Talk to almost any European in the opera business, and he or she will make some comment about the wicked control American donors have over the productions for which they give the funds. They usually bemoan the fact that art is sacrificed to the conservative will. No matter how many times I say that no donor to Seattle Opera has ever even suggested that he or she have anything to do with the look, time of the production, or the cast, they don’t believe me. I do think that I have been very lucky in this respect; I know that this does happen. I also know of cases where some of my colleagues have turned down possible productions because donors had attached visual, dramatic or artist strings.
The most prominent case in America of a donor’s requirements governing art came about from the extraordinary generosity of Mrs. Sybil Harrington to the Metropolitan Opera. Mrs. Harrington loved the work of Franco Zeffirelli and his hyperrealism. She spent a lot of money making that happen. A lot of critics deplored what she did, and there were examples toward the end of Zeffirelli’s work at the Met—the Tosca, La Traviata, and Carmen—when in my opinion the opulence went far over the top. In all the criticism of those productions the great ones never get mentioned—the 1963 Falstaff, the current production of La bohème, the Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, and as for the truly extravagant Turandot, I think the gaudy spectacle is exactly right for this “circusy” opera.
Still, art should not be dictated by donors, and certainly in Peter Gelb’s Metropolitan the move of the company into very contemporary and, for America, radical productions that must fulfill their creators wishes has proceeded inexorably forward. If the current donors to the Met want opera as it once was, they certainly are not getting it.
All that came to my mind on the occasion of the Supreme Court’s decision on April 2, enlarging upon the Citizens United opinion of a few years ago. After this decision, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a donor can give as much as he or she wants to influence an election with limits only to the amount to any one candidate or to one political party. The importance to our democracy is far more significant in this decision than anything any donor could ever do to or for an opera company, but the same rule applies. If the Court is letting one person’s political opinions have such a potential effect on the ballot box, the United States envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and company, not to mention Franklin Roosevelt, has changed dramatically for the worse. I don’t think this has anything to do with party; if anyone is given this power in either national politics or opera, the problem is great. In other words if the excesses of the later Zeffirelli era at the Met made opera there seem senescent, or at least behind the times, the Court has now created the world of the late nineteenth century where monopolies thrived and tycoons controlled political decisions. Where is the Theodore Roosevelt to battle this new Gilded Age?
Seattle’s Turandot was much better than the Met’s (never to be discarded?). I went twice.