Nowhere To Go but Up

By Michael Walsh

The nation's No. 2 opera house hit rock bottom last Feb. 9. That afternoon the general director of the San Francisco Opera, Terence McEwen, announced his resignation because of ill health after a troubled six-year stint at the helm of the company. A few hours later, McEwen's predecessor, the autocratic Kurt Herbert Adler, died of a heart attack. The Viennese-born Adler had ruled the organization like a private satrapy for 28 years and had remained its irascible eminence grise. Suddenly the troupe was leaderless and, it seemed to many, artistically rudderless as well.

This month, as the 1988 season opens and new General Director Lotfi Mansouri takes command, the road back begins. During his tenure, Adler had transformed ! the San Francisco Opera from a regional ensemble devoted largely to Italian opera into an international powerhouse that won renown by presenting major works, like Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, for the first time in the U.S., and by offering major American opera debuts to Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Sir Georg Solti. While never equaling New York City's Metropolitan Opera in either budget (currently $23.7 million vs. $88 million) or length of season (13 weeks compared with 32 weeks), San Francisco established itself as an alternative that was often more interesting and adventurous than its staid East Coast rival.

That reputation began to slide over the past decade. True, there were highlights like McEwen's 1985 Ring cycle, a dazzling vocal show that remains the best-sung Ring of the past 30 years. But there were also routine evenings of ridden-out war-horses and indifferent conducting. Meanwhile, a deepening budget deficit of $2 million forced the elimination of the company's short summer season. With a bottom-line board of directors perched on his shoulder, McEwen never had the freedom that Adler enjoyed. Nor, apparently, will his successor. "Opera has changed from the autocratic days, when people like Kurt Adler did it all themselves," says the affable, Iranian-born Mansouri, 59, a veteran stage director who has run the conservative Canadian Opera Company in Toronto since 1976, a post he is leaving this year. "It is much more of a business."

Sometimes, alas, it is business as usual. This year's season opener, Giacomo Meyerbeer's hoary grand opera L'Africaine, typifies the ills that have afflicted the company. As Vasco da Gama, Tenor Placido Domingo sounds tired and wan, Maurizio Arena's conducting is enervated and Mansouri's own stage direction merely serviceable. Only veteran Soprano Shirley Verrett, as the regal Selika, captures the fiery spirit of Meyerbeer's diffuse and improbable last opera.

Improvement will take time -- and money. Opera is fundamentally a money- losing proposition, requiring heavy fund raising each year. Even though the company plays to 96% of capacity, box-office revenues account for only 45% of operating income. Thus Mansouri faces a precarious balancing act: while he needs to take bold new artistic steps to regain the company's pride of place, he must also mind the box-office receipts and keep the paying customers in the seats.

So far, his plans look encouraging. In 1990 Mansouri will re-establish the summer season with an encore of the Ring cycle, and the following year hopes to stage a Mozart festival marking the bicentennial of the composer's death. Mansouri is also considering bringing Broadway shows like The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables into the opera house. "A major company must represent the entire gamut," says Mansouri. "Part of my task is to excite and stimulate the audience, to expand their horizons. The worst thing in art is stodgy complacency."

He may find, however, that economic reality outweighs brave talk. "The tension is between doing something that may or may not be accepted, and fighting the numbers to try and fill the seats," says Board President Tully Friedman. But if opera were just a matter of money, the solution would be to disband the company entirely and point to a balanced budget. Perhaps the days of tyrants like Adler, whose first duty was to art, not commerce, are gone. Yet their melody should linger on in the memories of managers everywhere.

With reporting by Dennis Wyss/San Francisco