Opera Wednesday-Night

"Money, money and money," Pierre Dufour, 43, the new managing director of the Opera de Montreal, said when asked to name, in order, the three most salient causes for the rapid transformation of a new-look company with an exciting future to an arts invalid on life support that seriously considered cancelling the 2006-2007 season.

Money does make the opera world go round, and there is definitely not enough of it in the OdM coffers. The accumulated deficit is $1.95 million, generated over two years - quite a sum for a company that spent only $6.9 million in 2005-2006. (The budget of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, this season, is $33 million.)

There are only four productions in Place des Arts, down from the five announced last season (before the deletion of a Stravinsky double bill) and six four years ago. There is no artistic director, Bernard Labadie having submitted his resignation in June, more or less on the grounds that in such an atmosphere there were no serious artistic decisions to be made.

Managing director David Moss, his co-pilot, was pink-slipped along with a dozen other employees in a summer massacre that brought the OdM staff down to nine (the COC employs about 75 full-time staffers alone). Dufour, formerly production director, has kept that hands-on portfolio along with the executive job.

Matters were no better in the upper chamber. Chairperson Andre Laurin resigned, after two high-profile board members bolted in a huff. There was talk of shutting down the company and using the $2.2 million in annual government grants to pay the debt. That idea was scrapped because cancellation penalties to artists already engaged would neutralize most of the benefit.

Something of the gravity of the situation can be surmised from the company's Recovery Plan. It seeks not to eliminate the deficit, but to bring it down to $650,000 in two years.

All this is shocking in a province that is said to love singing and in a city that is famous for its arts scene. And it is not as though the OdM looked old and fusty. Posters and flyers were stylish and outreach programs, like the TechnOpera video-jockey nights for youth, were innovative. The company broadcast a performance of Verdi's Aida last season to thousands on a big screen on the esplanade of Place des Arts - an idea the MSO appropriated for its opening Kent Nagano concert of Sept. 6.

"Let's say they were inspired," Dufour commented.

So what went wrong?

"If we could point out one reason why we are in this situation, it would be so easy to redirect," Dufour said. "But there were several reasons."

The outreach innovations, while bold, cost money.

"TechnOpera, all these programs, were fabulous," said Alexandre Taillefer, chairperson of the board since July. "The marketing, the new image of the opera, was the right thing to pick. But probably we did that a little too fast."

Ticket sales were soft. Labadie's 2005-2006 season, including the rarely seen opera bouffe L'Etoile, was only moderately experimental, but the company was not structured to sustain 1,700-customer evenings in 2,800-seat Salle Wilfrid Pelletier. We can be sure that the age of L'Etoile is over.

Dufour points out that the legendary vibrancy of the arts scene in Montreal has a downside.

"There is a lot of solicitation. And so many forms of art: four and a half months of festivals a year, close to 100 theatre companies, a few orchestras, more than a dozen ballet companies. There is one cake in the middle of the table. All the companies are sharing the same people."

This comment applies to both donors and ticket-buyers. The Puccini double bill that opened the season on Sept. 23 (the final performance is Thursday) attracted only a 65-per-cent house. The abundance of choice also keeps prices down. The $425-per-opera top price charged by the COC currently for Wagner's Ring would be unthinkable in Montreal.

Operatic crisis is not new to the city. The OdM had a shaky interlude before the arrival in 1988 of Bernard Uzan, a formidable Franco-Tunisian stage director who attacked the deficit by imposing internal discipline and marketing new productions to other companies.

Some will recall the OdM's predecessor organization, the Opera du Quebec, which collapsed in a Wagnerian bonfire after a budget-busting (but extraordinary) run of Tristan und Isolde in 1975.

All eyes now, of course, are on the future, and it is foggy. Dufour says he wants an artistic director as soon as possible, but no search committee has been struck. He is working with casting man Michel Beaulac on next season, with the 2007-2008 plans of Labadie as a template.

A stress on local rather than imported talent is inevitable. Happily, good singers in Montreal virtually grow on trees. The Atelier apprentice program survived all the summer chopping, in part because it is separately funded.

Public purses are harder to open in Liberal Quebec. Governments are no longer interested in bailing out ailing companies, the way then-premier Lucien Bouchard restored the MSO to health in 1998. To do so, the thinking goes, merely encourages other organizations to run up deficits.

Opera lovers are assured of a no-growth prospectus before 2008-2009. It is not a happy time, but there is some hope, and some determination, reflected by the motto selected by the company for its campaign: Montreal Deserves its Opera.

"One could add a question mark to that phrase," Taillefer said. "Are we in a situation where we can have an opera in Montreal? I think that we are, but we will need everybody's efforts to make sure that it can happen."

akaptainis@sympatico.ca

How he'll keep the fat lady singing

Meet Alexandre Taillefer, 34, probably be the youngest chairperson of the board of a major opera company in the world, and surely among the few wearing jeans and no socks.

"You're right, I'm young," the native Montrealer said, "but I've been around for almost 15 years, and what the opera needed was someone who could assist managing director Pierre Dufour in finance, operations and marketing. Our team has been reduced. We needed someone who knows that opera is - and I say this with great respect - a business."

An Internet and video-game entrepreneur who lives with his wife and two children in St. Lambert, Taillefer is another thing most opera board types are not - between jobs. The former president of Jamdat Mobile Canada comes into the office in Place des Arts two or three days a week and rolls up his sleeves.

"We have certain things to put in place, discussions to have. We need to do the right thing in terms of fundraising and sponsorship. We'll know by mid-November or early December what our situation will look like at the end of the season."

This was a reference to a Nov. 15 deadline to raise the $400,000 the company needs to get serious about its 2007-2008 season.

Taillefer was asked to join the board a year and a half ago. When lawyer Andre Laurin, beleaguered by a deficit and embarrassed by high-profile departures from the board, resigned as chairperson in July, he asked Taillefer, his former neighbour in the Tropiques Nord condo complex, to step in.

"Nobody really wanted the job," Taillefer admitted. "We were experiencing a very awkward situation. We still are. When you join a board you do not necessarily have all the elements in hand to fix the problems. You have to jump and see whether you can fix the situation once you jump."

The new chairperson is almost a prototype of the rookie customer the Opera de Montreal hopes to attract. "I'm not yet at an age where I could go see the Ring cycle," he said, referring obliquely to the colossal undertaking that has opened the Canadian Opera Company 2006-2007 season. "I have attended a few Wagner operas, Gotterdammerung at the Met. I found it quite difficult. I am more, for now, a bel canto man. Talk to me about Puccini."

Taillefer confesses to having seen more opera as a tourist abroad, with his wife in New York and London, than at home. "The more I attend the shows at the Opera de Montreal," he added, "the more I enjoy them."

He is obviously where he is in part for his under-40 Rolodex. "People give to people," Taillefer observed about telephone solicitation. "Usually, I get calls returned."

Securing one-off donations of $5,000 or less is not too difficult, he said. "But will we get someone who commits $100,000 a year from that generation? I don't know. That is someone who is absolutely in love with opera.

"There are donors like that elsewhere. You see how much money they raise in Toronto. It's our job to make sure that it happens here, too."

Taillefer is at pains to stress that part of his job is to re- establish connections with disaffected former supporters of the company. "I am someone who is looking to bring back harmony to the opera," he said.

The outreach effort involves Hans Black and Rick Renaud, energetic entrepreneurs who fell out with the old board last season. "Those two individuals are art lovers," Taillefer said.

Is there a chance that the business-suit types will find little in common with a video-game whiz sporting a three-day growth?

"In my career, I have managed to establish relations with the other generation, the 'old money' as you call it. I think they find this refreshing.

"What they want is to make sure that there is a team in place that will execute according to a plan, that the team will deliver. What they will look at are the results rather than the jeans I might wear once in a while."

Opera de Montréal

2008

2007

Luciano Pavarotti dead at 71

Getting our opera house in order

ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, The Gazette

How he'll keep the fat lady singing

2005

2002

Verdi¹s First Great Masterpiece

NABUCCO

notes for Opera nights

2001