what he wanted to do. And John Ludwig, the general manager, backed him up. John was a debonair, suave guy who felt we needed to keep pushing the envelope in terms of stage ideas because the world of opera, certainly in the ’70s, was a tamer place than it is today.

MA: Going back to your beginnings with the company, you were going from a full time position with the Minneapolis Symphony to a part time job with the opera company. Wasn’t this a professional risk for you and perhaps a personal risk as well?

PB: Both. And yes, it was. People told me I was crazy. They said, “You’re leaving the

Minneapolis Symphony, the best-paying job in town for someone in the arts. How can you do that?” But I saw my future. I saw that my future was going to be in conducting and not playing percussion, though I’ve always kept up the piano. And, of course, at the time, I started VocalEssence. And in the fall of 1969, I became the choir director and organist at Plymouth Congregational Church, and that gave me the opportunity to start the kind of music series that didn’t exist here because there was no place you could hear choral works beyond the traditional ones.

MA: You studied conducting at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the summer of 1968. How did that come about?

PB: In my first year at the University of Minnesota, in 1961, I was accompanying singers in a little theater in the basement of Scott Hall. A guy named Warren Pepperdine was doing a production of Offenbach, and it was just me at the piano. And then in my second year, Paul Knowles, who led the opera program at the university, a wonderful tenor and a crazy guy, asked me to play for the opera. I played for one opera, and he said, “You could be conducting these.” So I began conducting. We did Cosi fan tutte and Carmen. This was in the Scott Hall auditorium, and we had a student orchestra. Then I started playing with the Minneapolis Symphony. In 1968, when the Met came to town, their assistant conductor, George Schick, called me up. “Mr. Brunelle, I am calling about your audition for the Rockefeller program at the Metropolitan Opera.” I said I didn’t know anything about it.

He said, “Tomorrow you have your audition with me.” He told me what to bring and to pretend that I was at the keyboard, playing the parts and coaching invisible singers. So I did it. At the end of the audition, he said, “Very good. Now in two weeks I will see you in New York.” I said, “But I’m with the Minneapolis Symphony. I have a job.” He said, “I’m sure you’ll work that out.” So I did, and I ended up spending the summer at the Met. It was a wonderful experience with him and the singers learning the standard repertoire. When I came back at the end of the summer, John Ludwig called and said, “We’d like you to come and be music director of Center Opera.” And then he said, “By the way, I’m the one who recommended you for the Rockefeller program.” So then I started with the opera company, my first production being Cosi. Then I did Punch and Judy, which was a huge production at the Guthrie. The New York Times came out and reviewed it. In those days they came to see the new productions here. They praised the production and everything about it. Birtwistle, the composer, was hardly a household name back then, and he still isn’t. But he was a big deal in avant-garde in England.

MA: Wasn’t this a dark opera with a lot of violence?

PB: It was. It was very violent. Several of the set pieces were 10 feet tall, and there was someone inside them, and they had to move around the stage and sing. It was quite dazzling.

MA: That same season, 1969–70, you did Oedipus and the Sphinx by Yale Marshall.

PB: Yale Marshall was there at the beginning, a wonderfully quixotic, unusual man.

MA: What was he like?

PB: This will tell you everything. His father was an inventor, and he picked that up. He was always sprouting unusual ideas, like strange musical instruments. It would be like—this one I’m making up—is there a way that you can sit at the piano and at the same time play tambourine, cymbal and gong? And he would have figured out some way that your head could nod one way and then another way. And he loved to compose. He wrote a Christmas piece we did called A Christmas Gallimaufry, which we did at Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church in the early ’70s. And he also did Oedipus and the Sphinx, which used just three or four instruments.

MA: Doing opera at the Guthrie was a challenge. The standard joke was that the singers were onstage at the Guthrie and the orchestra was in downtown Osseo. Some thought the balance between orchestra and singers was sometimes uneven.

PB: It had a lot to do with the sets. If the back wall of the set was hard, that would keep the sound from going out, which is why I always pushed for as porous a backdrop as you can get. I recall productions there before I was involved where I could barely

hear the orchestra because the set had been designed with no thought to the sound.

MA: Not only that, the singers had to contend with Bob Israel’s wild costumes.

PB: Oh, there were all kinds of outfits. We had everything from almost nude, with Vern doing Faust Counter Faust, to elaborate costumes like the ones in Punch and Judy. Actually, some of them were really sensational because in that era there was a real desire to bring together first-rate music, first-rate design, first-rate costuming, the whole bit, and some very creative people were involved, like Bob Israel. I think of what they did on the Guthrie stage with Horspfal and The Mother of Us All. The designs were wonderful. It wasn’t just interesting staging and beautiful singing. It was also visually interesting.

MA: There was a kind of cross-fertilization with these two positions of yours: Minnesota Opera and what is now VocalEssence. That is, you did operas with the Plymouth Music Series. And you did a lot of Handel.

PB: Indeed. I did ten years of Handel oratorios, and none of them was Messiah.

MA: And those oratorios are really operas.

PB: Absolutely. Handel thought of them as operas. But they were performed during Lent, and there was no acting allowed on the stage in London in those days. All this, I would say, goes back to my love and fascination with the human voice both in opera

and in choral music.

MA: You worked with Dominick Argento more than any other conductor did and you championed his music. I know he didn’t believe in the workshop process. Did he think of his works as set in stone once he finished them or did he take suggestions from you?

PB: Yes, he did, but grudgingly because he did feel he knew what it should be. He and I had a discussion in the early years. This was for VocalEssence. I told him I wanted to commission something from him. He presented a text from a South American writer. I looked at it and said, “You know, this isn’t what I wanted. I don’t know what I wanted, but this isn’t it.” He grabbed the manuscript and left. He came back a couple of weeks later with “Jonah and the Whale.” It was a medieval translation. I read it and said, “Oh, this is really good.” And then I said, “But I don’t like the ending.” He grabbed it and left again. And, you know, this wasn’t easy to say. He had been my teacher. I was maybe at that time twenty-nine. He came back a week later. “How about this?” It was perfect. So I’ve had that experience. But, by and large, he knew what he was trying to do, and he was right 99 percent of the time.

MA: The other composer you had a special relationship with was Conrad Susa. You conducted the premieres of his operas Transformations and Black River and for VocalEssence you commissioned pieces from him such as the lovely Carols and Lullabies. What was he like to work with?

PB: First of all, Conrad was brilliant. He had a great skill for colorful writing, both vocally and instrumentally. He and Dominick were the two who I thought really understood both voice and instruments equally well. But for Conrad, it was impossible to get anything done on time. So you knew you were investing in someone who at the end of the day was going to cause you a lot of grief. It would be brilliant once you got it. Getting it was the question.

MA: Conrad rewrote Black River. Which do you think was better? The first or the second version?

PB: He shortened it. It was three long acts. I conducted the first production, not the second one. If we did five operas in a season, I conducted four of them and we gave the fifth to a guest. I think the second one was better. It was tighter, though all the great stuff was still there, but, oh, luscious, beautiful music. It’s sort of like Rosenkavalier with the three women, and I think that was his model as he was writing it.

MA: What about the tours? Were they more of a headache than a rewarding experience?

PB: No, they were certainly rewarding. First of all, it gave the singers a chance to get to know each other. And it was also wonderful to see the reaction of audiences to music they had never heard before. We were out in Lake George or Kansas City or Texas. And we always had enthusiastic audiences.

MA: Reviews of the company’s early work, especially those that appeared in the New York Times, gave enthusiastic praise to the productions but often found the voices weak. Looking back, how would you rate the level of singing?

PB: It varied. The hope was that the company would use talent that lived here in Minneapolis and St. Paul instead of importing people, whereas St. Paul Opera used imported singers almost exclusively. Yale Marshall, for instance, this was not a great voice. But he was such a wonderful character onstage and so whimsical that you wanted to find a way to use him. You would never give him a leading role, but you wanted him to be a part of it. And some of them were really outstanding voices. In those years we had people like LeRoy Lehr, a marvelous bass-baritone, who eventually left to go to the Metropolitan Opera, where he stayed for twenty years. And you had Vern Sutton, who has such a distinctive voice. It’s a character voice, and it happened to fit so many of the pieces we chose to do. For instance, he did the lead in Albert Herring, a role that Peter Pears had sung, and, in a way, Peter Pears and Vern have similarities. Their voices were so unique and filled with character that you were drawn to what they did onstage. And then at a certain point we started bringing people in for a year. Catherine Malfitano was one of them. Then she went to the Met. Michael Riley came in that way. And then we had great local people like Janis Hardy and Barbara Brandt.

MA: You conducted a number of new works during your years with Minnesota Opera. Which of them do you recall most fondly? Did you find composers to be good collaborators? Would they listen to your ideas?

PB: Some of them would listen more than others, and one can only hope that if you’ve been doing this long enough they would realize that maybe you know what you’re talking about. Fondness? Well, there are several. Definitely, Argento’s Postcard from Morocco. Oh, what a wonderful piece. And at the same time came Transformations, Conrad Susa’s opera. Those were both great pieces. And then from both of them we got one magnum opus, from Dominick, The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe, which is filled with great melody. I had the privilege of conducting it later in Gothenberg, Sweden. And then there was Conrad Susa’s Black River, another big production. And certainly when we had the opportunity to do some of the Mozart operas, it was a joy to do them, too.

MA: What was Mozart like to work with, by the way?

PB: He was easy.

MA: He was short, wasn’t he?

PB: Yes, but his music was composed in advance. I didn’t have to worry about rewriting. He worked out OK. But I also loved doing Orff’s The Wise Woman and the King and also taking on tour Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of us All. It’s one of those pieces

that stay with you. I could sit down at the piano and play the whole thing for you right now. But I won’t.

MA: Wesley told me there were works that he came to hate. One of them was Claudia Legare, which was Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, wasn’t it?

PB: It was. We did that at the Guthrie. That was not one of the better operas.

MA: What went wrong with that? Robert Ward had done The Crucible, which was a big hit, and it’s still done quite often.

PB: Well, you know, personally, Robert was a sweet man. I think he just ran out of ideas. The opera was nicely conceived, but it just didn’t go anywhere.

MA: Wesley also didn’t like The Jealous Cellist.

PB: Neither did I.

MA: What went wrong there? Was it the libretto?

PB: It had been promised to Eric Stokes when he wrote Horspfal that he could write another opera. I thought it was a poor man’s version of Haydn’s The Man in the Moon. We had to wear costumes. I was a Martian. We did it in a high school auditorium. What are you going to do?

MA: By the late ‘70s the ensemble format started to wither. The company was bringing in more singers from elsewhere to do just one role. Also, there was a downside to the ensemble system, which is that sometimes a singer would be put in a role that wasn’t absolutely perfect for him or her.

PB: Absolutely, that is the downside. There’s no question that there were times when someone would be cast in a role that wasn’t ideal simply because that person was a member of the ensemble. In principle, it’s an interesting idea, but in fact, it doesn’t work. The other thing, of course that happened was that since Barbara Brandt was married to Wesley Balk, he always wanted to make sure that she had a leading part in everything.

Barbara was this unique person. She had this absolutely gorgeous voice. Later, some problems developed, but that’s another story. But it was a beautiful voice. She was also totally wacky, and that made her all the more fascinating because you didn’t always know what was going to happen when she came on stage. I remember a production of Figaro. She was the Countess. This was at the Guthrie. She entered up-stage through the door, and she had on a long, flowing dress. She got to center-stage, and she suddenly jerked. Her dress had gotten caught in the door. So the entire aria, Porgi amor, was spent with Barbara backing up all the way to the door to get herself unhooked. This happened a lot with Barbara. You just didn’t know.

The cast loved working with her. At the same time they were cautious because they didn’t know what would happen next with her. For instance, we were doing Argento’s Postcard. Each of the seven characters sings an aria in which they talk about someone they are either remembering or carrying in a purse or a shoebox or whatever. Of course, it’s all fantastical. No one really had these things with them. Barbara’s aria went, “I keep my lover in this box . . .” It’s a beautiful aria that she sang so well. She’s holding this box, cradling it, and one night at the end of the aria, she dropped the box. Vern had to run over to her and deal with the situation: my lover just fell on the floor, but somehow he’s OK.

The other thing Barbara would do is make up words when she couldn’t remember the text. We did an opera by Werner Egk called 17 Days and 4 Minutes at the Guthrie. Barbara came onstage one night to sing this big aria. She was supposed to say—it was about Ulysses—“Great Ulysses, how we love you, Great Ulysses, we adore you.” Barbara came on—totally dramatic—and sang “Great Ulysses, who deserves you, Great Ulysses, we abhor you.” The meaning was totally changed. That was Barbara.

MA: A question about venues. Wesley told me he hated O’Shaughnessy, that it was cramped backstage. It always seemed to me to be dry acoustically. In your experience what was the worst venue: the Guthrie, O’Shaughnessy, the Cedar Theater, or the Orpheum?

PB: They each had their pluses and minuses. With the Cedar Theater you hoped that one of the quiet moments wouldn’t be when you’d hear the toilet flushing or the radiators clanking. We said, “We have to do it here. So how are we going to make it work?” And I agree: O’Shaughnessy was dry. But where else were we going to do an opera? This was before the Ordway. I remember conducting the off-stage chorus in the Poe opera at O’Shaughnessy and the sound was so distant. It went right up to the ceiling. Whereas, when I conducted it in Sweden, it worked just fine.

MA: The funny thing about O’Shaughnessy was it had what they called continental seating—no aisles—a design idea that, to my knowledge, has never been seen on the continent. The St. Paul people thought it was quite sophisticated. The problem was if your seat was in the middle of one of those long rows, seventy or eighty people would have to stand up in order for you to get to your seat.

PB: And the other thing in those early days was, when we tried to use the hall for some VocalEssence things, they needed to put a sound shell behind the singers, again, because the sound would go up to the ceiling rather than out to the audience, the way Northrop used to be.

MA: People on the staff, younger people, mostly, ask why wasn’t Brunelle, with his vast amount of experience—some sixty productions—invited to guest conduct from time to time, though you did do the Handel opera

in the 1990s.

PB: I wasn’t privy to inside information on this, but it felt to me that in the years after I left and after Wesley left, it was a decision by the board and the staff that they needed to move in a new direction and forget about the past and move as if it were a new company. Many people, to this day, are surprised to learn that there was an opera company here from the ’60s on. They think of it as having happened only from the time the company moved into the Ordway.

So I left in ’85. And you know what? It was a great time to leave. I was there seventeen years. I had a wonderful time. The years that Center Opera was in existence followed by the early Minnesota Opera years were formidable in putting the name of Minnesota Opera on the map because there’s no way that an opera company in Minnesota is going to have an impact by doing the same repertoire as, say, the Metropolitan Opera or San Francisco or the Chicago Lyric. There’s no way that you can compete for national attention. It’s not going to happen. But it will happen if you do things that are unique, which was true of those early years.

THE ALLIANCE

What an idea it was. It was bold and forward-looking. It had zip. If it were a monument, it would have been all bronze, and cars would stop to admire it and take pictures. It was a kick just to say the word and enjoy the sibilance: ALL . . . I . . . ANCE. It made you want to dance.

The Alliance. It captured headlines for four months and then it crashed and no one ever mentioned it again. In its most exasperating moments, a Minnesota Opera production was picketed by its own orchestra musicians, and the company’s name appeared on the International Unfair List of the American Federation of Musicians. What the Alliance was: For various reasons Minnesota Opera wanted the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra to replace its own orchestra. The Ordway Music Theater also wanted the Chamber Orchestra to function as its house band for touring dance ensembles and other presentations. Plus, there would be a sharing of ticket facilities. The Alliance would save the Chamber Orchestra some money, it was said, though not all that much, as it turned out.

Nonetheless, everyone was excited about it in the summer of 1993. SPCO music director Hugh Wolff called the Alliance announcement a “moment of historic change.” Peter Lefferts, chairman of the Ordway board, predicted the Alliance would “create a stronger and more focused identity” for the facility. Karen Bachman, board chairman of Minnesota Opera, predicted that the Alliance “will enhance the artistic quality of our productions.” Speaking as one voice in angelic har-

mony, the newly formed Alliance Management Group called their creation “a model of innovation in arts management.”

The problem was that no one asked the musicians what they thought about the plan, and there were reasons for this. Obviously, no one was going to ask the Minnesota Opera musicians, many of whom had played in the orchestra for decades, what they thought. The answer to the question “Do you want to lose your job?” most likely would have been a firm “No!” And no one asked the Chamber Orchestra musicians either. The question to them was, “Will you take work away from these other musicians if we can show that it will be to your advantage?” They, too, said “No!”

The Alliance was officially announced Aug. 30, 1993, which was colossally bad timing, given the fact that the opera orchestra, with no contract, had been on strike since April 15, and the SPCO, also without a contract, was scheduled to start its 1993–94 season in less than a month, which would leave insufficient time to negotiate a new and radically different contract.

The opera orchestra and its management had been negotiating a new three-and-ahalf- year contract since November 1992. The prior contract expired December 31. The dispute was not over wages. At issue were two points: the degree of involvement of the SPCO in opera productions and whether the management considered the musicians to be employees rather than freelancers. The

SPCO had been playing for one Minnesota Opera production a year since 1984, and, according to several musicians, Kevin Smith, company president and general director, told the musicians in late February that he was seeking a closer relationship with the SPCO and that the company, after negotiating for four months on a three and a half-year contract, would now accept only a term of eighteen months. Moreover, there was reason to think that the Ordway was pressuring its principal users to occupy the theater for fewer weeks and that this could be accomplished by the consolidation of their separate seasons, thereby leaving the Ordway more time to book touring plays and musicals. The groundwork for the Alliance was being laid. Unable to reach an agreement, the musicians voted in early March to stay away from a Wednesday morning rehearsal of the upcoming production of Madame Butterfly, scheduled to open March 12. The management ended up canceling the rehearsal, and a day later, at the recommendation of their union representative, Brad Eggen, the musicians agreed to return to work and to play the remaining rehearsals and the subsequent performances.

The decision, Eggen said at the time, had been difficult. Quite a few of the musicians were suffering severe financial hardship, he said. “They are counting on the $1,000 or so that they will make in the next two weeks. Many need loans just to get by.”

By April 30, when Minnesota Opera opened The Pirates of Penzance at the Historic State

Theater, its final production of the season, the musicians and their representative, the Twin Cities Musicians Union, were on strike, and Minnesota Opera was placed on the International Unfair List of the American Federation of Musicians, which meant that no union musician would work for Minnesota Opera until the conflict was resolved. Players in the opera orchestra and other members of the Twin Cities Musicians Union began picketing and leafleting performances. The company, meanwhile, had hired a nonunion ensemble of two digital keyboards, percussion, piano and seven acoustic instruments.

Then three things happened. First, Minnesota Opera filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claiming unfair labor practices on the basis that the musicians were not employees and thus had no legal right to strike. Second, the Minneapolis Community Development Agency, which owned the State Theater, passed a resolution ten to one to cancel the use agreement it had with the opera company because of its hiring of nonunion musicians, a ruling that would shut down the show. Kevin Smith responded, saying that if the city attempted to close the production, he would seek an injunction to keep it open. Mayor Donald Fraser then vetoed the agency’s resolution, which meant the production could continue. And third, on May 10 the NLRB ruled that the orchestra musicians of Minnesota Opera are employees and not independent contractors or freelancers, which meant that the musicians had the right to strike and the right to a collective bargaining agreement.

Neither Minnesota Opera nor the SPCO normally give performances in the summer, so the announcement of the Alliance on August 30 was the next step in the narrative. The announcement was accompanied by a statement from the SPCO saying that its 1993 budget showed a deficit of nearly $1 million, which, added to previous deficits, made a total debt of $1.55 million. The orchestra management said it would dismiss seven of its twenty-nine administrative employees to cut costs.

Contract talks resumed with little agreement. Musicians of the SPCO voted September 8 on a “final offer” from management that included a pay cut of 18 percent and reduced benefits and “overwhelmingly” rejected it after a three-hour meeting. Interim president John Davis said a day later that the orchestra’s executive committee considered a counteroffer from the players and refused it. Horn player Herbert Winslow, head of the players’ negotiating committee, acknowledged some “very positive results,” but added that “the players have never felt as unsettled about the future as they do now.”

The SPCO musicians wouldn’t budge. They saw themselves as being forced to “cannibalize” the opera orchestra. In addition, some of them didn’t like playing opera scores and didn’t think they were good at it. The management, on the other hand, saw the musicians as erecting a barrier to a larger and more worthwhile goal.

Frustrated, the board played its highest card,

and it couldn’t have been a worse card to play. The board gave the musicians an ultimatum: Sign this contract (meaning, agree to the Alliance) in three days or we will file bankruptcy. Ultimatums are usually unproductive since they rule out give-and-take. Moreover, the board had painted itself into a corner. If the organization did go belly-up in three days, the board would be admitting that all the propaganda for the Alliance was fake. What little money the Alliance would have brought in wouldn’t have saved them anyway. On the other hand, if they didn’t close up shop, they would be admitting that the ultimatum was a ruse.

The board moved the deadline back four days. The city was starting to tense up. An editorial in the St. Paul Pioneer Press raised an alarm, saying “No recent blow to St. Paul’s self-image and national reputation compares with the one that now threatens the city: the death of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.” The conclusion was dire. “Black crepe hanging throughout downtown would be in order if the SPCO folds.”

Finally, on September 23, they settled. The new agreement, a four-year contract, called for a reduced season of thrity-four weeks in 1993-94, thirty-six weeks in each of the two following seasons and thirty-eight in 199697. The schedule included one SPCO week of work for Minnesota Opera in the current season and two each in following seasons. The opera musicians hadn’t yet reached a settlement; it had been clear that the SPCO contract had to be settled first. According

to Winslow, the SPCO agreement was made with the consent of the opera musicians.

Four days later, after nearly a year of offagain, on-again contract talks and a fivemonth strike, the management and musicians of Minnesota Opera reached a tentative agreement that would provide orchestral accompaniment for productions for the next four seasons. Concerning what became a major issue in the dispute—whether the musicians are employees of the company—the opera orchestra would include a tenured “core group” of forty-seven musicians who will be engaged on a first-call basis if their instruments are required. The membership of this group, to be determined by the company’s principal conductor, George Manahan, will be drawn from the musicians who have played in past opera productions. Musicians would receive 3 percent wage increases for each year of the agreement as well as a 3 percent contribution to the musicians’ union pension fund in the third year. The SPCO would play for one production per season, and the opera orchestra would play for all other productions that require an orchestra. And Minnesota Opera’s name was removed from the International Unfair List.

Brad Eggen described the new contract as reasonable and said that “it allows both orchestras to retain their individual identities, as well as allowing some flexibility.” Architects of the Alliance, he said, were remiss in thinking the musicians of the SPCO would want to become an opera orchestra. “Chamber orchestra musicians may not want to

be pit musicians and may not be skilled at opera,” he said. “It’s two different worlds.”

Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow lauded the SPCO musicians for “sacrificing part of their own paychecks to spare the jobs of fellow musicians. They took pay cuts ranging from $5,000 to $9,000 a year in an effort to preserve jobs for members of the opera orchestra,” he said.

Asked about the crisis in an interview in 2018, Kevin Smith said the Alliance—on paper—made sense. “I think it failed for all the reasons why it couldn’t succeed,” he said.

First of all, the SPCO had an artistic identity. The musicians really weren’t interested in doing this thing. They weren’t committed to playing opera. They feared that, just like the lockout here (the Minnesota Orchestra lockout and labor dispute of 2012–14), they would end up doing more pops and Broadway stuff, being the house band for the Ordway rather than a chamber orchestra. Then you had all the union dynamics. It failed because of all these things. At the time, the Alliance was designed to make sense of a lot of financial problems for the SPCO. It was a way to ‘Save the SPCO’. There were a lot of efficiencies associated with it. That’s why we do strategic alliances and mergers. Everyone loves the idea until you get into the reality of it all.

I think it failed because it wasn’t viable, and it wasn’t viable because of people. It wasn’t that the idea wasn’t viable. In the abstract, THE ALLIANCE 89

it was. But in the context of dealing with real people in real situations in a real community, it just didn’t fly. The other thing is Carl Drake, who had been chairman of the board of the Ordway. I’ll never forget this. We were having this gathering of people from the three organizations, talking about this idea. Carl said, ‘Unless there is a shared business interest among these organizations, it’s never going to work to put together an alliance like this.’ And that was the problem. There was no real shared business interest. I mean, had we really tried to do it, we would have come up with a situation much like we have now with the Arts Partnership, where we’re not competing with each other. But back then we were competing with the Ordway. We wanted the Ordway to fail at doing the Broadway shows. So the last thing we wanted to do was to support them because the better they did the more they infringed on our schedule. There was no mutual interest in this other than efficiency, that is, our using the SPCO. We didn’t go into it with the idea that, ‘Oh, God, this is our dream of dreams, to have the SPCO as the Minnesota Opera orchestra.’ We certainly saw that they were a better group of musicians. Everyone knew that. On the other hand, the Ariadne auf Naxos that they did in ’86. They played horribly. It was terrible. So I thought, ‘It wasn’t going to be an increase in quality, this Alliance.’ And then the other thing we ran into ultimately was scheduling. We had the SPCO doing one production a year, and we always struggled to find a rehearsal schedule that worked for opera production, and they didn’t have an opera production

worked into their master agreement. So, overall, the Alliance just wasn’t meant to be.

Herb Winslow credits Kevin Smith with the resolution of both contract disputes. He recalled a meeting on a Sunday evening in which he and the members of his negotiating committee conferred with key board members of the SPCO, Minnesota Opera, and the Ordway. The mood was dreary. Winslow reiterated to the board members that the Chamber Orchestra players refused to displace their colleagues in the opera orchestra, after which the board members left in a huff. An hour later Kevin called Winslow and asked if he could have a private meeting with the musicians’ team. Winslow said yes.

As Winslow recalled it, “Kevin arrived and said, ‘I want to hear what you guys are saying to see if there’s any way to resolve this so we call all survive.’ He listened to our story for forty-five minutes or so, asked a few questions and left. It was during the following week that things turned around. I don’t know what he might have brought back to the other parties in the Alliance, but suddenly we were having a different type of discussion. I always gave Kevin a lot of credit for being willing to step up away from the other people and work toward a resolution.”

AUDITIONING THE SNAKE

We don’t see animals in opera productions all that often. To be sure, there are elephants in Aida and an occasional donkey in comic operas such as La Perichole by Offenbach. Snakes? Not so much. An actual boa constrictor? Hardly ever, though there was that one strange event quite a few years ago.

As a finale to its 2000–01 season, Minnesota Opera presented an unusual double bill, a pairing of Pagliacci and Carmina Burana, the one being Leoncavallo’s steamy look at marital infidelity and crying clowns in an Italian village, the other Carl Orff’s group of racy medieval songs arranged as an oratorio for orchestra, chorus, and soloists. The director, Christopher Mattaliano, created the show in 1997 for the Portland Opera and BodyVox, a Portland-based dance company. One of the dancers had choreographed her pet boa constrictor into the show, which was a touring production Minnesota Opera was renting, and that meant that those dancers traveled with the show. Lani Willis, who was then Minnesota Opera’s communications manager, tells the story.

“The dancer who had choreographed the boa had had a baby at some point after the production’s premiere in Portland and had, probably quite wisely, gotten rid of the boa constrictor. But the boa constrictor—or let’s say the role of a boa constrictor—was still in the show. But since the company didn’t travel with a boa constrictor, they had to find one every time they did the production. I drove down to Omaha in a snowstorm to see the show. A colleague at the opera com-

pany there told me, ‘We actually had to have auditions for snakes to see which ones the dancers could work with.’

“So we had to do the same thing, hold snake auditions. It was legitimate, but it also became sort of a PR stunt. We promoted it to all the pet stores. I made calls and was having strange conversations with snake wranglers at pet stores, wondering how we could get the word out to people that this is happening. We sent out a media alert about it and it was one of the few times we had every TV station in town showing up to report what we were doing. We had eight snake handlers with a whole variety of snakes, and the dancers were there to vet them. Nobody got bitten. Boas don’t bite. They squeeze their victims. But the handlers have ways to mitigate their instinct to squeeze, fortunately. People asked whether the snake was a soprano or a mezzo. It might have been a bass. The snake was just in the Carmina part of the show. It was this earthy, primal Garden of Eden setting with the dancers. Only one of the dancers handled the snake.”

The snake received no payment for its performances and, according to reports, has since retired from show business.

CENTER ARTS COUNCIL

Looking back many years later, Suzanne Weil said, “The Center Arts Council was one of the most amazing things that ever happened in Minneapolis—or anywhere. It was a volunteer organization, but you were a member only by invitation. Martin Friedman, who ran the Walker, gave it some money each year, but the council was very independent, though it was obviously in the spirit and aesthetic of the Walker Art Center.”

The council’s mission was to present events and sponsor activities—lectures, plays and concerts of all types of music. Members worked on committees. There was a dance committee, a drama committee, other committees for folk music and jazz, another for architecture and design. Suzanne headed the jazz committee and later served as vice-president of the council’s board.

Formed in 1952 by Walker director H. Harvard Arnason, the council’s two hundred or so members focused their efforts on the new and the unusual, though they didn’t shy away from traditional works such as a staging of Under Milkwood by council member Connie Goldman that was presented in the Walker gallery. The director was Michael Lessac, a young theater artist who later produced an album of songs titled Sleep Faster, We Need the Pillow.

More often, Goldman took a walk on the wild side. When the council invited Allan Kaprow to come to Minneapolis to stage one or more of his controversial Happenings, Connie was his assistant. A distinctly freewheeling ’60s

phenomenon, Happenings were serious and yet whimsical theatrical events composed of a seemingly illogical collection of elements in which performers interacted with audience members in what was often a non-theatrical environment.

“I was totally enchanted with this crazy project,” Goldman recalled in an interview in 1995.

I loved experiments and breaking up theatrical forms. I did a lot of driving around looking for strange things. Allan wanted huge numbers of boxes that would fall down right in front of people and scare them half to death. One time we had the audience walk around in the mushroom caves by the river in St. Paul. The audience reaction was mixed. Some had a wonderful time and thought it was wild and adventurous and crazy and fun and, thank goodness, here was something different to do on a Saturday night. Others were deeply offended. ‘This is art?’ I remember people stomping out and saying terrible things about Martin. They blamed him.” (Martin Friedman became Walker’s director in 1961.)

As a member of the council’s drama committee, Goldman hosted a symposium titled “How To Make Theater Seats More Uncomfortable,” which put forth the idea that theater ought to agitate and provoke. One year, she brought playwrights from around the country to the Walker, asking them to do whatever they wanted to do. Some read their plays to an audience.

One of them was Sam Shepherd, then unknown. “Somebody had said to me, ‘This guy’s hot. He’s really innovative,’ Goldman recalled. “He must have thought we were a bunch of dilettantes because he walked onstage, opened a box, and pulled out a bunch of balloons. He blew them up and let them go, and they flew up to the ceiling. That was his play. I got a lot of flak on that one. I thought Martin was going to kill me. But we all felt that we had a mission to nourish new artists and that that was what the Center Arts Council was set up to do.”

Norton Hintz, who was invited to join the council in 1955, saw the council as “a mix of fun things involving intelligent people interested in the arts and putting on programs and that allowed you to espouse some of your favorite ideas.” Hintz was interested in chamber music at that time and was starting to get interested in opera. He ended up being chairman of the music committee. The committee brought in people such as Arnold Dolmetsch, the early-music expert, and at one point put on an evening of songs by Hindemith with the soprano Helen Rice with Richard Zgodava at the piano.

“Almost all the events put on by the CAC lost money,” Hintz said.

Offbeat means you lose money. So we had to have a cash cow and for a long time our cash cow was the summer jazz concerts. There used to be a courtyard in back of the Walker, which later became the lobby of the Guthrie and when you set up folding chairs,

you could seat about eight hundred people. We engaged a local guy, Doc Evans, to give a jazz concert once a week. That would bring in, at $3 and $5 a ticket, a couple thousand dollars profit on every concert. Multiply that by six or seven and that’s our annual budget. We also brought in some major jazz players, but that cost more. Martin always expected the performing arts to break even, and that was difficult because on the one hand he wanted offbeat, innovative things. On the other, he didn’t want us to lose money.

Center Opera was CAC’s biggest and most expensive project—a little more than $40,000 for its first season. The company gave its first performances at the then-new Guthrie Theater in January 1964, and five seasons later it separated from the Walker and went off on its own, eventually changing its name to Minnesota Opera.

There had, in fact, been earlier efforts at opera production by the CAC. In November 1955, the council presented, for two nights, a double bill of chamber operas: a comedy from the eighteenth-century by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, The Maid as Mistress (La serva padrona) and a brief work from the twentieth century by Paul Hindemith, There and Back (Hin und Zuruck). The large staircase at the front end of the Walker lobby served as a stage. The audience sat on the stairs and in the balconies. James Alifaris conducted and George Amberg staged the two works. Both were well received by Edwin L. Bolton, critic of the Minneapolis Tribune, who described the productions as “com-

pletely charming.” Baritone Roy Schussler, chairman of the music department at the University of Minnesota, sang prominent roles in both operas.

Alifaris and Amberg resumed their collaboration three years later in another double bill that included Menotti’s The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore, a madrigal fable, as the composer described it, scored for chorus and an orchestra of nine players. The evening opened with a set of sixteenth-century madrigals performed by the University of Minnesota Chamber Singers.

The choice of repertoire in these offerings was relatively bold. Menotti’s Unicorn, which tells of a “strange poet” who keeps mythological animals as pets, had been premiered just two years earlier at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The Hindemith, first given in Baden-Baden in 1927, is a rarity, whereas Pergolesi’s La serva is performed quite often in colleges, even though it hardly ever seems as funny as It’s supposed to be. Clearly, the CAC wasn’t aiming at a mass audience, and, of course, it didn’t need one. Nor, we can presume, was it looking to attract opera aficionados of the sort who throw bouquets of flowers at the stars of the Metropolitan Opera at Northrop Auditorium each spring. What this repertoire suggests instead is the sensibility manifest in Center Opera, just a few years in the future, an uncompromising stance that said: we think these works—and the way we interpret them—are clever and smart, we hope you like them, and if you don’t, come back again—or don’t. This

essentially aristocratic point of view would successfully guide the company during its first decade but it would eventually prove inadequate as the need grew for a larger audience and increased income.

Though the opera company, once it got rolling, began to dominate the council’s attention, the organization continued to sponsor activities around the city, and not all of them cultural. The CAC’s parties, usually held at the Walker, became social events of some considerable pizzazz. Phoebe Hansen, who was CAC president from 1956 to 1960, recalled those parties in an interview in 1995.

“We put a bar on the landing,” she said. “We couldn’t get a liquor license, so people brought their own bottles. They put their name on them and left them on one of the tables. It was chaotic, but our parties were really marvelous.”

By the start of the 1970s the CAC was fading. “It began to die out,” Norton Hintz said.

“Partly, it was dying a natural death, but it was also partly being not given a lot of support by the Walker. Martin felt he no longer needed it or, in fact, no longer wanted it. He was professionalizing the performing arts. By then he had his own performing arts coordinator doing all of those things—chamber music concerts, jazz concerts, the lecture-dance things. That was all being done by his new performing arts curators rather than by volunteers.”

The CAC was unique in its time, said Connie Goldman.

I’m not aware of any situation like that, where a visual arts museum develops an elaborate performing arts program. It’s like the people in the Center Arts Council said to Martin, ‘Can we have a room to play in?’ That was the energy of it. And, I’d have to say, not everything that was done was a raging success. But everything that was done was interesting, and it was interesting that it was even done. People did things and organized things because they had a passion for experimenting with something new or bringing something that they knew about to a larger group of people.

And I’ll tell you something about Martin. As eccentric as he was, he stood by some of the crazy stuff we did. He really supported it. None of this would have happened, including Center Opera, if Martin hadn’t been a permissive parent. To do something like the Happenings, that was pretty adventurous, though a lot of that would probably seem pretty tame these days.

The Center Arts Council did a lot for me. It was part of my education. I learned a great deal about creativity and dedication and commitment and experimentation and about failure being a part of progress. Someone will come up to me and say, ‘I remember a folk-music concert at the Guthrie that you organized, and it’s wonderful that the Walker did this.’ In other words, I think what we did made a difference to people.

DOMINICK ARGENTO

“My problem is living too long. I’m ninety. Look, I’ve outlived Verdi, who died when he was eighty-seven.”

Dominick Argento, Minnesota’s most honored composer, was giving a visitor a tour of his new apartment in the Kenwood, a large, appropriately named building in the Kenwood section of south Minneapolis. Having occupied the apartment for just a month, he was still decorating and moving furniture around, setting up a smaller version of the elegant Mediterranean-style villa on Mt. Curve just a mile away that had been his home the past fifty years. In an effort to create a familiar environment, Argento had the waIls of the dining room and the bedroom painted the same colors as those in the house on Mt. Curve. Even so, it hadn’t been an easy maneuver, abandoning and selling the house, but after taking a fall on the stairway there in December 2017, Argento was gently persuaded by friends, along with his niece and his lawyer, to move to a place where he could get help if he needed it. He had been living alone since 2006, when his wife, the former Carolyn Bailey, a much-admired soprano, whom he called his muse and his constant companion, died after a protracted and undiagnosed illness. He suffered a stroke in 2015 from which he had almost totally recovered. He was walking slowly these days, but he didn’t look frail. Prior to his recent fall, he worked out at a nearby gym three times a week.

He brought with him to his new home some of his most prized possessions, among them

the five-foot Yamaha grand on which most of his music had been composed and, in the hallway, a case loaded with his favorite books, including all twelve volumes of Casanova’s memoir—books that had inspired his opera Casanova’s Homecoming, premiered at the Ordway in 1985 and then presented to wide acclaim at the New York City Opera. His most recent compositions—a set of cabaret songs premiered in 2012 at the University of Maryland and a group of choral pieces titled “Seasons,” settings of poems by Pat Solstad, first heard in Winona, Minnesota, in 2014—are, he said, his final works. He offered a pragmatic view of the matter. “I don’t know how much more I could write,” he said. “I’ve already composed fourteen operas.”

Age wasn’t the problem, however. It was his hearing—damage to the auditory nerves of the inner ear, the cochlea, the result of which is that the music he hears is distorted, and as result he stopped listening to music. Nonetheless, he did finish an opera in 2014, a new version of The Dream of Valentino, but this was more a matter of cutting than composing. The opera, which concerns the largely unhappy life of the silent-screen star, Rudolf Valentino, was premiered by the National Opera in Washington, D.C., in 1998. The new—and shorter—version for which Argento cut forty minutes out of the score, was premiered by Minnesota Opera—the eighth opera of Argento’s that the company has presented.

Widely considered one of the most important opera composers of his time, a Pulitzer

Prize-winner (From the Diary of Virginia Woolf) and Grammy Award-winner (Casa Guidi), Argento has been a vital force in Twin Cities music for more than five decades. A composer for many productions at the Guthrie Theater, a composer laureate of the Minnesota Orchestra, a Regents Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and a co-founder of Minnesota Opera, a company with which he has had successful collaborations, but also numerous disagreements over the years.

Born in York, Pennsylvania, Argento had lived in Minneapolis since 1958, when he accepted a position teaching theory and composition at the University of Minnesota. The move to Minnesota, he thought at the time, would be “artistic suicide.” Careers in music—and all the arts—are on the East Coast, not the Midwest. However, Argento soon began getting commissions from Twin Cities arts organizations, and after four years he and his wife decided to make Minneapolis their permanent home. “It had been my fortune,” he reflected in his book, Catalogue Raisonné as Memoir, “to have landed in a state, namely Minnesota, in which the art I practice is widely viewed as an essential aspect of life, not merely an ornament or an embellishment.”

It was late morning. Argento and a guest sat in the living room of his apartment looking out at a splendid view of the Basilica of St. Mary and beyond that the skyline of downtown Minneapolis. These two have known each other for forty years. There was talk of many things. It was a conversation but also,

as it turned out, Argento’s final interview. He died nine months later.

The conversation began with a memory. *

Minnesota Opera: In October 1993, you and I attended the premiere by the New York City Opera of Hugo Weisgall’s Esther at Lincoln Center. It was a hit both with audiences and with critics. Weisgall was your teacher in Baltimore. You’ve said that his Six Characters in Search of an Author, based on the Pirandello play, is the finest American opera. What is it about that work that you most admire?

Dominick Argento: First of all, I think it’s one of the greatest possible stories for an opera. The idea that characters are works of fiction and detachable from their setting is such an unusual idea, and Weisgall handled it beautifully. I would love to have had a crack at it myself, but I wouldn’t dare touch it now.

MA: Were there other Pirandello plays you looked at?

DA: Yes. I did a little one-act opera on his Sicilian Limes. I also looked at Henry IV, which is about madness.

MA: You’ve been affiliated with Minnesota Opera since its beginnings, and you’ve made no secret of your disappointments with the company over the years. What is your view of Minnesota Opera today? Is it an important company, and do you think it has evolved

in an interesting way, and do you admire its work today?

DA: I could almost say no to all of those. First of all, I think it’s become a very ordinary regional company, probably no more distinguished than the Des Moines Metro Opera in Iowa or the one in Tulsa. There was such enthusiasm connected to Center Opera in that first decade, but little by little that began to vanish and what evolved was a stereotypical opera company. And now there’s this whole parade of movie operas, an ill-fated idea, I think. The motivation behind it is that opera companies feel that, hey, we can sell that movie title. Anybody can set Casablanca to music, and every regional company in the country would do it because they think they’re selling Casablanca. People who go to these things are disappointed because there’s a quality to Casablanca that cannot be captured in an opera. A great opera composer like Verdi might have been able to do it, but I don’t think the young composers who take up a work like The Manchurian Candidate or The Shining, the worst example of all. I don’t think they can make them work.

MA: You were one of the founders of Center Opera. The first season, which included the premiere of your one-act opera The Masque of Angels, was, by all accounts, a success. The second production, given in the spring of 1964, was Britten’s Albert Herring. John Olon-Scrymgeour directed it, and Vern Sutton—quite memorably—performed the title role. What did you think of it?

DA: For me it was one of the great opera productions of all time. John was especially sensitive to Britten’s music, and Vern couldn’t have been better. We could tell we already had an opera star on our hands.

MA: In the autumn of that year, you and Carolyn went off to Italy for a year. You had received a Guggenheim fellowship. Your plan, on returning to Minneapolis, was to retain a position with the organization, official or not, and that John Olon-Scrymgeour would become permanent—or resident—director, and the model for the company would be the Aldeburgh Festival in England at which most of Britten’s operas had been premiered. Center Opera, in similar fashion, would be the birthplace of your operas. But it didn’t turn out that way. What happened?

DA: It was in that period that Martin Friedman decided that we had to have a company. We couldn’t just have an ad hoc company. He knew somebody named John Ludwig who he thought would be an ideal manager of an opera company. He had just come out of the Yale School of Drama. Ludwig accepted the job, and for director he had a friend named Wesley Balk. So for the second season John Olon-Scrymgeour directed The Rape of Lucretia and Balk directed The Wise Woman and the King. It became a contest between Olon-Scrymgeour and Balk as to who was going to become the future director. There was no question, I guess, based on what I heard from John that the decision was loaded in favor of Wesley.

MA: What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t gotten that Guggenheim and stayed here instead? Would you have been able to throw some weight in the direction you thought it should go, that it might have become Aldeburgh West?

DA: No, I don’t know if I could have. John Ludwig was a very strong person, and he had a mandate from Martin Friedman to make this something that represented an artistic vision.

MA: The impression I got from Martin over the years is that he was less interested in opera than in presenting the work of the artists he had engaged to design the productions. Moreover, as an aesthetic, what he wanted to present was “anti-opera.”

DA: I think you’re right. And I think that’s what interested Balk, too.

MA: During the remaining Center Opera years—up until ’69—you worked at the Guthrie composing incidental music for the plays. You perhaps saw all or some of the Center Opera productions. Did you admire them?

DA: I saw most of them. But after seeing two or three and seeing what Wesley was doing, I sort of gave up. Wesley thought every work had to be manipulated in a way that obviously favored the set designer. It was either Robert Indiana or Bob Israel. They were given a free hand. The company had a mission, which was to do new operas and innovative work. But they also wanted to

do some of the great classics of the past. My idea was they should do them without messing them up. I’ll never forget The Abduction From the Seraglio. There was this enormous folding chair on its side, a camp chair. The back reached to the ceiling. That was the set, an overturned camp chair. I’m sure the audience couldn’t help but wonder, instead of listening to the music, what the hell’s going to happen with that chair? Nothing happened with it, except that it messed up the opera.

MA: The company premiered your Postcard from Morocco in 1971. You have said that in composing this opera you found your voice. How would you describe this voice?

DA: It’s what I wanted to see—and what thrilled me—not just declamation. New operas were coming out, and they were all sort of talky, not melody but recitative. I wanted to attempt to express all the emotions one gets in La Boheme. What makes that possible is the full use of the voice. I think I achieved that in Postcard. There’s nothing like that in, say, The Masque of Angels, which is very contained, very disciplined. There’s a greater sense of freedom in Postcard. I always define Postcard as my forgiveness piece. They felt that after seven years, knowing that I was unhappy with this organization that I had something to do with the founding of, they invited me back to do something. By then, I had developed such an animus against Balk that I made it a condition that I could have my old director, John Olon-Scrymgeour, direct it. But that, apparently, was

too much to ask. John Donahue, who was a decent director, ended up directing it. I wrote the work intentionally for the people who I knew had been cast in it. Every note I wrote for Vern was something I knew he could do well, and that was true of every other role in the opera. I knew every singer that way.

MA: Here’s a quote from the composer Lee Hoiby: “Until Menotti’s The Consul, opera was considered a vanishing form, more or less, especially as far as American composers were concerned.” With that in mind, did you feel when you began writing operas as a graduate student that you were embarking on a bold and perhaps lonely journey?

DA: Well, I didn’t start out concentrating on opera. I mean, I did an opera for my Master’s thesis and one for my PhD. But being married to Carolyn, I began to write for her voice. And when Hugo Weisgall had an opera company in Baltimore, I was the vocal coach. We did nothing but contemporary operas, and I realized you could actually make exciting theater and call it opera, and that convinced me more than anything. And I think the first season here with Center Opera was more an epiphany of what opera could be. I knew that I was capable of creating dramatic theater pieces, but I always felt there was something a little tawdry or tacky about Menotti’s musical language. And except for Amahl, you almost never hear of his works being done anymore.

MA: You’ve taught at least two generations of composers. What’s the most common mis-

take a young composer makes in writing his first opera?

DA: Choice of libretto. It’s either not amenable to music or it has music of its own that gets in the way. For instance, if you were to take the plays of Yeats, the language is too rich, the same with Eliot. The Cocktail Party is a case in point.

MA: How much control do you have of productions of your own works that are done in some distant place where you can’t see them?

DA: None. The most recent example came last November when a German company did Poe. Evidently, they’re very Regietheater— director’s theater. In other words, it’s the director’s opera, not the composer’s opera. I didn’t see it, but they sent me photographs. Poe, for instance, was underneath a bathtub, and flowers were growing out of the bathtub. What the hell that had to do with the story I have no idea. If I had been in Germany, I wouldn’t have dared to speak against it. That might have kept them from doing it. Menotti had 100 percent control over his operas. He, of course, directed many of them himself. By and large, composers these days are so grateful to get a production they won’t do anything to jeopardize it.

MA: Going back to Postcard, John Donahue directed the first production in ’71, and then Wes Balk directed the revival two years later. Was that against your wishes?

DA: No, I didn’t mind the idea. I was interested in seeing what would happen because Wesley had never done anything like that. I was curious to see what he would do. I don’t even remember going to it, to tell you the truth. It must have been so similar to John’s production that I didn’t feel the need to see it.

MA: What were Wesley’s strengths and weaknesses as a director?

DA: His strength was that he always kept the stage picture interesting. There were very few dull moments. There was always a sense of drama going on, though there were occasions when he actually violated the opera. One was in Don Giovani, Don Ottavio’s aria, “O mio tesoro”—“Oh, my treasure.” He’s talking about Donna Anna. Don Ottavio opens her jewel case and looks at all her baubles, her treasure. Which totally changes the situation and turns him into a greedy little pig. But it made an interesting stage picture.

MA: And yet you must have admired him up to a point because he directed two of your later works, Poe, and, at the New York City Opera, Miss Havisham.

DA: The University of Minnesota commissioned Poe. It was for the Bicentennial. The idea was that it was something the university could give the nation. And I guess we all felt that Wesley, as director, would also represent the university.

MA: You described the Chicago Lyric production of Poe, given in 1990, as “the most exciting production of an opera of mine I have ever seen.” What made it so exciting? And how did it differ from the premiere production here in 1976? And I wonder if you’ve seen anything since then that rose to that level?

DA: It was so much more imaginative and poetic than the one here. That was a quality that Wesley didn’t bring to the thing. Wesley could be exciting onstage and interesting, but I don’t think I ever saw anything of his that evoked a sense of poetry. Whereas, Frank Galati, the director in Chicago, had wonderful ideas about the trio in act two. They’re singing about a lake that’s haunted. It’s right out of Poe. It’s sung by Poe, his wife and his nemesis, Griswold. All three are in lifeboats. Galati had a curtain on the lower half of the stage, indicating water, and he had the three lifeboats up on stilts. It was as if they were floating in the air. He made everything so special. For instance, two walls converged at the back of the stage, and there must have been two thousand computer slides projected onto the walls. The production had wonderful things like that, and they could have been done here, but I think Wesley was so intent on playing it straight.

MA: You revised the score for that production, didn’t you?

DA: Yes, I cut maybe twenty minutes of it. That was because of the conductor, Chris-

topher Keene. Ardis Krainik, who ran the company, had said, “We’ll get Christopher to do it because then he can take it to New York.” Christopher had said, “We can’t take this particular scene to New York. It’ll cost too much.” That’s why we cut it. He loved the piece. I don’t know whether that would have happened or not, but then he died and that was the end of that.

MA: Would you say that Poe is the most unjustifiably neglected of your operas? Or are there others you would put in that category?

DA: I think Casanova is very under-produced and unjustly ignored. Both of them have a fault. They have huge casts, a big orchestra and chorus, lots of scenery and costumes.

MA: Your libretto for Casanova was much admired by Miss Sills and others. The advantage of being your own librettist is clear: fewer arguments. But is there any advantage to having someone to bounce ideas off of?

DA: Not really. In fact, that was the reason Miss Havisham was my big flop. I still believe that the best operas are those where the libretto was written to be an opera. It’s not an adaptation, in other words. It’s like Rosenkavalier. That opening scene was obviously intended to be an opera. That’s how we started to go with Miss Havisham. In that case, the librettist pursued a certain idea. I didn’t like it, but it stayed in, and it wasn’t until the final dress rehearsal that I realized the opera’s too long. I allowed things I shouldn’t have. If I had written my own libretto, I would

have known better.

MA: You were widely thought to be a good teacher. Did teaching get in the way of composition or was it a welcome break for you?

DA: No. It was always refreshing. I loved teaching. I always said I studied with world-famous teachers—Dallapiccola, Cowell, Nabokov, Hovhaness—and I didn’t learn a thing from any of them, whereas the one who never achieved world fame I learned quite a bit from, and that was Bernard Rogers, the one teacher at Eastman who I really admired.

MA: So it wasn’t so much what or how much a teacher knows but whether the teacher can communicate what he knows.

DA: Yes. Or it’s not so much what the teacher says as what he does. It’s more about how to be a composer than about composing. A lot of it is learning to be more confident about what you’re doing, how to sustain yourself when you see everyone else admiring Philip Glass or raving about John Adams. Part of composing is learning to hear all those noises and then ignoring them and then doing what you do—to be yourself, in other words.

MA: So perhaps it was an advantage to be here all those years because there are fewer contending voices.

DA: Yes. The reason I love the Midwest is that I’m able to hear my own voice.

MA: Who among composers working today do you think is over-rated?

DA: John Adams. He’s been practically canonized. He can write the trashiest piece for orchestra and have conductors dying to do it. Something else is operating when that happens. It’s more like a kind of telegraph among conductors and orchestras as to what pieces to play.

MA: Carlyle Floyd?

DA: Carlyle and I have had our disagreements. I have always put him down, but he knows he has gotten even. He has written, maybe, six operas that get some attention, even though as a composer I don’t think he knows how to write an opera.

MA: Susannah, I think, is the only one of his that remains in the repertoire.

DA: And Of Mice and Men.

MA: You wrote once about the composing of Poe, that during one period you wrote ten to twelve hours a day. This makes me wonder: What has been for you the greatest satisfaction? Is it the writing itself, grueling though it may be? Or is it finishing the writing, putting the double-bar at the end? Or is it seeing the work onstage on opening night and hearing the thunderous applause? Is it the enthusiastic response from friends? Or is it the big fat royalty check from Boosey? What is it in this long process that makes you say, “This is why I do this?”

DA: The writing. It’s when I’m sitting at the piano and finding a little phrase that tickles me. There’s a line in the preface to one of Conrad’s novels. He talks about how the artist descends within himself, “and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. Such an appeal, to be effective, must be an impression conveyed through the senses. It is not amenable to persuasion. Its high desire is to reach the secret springs of responsive emotion.” And you recognize that. I used to test it with Carolyn. I’d say, “Which is the best part of this page?” I’d play it over, and she’d say, “Oh, those last couple of bars.” It’s that moment, in other words, when you’re writing.

MA: Is it like going into a trance?

DA: Yes. The preface to my book is all about composition. I quote Bernstein where he says that “the first step in composing is to relax almost to the point of falling asleep and allowing the mind to go blank.” It’s clearing the mind of everything—all the appointments you have. You want a completely blank stage. It’s almost, like you say, putting yourself into a trance because while you’re there you forget to eat, to drink, you forget what time it is and who you are. Nothing exists except the music. It’s almost like Homer’s siren who gets sailors in trouble. It woos you and you’re drawn in.

MA: Going back to the idea of opening night, that must be an experience of some ambivalence. On the one hand, you have—pre-

sumably—a feeling of accomplishment. You got through it, and the writing was what you wanted it to be, more or less. But the production is so frequently ambiguous in its pluses and minuses. Some things you see onstage give you pleasure; other things are irritating. Am I right about that?

DA: Yes. Until you see it onstage, you always imagine it in its perfect condition. When I visualize it, I stage it in my head, and I see the characters, and everything works. But when it’s onstage and somebody else is directing it, I wonder things like, “Why does he have to walk over and move that chair? Why can’t he just stand and sing?” The hard part is that I’m judging that opening night production by the perfect production I’ve seen in my head. They rarely overlap.

MA: When you’re composing, do you sing the part at the piano? Do you compose at the piano?

DA: Not always. I hate to compose at the computer. Anything that’s more than just three-part harmony, I can’t be sure of. I can write down what I think it might be, but then I’ll take it to the piano and check it. I spend most of my time walking back and forth between the piano and the computer. I need the computer now because I can’t write with my hand. It’s easier for me to think at the computer than at the piano. I just print it out and then take it over to the piano to hear what I like or don’t like.

MA: There’s a famous drawing of Dickens

sitting at his desk writing and a bunch of his characters appear in a cloud above him. Sometimes, we’re told, he would get up, move around and become one of his characters. Do you do anything like that in your composing, like getting up and thinking, “I’m Mr. Owen or whomever?”

DA: If I have to write a scene where someone walks across a room, opens a book, reads something, then closes the book and thinks about it, then takes a gun out of a drawer, I’d have to know when I’m writing the music how much time it’s going to take. So I’ll get up and act it out. I’ll walk over there and stand there with a book and do everything and see how long it takes. Then I know I’ll have to write, say, four minutes of music. That I’ll do, but I won’t do any singing.

MA: The newest recording of your music is a collection of three of your one-act operas: The Boor, Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, and A Waterbird Talk.

DA: That was done by a guy named Gil Rose, who has a new opera company in Boston called Odyssey. He brought them to the New York City Opera, the idea being a celebration of my 90th birthday. But the project ran out of money because the revived New York City Opera is barely standing. So they did just two of them at Carnegie Hall.

MA: That’s interesting because these oneacts are what could be called chamber operas. This summer Minnesota Opera is staging its first production (Fellow Travelers) at

a smaller alternate space, the Cowles Center in downtown Minneapolis. The idea is to put on chamber operas there, which is the kind of repertoire that this company, under the banner of Center Opera, started out doing back in the ’60s.

DA: Do you remember Goran Gentele, who was going to take over the Metropolitan Opera?

MA: He was Swedish. But he died before he got here.

DA: Yes. One of his plans was to have a Piccolo Met, a small theater like the Piccola at La Scala. He was going to open it with Postcard, but he died. People keep dying on me. It’s the story of my life.

MA: But you’re still alive and kicking.

DA: My problem is living too long.

MA: Have you seen the operas that the company has premiered under the banner of the New Works Initiative?

DA: Some of them. I couldn’t care less about them. I saw something called Doubt, which was an awful dumb thing. It was a Broadway show about some kid in a Catholic school. It was so boring.

MA: What about the World War One opera, Silent Night?

DA: I heard part of it in the broadcast. Kevin Puts: He’s a fellow Eastman student. He went to Peabody, too. He’s repeating my whole career. I didn’t find it very interesting. I heard it. Maybe if I had seen it I would feel differently. By and large, the other new works they’ve done—The Manchurian Candidate, The Shining, Dinner at Eight—to me they are all failures.

MA: What would you like to see Minnesota Opera do in the next decade?

DA: More chamber works. There are loads of operas that are never done here. We haven’t done half the Britten operas. Hans Werner Henze, the best German opera composer since Beethoven, wrote some wonderful operas, and we’ve never seen any of them here. We’re so chauvinistic. Henze used to be done in all civilized countries. Even the Met hasn’t done his operas.

MA: Were you as impressed with the revised Valentino as I was?

DA: My favorite thing—and for me the highlight of the opera—was the long tenor duet with only a saxophone accompaniment.

MA: I’d be surprised if this new version doesn’t go on to have a substantial life.

DA: Well, it better show some signs soon. I haven’t heard of anybody picking it up.

MA: You said a few years ago that the choral piece you wrote with Pat Solstad was the last

thing you would be writing. Has that proved to be the case?

DA: Yes. I tried to play the piano without these hearing aids. They distort so much. They make things louder, and they make the harmonies muddy. Anything above middle C gets shrill. You know, I’ve had more damn trouble this year. I’ve had kidney stones removed. I’ve had two falls that required hospitalization. I had a stroke. I’m having constant physical therapy. But now that I’ve been through all that, I feel I might go back and see what I can do. I might try to write. That’s the short answer.

MA: I hope so.

DA: I hope so, too.

Dominick Argento died nine months later on Feb. 20, 2019.

ENTERTAINING VIRGIL

They kept hearing that he was “difficult.” He, in this case, was Virgil Thomson, one of America’s most important composers, one of the first to borrow from popular music and to use folk tunes and hymns in his operas, ballet and film scores. He was admired but not so often heard. When Thomson died in 1989, Leonard Bernstein said, “We all loved his music, but we seldom played it.”

This made Center Opera’s production of the Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera The Mother of Us All, a tribute to Susan B. Anthony that some think is the Great American Opera, an event of some considerable substance. New York audiences hadn’t seen the opera since its premiere there in 1947. As a result, critics from all over the country descended on the Guthrie Theater in February 1967, and wrote enthusiastically about the opera’s cunning blend of folk-inspired music and fractured storytelling, and they offered much praise for the production, which was staged by Wesley Balk, conducted by Tom Nee, and designed by Robert Indiana.

There was one person in the audience who didn’t much care for what he saw onstage that night. That was Virgil Thomson, whom the Walker had invited to Minneapolis to see the production on opening night and attend some of the rehearsals. According to reports, Thomson hated Indiana’s costume designs, which looked like three-dimensional figure drawings, each singer wearing a sash with the character’s name on it. “There they go again, doing that awful stuff,” he shouted during rehearsals. He thought Balk and Nee

had taken liberties with the music and the libretto. Walker director Martin Friedman drew the assignment of keeping the ever-agitated Thomson in his seat and to drive him each day from the Minneapolis Club, where he was staying—at that time an all-male sanctuary— to the Guthrie. Thomson, Friedman recalled, made frequent use of the club’s facilities, especially the swimming pool.

“Those were the days when one swam in the nude,” Friedman recalled. “It was during a visit to the pool that I saw a little, pearshaped man who looked like Mr. McGoo walk to the end of the low diving board wearing only a pair of black ankle socks. Hands clasped as though in prayer, he dived in, making a big splash. It was the only time Virgil seemed happy during his visit, despite an endless round of lunches and dinners in his honor.”

Suzanne Weil and her husband, Fred Weil, Jr., (known to just about everybody on the planet as Bucky), were assigned to accompany Thomson for dinner before the final dress rehearsal. Suzanne eventually became coordinator of performing arts at the Walker. Bucky was Center Opera’s first board president after the company separated from the Walker.

“They told us, ‘Get him as drunk as you can because he’s impossible,’ Suzanne recalled not long ago.

At the final dress rehearsal he will want to stage everything himself.’ So I saw him in the

afternoon, and I said, ‘Mr. Thomson, we’re going to get together tonight. There are several restaurants in Minneapolis, or we could go to my house.’ He said, ‘I would like to go to your house.’ So I went to my butcher and said, ‘Give me $300 worth of anything.’ Bucky picked him up, and he didn’t speak. He was just sour and horrible.

We tried to give him a drink. Everything we pulled out he didn’t want. My husband, who was not easily cowed, had a little jug of corn whiskey that someone had given him. He pulled that out—it came from where Virgil grew up—and from that moment on, we were buddies. So we went to the final dress, and it happened that Robert Indiana’s friend had a photography collection from that period, the ’20s. It was hung in the Guthrie lobby. It was the dead of winter, and Bucky’s car had been towed. So he went to retrieve his car, and we went into the lobby where there were all these photographs from that period in Paris, and Virgil was saying things like, ‘Oh, that’s Alice before she grew her mustache’ and ‘Oh, there’s Pablo and little Pablo.’ Virgil knew them all. It was one of the most thrilling things in my life hearing all this. And we became friends. I used to go visit him at the Chelsea. He could be difficult, but, I must say, that was a wonderful production.

THE WORDSMITH

He writes the words that make the whole world sing.

While sitting at his desk in his apartment in New York City and getting ready to write his fortieth opera libretto and his fifth oratorio, Mark Campbell recalled the moment in April 2012, when he learned that his opera, Silent Night, with a score by Kevin Puts, which Minnesota Opera had premiered just a few months earlier, had won the Pulitzer Prize for music.

He was working for an advertising agency at the time. “I checked my messages at home,” he said. “This was in the days when you had to log on and check messages, and the subject was, ‘Silent Night Wins Pulitzer Prize.’ I screamed out loud. Someone came running in, wondering if they should call security.”

With some twenty productions of the opera having been mounted in the past few years, Silent Night is one of the most often produced new operas of the twenty-first century. Based on the French film Joyeux Noel, the opera tells the poignant story of the “Christmas truce” of 1914, the first year of World War One, when French, German, English and Scottish soldiers threw down their weapons, climbed out of their trenches and made the frightening walk across noman’s-land, where they mingled with their enemies, exchanging food and souvenirs, sang carols and played a game of soccer, and then the next day went back to killing each other.

Though Campbell had written nearly a dozen opera librettos along with numerous sets of lyrics for song cycles and music theater pieces, for Puts, Silent Night was a first—his first opera and his first collaboration with Campbell. They worked together again for Minnesota Opera in 2015 with The Manchurian Candidate, and two years later Opera Philadelphia premiered—to wide acclaim— their opera Elizabeth Cree. All told, for Minnesota Opera, Campbell has written librettos for six operas, the others being The Shining with Paul Moravec premiered in 2016; Memory Boy, a youth opera with Reinaldo Moya that same year; Dinner at Eight with William Bolcom in 2017; and Edward Tulane with Paola Prestini, scheduled for a premiere in fall 2022.

Besides being the most prolific librettist of our time, Campbell has been a tireless advocate for contemporary American opera and a generous mentor to future generations of writers. In 2020 he created and is funding the Campbell Opera Libretto Prize, the first and only award for opera librettists. The award is administered by Opera America. The initial recipient was Douglas Kearney, a poet and librettist who lives in St. Paul and teaches at the University of Minnesota.

As experienced as Campbell is, he finds it impossible to predict with any certainty whether a work of his will be a success, and by success he means that it will reach its audience. “With Silent Night, I thought we had something special, though I didn’t predict that it would be as successful as it

has been,” he said. “An opera that I thought would be more successful and has not, at least not yet, is The Manchurian Candidate. We had a second production in Austin, and it was one of the most thrilling things. You could just feel the audience. It was electric. I still think that opera will find its way into the repertoire. It will just take longer.”

The Shining, based on the book by Stephen King, was scheduled to be produced by Opera Colorado in early 2022 and a year later by Lyric Opera of Kansas City. According to reports, ticket sales for the Colorado production were out-selling Carmen. Dinner at Eight has had a couple of university productions, “but it hasn’t entered the repertory,” Campbell said. “There are some issues there with the ending that just didn’t quite fulfill what we had hoped it would emotionally. I don’t know what will happen with that one.”

Campbell considers Elizabeth Cree, a Gothic thriller based on The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd, his best collaboration with Kevin Puts, and Puts agrees, Campbell said. By the close of 2021, Campbell had worked with more than fifty composers. “I’ve been very, very lucky,” he said. “Actually, I only walked away from one project in my entire life, and that was many years ago.” He continued on:

What makes a good collaboration? The best collaborations begin with respect, where both the composer and the librettist know that the person they’re working with is the best person they could be working with on

this project. We know that we will bring out each other’s best work if we start with respect.

We also have fun. A good collaboration has a little bit of irreverence in it, irreverence for this crazy form called opera and for the whole commissioning construct and everything that goes along with it.

One thing that’s wonderful about Minnesota Opera is that they know how to do a workshop. And it’s not like you do the workshop and everyone says, ‘Oh, my God, that’s brilliant. No changes.’ At Minnesota Opera, we go there and we hear our mistakes—that’s the best part—and we make changes. And then you get to work with a director like Eric Simonson. We worked together on three operas, including Edward Tulane. He’s a writer, so he has no problem coming over to me and expressing a dramaturgical concern in a way I understand. That’s pretty wonderful.

Minnesota Opera’s expertise in the use of workshops grew out of its willingness to put on new works, a practice that goes back to the company’s beginnings in the early ’60s.

“Starting with The Grapes of Wrath and the New Works Initiative, Minnesota Opera really became a leader in creating new opera in this country and served as a model for other companies to follow,” Campbell said. “The three-workshop format is now followed by every major opera company in the country. I went to a World Opera conference three or four years ago in Madrid, and they were all interested in the way we were creating

new operas because we were doing it so successfully.

“Part of this is that the audience in Minneapolis and St. Paul has been cultivated for a long time to appreciate new work. They learned to reach out to the audience and say, ‘Don’t be afraid of contemporary opera. This opera is your opera. Come and see it, and you will see your stories on this stage, not the stories of Italians from five hundred years ago. I’m not maligning those old stories, but I think that Minnesota Opera, since the beginning, has been able not just to commission new work but to tell audiences to come and see these works. That’s a big thing.”

Edward Tulane, based on a book by Kate DiCamillo about a toy rabbit who is separated from his loving family and must learn to fend for himself, is a collaboration between Campbell and the composer Paola Prestini. It was to have been premiered at the Ordway March 14, 2020, but was canceled because of the COVID pandemic.

“I was heartbroken, but mostly for the cast,” Campbell said. “Paola and I both had projects to work on. And at the same time I was thinking, ‘I can now make this better,’ and I did, just a few months after the cancellation. I did a whole re-write of the final scene.”

Even so, the epidemic had taken a toll not so much on his writing projects as on the productions of his works that had to be canceled. By late autumn of 2021, he figured he had lost at least twenty productions. “After

twenty, I stopped counting,” he said.

In recent years Campbell has been active not just in the training of aspiring librettists but in raising their status, which means getting proper credit and compensation for their work. “When I started, in 2000, no one was teaching people how to write librettos,” Campbell said. “My agent and I were in the woods about ‘How come they keep taking my name off of the credit for an opera I wrote?’”

Campbell and Michael Korie, who wrote the libretto for The Grapes of Wrath, formed a committee at the Dramatists Guild to improve the standing of librettists. “Opera is always about music,” Campbell said, “but a librettist should never be mistreated. We won’t get good operas if we don’t have good librettists. So, one way we’ll get good librettists is to increase their power. It’s something I really believe in. My whole career has been moving toward making sure the librettists and the stories in opera are at the front of everything, that they’re not an afterthought.”

Over the years Campbell has set up libretto writing programs at the American Opera Institute, the American Lyric theater, the American Opera Project, and the Manhattan School of Music. “It’s something I very much believe in because I had no training when I started,” Campbell said. “My only training was listening to and watching the works of Stephen Sondheim. I had not even heard an entire opera.”

The fact that Campbell’s Opera Libretto Prize received eighty-eight applications in its first year suggests a considerable interest in the art of libretto writing. Douglas Kearney, the first year’s winner, has published seven books of poetry and has written several opera librettos.

“Kearney has a real poetic voice. The words just explode off the page, and they’re instantly musical,” Campbell said. “Usually, I get worried about a poet writing a libretto because poets often think in small, intimate terms and not of a larger story. A poem is usually something that doesn’t last for two and a half hours. The thing that impressed me in Douglas’s work is that he has both: a gorgeous sense of poetry and a great feeling for drama and storytelling.”

This follows along the lines of the late Alec Wilder’s comment in his book American Popular Song that song lyrics can—and should— be poetic. But they’re not poetry.

“I just taught this distinction three days ago,” Campbell said. I went into a class and said, ‘Guys, what I’m talking about are lyrics, not poetry, and here’s a good first definition of the difference. Steve Sondheim said, ‘Lyrics require music. Poetry does not.”

What is the biggest mistake a beginning lyricist or librettist makes? “It’s that they don’t realize that the libretto is a very specialized art form. It isn’t a play,” Campbell said.

I’ve ranted about this so many times—one thing I hate is what I would call the sung play, which means that it’s simply dialogue, that it doesn’t take advantage of the great things that an opera can do, like explode into an aria or become a giant ensemble or all those things opera does so brilliantly. When it just becomes this character speaking and then that character speaking and then another one speaking, it’s so dull. So the biggest mistake from young librettists is they’re not writing librettos. They’re writing plays.

VERN SUTTON

A good tenor is always in demand. In the case of Vern Sutton, the demand, on at least one occasion, was so intense that a radical solution had to be devised. In the fall of 1969 Sutton was booked on a Saturday night to preside at a workshop in the west suburbs of Minneapolis with a troupe from the University Opera Theater, of which he was artistic director, and that same night he was scheduled to perform a major role in a St. Paul Opera production of Falla’s La Vida Breve in downtown St. Paul. Though this was later in the evening, there was no way the trip could be made by car. The solution was one that any sensible opera company would have devised. They rented a helicopter and hired a reasonably experienced pilot who picked Sutton up and within twenty minutes he was standing in a dressing room at the St. Paul Auditorium putting on his costume.

Sutton’s career has been varied and surprising. A classically trained singer with a PhD in musicology, he appeared on the very first broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” July 6, 1974, and on many subsequent shows over the years. Counted among the regulars on the series, Sutton was considered “the class act.” Garrison Keillor once said of him, “Vern’s the one you’d want to sing at your wedding, even if it’s your third marriage.” On that first show, he walked onstage with the pianist Bill Huckeby and sang “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” in different styles: musical comedy, opera, calypso, rock ‘n’ roll, and gospel. He and Huckeby simply made it up as they went along.

Growing up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Sutton—born Everett Laverne Sutton—came to Minneapolis in 1960 to do graduate study in voice at the University of Minnesota, and over the decades he successfully balanced two full-time careers, one as a performer and another as an educator, while earning acclaim as a director, staging more than 115 productions for the University Opera Theater, and becoming a widely recognized expert in the creation of concert staging or “semi-staging” of musical theater works. He produced the “Opera on the Farm” program that took Copland’s The Tender Land to small towns throughout Minnesota and the Dakotas, and he sang with every major performing organization in the region—and some not so major. His lead roles as a member of the Stagecoach Players in Shakopee, Minnesota., especially his extravagant, almost Baroque-style villains—giving some 1,200 performances during the ’60s—remain the stuff of theatrical legend.

Sutton was a rather exotic bird, one not often sighted during the ’60s though perhaps not so uncommon today: a singer who can act. Sir Tyrone Guthrie saw Sutton’s all but definitive portrayal of the country bumpkin Albert Herring in Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name—the second production by the feisty new Center Opera Company—and he immediately offered Sutton a position in the company of the then equally-new Guthrie Theater. Sutton already had too many irons in the fire to accept the offer.

Over the years Sutton made his mark in an impressive range of pursuits: lecturer, radio and recording artist, champion of contemporary music, teacher and administrator. From 1991 to 1999 Sutton served as director of the School of Music at the University of Minnesota. For sheer impact and memorability, however, Sutton’s twenty-plus years with Minnesota Opera, first as a lead performer and then as a member of the company’s ensemble, would have to sit on the top shelf of this busy man’s accomplishments. Sutton sang in the company’s first production in 1964, the premiere of A Masque of Angels by Dominick Argento, and twenty-one years later he performed his farewell, a role in Casanova’s Homecoming, the premiere of another work by Argento. And then, in a command performance, he returned in the spring of 2013 to sing the brief but challenging role of the Emperor in a production of Turandot, the occasion being two birthdays, the company’s fiftieth and Sutton’s own seventy-fifth..

Between these years Sutton produced a gallery of indelible characterizations: the innocent and oblivious Schweik in Robert Kurka’s anti-war opera The Good Soldier Schweik (1966, ’71), the menacing and murderous Punch in Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy (1969), the paranoid and terrified Mr. Owen in Argento’s Postcard from Morocco (1971, ’72), the demented King George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (1974), and, as an example of Sutton’s skill playing comedy, his portrayal of the wily Don Medigua in John Phillip Sousa’s El Capitan.

Mezzo-soprano Janis Hardy, who joined the company in 1970 and over the years was Sutton’s most frequent singing partner, recalled seeing Sutton in Eight Songs at the Walker Art Center auditorium. “It was the most spell-binding performance I’ve ever seen,” she said. “He finished it by walking up the steps of the auditorium and out the door, giving out this haunting semi-scream. No one in the audience moved for a long time afterwards.”

John Ludwig, who was general manager of Center Opera during its first decade, recalled seeing his first Center Opera production in 1964: Albert Herring. “The first person I saw in rehearsal was Vern Sutton,” Ludwig said. “The quality of his acting and musicianship was fantastic.”

This is high praise for a singer who claims he never had an acting lesson. Sutton’s musical training came early, however. As is the case with most professional singers, he started out as a boy soprano. He sang in his church choir, and as a member of the local YMCA Boys Chorus he sang a solo number—“The Green-Eyed Dragon”—for an audience in Cleveland of 18,000 who were honoring the one hundredth anniversary of the YMCA. By the time he got to Minnesota, having graduated magna cum laude from Austin College in Sherman, Texas, his experience in musical theater had been chiefly in musical comedy, though he does recall a youthful portrayal of a dancing bear in The Bartered Bride. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until 1963 that Sutton sang in an actual opera production in the Twin

Cities, and this was a new work, Christopher Sly, an opera by Dominick Argento based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The production initiated a long and fruitful composer-singer relationship. Argento ended up writing a part for Sutton in his next opera, his fifth, A Masque of Angels, and he continued creating roles large and small for Sutton in operas (Postcard from Morocco, Waterbird Talk, The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe, Casanova’s Homecoming) and concert works (Jonah and the Whale, The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, Letters From Composers).

Sutton is essentially a light lyric tenor with a wide range in both pitch and tonal color. It’s not a conventionally big voice, certainly not the throbbing Italianate sound we expect in Verdi, for instance. (Whether Verdi actually looked for such a voice remains a subject of debate.) Here’s Argento on Sutton: “ I’ve always said Vern doesn’t have a great voice, but he’s a great singer. He may not rival Pavarotti, but he’s a hell of a lot more fun to listen to. He’s one of my loves. My whole career has been so interlinked and entwined with his that there’s no separation. Whenever I think of almost any of my music, I hear his voice.”

Once Center Opera got underway, the renown of both the company and its singers spread quickly. Sutton was surprised to find that conductors, performers, and vocal coaches in Europe knew who he was, as early as the late ’60s, when he studied voice in Italy. “I mentioned my name,” he

recalled, “and they said, ‘Oh, yes, you’re the tenor with the Center Opera company.’ They had read in the national and international publications my name associated with the company. We were better known in Europe than in the Twin Cities.”

Sutton named two roles as his favorites: Albert Herring and Mr. Owen in Postcard from Morocco. “And I loved Schweik, too,” he said. “And, you know, to have composers write things specifically for me, I really liked that, though I’ve been cursed by other tenors because they have to do what was written for me—what was in the score—and they can’t all do what I do, especially in the case of Mr. Owen.”

Asked about his least favorite roles, he mentioned a part in Robert Ward’s Claudia Legare, a commissioned work based on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that was premiered here during the 1977–78 season. Wesley Balk, who staged the production, said publicly a few years later that he didn’t like the opera.

“It was a bad idea,” said Sutton. “Hedda Gabler is a really good play. Placing it in the southern United States after the Civil War just didn’t work. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I think Wesley would have chosen to do. But he did it because the company had already commissioned it. And Ward, of course, had won awards for The Crucible, and he really wanted to do this piece. The good thing about it was that Ward then wrote a role for me in his next opera, Abelard and Heloise, which we premiered in Charlotte. I played

Heloise’s crazy uncle Fulbert. I don’t think the opera has ever been done again.

“I don’t know that I have a least favorite production,” he said. “I guess a less favorite would be the Paul and Martha Boesing piece called The Wanderer. It was a folk opera. Oh, yes, I remember Martha Boesing. We were on tour with the thing in some little town in Minnesota, and people saw the show and didn’t understand what was going on. Someone asked afterward what the poetry meant, the line about ‘the rivers that run through the houses of our lives.’ Martha tried to explain it. I said, ‘Martha, that just sounds like bad plumbing to me.’

By 1985, the year the company moved into the Ordway Center, Minnesota Opera was planning its twenty-second season and looking toward the future, which meant, in the view of some people close to the company, shutting the door on the past. Most of the performers associated with the company’s first two decades—the Balk-Brunelle era— were no longer being cast in the productions. Conspicuously absent were Sutton and Janis Hardy, though Hardy’s farewell didn’t take place until 1987 when she sang the role of Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus.

“I wasn’t asked,” said Sutton in a tone more puzzled than bitter. The question was whether he had been asked to audition for any of the upcoming roles. The company’s move in the second half of the ’80s toward more traditional repertoire was due, in Sutton’s view, largely to pressure from more conservative

members of the board, many of whom had been affiliated with the more tradition-oriented St. Paul Opera, which had cancelled its 1975 season and folded a year later. “A lot of those board members weren’t interested in what we were doing and what we had done,” Sutton said.

Sutton, at any rate, continued performing in various venues and capacities throughout the ’90s and beyond. In 1999, when he stepped down as director of the music school, Sutton’s departure from that position was acknowledged in an elaborate concert attended by more than one thousand people. The event, titled “All the Things You Are,” a reference to Sutton’s multiple careers, was held at Ted Mann Concert Hall, which Sutton and his predecessor as director, Karen Wolfe—with great help from Sandy Bemis— brought into existence. Sutton remained at the university as a teacher until 2003. From 2002 to 2005 he was director of Opera in the Ozarks in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Sutton’s performing schedule is less frantic today than in earlier times. (No helicopter rides are scheduled.) Now in his early ’80s—he has been a widower since 1998—he spends his winters in a condominium in Palm Springs. (Minnesota winters wreak havoc on his knees.) His summers are spent at his former home in Minneapolis, now owned by his son Michael, a violinist with the Minnesota Orchestra.

Sutton’s rare combination of gifts aren’t likely to be often duplicated. The stories about

him are legion, as the audience learned at the “All the Things You Are” tribute, this one from Dominick Argento. “Vern showed up for rehearsal one time,” Argento said.

I think it was for Christopher Sly. He was limping badly. I said, ‘Vern, what happened?’ He said, ‘Well, you know I’m getting married in a few days, and the fact is, I’ve always slept alone, and I wanted to prepare myself for a marriage. So I put the ironing board on the other side of my bed, and I got tangled up with it in the middle of the night. I fell out of bed, and it fell on me.’ To me, that was always typical of Vern, the kind of preparation he took that no one else would even dream of.