NYCO in the Rearview Mirror: Carlisle Floyd and Sherrill Milnes on New York City Opera

By

Sherrill Milnes and Carlisle Floyd share with us their memories of New York City Opera, thoughts on NYCO’s closing and advice for opera companies moving forward.

Sherrill Milnes – “I did three years (at NYCO) 1964-5 and ’66 and then I came back a couple of times as a guest, sang in Beverly’s farewell, I did Hamlet with Fabrizio Melano directing and Julius Rudel conducting.  And the last thing there was the Falstaff they did for me. 

My most treasured memory of New City Opera is singing with Norman Treigle and Beverly Sills.  Others as well but these were the two big City Opera names.

My debut was Faust the part of Valentin, in the old City Center before the NY State Theatre, in the Masonic Temple on 56thstreet fall of ‘64.  Norman Treigle was Mephistopheles.  Well Norman never sang out in rehearsals.  He always marked down the octave, sometimes two octaves because he had a huge low voice.  It was an old production.  Valentin is killed in a sword fight in the opera and I’m lying on a bier, dead.  Norman comes up behind me making an entrance in that scene and sings the word Mort, Death, on a middle C, which in his voice was just enormous and I had never heard him full voice but here he sang full voice and I know my dead body jumped.  I felt it.  It scared me, the sound.  He came up by my head and sang it right by my ear.  Dead people aren’t supposed to jump obviously.

Additionally, that ’64-65 season, I sang the American premiere of a Prokofiev opera called The Flaming Angel.  In English.  Because Prokofiev and certain other Russian composers were thought of in pre-Stalin and Stalin and post-Stalin time as “dogs” because they weren’t supportive of communism enough so their music was forbidden to study, forbidden to be performed, forbidden to hear it.  So we have Shostakovich, Isaac Stern those are the big name Russians and a lot of lesser known Russians who came to the American premiere because they had never heard this piece of their composer Prokofiev because the government wouldn’t allow it.  So it was a very exciting time.  Julius Rudel conducted that.
Early on at City in a new production of Cavalleria Rusticana and i Pagliacci, the stage director, it wasn’t Julius who hired him, they hired a Broadway guy who didn’t really know music and we came in to stage it and he was working from a record libretto.  Not from the music so he didn’t know if there was a beat, a bar, a page, an act between lines all he saw was the printed word.   Well, I mean he didn’t do any homework and the long story short is we got him fired because he didn’t know what he was doing.  We were sitting around the rehearsal, Dominic Cossa and lots of other singers, our eyes are rolling back in our heads, I mean ACK!  This guy doesn’t know a thing.  And we ended up getting him fired just because he didn’t know anything.  Highly unusual in that situation because this was before Julius was the boss, I don’t think he was the boss when I debuted, but then he was a major conductor of course for a long time and the boss for 20 some years.
In fact what Julius said recently about the closing of NYCO was very meaningful, very telling he said, ‘In my wildest dreams I could never have imagined I would outlive the company.’  That’s pretty powerful.
This was all a bit of a surprise to me, especially because I’m out of the New York loop so I don’t follow daily stuff.  We saw Fabrizio Melano in the last days and he said something interesting.  He said, ‘Well, they have to close.  They’ve really been dead for two years.’
I think the board has hired poor management.  I thought Gerard Mortier was a mistake when they hired him, which is already some time ago.  Totally European gentleman.  Very smart guy, I knew him when he was the right hand of Herbert von Karajan.  But he’s totally European in his attitudes, knows nothing of the American system of contributions and courting money and all of that that for us is a sine qua non, you have to, that’s the way we operate.  He knew nothing of that.  Started spending money they didn’t have right off and then resigned and it went from bad to worse.  Many of the details of course I don’t know, but New Yorkers that I know like Fabrizio and Julius said it’s been mismanaged for quite a few years they’ve been CPAs not at all musicians.” 
On NYCO’s $7 Million in three weeks campaign… “Their (NYCO’s) board just doesn’t have that kind of heavy hitters.  The Met board if they were forced to do something like that could probably do it but City Opera has always, they’re good people, well intended people on the board, smart people, by our standards wealthy but not mega and so a number like that for that board impossible.  They just don’t have that kind of clout. 
All of this is very sad.  City Opera while not exclusively an American company, they hired international singers, it was primarily an American company and they did many many many world premieres so not having that company is a huge loss for American singers and composers of all nationalities because there’s ones less major place in which to perform.
Someone did have a thought though that I read, the NY State theatre is really sitting there empty.  What would be wrong with presenting traveling orchestras there?  To use the space because it is a beautiful space.  Acoustically maybe not as fine as some of them but beautiful certainly to the eye and there’s a huge set up to have visiting orchestras, orchestras come all the time to New York.  Not just Carnegie.  Smaller or regional opera companies could also come in and do a pair or a week of something that was also mentioned.  That would be great.”


Carlisle Floyd –  “My first association with City Opera was in the fall of 1956 when I came up from the South to New York to assist in the professional premiere of my opera, SUSANNAH. (I played the orchestral reduction at the piano for all the rehearsals, thereby continuing to be a part of the opera’s life!) What I remember most vividly was vigor and energy and everyone in high spirits. There was a palpable esprit in the Company which I loved being part of during the time I was there. Also, one felt a commitment to the mayor’s notion of a People’s Opera and, with that, a commitment on the part of such singers as Norman Treigle, to the idea of an ensemble theater.

My feelings on the closing are incredulity, anger and deep regret. For me and many others, New York City Opera ceased to exist as soon as it left Lincoln Center and became a small touring group. That concept for an opera seemed to me from the beginning as being untenable, and certainly untenable for a Company with the reputation and past of City Opera. I felt that a move to the old City Center on 55th Street would have been a much more reasonable solution.

The Company died when it no longer had a home of its own and the ideal of a People’s Opera no longer existed. It seems incredible that this could have happened when one considers the healthy companies in Houston, Seattle, Miami, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and San Diego, among so many others, larger and smaller. The demise of City Opera has to be laid at the feet of its management and board since the blame can logically be laid no where else. I had an email just the other day from the General Director of a mid-sized company in the mid-west telling me jubilantly that his company for the past year had ended with a surplus. That, I feel sure, could be duplicated in any number of cities, and failing companies are usually identifiable because there are so few of them in relation to those that are continuing to flourish.

My advice to any Boards or General Directors of troubled companies is to compare their operations with those companies which are conspicuously successful and see where the differences lie. The one thing that is shared among companies, thanks to such an organization as Opera/America, is the willingness to discuss mutual successes, mutual problems, and solutions. I’m in the twilight of my career now but I still remember vividly those years when I was first associated with City Opera (which really means the fifty seven years which have passed since the premiere of SUSANNAH), for that once estimable Company has produced four of my operas over that span of years. What has been thrilling for those of us who are still here and can still take that long look, is to see the proliferation of new companies over those years, with new smaller companies still emerging. What is enraging in that same look is seeing the demise of a company as vital and alive as the New York City Opera was for so many wonderful years, and is no longer.”

– Elizabeth Frayer and Shawn E Milnes

Related Links:

New York City Opera, Kickstarter and the WTF Moment

A Drag Party on the Deck of the Titanic: The US Premiere of Anna Nicole (NYCO at BAM)

Bourbon, Chocolate and Opera: The Savannah Voice Festival 2013

Comments

  3. says

    Milnes was always a great artist, gracious to his colleagues, and his story on Treigle was wonderful. I saw Treigle and Sills in the FAUST Corsaro production, and they were spectacular in 1970 when I was still in high school @ City Opera.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *