OPERA PACIFIC CLAIMS RAISE DOUBTS : Music World Questions Sale of 16,000 Subscriptions for Season

Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.) was listening to a Reagan Administration official testify recently that new opera companies in Los Angeles and Orange County spoke well for the health of American opera. Yates’ House subcommittee was considering the President’s proposed 1988 budget reductions for the National Endowment for the Arts and was taking testimony from Patrick J. Smith, who heads the NEA’s Opera-Musical Theater Program.

“We’ve had two major opera companies that came into existence this year,” Smith told Yates, referring to the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Assn. and Irvine-based Opera Pacific. Without naming Opera Pacific, Smith then said the company in Orange County “sold 16,000 subscriptions before they opened the door.”

“Really? 16,000?” asked Yates, chairman of the House subcommittee on the interior since 1975 and one of Capitol Hill’s strongest advocates of federal funding for the arts.

He was not the first person to marvel at the figure. Since Opera Pacific general director David DiChiera began circulating the number in January, it has raised eyebrows throughout the small world of American opera.

In Opera Pacific’s program booklet for its Feb. 11 opening of “Porgy and Bess,” DiChiera wrote that the 16,000 number was “without precedent” and “surpassed by only five other opera companies” in the United States. A national opera association official referred to the “spectacular” achievement.

All this helped shape the company’s image as an overnight success story in American opera--an image that DiChiera acknowledges he sought as part of his effort to get federal funding a year before opera companies are eligible to apply.

But how accurate is that image?

Although they often compete for funds from the same sources, opera company managers tend to form a close-knit society, linked by their common struggle to raise money. In that vein, opera managers customarily send each other their press releases and programs. However, more than one member of DiChiera’s operatic brethren has raised questions about the legitimacy of his claims for Opera Pacific.

Some managers and subscription experts at several established opera companies say that Opera Pacific may be technically correct in its self-praise but that superlatives and assessments about national operatic ranking should be viewed skeptically. Even the NEA’s Smith, after hearing what some opera professionals said about the figures, sighed and said: “Is the number cooked? It is cooked. . . . I would hesitate before using it again.”

After being informed of his colleagues’ comments, DiChiera, who also manages opera companies in Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, acknowledged that he uses a liberalized definition of a subscriber. He apologized for making a national comparison based on his statistics but defended his portrayal of Opera Pacific’s first season as an effort to give a strong image to a company that needs all the financial support it can get.

Opera experts say three factors cloud the picture for those using Opera Pacific’s first-year subscriptions as a measure of its national stature:

--Its three productions were chosen for maximum popularity and didn’t include any traditional grand operas.

--The company performed in a new, highly publicized arts center where thousands of donors subscribed to virtually everything in sight.

--DiChiera’s liberal definition of the term “subscriber.”

“When I heard about how well Opera Pacific had done, I felt depressed because we don’t have nearly that many (subscribers), and we’ve been around for 31 years,” said Judy Rybicki, marketing manager at the Washington Opera. “Then I went up to my head of subscriptions and said, ‘Gee, look what they’ve done out there,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but it’s an unfair comparison. Look at what they’re selling.’ ”

What Opera Pacific sold in the 1986-1987 season were three productions: “West Side Story,” “Porgy and Bess” and “La Boheme.” Half of the subscriptions sold were for just two offerings--”West Side Story” and “Porgy and Bess.”

Speight Jenkins, who runs the Seattle Opera, said: “I’m delighted that he has 16,000 people who are going to his operas, but before I would start talking about a permanent list of subscribers, I would want to see how many he has in an opera season devoted to more of what most opera companies consider their repertoire. “ ‘West Side Story’ is really not in the repertoire of most opera companies in America,” Jenkins continued. “ ‘La Boheme’ is the most popular opera in the world, and ‘Porgy and Bess’ is uniquely popular in America. What I hope is that when he has a season of Verdi, Massenet, Gounod and Beethoven that he’d have as big a number. That would be wonderful.”

Ian Campbell, general director of the San Diego Opera, questioned the counting of people who bought tickets to “West Side Story” and “Porgy and Bess” as subscribers.

“For a typical opera, we sell 12,000 tickets and for ‘Porgy and Bess’ we sold 17,000,” Campbell said. “We know that that 5,000 differential would never be wooed to a real opera season. . . . These are people who came to hear the hit tunes and to have a wonderful time. But I can not count them as an opera audience, and I don’t.”

In January, DiChiera directed reporters to Martin Kagan, executive director of Opera America, a national association of opera companies. Shortly thereafter, Kagan was quoted in one newspaper describing Opera Pacific’s subscriber success as a “spectacular, absolutely spectacular” achievement.

DiChiera served as Opera America’s president from 1980-1984, remains on its board of directors and helped hire Kagan as the group’s top day-to-day manager. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that Kagan’s glowing evaluation of Opera Pacific’s numbers contrasts somewhat with that of Danny Newman, the Chicago-based author of a textbook called “Subscribe Now!” and perhaps the country’s most widely respected expert on building subscription bases in the arts.

“Reasonably good” is how Newman described Opera Pacific’s rookie season.

Newman, who handles public relations at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, noted that the Opera Pacific season really “did not ask much of a commitment from people, either in time or cost.”

Subscription prices for Opera Pacific ranged between $30 for the cheapest package for two productions to $180 for the most expensive series of three. “It sounds like they were good prices, and I’m not knocking that,” Newman said. “But we have a series (in 1986-1987) here that costs over $500. That’s what I mean by a major commitment.”

Opera company managers interviewed for this article indicated in separate interviews that they share an attitude toward what a “subscriber” should be. “We are not selling partial subscriptions because we feel that would be letting people go for the easier kind of fare,” said John Howlett, director of publicity for the Los Angeles company.

“We want a subscriber who is going to stay with us all across the boards. . . . I’m not sure you can call somebody who just buys a pair of tickets a subscriber.”

DiChiera concedes the point. “I think my colleagues have made very accurate statements,” DiChiera said. “If it offended any of my colleagues (to claim the sixth largest subscription base in the nation), I’d retract it. . . . You know, statements about what a subscriber is and how many subscribers we have is a way of making people feel good about what a community has done. What’s (wrong with) letting them feel as important, as I, in my burst of enthusiasm, tried to have them feel? Yes, the large subscription is in part due to a very popular repertoire that covers a very large gamut,” he continued. “I’m very proud of that. I probably never will have a season of Verdi, Massenet, Gounod and Beethoven. I don’t have a large donor base, and this year I had to earn at least at least 70% of my budget at the box office.”

One significant indication of Opera Pacific’s local popularity, various experts in opera management said, will be the percentage of people willing to renew their subscriptions for the 1987-1988 season. The three offerings will be “Aida,” “Die Fledermaus,” and “Kismet.”

DiChiera said he carefully shaped the second season in the image of the first: two popular operas and a musical. The structure of the two subscription packages will be the same, and even the prices will be similar, DiChiera said.

Newman and others say that the national subscriber renewal rate for opera companies is between 75% and 80%, figures that DiChiera said he expects to reach.