They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (26 page)

Steel was credited with imaginative contemporary and early music programming, but the New York City Opera’s challenge was several orders of magnitude larger and more formidable than running the Miller Theater. The David H. Koch Theater contained twenty-seven hundred seats, four times more than the Miller Theater. The Opera’s budget was a minimum of ten times larger than that of the Miller Theater. I was reminded of Karl Marx’s observation that a difference of degree, if large enough, becomes a difference in kind. In moving Steel from either the Miller Theater or the Dallas Opera, it is an understatement to suggest that the search committee of the New York City Opera had chosen someone about to encounter a difference in kind. The selection was nothing short of stupefying.

Satisfying the formidable private funding requirements of the Opera was an utter necessity of the post. Steel had never before confronted anything like it. The New York City Opera also came with a board of directors, and its general director would need to engage it in the context of the whole environment of Lincoln Center, a complex entity. And not least, the New York City Ballet shared the David H. Koch Theater as its home.

If it is true that good fences make for good neighbors, it is also the case that no fences are to be found in this building for which Phillip Johnson was the architect. The Opera and the Ballet quarreled incessantly over matters like scheduling, cleaning, insurance, security, catering, cost sharing, and much, much more. For example, live music played well is integral to beautiful dance making. Kellogg’s complaint about acoustics at the New York State Theater could adversely affect not only the New York City Opera, but potentially the New York City Ballet as well. Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief, was said to be livid. He felt strongly that Kellogg was speaking out of turn.

Around Lincoln Center, my colleagues were deeply disturbed by the embarrassing and very public amateurishness of the New York City Opera board and its leaderless and beleaguered staff.

We wondered why the search committee had not opted for a seasoned expert to replace Mortier, one fully acquainted not only with the art form, but also with the basics of leading and managing a formidable nonprofit enterprise. Just to name two possibilities, there was Francesca Zambello, then the director of the Glimmerglass Opera, who had expressed keen interest. Turned aside, she later added director of the Washington National Opera to her responsibilities. Another highly regarded professional, David Gockley, had been the general director of the Houston Grand Opera from 1972 to 2005 and then assumed a comparable post at the San Francisco Opera.

There were others inside Lincoln Center who could also have been excellent candidates. Two hardened, well-regarded veterans reported to me. One was Nigel Redden, the director of the Lincoln Center Festival and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, who at one point in his career served as the director of the Santa Fe Opera. He is a superb professional. Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s vice president for programs, was the other. She had built an excellent curatorial track record and had won the respect of artists, critics, audiences, and professional peers. Apparently, neither was seriously considered.

The interregna tolerated by the City Opera board between CEOs was also mystifying. The vacuum left after Paul Kellogg’s announced resignation and Mortier’s on-again, off-again arrival, and the second vacuum as the Opera considered who would step into the stubbornly vacant post, were both extremely damaging.

Each resident artistic organization at Lincoln Center takes pride in its autonomy. Lincoln Center is careful to offer advice and support only when a member of its artistic family asks or when irreversible damage threatens.

After consulting with the chair of Lincoln Center’s board, Frank Bennack, I decided to act. I asked Joseph Polisi, the president of The Juilliard School, and Adrian Ellis, the executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, to join me in meeting with George Steel as soon as possible after his appointment.

Our purpose was to ask leading questions and to help Steel think about how best to address his major challenges. Polisi had been the president of Juilliard for over two decades, and Ellis, prior to assuming his post at Jazz at Lincoln Center, had founded a successful strategic consulting firm focused on arts organizations. They were highly qualified to join me in offering good counsel.

We met with Steel for some two hours of intense conversation, after which I offered to draft a paper for him and his chair, Susan Baker. If the New York City Opera was going to disappear while I was Lincoln Center’s president, it would not be because I had failed to offer my best, uninhibited, and frank advice.

The paper was entitled “The New York City Opera: A Road to Recovery.” It pulled no punches. It characterized the Opera’s situation as a crisis and called for a revitalized and expanded board of directors, beginning with the resignation and replacement of Susan Baker. It made the strong case to reduce, contain, and control costs immediately. It called for the development of a serious three-year operating plan and business model. It suggested ways and means to raise substantial funds and to begin to repair the damage to relationships with key opera stakeholders.

The report also contained a serious and generous offer of Lincoln Center support.
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I had sent along an advance copy to my colleagues for comment and then to George Steel in case he thought some changes were in order before he showed it to Susan Baker. It was important that she have the chance to examine the white paper and think about it as soon as possible. We then arranged to meet with Baker and Frank Bennack for a thorough review of the document.

All of us gathered in my office some weeks later. There, it quickly became clear that Steel had not shared the paper with Susan at all. It even seemed that Steel himself had never read it!

No wonder I had not heard back from him about the paper before our meeting.

Accordingly, it fell to me that afternoon to talk both the beleaguered board chair and the CEO of the New York City Opera through the document. While I spoke, Susan Baker was seething, realizing that her very competence was being called into question. Steel’s face was completely blank, as if he now recognized that not giving the paper so much as a cursory look was a colossal error of judgment.

At the end of a very difficult hour and a half, I could tell that Baker was livid.

As she and Steel departed, my mind wandered to the subject of how this disaster in the making could have been avoided. In the life of many professions and institutions, there are solemn moments of declared intent and resolve. For physicians, the Hippocratic oath. For lawyers, fealty to statutes and to judicial rulings. For public officeholders, an inviolable promise to uphold the Constitution.

In nonprofit institutions, such a dignified rite of passage occurs when one is formally elected to the board of directors. And yet seldom is such an occasion accompanied by an articulated pledge of any kind.

Just imagine if Susan Baker and her fellow New York City Opera trustees were expected to affirm their institutional commitment upon election before all of their assembled peers with something like the following oath:

As a trustee, I pledge to participate actively in the governance of the New York City Opera. As such, I will take care to look closely after the selection of a Chief Executive Officer, to regularly monitor the CEO’s performance in office, and to carefully review both the organization’s financial affairs and the discharge of its artistic mission.

I recognize that the Opera requires financially supportive trustees, and I will offer generous contributions, consistent with my means. I shall also encourage friends, colleagues, and associates to donate funds.

In executing my responsibilities, I will first and foremost consider the best interests of the institution in its service to audiences and artists. I will not hesitate to voice my view if either my fellow trustees or senior management appear to be straying from the path of fiscal and programmatic solvency in pursuit of the New York City Opera’s clearly stated mission.

Would an oath of this kind help to set a peer-driven expectation of responsible governance? Surely it would allow a well-disciplined nominating and governance committee to review the conduct of every trustee and judge the adequacy of his or her financial and service contributions. Come to think of it, this idea of a statement of initiation that all newly inducted trustees would be required to avow might well work for any or all nonprofit institutions.

My reverie about what might have been did not last for long. Soon after our meeting, Susan Baker called Frank Bennack and gave him a piece of her mind about my effrontery. But our conversation had not been about me or her. It was about the future of a precious forty-seven-year-old opera company that she and her board colleagues held in trust for artists and audiences. It was about an imperiled institution well on its way to collapse unless drastic action was taken quickly, as in there was not a moment to lose.

As painful as it may have been for Baker to hear from me behind closed doors about the condition of the Opera and the need for her to part company with it, how much more painful must it have been to read the headline and opening paragraphs in a Pogrebin article in the
New York Times
on June 18, 2009, shortly after our tense session:

If nonprofit cultural organizations were run like corporations—in which chief executives are at least, in principle, held accountable for financial performance—then the Chairwoman of New York City Opera, Susan L. Baker, might well be out of a job.

During Ms. Baker’s tenure, City Opera has raided its endowment—which now stands at $16 million, down from $57 million when she was appointed in December, 2003—to pay off debts and cover operating expenses. The practice, known as endowment invasion, requires approval from the State Attorney General’s Office
and the State Court of Appeals and is widely considered a last resort for any arts institution.

. . . During the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, the company’s revenue from ticket sales, donations, and investments fell 23% to $30.9 million, while expenses increased 11% to $44.2 million, amounting to a loss of $11.3 million.

This was the state of affairs that George Steel inherited. Even so, he could have worked much more quickly and effectively to expand the board of directors and to build on the New York City Opera’s good name and goodwill. New Yorkers love an underdog. Donors and ticket buyers would need to be convinced that the New York City Opera now knew what it was about, financially and artistically; that it possessed the energy, the will, and the stamina to recover; and that it would reach out to its friends and allies in doing so. Nothing emerged from months of Mr. Steel’s tenure to instill confidence in the organization’s future. Indeed, in his first full year as director, Mr. Steel presided over a $5.9 million deficit, hardly a source of encouragement.

As I watched in sadness Steel’s flailing performance, I was certain of two things: Lincoln Center had not been called upon for help until it was too late to matter, and for the New York City Opera, it was all over. An accumulation of poor decisions had taken their full toll. The die had been cast.

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20, 2008, until November 5, 2009, for almost eighteen months, no New York City Opera performances were held while the David H. Koch Theater was being renovated. The new hall was hailed, most of all by Steel himself, not just because the space was more comfortable to be in, center aisles having been created in its orchestra, but because the removal of carpeting, the replacement of seat covers, the creation of a stage lift for the orchestra, and the various uses of acoustic shells, among other measures, appeared to have improved its sound. Critics, musicians, and audiences all said so.

Then Steel, having elaborately praised the renovation of his organization’s newly modernized artistic home, suddenly announced on May 20, 2011 that the New York City Opera would leave Lincoln Center forever and perform at various places around New York City: City
Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and El Museo Del Barrio, for starters. It would, in itinerant fashion, “go to where the people were.” Well, five million of those people who love the performing arts were at Lincoln Center every year, the very place City Opera was leaving. By Steel’s calculation, the costs of operating at Lincoln Center were higher than the brand equity of staying in place. The likelihood that Lincoln Center’s cachet and prominence would have less appeal to donors than a “now you see me, now you don’t” vagabond company was apparently his best guess.

No one followed the New York City Opera’s fortunes more closely than Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of the
New York Times
. He writes with nuance and texture. His prolific reviews have taught me much. Attentive New Yorkers pay heed to the paper of record, and his voice is an influential one.

How disappointing then, that his running critique was so inconsistent, so incomplete, and ultimately unhelpful, even whimsical. Tommasini contributed to the magical thinking that seemed to permeate the New York City Opera’s decision making. He supported the City Opera’s quest for a new home seemingly without considering its financial consequences or its adverse impact on the company’s artistic productions. He was in a very small minority that welcomed the Mortier appointment. He offered an almost Panglossian view of George Steel’s selection and of the Opera’s future with Steel at the helm.

On November 30, 2009, in “Better Acoustics in Koch Theater Give City Opera a Much Needed Boost,” he argued that the “acoustical improvements to the Koch Theater are real and encouraging, and nothing will help City Opera more.”