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]
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. Most
of these conversations have already been posted on my site
(and have links below), while the others will (hopefully) be done
in the near future. 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; 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.
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.
