Features
Song of the South
Atlanta has grown into an economic powerhouse. Will its operatic ambitions ever catch up? IAN KEOWN investigates.
The Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, home of Atlanta Opera
© Cobb Energy Centre/Fred Gerlich 2010
Atlanta seems ripe for a first-rate opera company. For starters, there's money there. As "The Economic Engine of the Southeast," the city is home to Coca-Cola, Turner Broadcasting, Home Depot and Delta Airlines; to the most Fortune 500 headquarters after New York, Dallas and Houston; and to more than 2,000 international companies. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport handles more passengers than any other airport in the world. The city's population has vaulted twenty-four percent, to 5.3 million, since 2000, filling its verdant suburbs with luxury condos, McMansions and posh malls.
Atlanta has hit the big time, for sure — except when it comes to opera. The Overview pages of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce website list the city's cultural attractions — Atlanta Ballet, High Museum, Atlanta Symphony among them — but there's no mention of Atlanta Opera, which celebrated its thirtieth birthday last year. I'm not the first of its visitors (I've been going there regularly for twenty-odd years) or residents to ask, "If the city can have an internationally acclaimed orchestra, why is opera still operating below the radar?" One oft-mentioned reason is that, even after three decades of operation, Atlanta Opera is playing catch-up with the entrenched sources of arts funding in the city. Another reason offered by many music-lovers is, surprisingly, the Metropolitan Opera tour, which treated Atlantans to grand opera during a golden age when the Met loaded its performers and stage crews onto trains and performed and partied in cities across the U.S.
"It was an extraordinary privilege for Atlanta to have the Met," says Bob Edge, a seventy-one-year-old Atlanta lawyer who was involved in sponsoring the tours in the '80s, "but there is wide-ranging disagreement on the lasting effects of the tour. Did the Met tours keep local companies from developing?"
"The Met tour being so powerful sometimes handicapped development of local opera," says Pierre Ruhe, arts critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and one of the city's most influential commentators. "Atlanta Opera is now moving up the ranks but should have been where it is now ten, twenty years ago."
For Atlanta, the Met tours began, incredibly, in 1901 and continued, with unscheduled intermissions for the Great Depression and World War II, through 1986 — three to eight operas each year introducing regional audiences to Caruso and Corelli, Tebaldi and Milanov, Price and Nilsson, live. "I must admit I enjoyed the visits to Atlanta," wrote Rudolf Bing in his memoir, 5,000 Nights at the Opera. "Never have I known a place to become so excited about opera."
Atlanta was one of the last holdouts for the Met tour, but the realities of budgets finally caught up with the dream. Yet even before the Met discontinued its tour and visited the city for the last time, the germ of the local company had been created when a handful of well-connected Atlantans came together in 1979 and merged a couple of small rival companies into Atlanta Civic Opera. In 1985 the company regrouped under its present banner, Atlanta Opera. It was spearheaded by a well-to-do entrepreneur named Alfred Kennedy, who became executive director, and William Fred Scott, a former assistant conductor under Sarah Caldwell in Boston, who became artistic director. Together, they led the company through 2004, performing at a number of different theaters, none of them ideal for opera. Audiences were less than enthusiastic, critics sniped, subscriptions tanked, and Kennedy and Scott departed.
The man largely responsible for the company's "moving up the ranks" is a fifty-eight-year-old Ohioan named Dennis Hanthorn, who was appointed general director in 2004 and charged with running the entire show, both administrative and artistic. Hanthorn came to Atlanta with a hands-on musical background, having played trumpet and French horn in school and aimed for a career in a top orchestra before deciding that arts administration offered more security. His resumé includes degrees in music performance and music education, a doctorate from Cincinnati Conservatory, a stint as manager of Dayton Opera and fifteen years as head of Milwaukee's Florentine Opera. Along the way, he has served on the board of directors of OPERA America and for many years has been a judge for the Met's National Council Auditions.
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The company’s 2009 Orfeo ed Euridice, with Deanne Meek, Katherine Whyte and David Daniels
© Tim Wilkerson 2010
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Hanthorn is now leading a companywith a full-time staff of twenty-three, a hand-picked orchestra, a chorus headed by the much-respected Walter Huff, and a cadre of regular singers augmented by several guests who were born in and around Atlanta (Jennifer Larmore, Leah Partridge) or who make Atlanta their home (David Daniels, whose recent performance as Orfeo in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice helped boost the company's artistic credentials). Most of the productions, sets and costumes are rented from or are joint efforts with other regional companies, such as Glimmerglass or New Orleans Opera.
With a budget of $6.7 million, the company's yearly offerings have typically consisted of four operas — "one 'new,' one 'family' and two 'standards,'" Hanthorn told me. They are organized into mini-seasons of two operas in spring, two in fall, with four performances of each.
That was then, this is now. Total ticket sales, including subscriptions, fell by nineteen percent over the past two seasons, donations were down thirteen percent, and the budget was cut by twenty-two percent, to $5.2 million. With virtually no endowment as a safety net, Hanthorn had the choice of trimming across the board and thereby compromising standards or upholding artistic standards by eliminating one of the company's productions for the 2010–11 season. He chose the latter. The 2010–11 season will be reduced to three operas (La Bohème, Porgy and Bess and Così Fan Tutte), still with four performances of each and still with ticket prices ranging from $25 to $153. "Dennis's cutback was necessary and prudent," says Bob Edge.
The company had been riding high from its September 2007 move to a new theater — the fifth venue for opera in Atlanta in thirty years. The Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre is part of a larger complex incorporating a hotel, conference center and the de rigueur shopping mall, located at the junction of two interstates, I-75 and I-285. The move was a gutsy decision: the new location is on the city's perimeter, eleven miles north of midtown. But Hanthorn and his board gambled that since more than half their subscribers live closer to the Centre than to midtown, this would not be a major drawback. The trade-off would be the company's first venue with first-rate acoustics, state-of-the-art stage equipment and an enlarged orchestra pit that accommodates eighty-six musicians.
The Cobb Centre, as it's commonly known, greets the visitor with a curvaceous curtain wall of glass fronting a three-story atrium; an alabaster staircase and ten twelve-foot-high chandeliers of sculptured Murano glass create an appropriate sense of occasion that justifies the drive. The auditorium (officially the John A. Williams Theatre, named for the funder who chipped in $10 million for its construction) likewise puts theatergoers in a festive state of mind, with crimson upholstery and gleaming woods, its 2,750 seats deployed on three levels, with the farthest seat no more than 160 feet from the stage. In its first season there, Atlanta Opera sold ninety-one percent of its available capacity, subscriptions almost doubled (to 6,267), and the gamble seemed to be paying off. Then came the economic Götterdämmerung.
Despite the setback, Atlanta Opera has maintained the same proportion of its budget, just under nine percent, for outreach programs to rally the next generation of operagoers. The company's education manager, Emmalee Iden, says that during the 2010–11 season, in conjunction with commercial and government sponsors, Atlanta Opera will bring opera to 21,000 students in more than 100 schools and colleges. The intriguing programs include "Student Shorts" (two condensed but fully costumed operas with orchestra), Opera Family Days (with an instrument "petting zoo" and demonstrations of stage combat) and, for students up to six years old, performances of perennial favorites such as The Ugly Duckling and The Baker of Seville.
These kids may be the future — but what kind of future? Because of the recession, many of the city's condos sit uncurtained, many of the McMansions have "For Sale" signs on the wrought-iron gates, and an ambitious multi-use development built around an east-coast version of Rodeo Drive is a silent, scruffy construction site. Before the recession hit, Atlanta authorities estimated that the city's population would rise by another two million in the next decade. More people, more businesses, more funds — fertile ground for the arts. Hanthorn is making the rounds, telling everyone who will listen that one way to attract more businesses and employees is to boost the city's quality of life with cultural offerings.
If only the authorities, foundations and movers-and-shakers could rustle up additional funds to help Hanthorn and his team to attain the same international acclaim as the city's symphony, Atlanta could add another title to its credits — Cultural Engine of the Southeast. 
IAN KEOWN, a travel writer and author of Caribbean Hideaways, has interviewed opera notables including Hermann Prey, Geraint Evans, Christa Ludwig, Rudolf Bing and Zubin Mehta.
