George Steel speaks at the pace of a man working on borrowed time. When we meet on a midsummer day in New York City Opera's development offices near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, Steel, the company's general manager and artistic director, seems to be doing his best to appear outwardly collected while trying to keep it all from falling apart: in what seems to be a single breath, he has apologized for the last-minute cancellation of our interview the previous day, asked for a clarification of the scope of our chat and launched into an account of the exigencies he faced in arranging the embattled company's upcoming five-opera, thirty-two-performance season in a "very, very short amount of time." (He estimates it took somewhere between forty-five and ninety days.) At the time of our meeting, he has been on the job barely five months.
Face to face, Steel, forty-three, resembles one of the straitlaced yet careworn subjects photographed for Richard Avedon's study of the early-1980s American West; one can hardly blame him if the cracks are starting to show. Since his appointment in January 2009, it is fair to say he has been charged with shepherding the "People's Opera" back from the brink of oblivion. At the time, City Opera was in extremis after a combination of years of deficit spending; a full 2007–08 season presented without a general or artistic director, followed by what was, essentially, a non-season; the November 2008 defection of its much-hyped general-manager and artistic-director designate, Gerard Mortier; the depletion of its $57-million endowment by nearly $41 million, owing to emergency operating costs and the souring economy; P.R. missteps over the fruitless search for a new home; furloughs; layoffs and taxing union negotiations — to say nothing of the morbid curiosity of New York's operagoing public. So one can understand why Steel does not seem eager to discuss City Opera's recent past. Rather, everything about the company under Steel's nascent tenure seems to be waiting breathlessly for the moment when the ticket-buying public might turn its gaze away from the proverbial man-behind-the-curtain and back toward what he's presenting on the stage of the newly renovated David H. Koch Theater, renamed following a $100-million capital-campaign gift toward the venue's multi-phase redevelopment by the oil-and-gas billionaire. City Opera's website — redesigned as part of a broad marketing overhaul enacted days after Steel's arrival — features a clock at the top of its homepage, counting down the seconds until its November 5 opening-night gala.
Anyone familiar with the details of Steel's career trajectory would be forgiven for being curious about what, exactly, inspired him to take on what may prove to be the most thankless job in opera. Rumored to have been on the shortlist of candidates in NYCO's search for a leader that culminated in Mortier's appointment in 2007, Steel ultimately arrived at the company on February 1, 2009, following an abbreviated, four-month tenure at the helm of Dallas Opera; immediately prior to that, Steel (who is also a conductor) spent eleven years as the executive director of Columbia University's Miller Theater, which, under his aegis, became a vital presenter of Baroque and modern fare in Manhattan. By most accounts, Steel's relationship with Dallas Opera amounted to an awkward marriage; local newspaper reports at the time of his departure characterized him as aloof and preoccupied, disinterested in fundraising, as well as in the logistics of putting up the meat-and-potatoes repertory that local audiences had come to expect.
For his part, Steel says he first heard from City Opera soon after his arrival in Dallas and initially rebuffed the company's advances. "Then I had a chance over the Christmas holiday to talk about it with my wife, and to think about how much we adore New York," he says. "Most important was the question of 'Why don't I stay in Dallas? I'll be here five to seven years, and then maybe I'll come back to New York, and City Opera will be sorted out, and that'll be a better time to take it over.' Then I realized absolutely that when an organization is facing these kinds of big structural questions, they're really mission questions. I think the more we return to our mission-driven historic programming and our historic role in American opera, the stronger we'll be. I wanted to be here helping the company make these difficult decisions. So I sat down with the chairman of Dallas Opera's board of directors [John Cody, now the company's interim general director]. We had an incredibly positive chat and both agreed that Dallas is in the best financial shape maybe of most opera companies in the country. The company is planned, artistically, for three or four years. It's a stable organization. It seemed like we knew that some company in the country was going to lose its director very quickly to come help out with NYCO, and that I was a likely person to do that."
According to Steel, the rough details of City Opera's 2009–10 season — left entirely vacant following Mortier's non-arrival — were fleshed out by gathering "a huge number of people in a room around a table and solving the problems together." In an industry where companies plan seasons and book singers years in advance, Steel and his artistic staff took just days to settle on the offerings of their 2009–10 season, which, while roughly one-third the size of previous years, he says still represents "the essential New York City Opera."
The decision to start the season proper with Hugo Weisgall's
Esther, not seen since its 1993 world premiere, when the company gave just two performances, starring Lauren Flanigan (who returns to the title role in November), was a natural choice — a work that Steel considers "the greatest opera by one of America's greatest opera composers. Maybe it was a little scarier in 1993 than it is in 2009, but not a lot." He describes the opera's sonorities as Bill Evans-esque, "occasionally tough ... always juicy." The remainder of the season features Christopher Alden's "radical reimagining" of
Don Giovanni, Handel's
Partenope, the company's long-running Mark Lamos production of
Madama Butterfly and Chabrier's
L'Étoile, in addition to an opening-night gala on November 5 that features Anna Christy, Joyce DiDonato, Lauren Flanigan, Anthony Dean Griffey, Samuel Ramey and Julius Rudel, as well as a performance by the New York City Ballet.
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© René Perez 2009 |
Perhaps what's most telling during our conversation is Steel's gusto in speaking about the works he hopes to feature as part of future seasons, which he predicts could offer as many as ten productions. He rattles off an admixture of the modern (Jack Beeson's
Lizzie Borden, Robert Ward's
The Crucible, Bernstein's
A Quiet Place), the evergreen (
Turandot,
Idomeneo and
Falstaff) and the truly recondite (works by J. C. Bach and Reinhard Keiser; Delius's
Koanga and Morton Feldman's monodrama
Neither) — programming that is likely to strike many as somewhere between shrewd, intriguing, enticing and unrealistic. "On the gnarlier side of things, a piece I'm absolutely dying to do is Ginastera's
Don Rodrigo, which was our first production at Lincoln Center and starred Plácido Domingo. It's a total face-melter," says Steel. "There are nineteen — count them,
nineteen — extra brass players onstage, blowing their brains out. Bells all around the room, a huge orchestra, giant epic story, incredibly thrilling music, big chorus." Admirable as his enthusiasm may be, hearing Steel detail his wish-list, one can't help but feel he is cataloging repertory better suited to a company unencumbered by City Opera's current problems.
Steel has obviously invested much of his faith in the renovation of the Koch Theater as a means of signaling to audiences that City Opera is back on sure footing. Not everyone else has agreed. Interviewed by
The New York Times about City Opera's request for a $9-million reimbursement from the theater's capital campaign for funds lost during its renovation, David H. Koch was quoted as saying, "It's out of the question that any of my money would go to City Opera for lost revenue." A week later, Koch amended his position in a curious letter to the
Times: "I very much endorse the opera's requesting reimbursement from capital-campaign contributions for extraordinary expenses related to the company's hiatus during construction," he wrote, adding that the disbursement would only happen after earlier renovation loans had been repaid. As part of the first phase of its renovation, the theater is due to receive an orchestral elevator in the pit, center aisles and a vastly refurbished auditorium. Asked about the company's acoustic-enhancement amplification system — which City Opera, to the dismay of the New York critical establishment, has long insisted was a necessary evil in staging operas in a venue built for dance — Steel won't speak specifics. He clearly has plans to address the theater's acoustic woes during future phases of the Koch's renovations.
At the time of our meeting in July, Steel is adamant that City Opera "has turned a significant financial corner." This feat was achieved, he says, by means of two cy pres petitions granted in October 2008 and April of this year, which allowed the company — under the approval and strict supervision of the New York State attorney general's office — to withdraw, as emergency operating costs, some $24.1 million from the DeWitt–Wallace Fund, which contributed the lion's share of its endowment. The effort, Steel says, stabilized the company's fiscal shortfalls from the prior season and will allow City Opera to get back onstage.
It would be wrong to think that the months since Steel's arrival have been without their glimmers of hope. Since February, more than $10.5 million has been raised, and new contracts have been brokered with the American Guild of Musical Artists — the union representing City Opera's principal singers, choristers, stage directors, stage managers and dancers — and the American Federation of Musicians, its orchestral union. Steel says the company's subscription-sales goals for the coming season have nearly been reached. But he recounts what is perhaps the most timely sign that City Opera intends to return to its core values with a relish that one again has to admire for its enthusiasm, if not for its logic: "Nineteen thousand of our tickets — not 100, not 200, not 500 — nineteen
thousand of our tickets next year are $25 or less," he says, his voice taking on the pitch of an infomercial salesman. "The cheapest ticket is twelve bucks."
Whatever the external realities, one gets the sense that Steel's job is now closer to that of running an underdog's political campaign than an opera house. The very real proposition that City Opera may not exist by this time next year, that the company may fail, seems to be an utterly inaccessible idea to him. It's an outcome that has been compartmentalized within a Schrödinger box that may not be opened by Steel's volition but will still likely be opened on his watch.
"I would say actually a lot of my job has been to raise people's eyes up to look at the future," Steel says, sounding a bit wistful himself. "Not to reduce expectations, but to restore hope and to remind people — and it doesn't take long — why they love New York City Opera and why it's so essential to life in New York."
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