The Whiff of a New Blacklist

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 12, 2015

The Whiff of a New Blacklist
by James Panero

Recent protests at the Met Opera and Carnegie Hall signal a new turn in the relationship between art and politics.

With his ties to Vladimir Putin , the government patron and old acquaintance ultimately behind his St. Petersburg-based Mariinsky Theatre, conductor Valery Gergiev has become, for some, a proxy figure representing the anti-Western turns of the Russian state, both in human rights and geopolitics. These tensions first took center stage in 2013. Following Mr. Putin’s suppression of gay rights, protesters lined up outside Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House with signs that read “Gergiev Choose: U.S. Dollars or Putin’s ‘Morals.’” Inside, just as Mr. Gergiev raised his hands to conduct, they shouted him down, yelling “Valery, your silence is killing Russian gays!” Performances were halted until security could remove the disrupters.

With the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea, Ukrainian sympathizers have joined the chorus of dissent. The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili publicly declined Mr. Gergiev’s invitation to perform in St. Petersburg while also indicting Western audiences for supporting his music. At the premiere of “Iolanta” at the Met two weeks ago, a Boston-based, pro-Ukrainian protester even leapt onto the stage at curtain call with a banner depicting Mr. Gergiev, the Russian headline soprano Anna Netrebko, and a Hitler-inspired image of Mr. Putin with the slogan “Active Contributors to Putin’s War Against Ukraine, Free Savchenko” (after the parliamentarian and former Ukrainian officer imprisoned by Russia in 2014).

Protesters shouting down concertgoers; musicians silenced by hecklers; agitators taking the stages of our performances. All this represents a new turn in the relationship between arts and politics. There’s even the whiff of a new blacklist. At the continuing picket line outside the Met, protesters are distributing fliers that accuse Mr. Gergiev and Ms. Netrebko of using “their artistic standing to support and promote war and aggression... We call upon the institutions to review their policies and to consider appropriateness of allowing vocal supporters of aggression to perform on their stages.”

Current events have now claimed a front seat on the culture, and it’s time to stop them at the gate. Let’s put aside the obvious security threats that political agitation can pose to audiences and performers: It was in a Moscow theater in 2002, we should remember, that Chechen militants left 130 people dead. In 1987, members of a radical group known as the Jewish Defense League pleaded guilty to a series of bombings that targeted Russian performers as they toured the U.S., including the firebombing of a stage door of Avery Fisher Hall and releasing tear gas into the audience at the Met, an attack that hospitalized 20 people.

A banner today may be a weapon tomorrow. Concert houses clearly need to do more to keep us safe, and the Met has since increased security for subsequent performances of “Iolanta,” which have proceeded without incident. But more than that, they must speak up more forcefully for the integrity of the arts and its performers outside of politics. As Russian-American relations continue to deteriorate, it may be tempting for those of us who are justifiably critical of Mr. Putin to join the protests. But by blacklisting artists over not professing the right beliefs, the only guaranteed victim is the art itself. Moreover, such censorship is bad policy toward the causes we might hope to advance.

Mr. Gergiev’s response to such interruptions has been to focus more intensely on his music. “I cannot comment. It’s a silly, silly new invention, silly, ugly, what else can I say here?” he said as he boarded a flight south to conduct in Florida. “People come to the concert hall, the opera house. They are searching for beauty, for a very exceptional journey with the artists. They want to hear great music played well, sung well, staged well. I think that’s all they expect.”

And that’s the point. During the Cold War, when both tensions and the stakes were even higher, culture was used as a bridge, not a wedge. Between 1958 and 1988, 50,000 Soviet citizens visited the U.S. through our initiatives of cultural exchange. While some Americans at the time feared this Soviet influence, Oleg Kalugin, then a KGB general, later said such exchanges were a “Trojan Horse” within the Soviet Union. As Soviet performers brought their Western stories back to Russia, “They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system. They kept infecting more and more people over the years.”

Today, no Russian figure promotes cross-cultural exchange more than Mr. Gergiev. Last month, he brought 300 members of his Mariinsky Theatre, which included over 75 musicians, 50 chorus members, and just as many dancers, to a residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and various appearances in Chapel Hill, N.C.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Palm Beach, Naples and Miami, Fla.; and Washington, interspersed with his own conducting for the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He had a role in bringing “Iolanta” and “Bluebeard’s Castle,” the new Tchaikovsky-Bartók double bill, to the Met in partnership with the Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera. Tens of thousands of people will see him conduct during this latest American tour, which Mr. Gergiev notes marks his 25th anniversary performing in the U.S.

And the conductor is also responsible for promoting cultural exchange back in Russia. In June, he will helm the next Tchaikovsky Competition, the same international contest that Van Cliburn, an American pianist, famously won at the height of the Cold War in 1958. Today, “big countries like the U.S. and Russia are sending competitors,” says Mr. Gergiev, “but also smaller countries like Georgia, Uzbekistan, Armenia. Last time, an Armenian cellist took gold. Armenian. It’s not a huge country, as you know. It was a surprise.”

What unites all of these initiatives is great music. Two weeks ago, I was at Carnegie Hall as Mr. Gergiev led his Mariinsky Orchestra through Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4. Despite vocal protests outside, it went off without interruption. In fact, after a gripping hourlong performance that sounded like an approaching subway train, he held the packed audience in silence for nearly a minute before the house erupted in applause. “Symphony No. 4 requires concentration. The audience was really good,” he told me. “This symphony, somehow, naturally, goes to some mysterious world, which cannot be interrupted.”

Exactly. Such music deserves to be heard for what it is. Most of us still understand this is possible only by putting differences aside in the communion of a concert hall.

Backstage Breakdown

CITY JOURNAL
July 6, 2014

Backstage Breakdown
by James Panero

The Met’s labor impasse penalizes opera lovers and supporters.

Labor troubles in the performing arts have often reached operatic proportions. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the middle of a dispute over foreign musicians at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and he wasn’t the last head of state to intervene in a backstage conflagration. The loss of a performance season due to a strike or lockout is rightly regarded as damaging and even deadly to an arts house, posing a threat to the culture of art itself.

Considering the intensity of the discord surrounding ongoing negotiations at the Met, it would take more than a president to solve this year’s crisis at the 131-year-old opera house (its other crisis, if you consider the eruptionover its decision to stage The Death of Klinghoffer). With contracts for 15 of the Met’s 16 different unions set to expire on July 31, the rancorous talks now underway between management and labor could result in a lockout of part, if not all, of the upcoming season.

Who is at fault? On one side is Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. In an era of escalating expenses and dwindling ticket sales, Gelb says he is justified in seeking 16 percent cuts in pay and benefits from labor in an attempt to rebalance the books. But Gelb has spent lavishly: during his tenure, which began in 2006, the Met’s annual operating budget has increased from $222 million to $327 million. Gelb has paid for some of this increase through drawdowns on the Met’s endowment, which now contains less than a year’s worth of reserve funding.

Alan S. Gordon, the executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists and the representative for the Met’s unionized chorus singers, has been Gelb’s most vocal opponent, accusing the Met manager of waging “nothing short of economic warfare.” Gelb, he wrote in one of many publicly circulated emails, “has, in essence, declared war on [the Met’s] performing artists, instrumentalists, stagehands and on the unions representing them and on all of the Met’s other represented employees, in an effort to deflect focus from the waste, excess, extravagance and out-of-control spending that has been the hallmark of Gelb’s administration.”

While each side in the imbroglio lambasts the other as unrealistic, both the Met’s management and its unions are out of touch with today’s realities. On June 16, the Met released its latest tax filings. Gelb earned $1.8 million in pay and benefits in 2012. Granted, Gelb has since taken a modest pay cut, and his 2012 salary represented some one-time payouts. Yet a salary in excess of $1 million a year underscores the unreality of Gelb’s leadership. And Gordon claims that Gelb plans to keep his full-time Met chauffeur.

Even Gelb’s purported success, the much-touted “Live in HD” broadcasts beamed to a couple thousand movie theaters, has not covered the budget shortfall. Meanwhile the HD initiative has further eroded the primacy of the Met’s live audience and eaten into its main donor base, with everyone from singers to seamstresses now forced to play to the cameras rather than the live ticketgoers. Gelb earned his reputation through music television, arranging the broadcasts of Vladimir Horowitz’s 1986 return concerts in the USSR. Yet at a time when even our phones can record in HD, his vision of lavish live broadcasts has quickly dated. For greater accessibility, today the Met could simply post a handful of full-length recordings free to YouTube every year, with opera by iPad serving as an invitation to rather than a replacement for the live event.

But similar profligacy reigns on the union side. The Met’s tax filings reveal that three of the house’s five top-paid employees are members of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees—stagehands whocommand pay and benefits in excess of $450,000 a year. Even Gordon’s beloved choristers, the 80 or so full-time employees who perform many nights behind the headline stars, take home an estimated $300,000 in annual pay and benefits. These are hardly proletarian sums, and the numbers are hard to justify to a millennial generation still suffering the job-market fallout of the financial crisis.

To move forward, both sides need to stop comparing their pay packages and begin proving their worth to a new opera public. Met management should pursue greater transparency in its nonprofit filings; the public deserves to see a line-by-line itemization of expenses for each new production and each star singer, as well as an explanation of where the money will come from to pay for it all. At the same time, the unions should explain why their meters click for everything from rehearsal time to costume changes, and open the door for workers of similar talents willing to do some jobs for less.

In the last few years, major arts organizations such as the New York City Opera have gone bankrupt; others, like the San Diego Opera, have verged on the brink of insolvency, and labor walkouts have silenced performances from Minnesota to Carnegie Hall. In most of these cases, management and labor have both been part of the problem. The losers are opera lovers and a future generation of supporters, increasingly treated with contempt. Joseph Volpe, Gelb’s predecessor and a seasoned negotiator whom management has kept out of current talks, pointed this out years ago, during an earlier round of strife at the opera house. “The most serious side effect” of a breakdown backstage is the crucial financial support of rank-and-file donors, Volpe wrote in his 2006 memoir, The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera. “[They were] turned off by all the bloodletting,” he added. “Opera is habit forming, but once the habit is broken, it’s easily kicked.”

An Italian Conductor Looks to US Models

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 6, 2014

An Italian Conductor Looks to US Models
By James Panero

The conductor Gianandrea Noseda knows what it's like to have the roof cave in. As the curtain falls on Act II of "Prince Igor," the acclaimed new production of Alexander Borodin's opera at the Metropolitan Opera, the roof in Igor's court of Putivl collapses in grand fashion: Sparks fly, beams and ceiling lights come crashing to the ground. "I hope the roof of the theater will not collapse," jokes the maestro, who will lead the Met's final performance of "Prince Igor" on Saturday.

Italy's continuing financial crisis could have spelled a similar fate for the Teatro Regio Torino, the Turin opera house where Mr. Noseda has been the music director since 2007. The country's austerity measures, which hit hard over the past five years, have slashed state funding for cultural institutions. And in the birthplace of opera, where the government has traditionally provided lavish support for culture and the arts, many opera houses have had no choice but to curtail productions, limit artistic recruitment and training, and, in some cases, go dark.

From Florence and Rome on down to Naples, most of Italy's opera houses are now operating in the red. But not the Teatro Regio, where performances increased to 110 in 2012 from 85 in 2005, even with a reduction in staff. Its orchestra and chorus have also just announced an ambitious North American tour, including an appearance at Carnegie Hall on Dec. 7, featuring concert performances of Rossini's opera "William Tell."

Teatro Regio's good fortunes can be attributed in large part to Mr. Noseda, the energetic 49-year-old native of Milan who has turned his country's financial crisis into an occasion to introduce an American idea to Turin: a culture of private philanthropy that will sustain the arts even when the government cannot.

"We need to involve the Italian people to support the arts," he explained during a lunch meeting. "To take from your pocket and give money for something culturally oriented—that philanthropic element is missing in Italy. Because, since we were kids, we have been used to the state doing that. So developing a culture of philanthropy is something that will take a generation. It will take 20 years to build that culture in Italy. But we are starting."

The issue is about developing not just donors but also willing fund-raisers. When it comes to donor development, European concert-house managers have traditionally been prima donnas more than rainmakers. The same year Mr. Noseda took the podium in Turin, for example, the Belgian-born Gérard Mortier was tapped to become director of the (now defunct) New York City Opera. Just as the financial conditions of that company worsened in 2008, Mr. Mortier—rather than pursuing new sources of revenue—bolted for a post in Spain when it became clear he wouldn't have the easy resources to enact his artistic vision.

"Of course it requires a lot of my time, but you have to survive. You have to continue your activity," says Mr. Noseda, who worries about the cascade of failures he now sees at other Italian institutions: "Less money; fewer productions. Less money; fewer singers. Less money; less opera." Instead, he says, "it is my aim to convince people to come along, to be supportive, to be part of the project, to really use the energy you have to get to a common aim." As he explained in a recent interview for La Stampa, Turin's daily newspaper, if he only did what his government could pay for, his opera house would disappear. But with bold plans, focusing on the global market, he is able to attract the funding to implement his broader artistic aims.

Five years ago, 95% of Teatro Regio's funding came from the state. Today, that percentage is closer to 75%. Ideally, he says, he would like to see private philanthropy make up 35% of his funding. "What I try to do is not to lose the majority of support coming from the state, but to integrate private sponsorship," he explains.

Such a mixed-funding model is now being pursued by other innovative Italian institutions as well. In 2006, the city and province of Florence joined forces with its chamber of commerce and private donors to revive the Palazzo Strozzi as an exhibition hall. With an autonomous board built in the style of U.S. nonprofits, the Palazzo Strozzi now boasts a business model that is "exceptional for its mix of public and private funding streams" and "its high percentage of earned revenue," according to its latest annual report.

At the Teatro Regio, Mr. Noseda's donor outreach has been met with support from Eataly, Lavazza and Fiat—all Turin-based companies—as well as from individual donors. The greatest interest, he says, has come from a younger generation of Italians such as Michele Denegri, the 44-year-old new owner of Del Cambio, Turin's most historic restaurant.

Mr. Noseda has found private support for his Teatro Regio despite the fact that Italian tax law does not grant deductions, along American lines, for charitable giving. Sometimes, Italian companies with U.S. operations are able to contribute through a U.S. charitable arm, but Mr. Noseda hopes that Italy will modernize its own tax laws to allow similar deductions for in-country contributions. "We will not copy, but we take some inspiration," he says of his new funding model. "So we have to find an Italian way to use these ideas that we can collect around the world." While Matteo Renzi, Italy's new 39-year-old prime minister, has recently promised sweeping tax reform, it remains to be seen if the charitable deduction will be included.

One irony of Mr. Noseda's enthusiasm for American-style cultural philanthropy is how such support has recently come under attack here at home. "Philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious," wrote the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer in his 2009 book "The Life You Can Save." By contributing to a museum rather than to cataract operations in the developing world, Mr. Singer claims, donors are in effect blinding children. Studies by the Conference Board and by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University show that such antiart attitudes have been absorbed by many American philanthropists. Last fall, in a widely publicized interview, Bill Gates reiterated Mr. Singer's utilitarian condemnation of cultural philanthropy.

Yet the future of Italian culture has little time for armchair philosophy. At the end of the Met's production of "Igor," updated by Mr. Noseda and the director Dmitri Tcherniakov, the prince, defeated in battle, humbly begins picking through the rubble of Putivl. As the curtain closes, a seeming cast of thousands comes together in repairing the city brick by brick. "Why do I have to delay until the next generation?" Mr. Noseda asks. "This duty is on my shoulders. There are so many ways to motivate people to support an opera house, to support culture."