LITTLE MORE THAN A DECADE ago, opera in the U.S. was regarded by many as an outdated European cultural import that held little relevance for contemporary Americans. Beset by high production costs, disastrous deficits, a declining talent pool and a static, aging repertory, American opera companies seemed to be the dinosaurs of arts organizations. In the past few years, however, a string of important and popular new works by composers as disparate as John Corigliano, Philip Glass and William Bolcom has helped improve opera’s artistic fortunes. At the same time, audacious native-born stage directors like Peter Sellars and Francesca Zambello have replaced the old histrionic semaphoring with bold, psychologically penetrating productions starring fine singing actors like June Anderson and James Morris.
Nowhere is the turnaround more visible than at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where Ardis Krainik, a former actress, chorister and secretary turned iron- fisted administrator, is today running one of the country’s most successful and innovative mainstream companies. Since 1981, when she succeeded the late Carol Fox as general director of the Lyric, Krainik, 64, has presided over a string of seasons notable not only for their high musical quality, formidable star power and adventurous repertory, but also for their happy balance sheets and sold-out houses. “Rudolf Bing ((the late general manager of the Metropolitan Opera)) once said there’s never an artistic decision without a financial repercussion,” says Krainik. “The two go hand in hand. That’s why I have to have total artistic control.”
That control extends to everything from hiring singers to choosing a * balanced program that encompasses not only classics and premieres but also thorny modernist works such as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which last week got a stunning new production that typifies the Krainik style. Krainik had originally planned the project as a co-production with the Chatelet Theatre Musical de Paris, to be conducted in Paris and Chicago by Daniel Barenboim. Following the French performance, Krainik decided that the lighting design was unsuited to the Lyric’s stage. “It would have cost us an extra $600,000 just to put up and take down the lights,” she explains. So, undaunted, she hired a new director, designer, conductor and soprano to complement her original cast. Baritone Franz Grundheber’s tormented Wozzeck, soprano Kathryn Harries’ ripe Marie, Graham Clark’s strutting Captain and Norman Bailey’s Mengelesque Doctor, all under the commanding baton of Richard Buckley, brought Berg’s acerbic, atonal ode to the lumpenproletariat to vivid, expressionistic life.
Such inspired improvising is characteristic of Krainik’s unorthodox management method, which is tactical rather than strategic. “I don’t have a master plan,” she says, “because there are always developments in the middle that are even better than the master plan.”
It’s not every opera company manager who can fire Luciano Pavarotti with impunity, but Krainik showed that she is made of stern stuff when she sacked the superstar tenor in 1989. Fed up with his persistent cancellations — between 1981 and 1989, Pavarotti bowed out of 26 of 41 Chicago performances — Krainik lost patience five years ago when he walked away from a season premiere less than two weeks before rehearsals began. “Lyric Opera is now unwilling to take the risk of one more cancellation,” declared Krainik, who has never asked Pavarotti back. Once criticized as a Pollyanna for her habitual speak-no-evil good cheer, Krainik was widely praised for her resolve.
Still, Krainik insists that it is her policy to “hire the best singers in the world.” Despite being the youngest major opera house in the country, the Lyric became known as a singer’s house — “La Scala West” — from its inception in 1954, when it introduced the fiery Greek soprano Maria Callas to American audiences. After 20 years, though, the Lyric’s stand-and-deliver stagings had become outdated, and Fox’s foray into new music ended disastrously in 1978 with the premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Paradise Lost; the opera was both wildly expensive and roundly panned. Three years later, with the company $300,000 in debt and its endowment exhausted, Krainik succeeded Fox.
Daughter of a Bohemian businessman and a Norwegian mother, Krainik was born and raised in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. For a time she harbored visions of an acting or singing career (at age 27 she appeared, breastplate and all, as one of the Valkyries in a year 1956 Lyric production of Wagner’s Die Walkure), but realized that her talents lay elsewhere. She joined the company as a secretary (“Carol hired me because she liked me, and I could type”), and had risen to general director when Fox stepped down.
At the age of 50 she had hit upon her true calling. In her first year she found ways to save more than half a million dollars, and by the end of the next season the company was showing an operating surplus of $800,000; the Lyric has lost money in only one season since.
The company recently bought its home, the Lyric Theater, for $3.5 million, and is running a $100 million endowment fund-raising campaign. A canny Washington in-fighter (she sits on the National Council for the Arts, which oversees the National Endowment for the Arts), Krainik makes sure her company gets its share of federal largesse; a current grant provides $1 million for the company’s ambitious “Toward the 21st Century” series of American opera premieres, the most recent of which was Bolcom’s triumphant McTeague in 1992.
A Christian Scientist, Krainik credits God for her success. “I go to church, I read the Bible, and I pray a lot,” she says. “I know it’s unfashionable to say, but it’s those angel ideas that come from elsewhere — that still, small voice in the middle of night — that have made the Lyric what it is.” Unfashionable, maybe; still and small, never.
