The Idea of Company: My 25th Anniversary at HGO
When I came to HGO in January of 1999, a new currency, the Euro, was being introduced to the world. The hot new TV show was The Sopranos. Jon Stewart started on The Daily Show. Michael Jordan retired for the second time. The hot weird film of the year was The Blair Witch Project. That year’s Best Picture Oscar went to Shakespeare in Love over what many thought was the better film, Saving Private Ryan. My favorite film that year was somewhat of a sleeper, Gods and Monsters. President Clinton was in an impeachment trial for what now seems sadly quaint: lying under oath.
My debut was conducting Verdi’s La traviata, which starred the also-debuting Patricia Racette, in a production by Christopher Alden probably best forgotten. I drove to the Wortham on the night of my debut with my late mother Grace in the passenger seat, and Frederica von Stade and Evelyn Lear in the back. Flicka and Evie were starring in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music at that time, and they wanted to be there. When we pulled into my parking spot, my mother said quietly, “you can’t park here – it is reserved.” Evelyn Lear, in her inimitable way, said, “Grace, it is reserved for him!”, and Flicka laughs about this to this day.
I came to Houston that month directly from my debut at the Metropolitan Opera, which had been on the previous Christmas Eve, conducting a new version of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus by Betty Comden and Adolf Green, and it was a dream to be in the room with them. They had, among much else, conceived one of the greatest film musicals ever, Singin’ in the Rain, and their script of Fledermaus had a lot of similar humor. We had a wonderful cast at the Met led Bo Skovhus and Carol Vaness, but the bulk of the physical comedy in the script didn’t fall to them, and it would have played better on screen with closeups than in a large opera house. Still, it was a great deal of fun.
When I started in Houston in February of 1999, the international reputation of the company was very high. A couple of years before, in the summer of 1997, I attended a dinner party at Lynn Wyatt’s home in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, La Mauresque, with almost entirely Europeans in attendance (the American guests were just me and Liza Minnelli, if memory serves), and at that moment most of them knew more about HGO than I did.
The international buzz about HGO was exciting, but locally, actual night-to-night attendance in Houston, was generally quite poor in those years. This mirrored many institutions at the time: peak arts attendance in the US was the same as sports – both peaked in 1987 and were in steady decline after. Live event attendance dropped considerably again in the years following 1994, which was the year that widespread internet use began. So, by the late 1990s, it was not at all uncommon to have houses of five to seven hundred people at the Wortham, which has a capacity of just over 2000.
The other defining moment of opera when I started at HGO was that the classical recording industry was on the precipice of collapse – and now it is essentially gone. By the late 1990s, the entire recording industry was owned by four entities: BMG (which was formerly RCA), EMI, Sony (which had formerly been Columbia Records) and Polygram, which alone controlled the major classical labels of Decca, Philips, and Deutsche Grammophon, but all labels felt the same squeeze at the same time: the internet quickly gobbled up all of the former avenues through which artists became known to the public.
The recording industry been a built-in publicity machine for almost the entirety of the 20th Century, and the business was in a panic then that has now yielded to other concerns. But, nothing in the industry has replaced the star-making machine of the recording industry, and no arts company has the slightest control over this – it is a tectonic cultural shift that can’t be altered. The biggest stars in the industry now, 25 years later, the ones who may sell out Vienna, London, or Salzburg, do not have an effect on tickets sales in Houston or Chicago. This doesn’t remotely mean they aren’t worthy artists, but their effect on the box office is not a reason to engage them. We should only engage artists who reflect the artistic values of our company – for what other reason could possibly be worthwhile? This is actually a welcome shift in some ways: it means people who engage with us are engaging for opera, not simply for star-gazing.
The person to whom I owe the enormous gratifications of these years is, of course, David Gockley. He was the company’s main source of gravity for the many decades of his tenure. I first met him more than 30 years ago now, in 1990, when he showed up in my dressing room in San Francisco and asked me to come to Houston to conduct. It didn’t work out for various scheduling reasons, but he kept in touch often. We discussed various projects, never very seriously, until 1996, when his overtures became more insistent and enticing.
It was during 1996 that the Houston Symphony decided they no longer wanted to play opera, as they had since the founding of the company in 1955. This made sense, of course, with a growing city and two growing arts organizations. The building of the Wortham Theater Center in the mid-1980s, opening in 1987, had changed the entire trajectory of both HGO and the HSO, as both organizations wanted coveted weekend nights for performances.
Operatic scheduling is complicated in a way that symphonic scheduling isn’t: sets have to be changed and very few operas can be performed on a consecutive Friday and Saturday because singers must have time between performances. A typical symphonic schedule will be Friday, Saturday, Sunday afternoon.
With the Houston Symphony’s decision, David was faced with a huge dilemma as the CEO of HGO: with the company growing and gaining reputation, and with an orchestra being at the heart of any major opera company, what was HGO to do? Though David and I discussed many ideas, from new music to desired singers of the day to major producers, I was ostensibly brought to Houston to build the HGO Orchestra into an ensemble capable of playing the range of operatic repertoire. At that moment in the mid-1990s, there was repertoire that was off-limits to HGO because there was no orchestra for it, and I built a plan with David, never articulated to anyone else except Anthony Freud, to build them for ten years. And the plan worked: almost exactly ten years after I started we were able to program Wagner’s Lohengrin, which began a different period of growth. Now, there is nothing in the repertoire of opera that is out of our reach.
My 25 years have not flown by; it actually does feel like I’ve been at HGO a long time because I have: I have been personally present for 37% of the company’s history. But that pales in comparison to Richard Bado, who has been on sight for 60% of HGO’s life, with 40 years at the company as of this writing. He has been every bit as integral to the company’s long artistic growth as I.
There are essentially two types of artistic careers: fireworks and fuses. The fireworks are, by design, much more noticed by the public and press, much more sought by organizations always on the lookout for the next big thing. The fireworks will tend towards fame, in the old-fashioned sense of fame – while the slow-burning fuses will naturally be more like a beloved old building that you only miss when they remodel it. The slow-burning fuses work at fewer places but have deeper artistic relationships with them. And these relationships, professional but not necessarily personal, are like all relationships: there will be good times and challenging times; there will be people you can never get along with no matter what you do, and people you only get along with, also no matter what you do. 25 years in one place indicates slow-burning fuse status, not a firework – and this was quite purposeful on my part, as I have never had the slightest interest in fireworks; they are loud, short-lived, expensive, bad for the environment, and they scare dogs. No, thanks.
Working at the heart of a company means seeing its lights and shadows, for companies have psyches. And like any psyche, it mixes emotion with intelligence, a metaphor that always sustains itself. A leader’s intelligence can be an enormous asset, but it can also turn a blind eye to certain types of wisdom. What a great, as opposed to a good, leader needs, is an ability to think organically while communicating with a very broad spectrum of people. I’ve been variously successful at this, better than good but less than great. Most leaders are so bound within a paradigm of maintaining a perception or being thought knowledgeable that they have trouble leading because they have no time: trying not to get found out becomes their fulltime job. Mediocre leaders will say, “you can’t do this without me”, while great leaders will say, “I can’t do this without you”.
Artistic Director and Music Director are two different positions and nearly opposing in their demands. Sometimes, as Music Director I might make one decision, but the Artistic Director’s decision would have to supersede it. My own knowledge and talents are necessary for both, but Artistic Director is an outward-facing extroverted activity, and being a Music Director requires something totally different: as a conductor/artist/musician, knowledge and fullness is not what I need at the beginning of a performance. My job at the beginning of opera performance is to put away all of my knowledge and curiosity, and become an empty vessel through which the music speaks. Artistic Director is introverted; Music Director is extroverted, and one must often be both, which is not particularly natural to anyone.
The expectations projected onto 21st Century leadership, though, have never been natural to me, even as I have constantly been called to run various things from my teenage years onward. Many times, or at least certain kinds of people, want absolute certainty in a leader, no matter what their decisions, and naturally-curious people like me are never certain about anything. We question everything, and we are extremely – and I emphasize extremely – cautious about anyone who claims the absolute truth about something artistic. The moment someone declares one singer or conductor or production definitive, I’m emotionally out of the discussion. By nature, I love ideas and spontaneity, qualities that are frustrating in 21st century leaders, where what is wanted, largely, is predictability.
There is an artistic standard below which we will not allow ourselves to fall, but this is a constant challenge for a simple reason: not everyone will assess quality in the same way. And for whom do we hold this standard? It certainly isn’t for critics, who have long since abrogated their ability to assess quality in a company. They have declared far too much competence as profundity to ever make that case. The large-scale stories about the arts in the national press, which basically now means solely the New York Times, are essentially the same stories as a quarter-century ago, and this is disheartening indeed.
The standards we keep are, of course, for our audience, those ‘wonderful people out there in the dark’ as Norma Desmond so memorably says about her fans. But there is another truth as well, and it may surprise: keeping the standard isn’t for any single group of people. We keep the standard because it is there to be kept. It is the right thing to do.
And we do all of this, the years of planning and fundraising, hoping, dreaming, crossing fingers and sweating together that gets the curtain up, the rehearsing, the pressures, and the sheer will, and we know even with all of that, we still won’t please some people. All of those years of work could still get reduced to a single sentence of dismissive assessment by someone who didn’t get it or didn’t like it if they did. That is the deal of being an artist at all: your life’s work will become a couple of nouns to some people.
What keeps us all up at night is how delicate the fabric is that holds a company together – and that fabric is in many forms: it is keeping the standard, it is in the generosity of donors, and it is in that strangest and most ill-understood of words, vision.
Vision is chronically misunderstood because the word is so often used to describe something it isn’t. It has become one of those catch-all words of the 2020s like “awesome” or “to tell the truth”. Vision has several imposter words that are adjacent to it: mission, branding, values,
Words matter. Vision is a complicated but vital thing for a company, and it is also like one of those molecules that alter their quality under a microscope: something that changes with observation. Vision is not a slogan, not the elevator speech, not a simplicity, and not a personality. Vision is a thousand small and informed decisions every day that are each rooted in a reverent respect and knowledge about the art itself.
Spinoza said that if you wanted the present to be different from the past, study the past. Not everyone who works in an arts company needs to know huge amounts about opera, but a few people must – and you’d better have someone around who holds one or two types of history: history of the art itself, opera in our case - and institutional memory, a sense of why certain decisions of the past were made. Any lack of this will result in endless inventions of defective wheels.
It has been the work with cherished colleagues, both on and off the stage, that has been my daily sustaining highlight, and this extends happily into HGO’s current administration, where Khori Dastoor is poised to take the company into its next 25 years with enormous strength and effortless elegance. That my tenure stretches from David to her remains of enormous meaning to me. And her invitation for me to become Music Director Emeritus in 2026 is extraordinarily moving and flattering. I am, currently, the longest-serving Music Director of a US opera company, and nothing could ever make me prouder than that.