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Is This the End of New York City Opera? Budget setbacks and a labor lockout threaten to derail the former Lincoln Center golden child By Megan Finnegan Bungeroth
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or decades, opera patrons have flocked to Lincoln Center to witness the unique, robust, sometimes daring, reliably entertaining performances of the New York City Opera. Now, thanks to a severely crunched budget, the company has not only moved from its home at the David H. Koch Theater but has its upcoming season threatened by an ongoing rehearsal lockout. It is, quite possibly, the end of City Opera as New York knows it. City Opera is at odds with the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), which represents soloists and choristers, as well as Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, representing the orchestra, and has initiated a rehearsal lockout to which neither side can predict an end. The opera has been forced to downgrade its normal contract offerings to its singers and musicians, from salaried staff positions with guaranteed work to a more freelance-based system, paying only for rehearsals and performances. As result, many choristers would go from making around $40,000 a year to only $4,000, according to AGMA National Executive Director Alan Gordon. “For a typical chorister who is either single or married to another chorister or married to someone who doesn’t have a job, their life is over,” Gordon said. His union is negotiating for larger severance packages and more health insurance, he said, and he assumes that many will simply take the severance and leave rather than stay on for a 90 percent reduction in income. The pay decrease goes hand in hand with a major cut in City Opera’s planned programming, with a reported budget of $13 million, compared to the approximately $31 million spent last year. If the current season is allowed to go forward, they will be staging just four shows this year. The first, Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, is set to open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House in just a few weeks, running Feb. 12–18. The second show, also at BAM, will be the U.S. premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s new opera Prima Donna. They are scheduled to run Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater on the West Side in March and Georg Philipp Telemann’s 1726 opera Orpheus at the Museo del Barrio on the Upper East Side in May. The
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abbreviated season will run a total of 16 performances—a far cry from the company’s former seasons of over 100. Some blame the company’s current troubles on its director, George Steel, who took the helm in 2009 with little experience in the opera world. Others point to the debacle over the 2007 appointment of Gerard Mortier, a Belgian intendant who had previously run the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera. Mortier ended up resigning in 2008 before he had even staged a season after the board presented him with a budget far below his contractual demands, leaving the company rudderless. Still others cast the blame for City Opera’s current state further back in history, to its baffling inability to reach pre9/11 levels of ticket sales or its history of difficulty in fundraising. Regardless of the pinpointed cause, many say the company is now in dire straits. In a statement responding to several media outlets last week, Steel wrote, “As we have said countless times, we have to transition to the model that most opera companies use: Paying people only for the work that they do.” Through his spokesperson, Risa Heller, Steel declined to be interviewed or answer questions for this article. Heller confirmed that the rehearsal lockout continues and that City Opera is “taking this one day at time.” To some, that response signals bad news ahead. “I don’t know what his Plan B—or at this point, his plan V—is, because I think it’s more likely this season won’t happen than it will,” said Fred Cohn, a classical music reporter who chronicled City Opera’s recent struggles for Opera News magazine this month. Cohn said he wouldn’t be surprised if City Opera in its current form ceased to exist as a result of many union members taking a severance offer and leaving. “It’s not like the unions are losing much,” he said. “What they’ve been offered is pretty paltry. For them to expect much more is unrealistic. There’s just no money.” Michael Capasso, the director of Dicapo Opera Theater on the Upper East Side, runs his company successfully on an average budget of $1 million a year— miniscule compared to City Opera. He said that the company’s biggest mistake was leaving Lincoln Center, and that he sees no way for them to recover financially without a home base. “This is our 30th anniversary,” Capasso
Shu-Ying Li as Cio-Cio San in a performance of Madame Butterfly by the New York City Opera. said of Dicapo. “For the first years of our existence we were homeless; we performed wherever we could and we flourished as soon as we had a building. It helped a lot.” As for the budget woes that led them to leave Lincoln Center in the first place, Capasso denied that the problem is with a waning public desire to see opera. He said that Steel had disregarded what his core audience wanted to see in favor of out-of-character programming. “If you look at the annals of the NYCO, it’s very clear that they understood their audience, and they knew that at the end of the day, people still want to see La Bohéme and Carmen,” Capasso said. “If you’re doing something unusual, you have to balance it with something that you know will sell.” Gordon put the problem more bluntly, resting it on Steel’s shoulders. “Nobody who cares about opera is going to see the junk that he performs,” he said. In a letter to the chairman of the City Opera board, Charles Wall, Gordon wrote that Steel’s decisions have “forced [the singers] to decide whether it would be appropriate for City Opera to cease its
operations [rather] than to allow it to continue to operate with uncaring and gross disrespect for its performers.” Others have suggested that the company might be able to survive—just not as City Opera. “What he’s proposing is essentially turning City Opera into Gotham Chamber Opera,” said Cohn, referring to a group, now in its 10th year, that performs offbeat programming and small-scale operas at different venues around the city. They are successful, said Cohn, because they’ve found a niche and stick to their identity. For now, City Opera remains in a holding pattern. If the unions reach an agreement that allows the company to begin rehearsals, the season may go ahead. While tickets have sold for La Traviata, the short run is far from sold out, with hundreds of seats still available. The current lockout isn’t inspiring much confidence in potential audience members. “As long as there’s a lockout, it seems to me inconceivable that they will move forward,” Gordon said. “They could try to do it non-union, but I don’t know where they’ll get the singers from. If they try to go forward with their performance, we’ll obviously have to picket them.”
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