Skylight Comic Opera Smith College Museum of Art South Bend Symphony Orchestra South Carolina Symphony Association South Coast Repertory Studio Theatre. Washington, DC Syracuse Symphony Orchestra Telfair Academy of Arts and Texas Opera Theater Twyla Tharp Dance Foundation Vermont Symphony Orchestra Virginia Opera Association Virginia Symphony Walker Art Center Walters Art Gallery Washington Opera Whitewater Opera Company Williamstown Theatre Festival. ASSOCIATE MEMBERS Poets and Writers Teachers and Writers Collaborative Mr. YATES. Number two on your list? Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, can I just make a few points? Mr. YATES. Sure. Mr. DICKS. I want to welcome this panel. The only thing I would say about your point that you have made is that we are faced with the budget realities. We have Gramm-Rudman hanging over our heads. The President, in his address to the Congress, outlined a series of initiatives for his "kinder and gentler America" that did not include increasing funds for the National Endowment for the Arts. Now, the realities of this budget are that with that $11 billion in increase that he wants for that agenda, we would have to cut twice as much as we were going to have to cut in the discretionary domestic spending programs, of which this is one. Speaking only for myself, a number of us feel very strongly that if we are going to be able to do justice to this program and to a lot of other things that are priorities within the Congress, we're going to have to have some additional revenue. We have had three-you can see from where the decline started-two Presidents and three elections in which the question of raising taxes has been thoroughly discussed, and the people who advocated no additional taxes won. So we are caught in a very difficult position here of not being able to take care of priority programs-not just here, but in education and housing and transportation-other things that are critically important to the American people, as well. So it isn't because this Committee doesn't want to-in fact, you have actually gone up a little bit, and I think the Chairman deserves enormous credit for being able to protect the arts as well as we have. Remember, when the Reagan Administration came to power they wanted to cut this budget by 50 percent and we said no and held that up. So I just want you to know that even though it is not a pretty picture, there has been a lot of other pain in this whole process. I just hope you'll appreciate and understand the situation that we face. Mr. YATES. I'm sure they do. Mr. BLAIR. Yes, Mr. Chairman. That was part of what we were saying. We are very appreciative. We also understand the position that this Committee has set forward of not necessarily taking the recommendations of the President in determining the arts budget. Mr. YATES. That's very true. I think that we are very cognizant of the place the arts play in the life of this Country. Now we have Mr. Bergman of the Walters Art Gallery. Mr. BLAIR. Mr. Chairman, since Mr. Dicks is here we thought that we might start with Mr. Jenkins. Mr. YATES. I'll throw out the batting order that I have here. Mr. BLAIR. You can carry it on other than with that. I should have turned it over to Mr. Jenkins. Mr. YATES. Seattle? Mr. JENKINS. Yes, sir. Mr. YATES. The Athens of where? Mr. JENKINS. We're certainly the Athens of the West and the Northwest. [Laughter.] Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, first of all, may I say I meant to bring the actual issues, but I thought perhaps for the Seattle Opera and for me-first of all, I had an article that appeared in a large opera magazine, "Opera News this Week" that describes us, and I would like to give you a copy and give a copy to the Committee. Mr. YATES. We'd be very glad to receive it, and we will put it into the record. [The information follows:] 96-829 0-89-21 W ho has the most stressful job on earth the President of the United States? That guy who puts out oil-rig fires? The manager of the New York Yankees? Close, but no cigar. Ask the general manager of any major opera company and, whether he is modest or self-congratulatory, he will tell you. "I do." Though a few such officers, such as San Francisco Opera's late Kurt Herbert Adler or the Metropolitan's Rudolf Bing, stay in the hot seat for many successful years, the burn-out rate is astounding. Vienna, for instance, is a revolving door, so tremendous are the pressures to please everyone from politicians to misty-eyed monarchists, the caprice of star singers and conductors, the poverty of new musical invention. When Terence A. McEwen stepped down because of ill health, exacerbated by six years at the helm of San Francisco Opera. he said ruefully, "I hate to leave now--I was just beginning to enjoy the job." We'll have to tune in a few more years down the line to see if Speight Jenkins of Seattle Opera is still having a good time, but he must be one of the few current opera impresarios who actually seem to thrive on stress. Considering that Jenkins, like McEwen, had never put on an opera before he took his current post in September 1983; that he had not worked his way up through the ranks, as Adler and Bing had, learning how things work as he went; and that in five years he has improved the financial and artistic status of Seattle Opera, one has to suspect that stress may even be necessary to Jenkins. Former colleagues in the New York music world, where he was a journalist and music critic for OPERA NEWS, the New York Post and Record World, marvel at what they consider the change in the fifty-one-yearold Texan. "Speight always had enormous energy," says one of them in exchange for anonymity, "but you got the impression he wasn't quite comfortable. Since Seattle, there has been a marked change in his personality. He's much more expansive, NORTHERN PACIFIC BY STEPHANIE VON BUCHAU humorous, outgoing." Possibly, Jenkins himself admits, but not much more low-key. Sitting behind his desk in his modest headquarters on the fourth floor of the Seattle Center Building, in the beautiful park created (along with the company's 3,017-seat opera house) for Seattle's 1962 Expo, Jenkins glows like neon. Seattle Opera celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this season, and Jenkins ticks off its recent accomplishments, among them his presentation of the first homegrown avant-garde production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (1986-87) and such aesthetically enterprising ventures as the first U.S. performance in this century of Gluck's 1774 French Orphée et Euridice (tenor version) with dances created by wunderkind Mark Morris and, this February, the world premiere in French of Massenet's variant edition for baritone (first performed in 1902 in Italian by Mattia Battistini) of Werther. Though financial overextension forced Jenkins to suspend the annual Ring cycles until 1991, he kept Seattle's summer opera tradition alive with the West Coast premiere last year of Philip Glass' Satyagraha. This coming season, the offering is to be a festival production of Die Meistersinger, and in 1990 Prokofiev's War and Peace, in Russian, will complement the Goodwill Games. As with any mover and shaker, Jenkins' ego is substantial. Yet he repeats in that Dallas draw! he never lost despite years in New York. "This is not my opera company. This is Seattle's opera company. With a 1.5 million population, Seattle has the smallest per capita opera audience to draw on in the U.S. Yet we give six performances each of five operas, and last year we were 94.5 percent sold out. The first year I planned, the subscription base was only 47 percent. Last season it was ninety." Jenkins' appointment was met with raised eyebrows, especially among journalistic colleagues. Critics in Los Angeles and San Francisco were particularly unkind. The consensus seemed to be that there was no way a neophyte could stage viable opera. Jenkins scoffs at that viewpoint. "Putting opera on the stage was the easy part! The hard part, even though I had the advantage of being a lawyer, was to learn the ropes how to program effectively. how to recruit active board members, how to join the community [he owns a town house in the Capitol Hill area, and his son, Speight III, attends a local high school; daughter Linda Leonie is a student back East at Smith College], how to raise funds the millions of aggravating details you never consider when you're dreaming of how much fun it would be to put on La Bohème." How did a well-to-do Texas lawyer from a family with few cultural pretensions end up having a ball as head of a growing opera company in the Pacific Northwest? We spoke at length with Jenkins, who is a nonstop conversationalist. ("This is like talking to a psychiatrist," he joked at one point.) The following are excerpts: OPERA NEWS: How did you become interested in music? Was your family musical? SJ: My grandfather actually helped bring the Metropolitan Opera to Dallas on tour, but no, the family wasn't musical. I had a wonderful second-grade teacher who told us one day about this thing called opera. I'll never forget, when I asked my mother about it, she laughed and said, "Oh, they have crazy stories about women who fly through the air on horses, about a woman who is put to sleep on a rock surrounded by fire." Naturally that interested me, so she got me a book called Stories of the Metropolitan Opera by Helen Dike. There was an instant connection. Then my teacher told us about the Texaco broadcasts. I don't remember what the first opera was that I heard, but a few weeks later they broadcast Die Walküre, and as weird as this sounds, I totally loved it. From then on, through grammar school and high school, there was a battle between my parents and me about Saturday afternoons. They couldn't get me out of the house. ON: What about live performances? days they were thrilled by my cultural interest. Later on, things weren't so easy, but it was my problem, because I knew I wanted to work in opera, but I also knew I didn't want to sing or conduct or direct. Since in my family it was expected I would become a professional man, after I graduated from the University of Texas I took a degree at Columbia Law School, but the basic reason I went there is because it was in New York, where the Met was Aiter law school I joined the Army, and |