David DiChiera: A personal remembrance of Detroit's cultural Pied Piper
I got a call once from a friend writing a piece about David DiChiera for a national publication. My friend had talked to a gaggle of folks in the opera world and could not quite believe the haloed portrait all of them had painted of David, the founding general director of Michigan Opera Theatre. Nobody could be that saintly, my friend said. There must be a dark side, right?
Nope, I responded. It’s all true. David was one in a million.
David, who died Tuesday at age 83, led the most graceful of lives. Little gave me more joy during my 21 years as an arts reporter and music critic at the Detroit Free Press than getting to know him and chronicling the pinnacle of his career as a visionary cultural leader and community builder — and his autumnal renaissance as a composer.
David’s journey seemed to bookend my own. The most important story I covered during my first year at the paper was the opening of the Detroit Opera House in April 1996. Among the most significant stories of my final year was David’s impending retirement. When he learned I was leaving the paper at the end of 2016, he called with a request: Could I could postpone my departure for six months, so we could go out at the same time? He liked the symmetry of such timing. I felt guilty having to decline: Everyone in Detroit knows how hard it was to say no to David DiChiera.
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David belongs on the Mount Rushmore of contemporary Detroit. With his beloved city at its nadir in the 1970s and ’80s, he dared to imagine a future that was audaciously optimistic and inextricably linked to the arts and downtown Detroit. He promised to build an opera house and a major opera company from scratch in a city better known for producing Chevys than “Carmens.” Most people thought he was nuts.
But then he accomplished everything he said he would do. Michigan Opera Theatre, founded in 1971, eventually grew into a top 10 American opera company and the glittering $70-million Detroit Opera House breathed new life into a formerly dormant downtown neighborhood. The theater became not only a home for great art but a beacon and a symbol for what was possible in Detroit and the role culture could play in rebuilding the city. David became a role model for all those who dare to dream big.
Along the way he also found the time and inspiration to re-engage with his past as a composer. He made his career as an impresario, but he had the soul of an artist. His rewarding opera, “Cyrano” (2007), based on Rostand’s tragedy of the poet-swordsman with the prodigious nose, wears its late-romantic heart on its sleeve. The musical idiom is unabashedly conservative, but David’s melodies and harmonies speak with a personal voice, and the yearning lyricism pleases the ear and stirs the emotions.
David somehow how managed to accomplish all of this while remaining the nicest, most genuine and charming man I have ever known in or out of the arts. I asked him once about the Svengali-like pull he had on donors, power brokers, temperamental divas and, well, everyone. He shrugged his shoulders: “You know, I don’t really know why people follow me.”
The Mona Lisa also has a hard time explaining her allure.
David’s personal warmth certainly won friends. One reason no one said an unkind word about him was that no one ever heard David say an unkind of word about anyone either, even when one or two such words — or a thousand — would have been warranted. His combination of passion, graciousness and persuasion were legendary, and when he put on a full-court press, a prospective donor was as helpless as a club golfer going up against Tiger Woods in his prime.
But the real secret to David’s leadership cut deeper. His gentle countenance masked a stubborn resolve of heroic proportion. At the same time, he had the most magnanimous ego of anyone I’ve ever known. With David, nothing was ever about his own glory. It was always about the city, the company, the art form, the community. He had a way of putting his hand on your shoulder and bringing you into his confidence. It was as if he was saying: We’re all in this together. Let’s build this together. Look at what we can accomplish together.
No wonder he became a Pied Piper.
David’s charisma was a challenge to a reporter and critic. It was impossible not to like him and root for him, which put the journalist’s creed of objectivity to a test. David must have known this, but he respected professional boundaries. He never lobbied for favorable coverage, never ducked talking about difficult news, never called to complain about a bad review. Sometimes, David would call and implore me to come hear the alternate cast of a production — not to angle for a second review but just to make sure I didn’t miss a young singer that he thought especially promising. I also recall how he’d acknowledge an artistic misfire with a twinkle in his eye: “That’s show biz.”
David knew it all. He had heard pretty much every important singer and conductor of the second half of the 20th Century and beyond and knew many of them personally. He also knew the esoteric corners of the repertoire like the musicologist that he was; he wrote his doctoral thesis on the obscure Italian composer Gian Francesco de Majo (1732-1770).
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David loved to talk shop. Whenever I interviewed him, the conversation would invariably wander into the weeds about singers he adored — bel canto queen Joan Sutherland reigned supreme in his personal cosmology — or operas that quickened his pulse. David had few regrets, but one was that he never got around to producing two masterpieces of the 20th Century: Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and Janacek’s “Jenufa.”
The last time I saw David was in July at his home. We spoke for hours, and he appeared hale and in great spirits. If you didn’t know he had been diagnosed in 2017 with pancreatic cancer, you would have never suspected he was sick. He read aloud some amiable bits from the memoir he had been writing and showed me letters, photos and other ephemera dating back five decades.
At one point, I asked him what he was most proud of in his career. His answer came in waves.
He talked about color-blind casting and providing key early opportunities to African-American singers — among them Kathleen Battle, Maria Ewing, Leona Mitchell, Wilhelmenia Fernandez, Vinson Cole and Noah Stewart. He talked about championing new American opera not only in Detroit but as president of the service organization Opera America, where he started an influential grant program in the early ‘80s that seeded a bevy of new works across the country.
He talked about using opera to build bridges into Detroit’s ethnic communities, deepening ties with diverse audiences while reaffirming our common humanity. Examples: the Polish opera “King Roger” by Karol Szymanowski; the Armenian national opera “Anoush” by Armen Tigranian; commissioning the world premiere of the African-American themed “Margaret Garner” by Richard Danielpour with a libretto by Toni Morrison.
Finally, David talked about his destiny as a catalyst. “I wanted Detroit to understand that it was worthy of a great opera house and opera company,” he said. “Now that we have them, it’s impossible to imagine the city without them.”
It’s impossible to imagine Detroit without David DiChiera either. The Detroit Opera House and Michigan Opera Theatre will stand as ever-present physical manifestations of his legacy, but it will not be the same without David holding court — especially these days, when grace has disappeared from so many areas of American life. David reminded you that nice guys sometimes finish first and that the better angels of our nature still have a fighting chance.
Former Free Press music critic Mark Stryker can be reached at mstryker63@gmail.com.
Funeral and visitation details
A funeral will be held Friday in the Detroit Opera House at the David DiChiera Center for the Performing Arts, 1526 Broadway, Detroit. Public visitation begins at 11 a.m., followed by a public funeral at 1 p.m.