Alan Stone
Founder
and Artistic Director
of the
Chicago Opera
Theater
Four Conversations
with Bruce Duffie
Alan Stone (April 28, 1929 – July
9, 2008) was an American opera director, opera singer,
and vocal coach.
Born and
raised in Chicago, Stone founded the Chicago Opera
Studio, Inc., which later became the Chicago Opera
Theater. He served as Artistic Director until
1984, and remained with the company as an advisor until
1993.
Some of the Chicago premieres presented under
Stone's tenure include Virgil Thomson's
The Mother of Us All (1976 & 1984), Marc Blitzstein's
Regina (1982), Carlisle Floyd's
Susannah (1986) and Of Mice and Men (1988 - directed
by Arthur Masella),
Robert
Ward's The Crucible (1985), and Dominick Argento's
Postcard from Morocco (1991).
|
With the exception of my second conversation with
George Jellinek,
all of the interviews I did for WNIB from 1975 to 2001
were pre-taped. I would then edit
a portion for use on the air. That way my guests
and I could relax and not have to watch the clock. This
method also afforded me the opportunity to speak with these
musicians about many areas of mutual interest. When
transcribing them for my website, the entire encounters
have been presented, and I am happy to report that the response
from readers has been completely positive.
Most of the meetings were singular
events. Occasionally I would be able to speak
with a guest twice, but the material on this webpage
presents four times I interviewed the Founder of the Chicago
Opera Theater, Alan Stone. While the first purpose
was to promote specific upcoming performances, Stone
also gave much insight into the workings and problem-solving
needed to sustain a small and growing opera company.
In each case there was much laughter,
as well as serious discussion. For this website
presentation, I have eliminated most of the detailed
listings of exact locations, dates, times, and ticket
prices. The radio audience needed that information,
but it is unnecessary here. All names which are links
refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. Brief
biographies of some of the other artists he mentions are scattered
throughout the webpage, and are indicated by an asterisk (*).
We begin in February of 1979
. . . . .
Bruce Duffie: As you head
into your fifth anniversary season, are you pleased
with where the company is going?
Alan Stone: We’ve
come a long way. If you remember, when we
started the organization in 1974 with our first production
of Così Fan Tutte, we were called
The Chicago Opera Studio. We changed our name over
a year and a half ago, and that also reflects a change in
the company toward a more professional look and feel, and
away from the school image that the word ‘studio’ represented.
Certainly, when we did our first production, we were
a studio. Nobody was paid, including myself.
The singers were not paid, the directors were not paid,
and the orchestra was a very minimal student orchestra.
BD: Now you have
a permanent home, or a semi-permanent home at
the Athenaeum Theater?
Alan Stone: This will be
our second season at the Athenaeum. [Photo of the
Athenaeum is shown below.]
BD: Is it working out
the way you want it?
Alan Stone: Yes. We
have found a very congenial home in many ways.
Being about 930 seats is just right for our size
operation, and my own concept of the way opera should be
seen, in a relatively small theater. It is very much
like the European theaters, most of which are about 1,000
or 1,500 seats.
It looks like an old-world
theater. It has a little bit of that feel and
charm. People think opera ought to be in that kind of
a place.
BD: In these five years
you’ve made a lot of progress with your group?
Alan Stone: We’ve made
extraordinary progress. People these days
measure things with dollars and cents, and in those
terms our first annual budget was $8,000 for the entire
year. This year our annual budget will be reach
about $240,000. We’re also up to doing three productions
a year, whereas for the first two seasons we only performed
one opera a year. Then for three seasons we did
two operas. This is our fifth birthday, and we’re up
to three productions. We’re doing six performances
of the first work, four of the second, and six of the third,
so we’ve got sixteen performances of three different works.
We’ve got 16,000 tickets to sell.
BD: What are the three
operas that you are doing this year?
Alan Stone: We’re doing
Così Fan Tutte again, but I want
to stress to all of your listeners that this is not the
same production. The first production was done with
spit and gum, and cardboard cracker-jack sets, and rented
costumes, and borrowed props. It was a real
thrown-together production. We had no money.
In fact, you shouldn’t call it the old production!
It was a no-production because we have nothing left of
it. It was all fed to the fire when the show closed.
Now we have a really beautiful and exciting production.
We received a grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts in the visual arts program, to have a local artist
design the sets and costumes. We commissioned the Chicago
artist, Roger Brown*, who is very well known in this area,
to do this production. He has paintings hanging in the
Art Institute, and the Contemporary Arts Museum. Along with
this all-new production, Corinna Taylor has been working with
Roger doing the costumes. We also have a mostly new cast.
Two of the cast members appeared in the first production, but
they are appearing in different roles in this production.
Warren Fremling*, who sang Mr. Ford most recently in our The
Merry Wives of Windsor, and is probably best remembered as
Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro, sang the part of Don
Alfonso in the first production of Così in 1974,
but in this production, I have cast him in the role of Guglielmo.
BD: Isn’t that a higher
part?
Alan Stone: Strangely enough,
it isn’t higher. People think it’s higher,
but it’s actually lower, and in the ensembles,
the Guglielmo part is written under the Don Alfonso. But
they’re very, very close.
BD: Isn’t Guglielmo the
more lyric part?
Alan Stone: It’s a more
lyric part. It’s a role for a younger man,
whereas Alfonso is the older bachelor. But I thought
we had given Warren enough of those heavy villainous
roles, and for once we ought to capitalize on his charm,
and his wonderful warm personality.
BD: Let him play a lover
this time?
Alan Stone: Let him be
a lover like he did in Figaro. He’s
lovable as Guglielmo. The other hold-over, and
turn-around, is our wonderfully popular Robert Orth. He did
Guglielmo before, and now I have cast him as
Don Alfonso. Bob is a wonderful actor, and
I felt that Alfonso offers much more opportunity for
subtlety of acting. I’m from the old-time school
when Alfonso was sung by a baritone. The first time
I heard Così Fan Tutte was with one of the
greatest Mozart baritones, John Brownlee. He was the classic
Don Alfonso, and Count, and Don Giovanni, and many other
roles as well.
BD: Being an armchair impresario,
I would have given Orth the part of Guglielmo,
as you did earlier.
Alan Stone: Yes, but his
suavity and his elegance sold him in the role of
Alfonso. So, they are the only two that appeared
in the original production, and it will be interesting
to see them in these new roles. They’re also
very excited about the challenge of doing the other parts.
BD: We’ve talked about two
of the three men. Who is the tenor?
Alan Stone: The tenor is
a wonderful man who has appeared with us in two
previous productions. His name is William Eichorn.
You will remember him from The Mother of Us
All in 1976. He did the part of John Adams,
and the next year he sang a much more prominent
role, Belmonte in The Abduction from the Seraglio.
He is a fine tenor, a wonderful Mozart singer,
and we’re very proud of the fact that just recently
he won the Plácido Domingo Award for Singers in Barcelona,
Spain. He had all kinds of notoriety, and we’re
really proud to have him.
BD: Who will be singing
the three female parts?
Alan Stone: In the role
of Despina, the little maid to the two elegant
Ferrarese sisters, we have our really lovely and
beloved Maria Lagios*. She has appeared with
us as Norina in Don Pasquale, Rosina in The
Barber of Seville, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro,
and she was also in The Mother of Us All.
Maria is really a staple with the company, and whenever
I see these kinds of roles, I already have her in mind.
She’s absolutely adorable in all these parts, and Despina
is a role that was made for her. In the role of the
younger of the two sisters, Dorabella, we have a very lovely
lady from Chicago, a mezzo-soprano from the Calumet City
area, whom I have known, and who has auditioned for us for many,
many years, but we never have seemed to find the right part for
her. But this year she scored. Her name is Joyce Carter.
Then, in the role of Fiordiligi, the older, sedate, more elegant
and strong-minded sister, we have a young lady who is a student
at Northwestern University. I was very much impressed
when she auditioned for us, and Karen Huffstodt* is her name.
In addition, I have a group of alternate singers who will be
not only covering these other people in case of an emergency
or illness, but they will be doing one matinee student performance
that we’re doing for the Urban Gateways Group, sponsored by
the Field Foundation on February 28th. That group includes
Diane Ragains*, who sang this last season at Grant Park, and
has appeared with the Symphony, who will be doing Fiordiligi;
Kathleen Ferrin, who sings with the Chicago Symphony Chorus,
and has done lots of work in Chicago, will be Dorabella; Arlene
Barkley-Bright, who has appeared with us in the past as Blonde
in Seraglio is our Despina; Henry Hunt, who was our Ernesto
in Don Pasquale will be singing Ferrando, and Lee Snook will
be our alternate Guglielmo. Snook also has appeared with
us in touring performances Don Pasquale. Our
alternate Don Alfonso will be Warren Fremling, who is doing
our Guglielmo. He already knew the role, and it was an
expeditious thing to do. So, we’re covered now in case
of accident and, with this winter so far, we never know what’s
going to happen, be it illness, or a car that doesn’t start,
or snow...
BD: [Feigning alarm] Don’t
say snow! We have already had more than
enough this winter! [Both laugh]
Alan Stone: I shouldn’t
mention snow! I’m never going to do
The Snow Maiden of Rimsky-Korsakov. We’ll
skip that one, and do only summer-scene operas!
BD: We’ll rename you The
Fair-Weather Opera Company!
Alan Stone: Right, and
we won’t do all of La Bohème because
of the snowflakes in act three. We’ll just have
to cut that act right out of the opera!
BD: Keeping that in mind,
what are the other operas that you are doing this
season?
Alan Stone: We’re doing
a most interesting season of which I’m really
proud. It’s going to be hard for me to find a
similar balance in future seasons. Our first work
is Mozart, so that’s the late eighteenth century.
Then our second work is a brilliant opera that has never
been done in Chicago, so we’re adding still another Chicago
premiere to our list. We’ve done several Chicago
premieres, as you know. In the past, The Merry
Wives of Windsor was a Chicago premiere in a professional
production, as was The Mother of Us All, and Summer
and Smoke [by Lee Hoiby].
Our production of The Abduction from the Seraglio was
the first one that had been done around here in something
like thirty years. So, we have always been very adventurous
and very innovative in repertory. That’s something
we’re dedicated to.
BD: So, what is this new
work for this season?
Alan Stone: I don’t want
to scare our audience, because it’s nothing really
that avant-garde. It isn’t all that new, but
it’s new for Chicago. It is the marvelous comedy
of Benjamin Britten Albert Herring. There
was a recent production of it on the television from the
St. Louis Opera, and I attended that production just to decide
whether or not I really wanted to do the work. I had never
seen it, and when I saw it and heard it, I really fell in love
with it. It is a wonderful work, one that is right
up our ally. It’s brilliant. [In addition to this
1979 production, COT would revive the work ten years later (in 1989)
conducted by Hal
France, and again in 2022-23.]
BD: It has a lot of intimate
dramatic possibilities?
Alan Stone: It has wonderful,
intimate dramatic situations, and is also a real
ensemble opera. There are thirteen characters,
and of those thirteen, I would say that at least ten
are very large leading roles.
BD: So there are lots of
opportunities for the young singers.
Alan Stone: Lots of opportunities,
and it comes across as a whole company effort,
rather than an opera which is a vehicle that you can
build around one singer. It is going to be directed
by Frank Galati,
who directed our production of The Merry
Wives of Windsor. He also did The
Mother of Us All, and Summer and Smoke.
He is a very theater-orientated person. The story
of Albert Herring is so brilliant and so amusing,
I know he’s going to make something just wonderful
out of it. I should also like to mention that the director
of our Così Fan Tutte is Peter Amster,
who was our choreographer for The Merry Wives of Windsor,
and co-director of The Mother of Us All.
Peter has a great background in musical comedy, and also has worked
a great deal as a dancer. You’ll see the dancer’s
touch in Così Fan Tutte which the music can use.
BD: It needs elegance.
Alan Stone: Yes, it does
need a lot of that lightness and buoyancy.
BD: As long as we’re giving
credits here, who is the conductor for all
of these operas?
Alan Stone: Our conductor from
the very beginning is a man who helped me so much
initially in the forming of the company, Robert Frisbie
[who also participates in my interview with Lee Hoiby].
He will conduct all the productions, and he’s
now also conducting his own American Chamber Symphony. He’s
really beginning a very busy career, and that is not an
easy thing to do. It’s hard being a singer, but it may
be harder being a conductor. A singer can walk around with
his pipes, but a conductor can’t carry his orchestra around in
his briefcase.
BD: Much as he’d like
to!
Alan Stone: [Laughs]
Much as he’d like to, right.
BD: What is the third work
for this new season?
Alan Stone: The third
is a work that seems to be a great favorite of
audiences. I understand that there are more requests
for this opera than any other opera, and that is
Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.
BD: Oh, with the wonderful
duet.
Alan Stone: Yes, it
has the wonderful duet that everyone remembers between
the tenor and the baritone. But there is also
some wonderful music between the tenor and the soprano,
and wonderful music for the tenor by himself, as well
as wonderful music for the soprano, and some marvelous music
for the baritone, and brilliant choral music. It’s
a very, very big choral opera, and we will have the largest chorus
that we’ve ever had, as well as squeezing in the largest
orchestra that we’ve ever had into the pit at the Athenaeum.
The largest drawback we have at the Athenaeum is the size
of the orchestra pit [shown in photo at right].
We can only get about thirty players in there. Most
of the nineteenth century operas call for more, so we have to
eliminate them because they are impossible
to do with just thirty players. You need a bigger
orchestra for them.
BD: I won’t wait for a
Wagner performance with your company.
Alan Stone: No, don’t wait
for us to do Wagner, and I’m afraid you’re
going have to wait for a long time for Puccini,
or for any of the romantics of the nineteenth century.
BD: But these are done
elsewhere, and on recordings, and in productions
on television. It’s a great joy to have your
company doing operas that we don’t see all the time.
Alan Stone: I’m very happy
to hear you say that, because you’ve really summed
it up nicely. That’s exactly my philosophy.
People ask me why I don’t like Traviata. I
love Traviata, and that’s why I don’t want
to do it. I would not want to subject an audience
to the musical and artistic compromises that we would
have to do to put it on, or to do Il Trovatore,
or Turandot, or so many other favorites.
BD: You do things in a different
way because it’s a much more intimate setting.
Alan Stone: Plus the fact
that we do things in English. We are always
stressing the theatrical aspects, and this year
we have got a balance. We’re doing an eighteenth century
work, a nineteenth century work, and a twentieth century
work.
BD: Interesting repertoire
that is not always done.
Alan Stone: Yes.
BD: But they are all charming
works. These are not new works you’re experimenting
with. These are all works that have proved
themselves.
Alan Stone: Exactly!
They’re not unknown works that we don’t know what
to expect. There is some precedence.
We know that Albert Herring has brought the
curtain down to a tumultuous applause many, many
times. The Pearl Fishers has been recorded,
and Così Fan Tutte has been a staple
since 1790 when it was written. I like the combination
of an early work, be it a Mozart or Rossini or Donizetti,
coupled with a contemporary work. Strangely
enough, the demands on the orchestra are very similar between
the eighteenth or early nineteenth century works, and then
the twentieth century works. It was in the mid-nineteenth
century that the orchestras grew. Perhaps a modern
composer, because of his knowledge of wanting to get his work
performed, realized it was practical to build an opera that could
feasibly be produced by a smaller company.
BD: Do you think there
will come a time when the Chicago Opera Theater
will be commissioning a world premiere?
Alan Stone: That possibility
is quite strong. There are many composers
who are anxious to have works commissioned, and they
generally can be mounted by smaller companies.
A company like Lyric Opera, the Metropolitan, and San Francisco
will not take a chance, except for the work of a fairly
monumental nature, such as Paradise Lost [by Penderecki].
But the time will come, provided
that we can get support and proper funding,
that we will commission a work. As our audience
grows, we will become more and more courageous,
and be able to take a chance on a work, because we know
that people will buy a subscription, and will be more
adventurous.
BD: People will know
that you’re going to give it the same treatment
that you give the other operas they enjoy?
Alan Stone: Yes, and they
will trust us, and know that we will give them
something that is worthy, even though they may not know
what it is, or what it will be.
* * *
* *
BD: As you head into your
fifth anniversary season, did you think that you
would be at this point five years ago?
Alan Stone: No, I never
did. I started this company primarily
as a showcase, as an experimental workshop. It
was a hobby for me, and it was a place for singers to
get a chance to sing and learn something. When
we did Così Fan Tutte the first time,
I don’t even think I was considering looking any further
than that first season. It was an outlet. It was
a culmination of a study process. It was a practical
thing you do when you have an opera workshop in school.
You put on a performance because you’ve worked all
year, and you have to show to the public that you’ve done
something with your time.
BD: Is this the first
time you’ve repeated a work?
Alan Stone: This is the
first time we’ve repeated a work, and as we know
from many opera companies, there’s a great percentage
of the same operas which are done year after year after year.
Only a few new productions come in. As time
goes on, there are a few staples in our warehouse that
we should bring out again, like The Mother of Us All
[1976 & 1984], Summer and Smoke [1977 & 1980],
and The Merry Wives of Windsor [1978 & 1990]. These
are things that really have our own very personal stamp, and
if we don’t do them, people won’t hear them.
BD: Are there any plans now
for anymore television?
Alan Stone: For the time-being,
we’re in a holding pattern with television.
We recently did The Merry Wives of Windsor
on WTTW, Channel 11. It was highly successful,
as was our previous production of a condensed version of
The Mother of Us All. We have received
money from the National Opera Institute to do a production
of Così Fan Tutte on television, but
for the present time we’re holding off on accepting
the grant, because we’ve learned that there are two European
productions of Così that will be released
on television within the year. We don’t want
to be compared with Salzburg or Glyndebourne, because we
have our own style, and do our thing our way. We’re
a regional company, and we’re not looking to be competitive with
the larger companies.
BD: By giving the public
a different opera, these television tapes
perhaps might even go to Salzburg and other places.
Everyone benefits by having more repertoire.
Alan Stone: It’s very possible.
We hope so anyway. We are on very good
terms with WTTW. We’ve worked with them now
on two occasions, and when the right moment arrives,
we’ll be back there in front of those cameras filming something
fine. [Taking a moment to reminisce] I remember
when I was a very young person, the first time I saw an opera
production on television was the Don Carlo that Rudolf
Bing did when he first came to the Met in 1950. The
cast had Robert Merrill,
Jussi Björling, Cesare Siepi, Fedora Barbieri,
and Delia Regal. It was black & white
on a teeny-weeny screen, and that was such an
exciting event.
BD: And that was the only
thing you had all year.
Alan Stone: It was the
only thing all year, and now there’s often something
exciting operatically on PBS, or somewhere on the tube.
[Remember, this interview was held in 1979, when
opera on the TV (and now the computer!) was much rarer than
it is in 2023.] I think the television has
done enormous things for opera.
BD: A speculative question...
Now, with the advent of opera on TV, do
you think that is going to bring more people to the
opera house?
Alan Stone: That is an interesting
question. I don’t know. If it
were me personally, it would intrigue me to go, but
I know that lots of people have found the media a substitute
for the live form, as in sports. My brother is a
big sports fan. He loves baseball, but he never goes
to a game anymore. He’s watches it on TV. I don’t
know how that would work for opera. I would hate to think
that the people who have never seen an opera would base their
judgment of it, even if it’s a good judgment, completely
on the tube, because I don’t think you can appreciate
opera on the tube unless you’ve seen it first.
BD: [Gently protesting]
But the audio recordings have been a great
boon to the live opera.
Alan Stone: Oh, yes!
BD: With the bigger repertoire,
the public can know the works and understand them.
Alan Stone: The record
industry has done a great deal.
BD: This is what I was getting
at. Will opera-on-TV feed that, or will
it send people off in a different direction?
Alan Stone: Hopefully it
will help, but I’ve heard the opinion of people
I’ve talked to at WTTW and also WNET, Channel 13 in
New York, that most of this opera stuff on television is going
to come to a crashing halt very quickly! [Let us all
breathe a huge sigh of relief that this prognostication was completely
off the mark!]
BD: Why?
Alan Stone: Because they
can’t afford it anymore. It will have to go
onto some sort of Cable TV, and people will have to pay
for it. They can’t give it away so much anymore because
it’s just become too expensive.
* * *
* *
BD: Now that your company
is five years old, how does it fit into the picture
of opera in America?
Alan Stone: We seem
to be fitting into a very comfortable and very
warm and happy niche. We recently became members
of the large organization called Opera America, which
is a conglomerate of most of the professional opera
companies in United States. We are not such a
little opera company after all. We are definitely
a middle opera company. There are many who have budgets
of $40,000 or $50,000 a year, and we have a budget of almost
of a quarter of a million dollars a year.
BD: Are you getting national
recognition?
Alan Stone: We are getting
recognition. We have been reviewed
in Opera News, the Christian Science Monitor,
Opera magazine of London, and Opéra
magazine of Paris. Opera is the largest and fastest
growing classical music art form in the United States.
There are over a thousand opera companies in the
United States of some form, and something like 600 companies
that you could call professional, in the sense that they
have professional artists, and people pay money for their
seats.
BD: The Chicago Opera
Theater is one of this group of 600?
Alan Stone: We are one
of those, yes. We haven’t been ranked yet
because we just joined the organization, but we are definitely
there, and people know what we’re doing. We’re
on their lists. We exchange artists, and designers,
and ideas for sharing productions, and so forth.
BD: What about touring?
All of these sixteen performances of the
three operas that we talked about are taking place
at the Athenaeum Theater. Will you also be doing
performances at high schools and elsewhere around town?
Alan Stone: Yes, and this
creates a terrific problem and dilemma for
us that we really must wrestle with. We recently
did a production of Don Pasquale at the Beverly
Arts Center, and next month we’ll be doing two performances
of The Barber of Seville with the Lake Forest
Symphony, plus a performance of Don Pasquale
for the Skokie Fine Arts Commission at Niles Township High School.
In addition, we have all kinds of concerts that we give
for various organizations, including Triton College, the Northwest
Indiana Symphony Opera Ball, and the Nathan Goldblatt Cancer
Society. We’re constantly being called on.
BD: In other words, you’re
constantly in demand?
Alan Stone: We’re working
all the time. My artists are singing, and
we are keeping them working, so a little bit of income
is going into our treasury to keep us alive.
The problem is that so many of these things come about at
nearly the same time, and we have such a limited number
of singers. For example, our bass Carl Glaum,
who sang with Lyric Opera this season, is our resident bass,
and has appeared with us as Don Pasquale, and Basilio in
The Barber of Seville. He will be working during
the month of March, and I don’t think his poor wife will
get to see him for three weeks between rehearsals and performances.
There are only so many nights in the week, and good basses,
like good tenors and good contraltos are very, very hard to
come by. So those people are really much in demand.
There is a lot of talent around, but in many voice categories
the amount of talent is definitely limited. We would
do our public a big injustice to put someone on who isn’t
ready to do the role, rather than someone who is, even though
they may have been used before. The public agrees, because
they still love to see their favorites in the opera. We
get calls from people asking if Maria Lagios or Robert Orth
in the production, and if we say no, they don’t appear in
that opera because there is no part for them, they’re very disappointed.
They have formed their own fan clubs.
[We then reiterated the dates and times, as well
as ticket prices and availabilities for these performances.]
==========================================================
We now move ahead to December of the same
year, 1979, and pick up the conversation
where we are
talking about the problems of commissioning
a new opera.
BD: Let’s look at it the
other way. If you had the money problems
solved, and you didn’t have to worry about cash, and
all you had to do was worry about the actual opera that
was going to be turned out, what would you ask for?
What would you look for? What kind of guidelines
would you want?
Alan Stone: I would
look for someone with a good eye to the practicality
of producing it. This is not necessarily
just the money, but what kind of demands there are as far
as orchestra size. If it were written for a Richard
Strauss kind of orchestra, I couldn’t do it because I
don’t know where to present it. If that was the case,
I wouldn’t accept the commissioning
money.
BD: [Starting the actual
interview for broadcast, though, as you will see,
we soon slip back into our general discussion] Your
company now is six years old?
Alan Stone: Yes.
BD: What have you learned
in those six years?
Alan Stone: I’ve learned
a lot. For one thing, ultimately the
things that are important in any opera company are
not always the excellence of the performance, but how well
organized you are, and the good strong fiscal backing
you have. I’ve learned that what’s good for the
singers — which
was what prompted me initially to start this company
— isn’t ultimately
of really great interest to the public. If it doesn’t
fit or fill a community need, or if people of the community
don’t need it, the fact that singers need it, means it’s
not important.
BD: What compromises have
you had to make?
Alan Stone: I don’t think
we’ve had to really make any compromises, except
in the choice of repertory, and those have been dictated
by the number of musicians, and so forth. When
I first began my whole experience as a singer and as a coach,
I didn’t realize that you can’t perform La Bohème
with fifteen or twenty musicians, whereas you can perform
The Marriage of Figaro with twenty-four, and have
a very beautiful, effective and very authentic orchestra.
But you can’t do that with many other works, so we’ve
had to make those compromises. There are lots of operas
in the middle repertory I would like very much to do, such as
unusual works of Smetana, or Janáček, and perhaps some
early Puccini as well. [In 1987, the COT would produce
The Two Widows of Smetana, conducted by Pier Giorgio Calabria.]
I might like to take a crack at La Bohème
some time. We might be able to do it with our
small sized theater, but the pit is much too small, which
makes it impossible for the whole latter nineteenth century
repertory, and much of the French opera. [Wistfully]
I’d love to do some Ravel operas.
BD: The double bill of the
two Ravel operas would be nice.
Alan Stone: Right. L’heure
espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges.
I would just kill to do that, but there’s no way
that it can done with an orchestra of sixteen players!
Even Massenet and some of those things require a much
bigger orchestra.
BD: So primarily you’re
looking for pieces that will suit the orchestra?
Alan Stone: It’s one
of our most important factors, and the fact that
we don’t have access to large dramatic voices among the
younger singers. It is the same with Lyric Opera, or the
Metropolitan. When I think of singers today that
are singing big roles, no one would have believed that
Renata Scotto would
ever attempt to sing La Gioconda, or
Mirella Freni would sing
Aïda. To me, with my orientation,
that kind of thing is inconceivable.
Even having Roberta Knie do Isolde, you
have the choice of either hearing it with those people, or
you don’t hear it at all!
BD: We’re heading into
1980, and a new decade. Not just your theater,
but where is opera going?
Alan Stone: It’s growing.
There’s no question of that. It’s
going ahead. I have my own theory that eventually
the crunch is going to be with the big theaters.
Unless we find some kind of governmental subsidy,
much more than we have, which is very unlikely, the larger
companies are going to have to start thinking in terms
of cutting down on some of their scope and ideas. They’re
going to have to find more inexpensive and modest ways of
presenting operas, just as they have found more modest choices
of artists, because their bigger and better artists are not
available. Eventually the bigger companies are going
to see that the money to put on these big productions is not
available, and they’re going to find ways of putting on shows
using unit sets, and more projections, and trying to follow
the trend of some of the smaller, more regional companies.
That’s where it’s going to go, but I don’t feel that opera is
in serious danger, because the trend is very, very fast, and
up all over... almost too much in some cases.
BD: Do you resent the record
companies, and their use of a few big stars over
and over again, and the feeling by the public that
if these big stars are not in their casts, it’s not
as good a performance?
Alan Stone: I understand
that, and it’s a very interesting question.
I resent it from a certain point of view.
Rather than resent the record companies in choosing the
same artists over and over, I’m a little bit disappointed
by their artistic standards and values. There
are many fine artists that I don’t feel really should
be documented in certain repertory. Even though they
may want to perform it, or may have performed it, I don’t
feel that the public is wise enough and sophisticated
enough to know who is the best, or who are the best. There
isn’t just one, but several may be among the best. As
a result, generally the public will go with whoever is the
most popular at a particular time. What name have
they heard mostly? It may turn out that the recording
by this artist is a very inferior one. Often it’s
because that role is not really associated with that artist,
and that artist would never have a great success with it because
of the size of their voice, or temperament, and so forth.
You are right, though, when you say many times people get a
pre-conception of what a certain part is supposed to sound like.
Comparisons are odious, and after hearing Sherrill Milnes or Robert
Merrill knock out Figaro in The Barber of
Seville, if someone were to hear our Figaro
they might make some kind of rather negative comparison.
BD: So, it’s two-edged sword.
Recordings have made opera more popular, yet
they have perhaps pushed it a little bit too far
in a wrong direction?
Alan Stone: They have made
it popular and certainly accessible to so many people,
and with the discount record stores, which have become
the rule rather than the exception, more and more people
are buying records in a very unselective way. Records
are what got me into opera. I learned opera and
became involved by listening to records as a young child.
It was Enrico Caruso, and Beniamino Gigli, and Amelita Galli-Curci,
and Kirsten Flagstad that got me interested.
BD: Unless you’re in a
place where you can go to the opera every night,
that’s really the only way you can get a constant and
continual exposure.
Alan Stone: As a young
child, I didn’t have the means of going to hear
them. Caruso had been dead quite a few years by
the time I heard his recordings. [Both laugh]
But in those days, I remember how one would talk
about their Caruso collection, and bring out their
dozen 78 rpm recordings of Caruso as a great treasure.
BD: We’re talking about one
artist recording too many roles. Is the
converse true? Do you feel there have been some
major losses, some things that should have been documented
that have not been?
Alan Stone: Oh, absolutely!
We’ve missed some very good possibilities.
There was never a studio recording of Bidú Sayão
doing Manon. She was the Manon
of our period, and sang it well in to the 1950s,
when recordings were really at their peak.
I remember a great, great Wagnerian mezzo-soprano,
Kerstin Thorborg, who was a great favorite, and who has been
almost forgotten. She was the number
one mezzo at the Metropolitan during the entire Flagstad/Melchior
period. Her performances of Kundry and Brangäne
only survive via broadcast recordings [some of which
have been licensed and issued]. The Brangäne
is on an unofficial recording that the Met gives
you when you give them a contribution. She
was the first Amneris I ever saw. What a shame that we
never got a studio recording of Un Ballo in Maschera
with Zinka Milanov when she was in her prime, though her recording
of Il Trovatore is wonderful. Kirsten Flagstad
was poorly recorded. We missed a lot of chances,
and when they did start to record her, it was already a little
bit late.
BD: When the record companies
start recording a young tenor, or a young baritone,
or a young soprano doing everything, do we then have
the right to complain about that, when we have just
lamented that we did not catch Zinka Milanov or Kirsten
Flagstad early? We seem to be on both sides of the fence.
Alan Stone: Yes, it’s
a mistake to do both things, either too soon or
too late.
BD: Then here’s the question...
How do you know exactly when a singer is in his
or her prime?
Alan Stone: [Thinks a moment]
Well, you don’t ask them. [Both
have a huge laugh] It’s very difficult to answer
that question, because many singers go through
crises during their careers. Had one heard Leontyne
Price singing at the time when she was doing those
famous performances of La Fanciulla del West at
the Met, one would have said that was the end of Miss Price’s
career... and indeed it was for a period of two years.
The same thing happened with Zinka Milanov in the late ’40s,
when she quietly went back to Yugoslavia, and came back
three years later in superb form.
BD: How much of that
would be simply resting the voice?
Alan Stone: A good part
of it is vocal rest, and a re-evaluation of the
voice. It’s interesting to listen to recordings
of singers and how they have changed. It’s
very difficult for a singer to go through a period of vocal
transition, because they are fearful that once they take
themselves out of the market, there will be someone else
to come along, and they’ll be forgotten. I think about
a friend of mine, Grace
Bumbry. When she finally decided
to really make the transition in her mind from mezzo-soprano
to soprano, and not call herself a mezzo-soprano even
though she might still sing a Carmen or an Amneris from
time to time, she had to literally not accept engagements
for at least a year. During that time, she restudied
her voice, and re-evaluated, and reworked on a new technique
of singing. This took enormous courage! Imagine
the courage it takes of an artist who is working and making
money, and who is not in any kind of serious problem.
It’s not like a tenor who decides he’s going to become a baritone
because he’s losing his high notes. This is quite different
because someone is going to tell him to stop. I admire Bumbry,
and I admire other artists who have done the same thing, and
have stopped at a point in their career.
BD: Can it back-fire?
Alan Stone: Yes, there have
been many cases of singers who have stopped,
and then wanted to pick up the career but never quite
picked it up where they had been. Others have
been fortunate in doing so. For example, Carlo Bergonzi.
For a long time there was very little heard
from him. He’s not a young man, at least
not a young man for a tenor. He’s in his middle-fifties
now, and he’s been singing for probably thirty-five
of those fifty-five years. Now he’s quite active at
the Met, and even though he is somewhat limited, he’s still
an artist that has to be dealt with. He still sings
with great style, and with beautiful phrasing.
BD: Where’s the Met’s first
obligation to an artist like Bergonzi, or to the young
artist who is getting started, and beginning
a career, and needing the experience and exposure?
Alan Stone: Of course, they
have to divide their loyalty. Obviously,
they can’t depend on the veteran artists forever, because
they are in some precarious situations. How long
will the high notes ring out as well as they did before?
And when does the moment come when the high notes
don’t ring out at all, or don’t even sound? When the
moment comes that they can’t make a noise at all on the note,
then they have to re-consider their repertory, or reconsider
their vocal range, or just retire and teach in a conservatory!
BD: Are there too many
singers today?
Alan Stone: It’s interesting
that you ask that, and the answer is yes. I’ve
just come back from Opera America auditions. It
was a convention of many of the opera associations
of the United States, including the Metropolitan, San Francisco,
the Lyric, Miami, New York City Opera, and the Chicago
Opera Theater. There were about seventy-five companies
from the whole country, and we heard the final auditions.
They were supposed to be the best young singers that
had been recommended by Opera America companies from all
over the country, and they were there to sing for all the
directors and managers of the opera companies, with the
idea of getting some work. My own feeling was that the
general standard was very low. It seems to me that with
the enormous increase of opera companies, the demand for singers
has increased tremendously.
BD: Is the cream of the
crop being spread too thin?
Alan Stone: The problem is
not that the cream of the crop is being spread
too thin, but the very bottom of the skimmed-milk is
really getting used more than it ever was before.
The small companies can’t afford to have the cream
of the crop, the superstars. So very often young
singers fill those big roles.
BD: I don’t necessarily
mean the superstars, but what about the young
singers who are good?
Alan Stone: Yes, they are
super in demand, absolutely. They are
the ones whose performances in a small company gained
them some distinction, and sometimes in a large company
they are a source of embarrassment. For example,
I’ve heard some very fine young talents with the San
Francisco Spring Opera, and other companies of that size.
I was terribly impressed with them, and I would be very
happy to have them sing with me. But after having
heard them in productions at the Metropolitan and at Lyric
Opera, I’ve been disappointed. They were outclassed.
They were not ready yet for the big, big time.
They were ready for the middle time. Some of these
singers are getting work on the mere fact that they can hit
the notes. For example, we heard a low bass sing Sarastro’s
aria from The Magic Flute.
BD: He had the low F?
Alan Stone: He had the
low F, but that’s all he had. He sang in tune,
but he had no understanding of the nobility, the dignity,
the depth and the breadth of this character.
He was just singing it like a nice song, and yet because
he had the low F, many directors were interested in him
because he could hit that note. It would mean
that they could do a production of The Magic Flute
because they would have someone that can ‘get through’ the
part. That’s all they were worried about. To me,
that’s not enough of a standard. I don’t want a Sarastro
to get through the part. I want him to just thrill
his audience with the role. So this man is going to get
work, but he’s too young to get work. What he needs is
about two years of more study, not just experience. By this
I mean vocal study, language, style, immersion. That man
should be going to Germany and living there, and listening, and
hearing, because when you’re in this business, professional experience
is extraordinary. There’s nothing quite like it, but
there’s a special kind of experience, study experience,
and they’re different.
BD: Have you, as an impresario,
ever asked a singer to do anything that you really
felt, if you were his or her vocal coach, you would have
said no?
Alan Stone: In all conscience
I would say I have not. I have tried almost
pathologically to avoid hurting the young voices.
I was a singer myself, and got myself into terrible
trouble vocally. In fact, for a period of
time, I lost my voice because I was being pushed into a
repertory that I didn’t belong. I was a lyric
tenor, and I sang Mozart and Donizetti, and I was pushed
into heavier Italian repertory, and Wagner because I
was tall. The agents needed those kinds of singers.
I remembered all this very much, and I started the
Chicago Opera Theater. Initially it began because
I was an opera coach, and I was not going to suddenly betray
my standards and my goals!
BD: I just wondered if you
ever found that you had to.
Alan Stone: Sometimes I have
been more persuasive than perhaps I would like to
be, but I never felt that I would offer someone a
role that would do them any physical harm to their voices.
Usually it’s just the opposite. I have to convince
the singers that this particular role is not right for
their voice. Singers are very, very special. They’re
not very objective about their own voices and their own singing.
This accounts for some of the strange things we hear these
days, with artists we love all of a sudden appearing in the
most unlikely roles on television, and in the opera companies.
We ask why they did it, and it’s
because they’re impressionable.
They also feel they need new challenges all the
time. They get tired of doing the same Mimì
over and over.
BD: What about the singers
of the last century, who would have a huge repertoire?
Alan Stone: Many factors
were different in those days. For one, the
size of theater. Obviously, a soprano singing
Tristan and Isolde in a theater that seats
1,500 people as opposed to a theater seating 4,000
makes enormous demands on the voice, including
fighting over a much larger orchestra. Also, the
pitch was considerably lower, so the singers weren’t straining
at the absolute uppermost reaches of their voices.
Despite the fact that we hear stories of Adelina Patti and
all these people who went on forever, most of those people
in the so-called ‘golden age’, had very short careers.
If you look back, when they started talking about Giuditta
Pasta, who created Norma, they talked about her being already
in vocal decline when she sang that role.
BD: But we have no way of
really knowing this.
Alan Stone: Yes, no way
of knowing it except from documentation.
I remember reading about it in Pleasants’ book [shown
at left]. He brings out how the voice was
somewhat in tatters, and the pitch was not so good anymore.
But she was not an old woman. The career of Maria Callas
approximates more the kind of career that existed in the ‘golden
age’. They did everything, and they did incredibly
well, but not for very long. We don’t know
exactly how many of them retired very young, as Callas did.
It’s hard to believe that by the time she was thirty, her
best days were practically over as a singer. This is against
all the rules of physiology because there’s no question
that if a singer is careful and judicious in their repertory,
and if they are technically strong, and keep themselves healthy,
it is not unusual for a singer to sing well into their fifties,
and even as old as sixty. There have been some that go
even longer than that. The deeper voices, the contraltos
and basses last longer. Look at Jerome Hines now. He’s
marvelous.
BD: But they’re not forcing
the upper reaches of the throat.
Alan Stone: They’re forcing
their own upper reaches. A high F for a bass
is just as shattering an experience for a bass
as a high B-Flat is for a tenor, but there is less tension
in it. The emphasis is more on the lower part
of the voice.
BD: A bass doesn’t have
to sing high Fs all the time, whereas the tenor
has to have a lot of B-flats.
Alan Stone: That’s correct,
but there have been some examples... The great tenor
Beniamino Gigli sang like a young man up to four or five
years before his death. There are recordings that
are amazing, not just a recital, but full performances,
and he had sung everything. He had done a huge gamut
of roles, from the lightest lyric leggiero-tenor, all the
way up through to Andrea Chénier, and Radamès,
and Manrico, and Pagliacci.
* * *
* *
BD: Are you happy with opera?
Alan Stone: Am I happy
with opera in general, or with my opera company?
BD: Let’s ask it both ways,
as a patron and as an impresario.
Alan Stone: As a patron, I
must admit not being as happy and not getting the
immense pleasure from opera that I did when I was a young
student. I don’t know if it’s just getting older
and a bit cynical about opera, and sour grapes, and bored
with it, and blasé, but it’s a rare occasion now when
I go to the opera and am really transported into this world
that I lived in as a young singer and young student in Milan
and Chicago and New York. From the other point of view
I understand the reasons for it, but sacrifices have been
made in the standards. I don’t hear the great conductors
conducting opera anymore. When I was living
in New York, I would hear Manon with Pierre Monteux
conducting, and Victoria de los Angeles and Cesare Valletti
singing. In Milan I heard Tosca with Maria Callas,
and Tito Gobbi,
and Giuseppe Di Stefano in his prime, and Tullio
Serafin conducting. So, as a patron I am often
disappointed.
BD: But now you’re in a
unique position, because you are sometimes a patron,
and sometimes an impresario. Is there anything
that you are doing, or are there lots of things that
you are doing as an impresario, simply to make patrons more
satisfied?
Alan Stone: It’s interesting,
and I’ve often wondered about this. I love
my performances! I just think that the Chicago
Opera Theater performances are wonderful.
BD: But you’ve molded them
to your taste.
Alan Stone: That very well may
be part of it, and also because I go to those performances
not expecting the kind of perfection and the superior
state of the art that I do expect from the Metropolitan
Opera and the Lyric Opera productions. I go to my
productions looking for entertainment and music theater.
I know already that I’m not going to hear Luciano Pavarotti.
I’m not going to hear Birgit Nilsson,
and Joan
Sutherland. So, my whole expectation
is considerably different.
BD: What would happen if
you went to the Lyric Opera, or the Met, with those
kinds of expectations?
Alan Stone: When I have gone
like that, then generally I’m not disappointed.
It depends a lot on the repertory. For
example, when I went to the Lyric to see The Love
for Three Oranges, I knew from the nature of the
work that I was not going to get a display of individual
vocal skill. I knew it was being done in English.
I knew the singers were mostly younger American singers.
I went to see a spectacle, rather than one of my old
favorite operas. Then I wasn’t disappointed. You’re
right, I came with a different set of values.
But when I go to hear Andrea Chénier or La
Bohème at the Lyric, I have too many memories
in my ears of people I have heard over the years,
and there aren’t too many people singing these parts today
that are going to make you erase those memories. They
tell you that’s a sign of getting old when you start feeling
this way.
BD: It seems that every
age is that way. People who have been going
to opera for twenty, thirty, forty years, begin to
only remember the performances of twenty, thirty, forty
years ago, whereas the young goers are remembering performances
only from last year, or the year before. So they’re
perhaps more satisfied with what they’re hearing.
Alan Stone: That may very well
be. Although because of the enormous immersion
in opera that so many people have, it is hard to gain
a sense of what is the best. In the early days before
there were so many recordings of so many things, one knew
about Kirsten Flagstad. She sang almost all of
the Wagner roles, and made a few recordings.
BD: Then were people disappointed
later when they heard Astrid Varnay or Helen
Traubel?
Alan Stone: Perhaps if
they had heard them at the time, if their careers
had been contemporary, they might have been somewhat
disappointed. Astrid Varnay’s career perhaps did
suffer, and Helen Traubel’s career suffered, although she
had a huge career. But now there are so many more
singers appearing on recordings, and so many people have recorded
the same work. There are too many recordings for
my money of the same opera. I don’t know why we need all
those, except to sell more records. What’s even more
confusing is when someone has recorded the same role twice.
It’s interesting from a documentary point of view, for a
musicologist or a vocal pedagogue to compare one recording to
the next one he made five years later, but I don’t think the audiences
get into that aspect of it at all.
BD: How many different
opera audiences are there, or are there are as many
audiences as there are people who go? [Vis-à-vis
the biography of Karen Huffstodt shown at right, see my interviews
with Zubin Mehta, Semyon Bychkov, and Antonio Pappano.]
Alan Stone: I don’t think
I could define how many audiences there are. [Pauses
a moment] It’s the first time you’ve ever
talked to me about these things! It’s interesting
that you mentioned me as a singer turned impresario,
because that was brought out at the Opera America meeting.
Here we had all these people from all over, but of
all the artistic directors, or managers, the orientation
for most of them was not in the singing. There were
only three that came from a singing career.
BD: The rest were from
the business world?
Alan Stone: No, most
of them came either from the stage, as stage directors,
or they were conductors. In the little companies,
many of the artistic directors conduct the orchestras.
The only people who came from the singing world
were Beverly Sills, and David Lloyd,
and myself.
[At this point we promoted La Périchole
with details of performance dates and times.]
=========================================================
Now we move along to
February of 1983.
BD: It’s my pleasure to
be speaking once again with Alan Stone, the founder
and artistic director of the Chicago Opera Theater,
which is embarking on its ninth season. There
will be three operas in this particular season
— Martha by Flotow,
The Consul by Menotti, who will
be in town to direct his work, and also The Barber
of Seville by Rossini. Why Martha?
Alan Stone: Why not Martha?
It was for so many years one of the standards
in the repertory, and one of the most popular of all
the grand operas. I remember seeing the Mario
Lanza movie, The Great Caruso, with music of Martha.
Then in the last thirty or forty years it’s
gone very much into obscurity, and has been neglected.
I really think it’s due to the fact that it’s devilishly
difficult to do. It’s much harder than it seems.
It calls for a cast of virtuoso voices, wonderfully attractive
people, and a big chorus. Perhaps twenty or thirty
years ago we were too cynical to enjoy some of the sentimentality
and romanticism, but the wheel is turning now, and people
are ready to enjoy shows like that just like movies such as Tootsie
and things of that kind. We need some of that fresh air
in this ugly atmosphere that we’re living in, and that’s why
I picked Martha to do.
BD: Is this one of several
that you have in mind, little plums, little gems
that you’re sprinkle season after season?
Alan Stone: Yes, it’s something
I have been trying to do, and quite successfully
over the years, ever since we started doing three
operas. We’ve done, for example, The Daughter
of the Regiment, which is hardly ever done. It
was only done once by Lyric Opera in almost thirty years of
its history. We’ve also done La Périchole,
and La Rondine, The Italian Girl in Algiers,
and The Abduction from the Seraglio. These
are not frequently performed operas, and yet they are the works
that everybody knows, but nobody’s seen lately. The
Pearl Fishers is another one that we’ve done which is very
much forgotten on the stage. It has a beautiful score,
and one that the public knows a lot from recordings of excerpts.
My problem is to keep digging these things up and not digging
myself under the ground while I’m doing it! [Both laugh]
BD: This seems to be the
pattern of your season. You do one favorite,
one middle romantic novelty, and then one contemporary
theater piece, and it provides a balanced season.
Alan Stone: That’s a formula
I devised back in 1979 when we went into three
productions, and so far we’ve been able to continue
it. I hope we will be able to follow this device,
because it offers something for everybody. It’s
good training for the audiences, and good training also for
the artists to get a chance to work in different genres of opera.
BD: Tell us a little bit about
Martha.
Alan Stone: It might be
called the counterpart to Così Fan
Tutte. In this opera we have two men and two
women. The women in this case are aristocratic,
or represent the aristocracy, as they do in Così,
except that in this story, they get into costumes and go
into a new environment. They pick up these two farmer
boys, thinking they’re going to have a little fun.
But the plot gets a little rough, because the boys are quite
serious about this romance. It turns out that one
of the boys isn’t really a farmer, but an aristocrat in disguise.
After all the complications and ramifications of the plot,
of course it all turns out happily ever after at the
end, accompanied by glorious music. The famous ‘M’appari’
is the tenor aria that everyone knows.
BD: How does that translate?
Alan Stone: In this particular
translation, I believe it says ‘Like in a
dream, I think of you at night’. I may not have
all the words right, but it’s a very easy translation to
sing, and quite close to the original ‘Ach! So Fromm’.
‘M’appari’
was a translation because the opera was originally written
in German. So here we have a German composer
writing about England in the beginning of the eighteenth
century, and being most famous in its Italian translation.
There’s as little song called ‘Qui Sola Vergine Rosa’
which we know better in English as ‘The Last Rose of Summer’.
Many people don’t know it was used in Martha.
[It’s an Irish poem from 1805 by Thomas Moore, and the tune
goes back to 1792. So the music for this number was arranged
by Flotow.] There’s also beautiful
ensemble music, quartets and quintets.
BD: You say it’s very difficult,
but is it fun to work with?
Alan Stone: Oh, it’s marvelous
fun. It’s difficult technically, and yet
it mustn’t sound difficult. The pyrotechnics
are all concealed in the lightness and romanticism of the
work. Particularly on the part of the tenor and the
soprano, it calls for very, very difficult singing.
There’s very high tessitura
for the tenor, and a very extended range for the soprano,
with numerous high Ds and E-Flats. The contralto
is the sort of voice of Verdi called ‘mezzo
soprano’. She
should be able to sing Azucena or Amneris with the
personality of a Rosina. Dramatically it’s a soubrette
role, but it cannot be sung by a light soubrette
lyric mezzo soprano. Instead, it needs a really full
mezzo-contralto. The baritone or bass is another
wide-ranged role, a big, almost like a Heldenbariton,
from a low F to a high F, with sustained notes,
too. All of these parts are very, very difficult.
BD: Was it very difficult
to cast this opera?
Alan Stone: It was difficult,
except that fortunately over the years I have
built up a wonderful stable of great vocal artists.
They are young, but still wonderfully talented.
Generally, I always have an idea of someone in mind
for at least some of the major parts. One of the
reasons I decided to do Martha was because I had
worked with Karen Huffstodt, who had done La Rondine
with us, and also the previous Così Fan Tutte.
I knew her voice, having worked with her and coached
with her. I felt she was the right soprano. She
had the extension on the top that you could work with.
Also, the tenor, Richard
Leech, had sung in our production of La Rondine
with Karen, and they were very beautiful together. They
sing so well together that I knew if I could cast the tenor and
the soprano, I could go ahead. The mezzo soprano, Jane
Bunnell*, is the only one who is completely new to the company.
I cast her from New York. She has just the most
beautiful and wonderful rich deep contralto voice, and yet there’s
no resemblance to a contralto who sings ‘O Rest in the Lord’, or
‘O Thou that tellest good Tidings to Zion’. She’s a perky girl
with a big huge perky voice, and it’s wonderful. The
bass, Paul Geiger*, has done Figaro with us before, and The
Italian Girl in Algiers. The character he plays, Plunkett,
is a farmer in the story, and Paul lives in Iowa and is kind of
a farmer boy himself. He’s
6 feet 5 inches! I had the cast pretty well in mind.
The big question was the mezzo, and when I found her, we were
all set.
BD: Are there some little
roles in the opera?
Alan Stone: There are two, and
they’re not little. There’s one quite a big
juicy supporting role in the role of Sir Tristram Mickleford,
who is the suitor and cousin to Martha, or Lady Harriett.
It’s a basso-buffo part, which is being done by William
Walker*, who has just come back from a year with the Zurich
Opera. He sang with us in The Good Soldier Schweik,
and has done Don Basilio in our tour of The Barber of Seville.
The other small but very important part is the Sheriff.
He only sings in one scene, but that’s the role in which Paul Plishka made his
debut at the Met back in the ’60s.
That is being sung by Kurt Link*, who has
sung with the Chicago Symphony and Georg Solti, and is
now beginning his operatic career. He has a wonderful
voice, and although it’s a small part, I heard him
in rehearsal today, and it was a big noise! [Both
laugh]
BD: Who’s the conductor?
Alan Stone: Conducting
will be our regular conductor, Steven Larsen,
who last year did such a wonderful job
with our Regina, and the year before he
led an incredible production, one of the things I’m probably
proudest we ever did, The Good Soldier Schweik.
[Twenty years later (2001), the COT would again
present this opera, conducted by Alexander Platt, and directed
by Harry
Silverstein, with sets by John Conklin.
It was also (audio) recorded at that time as a
two-CD set.] Steve has been doing a lot of contemporary
music, and I decided to give him a break this season and
let him try a different kind of music. That’s why he’s
not conducting The Consul, but he is conducting Martha.
BD: I had expected him
to do The Consul.
Alan Stone: Yes, everyone
did, and he did too, but his experience has
been primarily in symphonic and orchestral conducting,
as opposed to opera. There’s not that much opportunity
for young people to conduct opera. He had a real
feel for orchestra, and Martha [1847] is very Germanic,
in its own way. The influence of Weber is very strong,
and you can hear early Wagner all over the place. Not Tristan
or the Ring, but there are choruses that sound right
out of The Flying Dutchman [1841]. The Farmers’
Chorus has that wonderful rousing beat and rhythm and vigor
that we hear in Wagner’s very
early opera Rienzi [1840]. So, that’s why I was sure,
and I’m even more sure having heard the rehearsals, that Steve
will bring all of that sound out of the orchestra, and the chorus,
and singers as well. [The production would open a few days
after this broadcast.]
BD: Everything always seems
to work in your productions. Even as you go
into the last couple of rehearsals, and you’re worried
about this and that, you always seem to bring it off
well. Tell us about the other operas you will be presenting
later in this season.
Alan Stone: You mentioned
The Consul [winner of the 1950 Pulitzer
Prize for Music], and the biggest coup we have this
year is that I was able to persuade Menotti to come and direct
his own opera, which has never received a professional production
in Chicago. It is a great honor and thrill and treat
for us to have the great man here. I worked with
him many years ago very briefly in Tamu-Tamu [1973].
I was the casting consultant, which meant I set up all
the auditions, and did the preliminary auditions for the singers
for that opera. You will recall that I did have my
training in Italy, and I lived there for three years, so I speak
the language quite fluently. Although Menotti
was born in Italy, he prefers to speak in English, and
for his operas he writes his own librettos, and he writes them
in English. He doesn’t translate. The only opera
he wrote in Italian was Amelia al ballo [Amelia Goes
to the Ball].
BD: That was a very early
work [1936].
Alan Stone: Yes, an early,
early work. But even though he prefers
to speak English, he speaks Italian fluently, and
he does have a slight accent. He was in his early
twenties when he came over from Italy, but it’s wonderful
to be able to speak to him in Italian because we have
all these little secrets going on. We can say
these terrible things about everybody, and nobody knows
what we’re saying... at least we hope they don’t! [Both
laugh]
BD: Is the casting for The
Consul complete now?
Alan Stone: Absolutely,
and it’s a wonderful cast. This is our richest
year of casting. When you see the names of
the people, you might wonder what happened to all the Chicago
singers, and I must say that I did get the majority
of the leading singers for The Consul from the
New York area. That was partially due to the
fact that Menotti wanted to be in on all the auditions himself
with me, and at least be able to agree together on
who we would choose. I had four series of auditions
in New York with him before we finally fixed on our artists.
So, most of the leading people in the big roles are from
New York. The smaller roles, the supporting roles,
are important, and most of those are from Chicago. Then,
the Barber of Seville has a good mix. As Figaro,
we have our veteran star, Robert Orth, who is singing all over
this country. He was so wonderful as John Buchanan
in Summer & Smoke on television this last year.
His Rosina is Cynthia
Munzer, who is formerly of the Met and sings all over
the country and all over the world. She did The Italian
Girl in Algiers. The tenor is Abraham Morales,
a wonderful leggiero tenor, of which there are so few, because
most tenors get tired of singing Rossini. They want to
sing bigger things, and then when they want to go back to the
good old bel canto leggiero stuff, they can’t
do it anymore. There are very few of them that have
learned the lesson of Alfredo Kraus, and
who is still singing amazingly and beautifully well. The
basses are Kenneth Cox, who was our Osmin, and Carl Glaum,
who did Pasquale with us. Glaum did Basilio in our
first Barber, and he’s now a staple at the San Francisco
Opera, where he’s done some wonderful roles. They love
him there, and now he’s coming back to sing Bartolo.
He always wanted to do Bartolo, and physically he’s small
and bit husky, which is really physically much more for my
taste as Bartolo. For Basilio I prefer to have a slender
taller man. Carl is able to handle that terribly difficult
tessitura of Bartolo. It’s a very difficult role, maybe
the most difficult role in the whole opera. People don’t
always realize that because he is covered up with a load of jokes,
and is asked to do funny things with the voice. I should
also mention our conductors too and directors. Our director
for Martha is Dominic Missimi,
a local director, teacher and professor at Northwestern,
and one of the most incredible young operatic directors. He
is not only a director, he’s a musician, and he can
breathe life into most scores that are very difficult.
He did La Rondine for us, and The Italian Girl
in Algiers, and Seraglio. That’s already
something because there’s very little action, but Dominic
can extract much from it. In The Consul,
our conductor will be Joseph De Ruggieriis,
who conducted our Seraglio last year.
He is the conductor of the San Diego Opera and
also San Francisco Opera. He worked with Menotti
in Spoletto, Italy, years ago as his assistant, and he
asked me not to do a classic this year. He wanted to do
a contemporary opera, so it worked out. Larsen,
who had done the contemporary one, wanted to do the
classic, and so we made a nice switch. Nicholas Muni
will direct Barber. He is from New York, and is a
director who’s trained in music. He’s been very helpful
to me in working out recitatives. The conductor is a wonderfully
bright young man whose operatic career has been going wild
in this country, Mark
Flint. He is from the Michigan Opera, and has also conducted
the St. Louis Opera and the San Francisco Opera Spring Opera.
He’s probably the busiest young American opera conductor,
and so we have quite a team.
[At this point we listed dates and times for the
radio audience. We then continued chatting privately
about other operatic subjects, including the use
and mis-use of recordings.]
Alan Stone: Young singers always
like to get a recording to help them.
BD: To crib from! [Both
laugh] [Vis-à-vis the biography of William
Walker shown at right, see my interviews with Eve Queler, John Rutter, Thomas Wikman (Founder
of Music of the Baroque), and Margaret Hillis (Founder
of the Chicago Symphony Chorus.]
Alan Stone: Yes, sure. I
just wonder what people did before those days.
To me, the recordings and tapes are so important, not
to copy but just to get a feeling of the work. I hear
singers say they’ve enjoyed them because this is their passion,
too. But I hear some conductors say they
never listen to recordings, or they never listen to their
own recordings. They can give you a point of view, but
they want to do it fresh. Steve said that to me one
time, and I told him he should have listened to it because his
tempo was completely wrong dramatically. It was just
off a hundred per cent. This was not in Martha,
but rather was some years ago. He had learned a little
bit since. About four years ago I was in Italy,
and I went to visit my old friend (conductor) Giuseppe Patanè.
I stayed at his home, in his villa. He lives
in Milan and has a villa up in the mountains with a beautiful swimming
pool, and a garden. He loves animals, and he’s got all kinds
of monkeys. Even though he had invited me, I practically never
saw him because he was going to be doing a production of The
Flying Dutchman in Vienna. He was studying, studying,
studying. This was his vacation, but he said that he’s
got to prepare. One day he called to me and said he was sorry
he was spending so little time with me. I was there for four
days, but we only saw each other at meal times, once in a while.
He said, “They want to kill me in
Vienna because I’m Italian. They don’t think anybody
can play Wagner but the Germans. But I will not let
them kill me! I am preparing for this so much.”
In his studio he has wonderful sound equipment, and he asked
me to listen to something. “Is there too
much portamento? No? What do you think?”
I asked who it was, and he said it was Gwyneth Jones.
Then we listened to Kirsten Flagstad.
He also played Furtwängler and said,
“He has it all. He gets
everything, and he hears everything.”
Today it’s like wine-tasting. One
knows what he likes because he’s tasted all of it.
He takes a little bit of this idea, a little bit
of that idea, and puts it all together and comes out with
his own interpretation which is influenced by these other
thoughts.
BD: [Gently protesting] But
Furtwängler didn’t listen to all of these
others. He got it out of the score himself.
Alan Stone: This is true.
That’s what I’m saying. Now these guys
don’t have to do that. Today they have the opportunity
to absorb the great thoughts of so many. In
some ways, it’s much easier for them.
BD: Is it a blessing or
is it a curse?
Alan
Stone: It can be a blessing, depending
on who is doing it. I think that every soprano
today should sit down for about two years and be forced
to hear the best recordings of Rosa Ponselle and Zinka
Milanov, and the other best singers. I am horrified
when I mention these names to these young kids and they
don’t know who they are. There are recordings
of them, but I would never ask them to try to copy.
They could never copy! They don’t have the vocal equipment
to do it even if they wanted to. But they need to learn
something about an approach, or know when something is wonderful,
and then try to do something wonderful themselves.
BD:
If one of your artists came to you and asked
which recording of Martha he or she should listen
to, they could almost learn it by rote.
Alan Stone: No, can’t happen
because, for one, we do it in another language.
That already changes things. I don’t believe
they should listen and learn by rote because we’re
more sophisticated nowadays musically. There are fewer
approximations of musical performances.
BD: Are they becoming too
tentative?
Alan Stone: Tentative?
No, no, no! On the contrary, we’re very
much more demanding musically. They don’t give
themselves the rein that they could because the times
have changed. Conductors don’t give them those
privileges anymore. But worse than that, they don’t
even know the potential of what’s in their innate abilities.
In a phrase, they need to know how much stretch then
can give without really distorting or hurting it. I
learned more about ‘declamazione’, recitative and declamation,
from hearing Callas in Milan. I would never sing
her repertory, but I could transfer it to my own.
Nowadays, I’m not very happy with what’s going on. I’ve
heard things from the Met that if I had heard that stuff
when I was sixteen, I’d probably be doing something different
than I’m doing now. These days, when I hear the Met
on the radio, I turn it off. I can’t even listen to
it. Some of it is like the old touring San Carlo Opera.
The singers are doing roles that they shouldn’t do.
BD:
Earlier you said you had to restrain singers
from trying to do too much.
Alan Stone: They don’t
know that they’re not instrumentalists. We
see these guys in our orchestras. They work,
and they do the most horrendously difficult things.
They come running from one gig, and they’ve
got their food with them, and then they sit down and do a
four-hour rehearsal with us, and then they’re going to another
rehearsal. They’re terribly tired, and we think
they’re very commercial. But they have to raise
their families, and their kids have to eat, and they have
to pay the rent, and all that. But the singers equate
themselves to that, and they don’t realize that this ain’t no fingers
on a fiddle! [Both laugh]
BD:
If you break a string, you go into the case
and get a new one.
Alan Stone: Right!
Exactly! You put another string on, or
you borrow someone else’s fiddle when it’s necessary.
BD: Even if you’re tired,
you can still scrape along.
Alan Stone: You scrape
along, but you don’t do yourself any permanent
damage to the muscles in your fingers. But
these singers have to take care of their voices.
==========================================================
We now move forward to April of 1991. Like
the text of Wagner’s Ring,
each
recounting
of the history of the company presents new details
and viewpoints,
as well as
continuing the narrative through a very difficult
time.
BD: After eighteen
seasons of producing opera, are you now where you
thought you’d be?
Alan Stone: I’m nowhere that I
thought I was going to be eighteen years ago, because,
very frankly, I never intended nor had any dream of
forming an opera company. Our original name when we
incorporated in 1973, was the Chicago Opera Studio. The
whole company started out as just a group of my own coaching
students that were working with me, wonderful people like
Phil Creech, David Kuebler, Isola Jones, Bill Diana, and
Linda Mabbs, some of whom now have big careers going for
them. I started coaching in about 1971, and had a huge
studio of people who were wonderful singers, and nowhere
to sing. In those days at the Lyric Opera, Carol
Fox [one of the Founders, and General Director] did not
want to hire American singers, even for the small parts. So
I decided a performance would be good business for me as a coach.
I’d get more students that way, and also it would give them
an opportunity with something to work for, not just coaching.
So, we got together, and decided to do Così Fan Tutte,
because the Chicago Opera Studio Incorporated spelled out COSI.
I thought it was a message from on high. We were going
to do it with two pianos, but Bob Frisbie approached me at that
time, and asked if we could get an orchestra together. So we
did, and no one got paid, no one. It was all love’s labor.
We had two casts with some wonderful people in it.
BD: After all of this,
when did you get the idea of forming a regular
company?
Alan
Stone: We really didn’t think of the
idea of a company. It only came well over
a year later, when Dr. Morris Krieger, who was then
the President of the Board of Directors of Michael
Reese Hospital, took on the job of President of our Board.
He really organized the Board. People who
had raised money for the company before that were really
just my friends. So it wasn’t until about 1976 that
we were really going to make a company. That was when we
did our first production of The Mother of Us All. We
got such a response from that. It was done at Jones
Commercial High School, and Virgil Thomson came out from
New York, and sat in on rehearsals. We had so many fantastic
people in it including Carol Gutknecht,
Robert Orth, and Maria Lagios...
BD: Then for several years
you just went along producing operas, and doing
things very, very well. Now all of a sudden,
things have started to get very shaky.
Alan
Stone: It isn’t really all of a sudden.
Opera has never paid for itself. It never
has and it never will. For many years
we managed to operate in the black. We started
with one opera, and then we went to two, and then in 1979
we went to three. But in 1988, the managing director
suggested we go to four operas, and that was the first
year we had a deficit. We had another deficit in
Fiscal 1989. The problem, of course, was very simple.
Despite the fact that we’ve always paid very modest
fees to our artists, to our staff, and to me too, the
theater with 920 seats could not bring enough income to support
the company. We did not have big corporative support
like the Lyric has, and we didn’t have big donors, people who
wrote checks for $50,000. No one ever wrote a check
for that amount for us in our history. Then the manager
of the company decided that one way we could come out of the
hole would be to go into some big ventures in the Loop [the downtown
area of Chicago]. That’s why we did Carousel
last year, which was an enormous critical success, but we lost
money on it.
BD:
Even though it sold out?
Alan Stone: It sold out,
but we lost money because of the union problems
of the Schubert Theater. You couldn’t bend
over without paying somebody. We were green, and our
manager did not know how to negotiate a new union contract.
So, although we sold out, and did two extra performances
[for a total of nine], we didn’t actually lose money,
but we broke even. Since we had budgeted $150,000
profit, and we only broke even, that meant we had a $150,000
loss, because that’s how we budgeted.
BD: It’s
a loss of expected income?
Alan Stone: Exactly, but
we spend money on the presumption of we’re going
make, so that is what is projected into the budget.
An earlier mistake was doing Peter and the
Wolf, with Where the Wild Things Are [by Oliver Knussen].
That was at the Auditorium in 1988, and it was
a great, great success.
BD: It was a wonderful
production!
Alan Stone: It’s a fabulous
show, and it was a wonderful production, but
we didn’t make any money because we didn’t have sufficient
corporate sponsorship. We should have never
taken on a venture at the Auditorium, but unfortunately
our fiscal administration was not strong enough to realize
that. Again, that was going to make us all this money,
but we didn’t think about all the expenses including huge
royalties to (the librettist and designer) Maurice Sendak, and
fees to the director (Frank Corsaro). The
worst thing that happened was this last time
we did it (in 1990) at the Chicago Theater. Again
I married Wild Things with Peter and the Wolf,
and two of the Narrators were local TV news anchors Linda
Yu and Lester Holt. It was wonderful, but because of
the economy, and the fact that there were so many things going
on in the Loop — we
were bucking against The Nutcracker and A Christmas
Carol — we
did not have the audience, so we ended up losing $75,000,
plus all of the accumulated deficit. However, we
didn’t know that because the manager, the man who got
us into this situation, had already left. He had big
hopes, but they were not realistic.
BD: He hid it all from the
board?
Alan Stone: He just didn’t
plan well. He certainly didn’t make a
big thing out of it, and he tried to resolve the problems
the best way he knew how, which was not the best way
to do it. He didn’t pay the IRS, and we got into some
very serious trouble. By the time we got the final
reckoning of what happened, we had a deficit of $400,000,
including $100,000 to the IRS. Plus he had some very
creative budgeting. He thought that we would break even at
the Athenaeum, but the truth of the matter
— which somehow he did not
grasp — is that
if we sell every seat of every performance at the Athenaeum,
we end up with approximately $200,000 and $250,000 deficit.
He was even trying to get us into the idea of renovation of
the Athenaeum. That, of course, was pie in the sky.
That would have killed us, because we were talking about raising
$9 million to renovate a place which we couldn’t live in
anyway. So, we came to the point before the opening
of Idomeneo for the Board to decide whether or not we
could open, or if we should declare Chapter 11 and revamp some
other time. There was a strong movement to close the company.
A lot of people on the board, many of the more cautious businessmen,
who think you run an opera company like you run a nuts-and-bolts
business, were thinking that we should just call it quits, and
avoid more risks and more liabilities. But fortunately,
there was a strong movement that said no, that we really have
to see what we can do. In forty-eight hours we raised $310,000,
which is unbelievable. It was a miracle. Even The
New York Times had a little quip about ‘the
miracle in Chicago’, because raising
$310,000 for a middle-sized arts organization in this economy
at this time was really good. So, we got through Idomeneo.
Henry Holt
was the conductor, and we even did appeals from the stage.
Money started coming in from all places, from people
we never even knew, because they never thought of us as being
in trouble financially. We had had such a good record,
and we didn’t advertise the deficit. We finally got to
do Madame Butterfly, but we don’t have enough to do our next
production, which is Postcard from Morocco. Contemporary
operas, like Postcard, are the thing that we’re
famous for. If we can’t do this opera, if we can’t
raise enough money to put that on, there’s something wrong.
BD:
Where are you right now?
Alan
Stone: We’ve paid off IRS, so the government
is off our back. We paid, and now we hope
that they will be kind, and understanding, and generous
with us regarding the penalties and the interest.
We still are in the process of negotiating
as far as penalties and interest are concerned,
but we’ve paid off what we owed them. After that, we’re
short close to $150,000 for the production of Postcard.
BD:
Now Butterfly is running to rave reviews?
Alan Stone: Rave reviews,
so you can’t get any more tickets at this point.
BD: Are you going to put
on a couple of more performances?
Alan Stone: No, we can’t
because we’ll lose money. Every time we pull
up the curtain at that theater, we spend more
for the orchestra, the chorus, the singers, and the crew
than we could possibly take in. So it doesn’t do us
any good to do more performances. It makes people
happy, but it makes our situation worse. So if we’re
going to survive, the only clear answer is that we have to
get out of that theater. There’s no alternative...
either that, or raise our ticket prices fifty or sixty per cent,
which we can’t do because then we wouldn’t be the same kind
of company.
BD:
Assuming that you raise the money that you
need for Postcard, and you wind up the end of
year with perhaps no surplus, but no deficit. Where
does the Chicago Opera Theater go?
Alan Stone: That would
be impossible. It’s unrealistic, unless you know
a couple of angels who would write us checks for $50,000,
or five angels to donate $25,000. We need $105,000
for the production Postcard, but we also have
to keep paying salaries to our staff, and paying the rent,
which has nothing to do with the Postcard budget.
The Board ultimately dreams of a situation when
we could end up at the end of the fiscal year with no deficit.
Surplus??? There’s never been a surplus. There
can’t be a surplus! If we have a surplus, we’re not a
non-profit corporation by definition. If we have
a surplus, it has to go into an endowment, which we don’t
have.
BD:
If you pull through all of this, and if the
company survives, and makes good, and goes on to
the next season...
Alan Stone: [Loudly interrupting]
We’ll have to!!!
BD: ...will you then go
back to the tried-and-true method of doing three operas
a year — an
old one, a new one, and a chestnut?
Alan
Stone: All we can say is that we’re
taking one step at a time. We got as far
as Butterfly. It opened the night before last,
as you said to rave reviews. It’s a fabulous production.
I’m very proud of it. The critics compared it
favorably with Lyric productions. In some ways,
it’s the most successful Butterfly I’ve ever seen,
because it’s such an intimate opera and it’s so beautifully
performed. I’m very proud of it. There’s
no sense in being overly modest about it. It’s
absolutely one of our best achievements in all the eighteen
years that we’ve been running... and we’ve done some pretty
good things! But the next step is Postcard.
Then we’ll have to take a look and see what happens.
As the guiding force of the company, and the original founder,
obviously I’m absolutely convinced that there will be a 1992
season. Otherwise, why did we do this? Why did we
work so hard? We could have been better off to declare
bankruptcy, write off the debts and then jump. We did
this to show our public that we didn’t want to renege on them. We
could have just not done anything and kept all the subscription
money, but we didn’t want to do that. It wouldn’t be the first
time in history... What are they going to do, sue us?
We were bankrupt so that was it! But what we do next is
very, very questionable. Four operas? Absolutely not.
No question about it. There are some people who think
we should do just one opera next season. We’d have to do at
least one opera. I personally feel one opera is by no means
a season, plus in order to get funding from the National Endowment
from the government, which we depend on every year, you have
to do at least two operas to qualify. So that means the
chances are pretty good that we’ll do two. My hope is that
we can do three, because two would be only fifty per cent of what
we did this year. That’s not cutting back, it’s cutting in half,
and that’s a big, big thing.
BD:
Even if you only do two operas next year, and
then come back with three the following year, would
that put you back on track?
Alan Stone: I think so,
yes, and maybe that’s the goal. But being an
eternal optimist, I will strive to do three, or try to
encourage my Board members to aim towards three, because if
we aim only for two, we may only do one. I have to
keep that forward feeling and energy up.
* * *
* *
BD:
Let me ask you a hypothetical question.
If you had not gone out on a limb with the big theater,
and just stayed with the three operas every year,
would you have been in the problem that you’re in now?
Alan Stone: Probably not.
If we had stayed with three operas, as we were
up to the fiscal year of 1988, we were breaking even.
We were not allowing ourselves room for any growth,
but we would have been stable. It was going into the fourth
opera that was the mistake, because our fundraising ability
is limited. With the ticket prices that we charge, and
for a 920-seat theater, this company can only raise the difference
to support three productions. So, that was the fallacy
right from the beginning. We have three weeks
of staging rehearsals, and one week of music rehearsals.
Not all the Lyric productions are like that. Obviously,
the new ones do get more time, but other things are put together
very quickly, as they are in every opera company in the world.
In the long-run, maybe we needed this crisis, because the
time has come for us to move away from the Athenaeum.
It has placed some terrible limitations on us. First of
all, it is dreadfully antiquated. We won’t talk about
the condition of the washrooms, but that’s the situation.
The pit is pitifully small, and it is not recessed, so we have a
terrible problem of balance. The backstage facilities
are dismal, and the stage is very, very limited. The flies
are small, and there is no wing space.
BD:
Is there some other place in Chicago that you
could use?
Alan Stone: I believe that
there are theaters in the Chicago area.
Our mistake was that we made the assumption that
we had to be in Chicago, meaning in the center of the
city. That was something we inherited from Jones
Commercial High School. But the situation in the
Loop was quite different in 1974 than it is in 1991.
Now the Loop was thriving. No one would have dreamed
of theaters being on Halsted Street in those days.
But now we see that the theaters like Wisdom Bridge are
popular, and people are going to the suburbs for Drury Lane.
Many of the biggest opera companies are not anywhere
near the cities. St. Louis Opera is not in St. Louis.
It’s in Webster Grove. Santa Fe Opera is not in Santa
Fe. It’s outside, and twenty-five miles away in the
mountains. There is no theater in the center of Chicago.
We know that. We’ve tried for years. We looked
and looked. Chicago Opera Theater patrons do not come
on public transportation because there is no public transportation.
It’s always too far. They all take cabs, or cars.
Some people do take buses and walk, but we may have to be
in suburbs. We may have to be in Evanston, or Skokie,
or possibly there are some places, but we just have to look at them.
BD: Rather than just
doing all your performances in one place, would it be
possible to do two or three in one location, and two
or three in another location?
Alan Stone: No, that’s
terrible. That’s a mess. We tried
that. One year (1977), we tried doing performances
in Mandel Hall [at the University of Chicago], and then
moved up to Evanston Township High School. You
can’t do that, because the lights all have to be refocussed.
Then there’s the pit situation. You have to do so
many rehearsals in order to keep the same standard up in
each theater. The cost would be prohibitive. It’s
my dream, and the dream of many people who are concerned, and
the thing this city needs the most, more than any kind of performing
arts center, is a medium-sized theater. It’s outrageous
that there is none. We need a 1,300 to 1,500 seat theater
in Chicago. [The Harris Theater, just east of the
loop at the north end of Millennium Park, and near the Pritzker
Pavilion (home of the Grant Park Music Festival each summer),
seats 1500, and was constructed in 2002-03. It is now the home
of several performing companies, including the Chicago Opera Theater.
To see three interior photos, click HERE.] I’ve
been reading about a proposed $300 million performance center.
It’s unconscionable that they could think of putting up
a performance center with a huge theater for the Lyric Opera,
and another huge theater for the Chicago Symphony, and forget
about all of the middle-sized organizations, like us, that
really give this city a special situation. There are
no other cities that have this kind of richness in the companies
like we have. Chicago has a great theater and opera tradition.
Tomorrow night I’m going out to dinner with Ardis Krainik [General
Director of Lyric Opera], and I’m certainly
going to mention that to her. I’m very much
a believer in having a performance art center, provided
there is a theater for us. Otherwise, I will do
everything in my power to create as much interference for
it as possible. She’ll know it, and Henry Fogel [President
of the Chicago Symphony] will have to know it too. I
need to have a little bit of input.
BD: If the Symphony vacates
Orchestra Hall, would there be any point in renovating
that space for the COT?
Alan Stone: No. Orchestra
Hall is much too large, and it’s not a theater.
BD: Even if they close off
the top balcony?
Alan Stone: It’s not a
theater. It’s an auditorium. It has no
wing-space, no fly space, and it has no backstage facilities.
It’s not possible to use it as a theater.
A theater is a theater, and an auditorium is an auditorium.
Even The Auditorium is not a theater.
BD: Even though it calls
itself The Auditorium Theater?
Alan Stone: It calls itself
that, but it is an auditorium. All you have to
do is look at the backstage facilities, and you’ll
see that it is not a theater. There are not enough
dressing rooms. Many years ago, opera was done
there, but they used to have to leave the sets out in
the street overnight when they were changing them, like
they did at the old Met.
BD:
There’s no movie house that happens to have
wing-space?
Alan Stone: No, there aren’t.
We’ve spent years looking. The movie
theaters are usually enormously large, and they were
not built for music. We played at the Chicago Theater
[in the Loop], and the acoustics are horrendous.
They were built for movie screens.
BD:
There must be some small movie theaters.
Alan Stone: No, there aren’t.
We’ve spent years looking! We had
a search committee for four or five years that
even included Joan Harris, who has access to everything.
There is nothing! It is a crying shame.
Cities like Milwaukee and Des Moines have a performing
center, but Chicago, one of the great cities of the world,
does not.
BD:
Is the Blackstone any good? When I was there
I thought the sight-lines were poor.
Alan Stone: It’s not bad,
but it’s a terrible theater for music because
it’s so dry. It was built as a prose theater
specifically. It’s all carpeted.
BD:
I hope that the Chicago Opera Theater does
continue.
Alan Stone: Ever since
all this about the deficit came to light, we’ve been
working in a crisis situation, and it’s taken a terrible
toll on everyone. I’m now finding myself in the
position of having to become a principal fundraiser for
the organization. I’m quite successful at it, because
I believe in what I’m asking for, so I get it.
But it takes an enormous amount of my time from other things
that I’m really supposed to be doing, such as thinking about repertory,
and artistic decisions. Many arts organizations
have gotten themselves into trouble. You need
money to pay the rent. You need money to pay the phone.
You can’t operate an office without the phones. When
you work on a small cash flow, there is so little money. It
turned out that in February we didn’t even have enough money
to make the payroll. I didn’t get paid. None of
us got paid. The employees and the cast had to wait.
We went to the chorus and told them, and they were wonderful.
In fact, some of them even gave us money!
BD: You’ve spent years
building up trust.
Alan Stone: Yes, thank
goodness! I have to be a wheeler and dealer,
but I do believe I have do have some personal integrity
about things like that, and I would never cheat my
employees. Impresario, yes, but a charlatan, no.
[Both laugh]
* * *
* *
BD: Not just your company,
but in general, is the future of opera in America bleak,
or bright, or uncertain?
Alan
Stone: [Thinks a moment] In
general, I think the future of opera in America
is bright. There’s a great love, and a renewed
interest in opera, much more than there was years
and years ago, when, except for workshops and student performances,
the opera consisted of the Metropolitan, San Francisco
Opera, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. That was all
there was. Now there are big companies all over, and
most of those companies are doing well. Companies like the
Lyric really get most of their money from corporations.
BD:
That gives them publicity?
Alan Stone: They get the
publicity. They can do more because of their
very nature, plus they get an enormous amount of people
who give them support. The Lyric doesn’t do one
production that is not completely underwritten.
We’ve never had a production completely underwritten.
BD: Has Lyric ever given
money to the Chicago Opera Theater?
Alan Stone: No. They’re
not allowed to give money. One non-profit
corporation cannot give money to another because
they don’t have any money ostensibly to give. However,
they came out with a bigger surplus than our whole $500,000
deficit.
BD: I assume that a surplus
is just immediately applied the next year’s
budget?
Alan
Stone: It’s
put into the various endowments and funds that they
have. We’ve gotten small and very important
personal contributions from Ardis Krainik, Danny Newman,
and Al Glasser [Director of Education at Lyric].
These are very important to me because it’s
a sign of trust and faith in what we’re
doing. In our program you will notice a little
section about colleagues, and there are some
wonderful names in there. On the other hand, many
of the smaller companies in the small cities are in
trouble. There’s no question about that. Columbus
Opera went bankrupt, and when it announced bankruptcy they
got $55,000, and then they opened the next day. Now
they’re struggling. New Jersey Opera has been in
terrible trouble. Most of the smaller and medium-sized
companies are not in good shape, because expenses are enormous
and money is tighter. People are not giving as much. They’re
afraid, and they don’t have as much to give. Government
funding has been cut back even in Europe, although there the
companies depend on government subsidies. Even though they
get a lot of money, they don’t get as much as they need, and it is
a problem. But you just have to hope. I can’t worry about
Columbus. I just know that Chicago is very special. If
anything it is an opera city. Before it was a Symphony city,
it was an opera city. Opera has been in Chicago for so many years.
I have a book that Charles
Nelson Reilly gave me which traces opera in Chicago from
the 1800s to the present day. Mary Garden, Amelia
Galli-Curci, Italo Campanini and Luisa Tetrazzini made
their careers in Chicago, not in New York. They went
to New York later, but for very few performances.
There was constant opera in Chicago. [For more about
all this, see my article Massenet, Mary Garden,
and the Chicago Opera 1910-1932.]
BD:
These were resident companies, not just tours!
Alan
Stone: Yes, Chicago is a great opera
city, and I know that we have enough supporters.
There’s enough money here, and enough wealth,
and enough financial backing to support not only the Lyric
Opera and the Chicago Opera Theater, but other small
companies which we gave birth to. There were none
of those when I started. Ours was the first one, and
our success encouraged the Light Opera Works, the Chicago
Chamber Opera, the Lincoln Opera, and the Opera Factory.
I mean, there’s a long list of companies now. Even
Opera Midwest, which had to close due to a financial
scandal [as reported in the newspaper, shown below-right].
These other companies are small, but they still
pay their artists, and they do excellent work. In
a way I’m very glad, because we have grown to the point where
our audiences now expect the very best from us, and we have
to use the very best of the younger American talent.
We had some singers that sang with us in the very first days,
such as Robert Orth, who was a star then, and is a bigger star
now. But some of those other people were acceptable for
us in our first performances for our first couple of years,
when we charged $3 a ticket. Now we can’t ask people
to pay $38 dollars a ticket to hear those same people, but that
kind of talent is now being used by these smaller companies.
BD: Do you have better talent
coming into your company all the time?
Alan
Stone: All the time! One
of the things that was very helpful back in the early
1970s, was an incredible group of singers here in
Chicago. Karen Huffstodt lived in Chicago, as did
Cheryl Woods, and
Kenneth Cox. These were all people from this particular
area. They went to Wheaton College, Northwestern
University, or the American Conservatory. Now there’s
a new crop of local people.
BD:
Good! That’s what I was worried about.
A few years ago you started getting a lot
more singers from elsewhere.
Alan Stone: Right.
BD: Now you’re back
to getting more singers from Chicago?
Alan
Stone: We’re still getting a lot of
people from elsewhere, but there are a lot of local
people. For example, the Lyric Opera Center
is a great source of singers for us. Nobody really
cares very much about where someone is born. That
really isn’t important. We like to use our people
if we can. Not only does it help their careers, but
it makes good business sense. We don’t have to put
them up in hotels, or pay their transportation from New
York or California. Plus, they tend to remember us,
and when they get to be big people, they still sing with us.
Frank Galati is also that way, returning even though his
is quite well-known now. The Postcard from Morocco
has three singers that were former members of the Lyric Center. Plus,
there has been a strange but persistent move of artists to Chicago.
BD: From where?
Alan Stone: From the east,
especially from New York City. Many people
are fed up with the expense and the lifestyle of New
York. They find that they can live much more comfortably
and much more pleasantly in Chicago for less money.
So, we have a whole crop of people coming back to Chicago
including Bruce Hall and Sunny Joy Langton
who are living and teaching here. We also have
conductors and directors. We have people coming here,
finding that Chicago is really what New York was twenty years
ago. They like the city, and want a city atmosphere, but
just don’t want to put up with New York. For years I’ve been
going every year to New York for four days of auditions, and I don’t
know if it’s going to be necessary now for me to go every year.
There are singers I have in this area, and ones I know that are ready
because I heard them last year. I really don’t particularly enjoy
going to New York myself. It’s a rat race. I go to the auditions,
and I come back to the hotel and have dinner. In the morning
we’re up at 7 o’clock to get to the audition by 9 o’clock to
start again, and we do this for four days, and it’s an extraordinary
expense. We pay $200 a night, and it’s a cheapy little
hotel. That’s New York. Those are the wildest
prices, plus food, and transportation. I could save the
company some money, and I could also save a little bit of fatigue
by not going.
[At this
point we took care of a few technical details, and
I asked him to do a Station Break]
Alan
Stone: Hello this is Alan Stone, Artistic
Director and Founder of the Chicago Opera Theater,
and you’re listening to Classical 97, WNIB in
Chicago.
BD: Thank you. I
get all my guests to do that, and you’ve
not done one for me before.
Alan Stone: That’s my radio
announcer voice! You know, I started out in
radio. When I was a kid in grammar school, I started
working at WBEZ doing dramatic parts in the those programs.
They were on LaSalle Street before they moved
to where they are now, and I did that all through school.
Then I got a job working on CBS. I worked on ‘soaps’
as a kid, and I did Ma Perkins, and Life Can Be
Beautiful. Generally I did parts of
little children because [speaks like a child] I had these
real high voices... “Gee, Mister,
can I go with you to California?” or,
“Golly, I can shoot a gun!”
BD: You were the bratty
little boy?
Alan Stone: I was the wild
little kid, and then I did accents.
I was André on Ma Perkins, the little
French boy who came over from the War. I did
that, and with that money I paid my way through the
University of Chicago.
BD: Your degree is in music?
Alan Stone: Actually, my
degree was in English. I took electives in music,
but my actual degree was Bachelor of Arts. I really
didn’t get into music until after college, because most
of the training of music in singing was on a professional level.
They study, but I don’t think a degree would have helped
Mr. Pavarotti, or Mr. Björling, or Mr. Gigli, or Miss
Sutherland.
BD:
But now a singer without a degree is practically
unheard of.
Alan Stone: No, we never
care about degrees. I don’t
know any who have them.
BD:
Don’t they go to a conservatory?
Alan Stone: They do, but
they don’t all give degrees in music. The
Conservatorio di Verdi didn’t give degrees. They
just gave certificates of performance, but that’s not
the same thing as a degree. A degree is worthless
to me. I don’t care about that. Even
on a conservatory level, do you think that the people at Bloomington,
Indiana have been asked if they have a degree? What
about Margaret Harshaw,
or Nicola Rossi-Lemeni,
or Martha Lipton?
Many of those people go into teaching when they stop performing,
but having a degree in music does not make you necessarily
become a performer. I’ve never been in any kind
of audition where a degree has been required.
BD: Don’t you see it on
the resumés?
Alan Stone: No. What
they put on the resumé is where they sang, what
roles they sang, when did they do it, what the press
says. They will say their teachers, and occasionally
someone will say they have a master’s degree, but it’s
not important at all. It’s not like being a
lawyer. You can’t create art in a curriculum.
BD: Then where is art coming
from?
Alan Stone: It comes from
talent!
BD:
Maybe I’m thinking more
of the instrumentalists. They all seem to have
degrees.
Alan
Stone: That I don’t feel equipped
to talk about, but singing is a completely different
thing. A singer has to learn the physical emission
of the voice, and the languages.
BD:
[Noting the time] Thank you so very much
for founding and continuing the Chicago Opera Theater
all these years.
Alan
Stone: Thank you. I’ll
just continue to do my best.
In
addition to the names above which are links, or have
single-asterisks, there are several more artists associated
with COT whom I have had the privilege of interviewing.
These conversations have been posted on my site, and have
links below. I have listed them approximately in the order
in which they made their first appearance with COT.
Complete annals with full
cast-lists appear in Chicago Opera Theater:
Standard Bearer for American Opera, 1976-2001, by
Director/Administrator
Carl Ratner. Also, the complete list of titles and composers
of works presented through 2023-24 appears on the COT
website.
Baritone Philip Kraus; Mezzo Soprano Anita Berry;
Soprano
Mary Beth Peil; Soprano Nancy Gustafson;
Baritone
William Sharp; Conductor Robert
Carter Austin; Soprano Gloria Capone,
and Director Patrick
Bakman; Tenor Jonathan Welch;
Director
Linda Brovsky; Mezzo-Soprano Robynne
Redmon; Director David Gately;
Translator
Andrew Porter; Translator Walter Ducloux;
Director
Rhoda Levine; Mezzo-Soprano Constance
Beavon; Conductor Michael Morgan;
Director Richard
Pearlman; Tenor
Gregory Kunde; Mezzo-Soprano Carol Madalin;
Director Andrew Foldi;
Composer Peter
Maxwell Davies; Conductor Fiora
Contino; Director Robert
Tannenbaum; Mezzo-Soprano Mignon Dunn;
Conductor Lawrence
Rapchak; Director Marc Verzatt;
Bass-Baritone
Arnold Voketaitis; Conductor Ted Taylor;
Director
Mary Zimmerman; Soprano Judith Raddue,
and Tenor Carl Tanner; Mezzo-Soprano Melanie Sonnenberg,
and Conductor Bradley Vieth; Composer Daron Aric Hagen;
Baritone
Brian Davis; Director/Designer
John Pascoe; Bass-Baritone William
Powers; Soprano
Angela Réaux; Composer Michael Ching;
Composer Philip
Glass; Tenor
Laurence Dale; Conductor
Jane Glover; Conductor Nicolas Cleobury;
Mezzo-Soprano
Frederica von Stade; Composer John Adams;
Composer Tobias
Picker; Composer
Mark Adamo, Bass
Samuel Ramey, Mezzo-Soprano Susanne Mentzer,
Conductor Raymond Leppard.
Ross Beacraft,
Principal Trumpet of the COT Orchestra, and Co-Chair (with Maria Lagios)
of the 50th Anniversary Gala; David Cangelosi,
Emcee of the 50th Anniversary Gala.
|
© 1979, 1983, 1991 Bruce Duffie
These conversations was recorded in Chicago on February 13, 1979,
December 20, 1979, February 3, 1983, and April
5, 1991. Portions were broadcast on WNIB
in 1979, 1980, 1983, and 1991. A portion ws transcribed
and published in Opera Scene in February, 1983
This transcription was made
in 2023, and posted on this website
at that time. My
thanks to British soprano Una Barry for
her help in preparing this website presentation.
To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed
and posted on this website,
click here.
To read my thoughts
on editing these interviews for print, as
well as a few other interesting observations,
click here.
* * * *
*
Award -
winning broadcaster Bruce
Duffie was with WNIB,
Classical 97 in
Chicago from 1975 until its
final moment as a classical station
in February of 2001. His interviews
have also appeared in various magazines
and journals since 1980, and he now continues
his broadcast series on WNUR-FM,
as well as on Contemporary
Classical Internet Radio.
You
are invited to visit his website for more
information about his
work, including selected transcripts
of other interviews, plus a
full list
of his guests. He would also like
to call your attention to the photos
and information about his grandfather,
who was a pioneer in the automotive
field more than a century ago.
You may also send him E-Mail with comments,
questions and
suggestions.
