MONEY & THE ARTS : A Good View in the House : Opera companies are thriving at a time when many cultural institutions are sinking--but can this most expensive of performing arts continue to enjoy good fortune in tough times?

If you had to name a tune for the state of the arts these days, it would surely be “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Galleries are closing, theaters are sinking, dance troupes and orchestras are struggling, and alternative spaces are reeling.

Opera too is feeling the pinch. Yet unlike many of the performing arts, the Fat Lady isn’t nearly ready to sing this popular tune.

At a time of cutbacks in both public and private funding, opera is holding on. With subscriptions steady and even rising at many companies--and a substantial crop of new programs, commissions and premieres across the country--the medium is better off than most, its institutions more able to weather the hard times.

Still, opera is the most expensive of the performing arts. And any art that relies on the kindness of strangers and donors could well be in trouble if the economy doesn’t turn around soon.

What’s more, tight budgets are taking a toll as seasons become more conservative, borrowing is increased, touring is curtailed and pricey ventures are postponed. And giving new work the commercial appeal of the old warhorses is as difficult as ever.

Some of those who would strike out in bold, new directions are doing so despite the fiscal outlook. But others--including the Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s general director, Peter Hemmings--are fortifying their operations with more crowd pleasers per season.

In any case, players in the game are upbeat.

“Opera is hot. We have many more performances than last year. We have many more people in the audience,” says Ardis Krainik, general director of the relatively healthy Lyric Opera of Chicago. “Of all the arts right now, opera is doing the best of them all. I’m bullish on opera in America.”

“We hear from the theater world of significant numbers of companies closing. We hear from the orchestra field of numerous multimillion-dollar deficits and closings,” notes Marc Scorca, executive vice president and chief executive officer of Opera America, the Washington-based national service organization. “But I cannot report on any opera companies going out of business or any huge, multimillion-dollar deficits.”

The situation is confirmed by Tomas Hernandez, director of the Opera-Musical Theater Program of the National Endowment for the Arts: “Relative to the effects of the recession, the opera and musical theater field has, amazingly enough, done better than most in maintaining its level of activity. Perhaps the one negative thing that might have resulted is that companies that have started to take risks in doing new work have had to pull back.”

Explanations for this comparative stability range from opera’s unique path toward institutionalization in this country to the upscale demographics of its patron base. “There’s been some impact from the recession, but opera companies have structures that other kinds of companies don’t,” Scorca says. “Opera companies tend--in order to survive and grow--to have institutional structures that allow for flexibility when the going gets tough.”

No matter what the reasons for this vigor, though, the upshot is that it’s allowing the form to move ahead at a time when most arts are struggling just to hold onto the status quo.

Artistic innovations are receiving hearty welcomes. Sold-out houses and standing ovations greeted the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of John Corigliano and librettist William Hoffman’s “Ghosts of Versailles”--the first premiere of an American work there in more than 25 years. The San Francisco Opera will soon officially announce a series of three commissions over the next 10 years.

The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Toward the 21st Century program, which received a $1-million challenge grant from the NEA, is presenting two 20th-Century works a year throughout the ‘90s, including three commissions.

Recently, the Houston Grand Opera presented the American premiere of Robert Wilson’s controversial staging of “Parsifal,” as well as the premiere of Robert Moran’s “Desert of Roses.” Moran also had another opera bow at the Minnesota Opera.

The Houston “Parsifal” required an increase in the company’s annual budget. A combination of funds from individuals and Conoco made up the $600,000 difference.

The Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Opera for a New America program just awarded $360,000 in grants for six new operas. And while this amount is hardly enough to constitute a trend, it does encourage artists.

“From the artistic perspective, there is a continuing, sustained interest on the part of producers and audiences in new works,” Scorca says. “In part, this is a reflection of increasing commitment on the part of contemporary composers to connect with their audiences. At the same time, a variety of programs have made it easier for producers to take the risks.”

It is, according to some, opera’s moment. “This is the flowering that we’re going to be seeing in the last decade of the century,” predicts Chicago’s Krainik, who is also president of Opera America. “We’re going to be discovering our own voice of opera, a new American vernacular.”

Yet even the gung-ho Krainik notes the difficulty of bringing new audiences to new operas. “People are not running to the box office to buy tickets for modern opera,” she acknowledges. “ ‘New opera (equals) new audiences’--that’s an old saw that isn’t true.”

And for those who program new and rarely seen 20th-Century works, there must often be a way to make up the profits that are lost. The New York City Opera, for instance, is continuing its emphasis on 20th-Century works in the 1992 season, yet the company also maintains its controversial penchant for Broadway musicals. According to General Director Christopher Keene, the hearty box office from the musicals pays for the less-commercial contemporary opera fare.

Of course, artistic risks on such a costly scale as opera requires rarely happen unless the powers that be feel their operation’s finances are on solid footing--or they can use the publicity from new works to justify funding.

The Lyric Opera of Chicago, for instance, filled its subscription capacity before this season began. “They’re coming in droves,” Krainik reports. “Before the season began, we we’re 100% sold out. Our fund-raising is very good: I have no doubt that we will reach the goal. It’s a solid year.”

Here in Los Angeles, the Music Center Opera, which has operated in the black for the past three of its six seasons, has, in Hemmings’ words, “an increasingly secure financial base. The audience and even the financial support do not seem to be the main problem.”

Music Center Opera, for which earned income now covers more than half of the costs, decreased its deficit from $3 million in 1988--much of it from start-up costs--to a manageable $1.3 million. “We have seen an upturn in our audiences,” Hemmings says. “There are 27% more subscribers this year alone.”

Yet special pleas had to go out to make up the deficit caused by an unanticipated Music Center Unified Fund shortfall, which Hemmings describes as a “considerable setback.” And the local company has decided to postpone some of its more ambitious plans, resurrecting past hits instead.

The effect will be felt most in single-ticket sales--the one area where companies are reporting some drop-off. “The recession has affected single-ticket sales more in the last few months than we expected it to,” says Marcia Lazer, Music Center Opera director of marketing and public relations.

However, “the gap is being filled by subscribers, and we are bringing to the fore potential donors,” says Hemmings, noting a $450,000 gift from the Forman Family Fund in honor of Dorothy Forman that will support next season’s production of “Rigoletto,” the largest donation the company has ever received for a single production. “There are people living in this city who understand the importance of opera and how much it costs.”

Those people, however, are not necessarily going to support new or artistically adventurous programming. And while Music Center Opera’s financial outlook is increasingly stable, Hemmings is pulling back from risky choices.

The “Rigoletto” will be one of only two new productions originating here in the 1992-93 Music Center Opera season (along with “Die Zauberflote”). The upcoming repertory is more traditional than the previous six seasons have been, including “La Traviata,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Tosca,” “Ariadne auf Naxos” and “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

This continues a trend. “This current year is more overtly popular,” Hemmings acknowledges. “There are operas like ‘Carmen’ and ‘Madama Butterfly,’ whereas the previous year we hardly had any popular operas.

“I’d be the first to say that in my early years I may have overestimated the attraction of rare pieces,” he says.

The concern in opera circles is that there will be more general directors who feel forced toward Hemmings’ cautionary approach as a means of insulating themselves from a possibly long-term downturn.

“There are artistic and financial deficits--neither is to be encouraged,” Scorca says of the ways in which opera companies can cope. “A decision can be made about whether you’re going to do a new production or rent one.

“There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the decisions opera companies have made to endure,” he says. “It doesn’t manifest itself in statistical surveys: An artistic deficit is not quantifiable.”

Despite batten-down-the-hatches tactics, the fact remains that opera companies do have options. For many theaters, dance troupes and orchestras, there are no such choices to be made. If all it took for those groups to make their operations fiscally healthy was making the seasons a little more crowd-pleasing, many say they’d gladly do it.

Opera companies have leeway partly because their basic institutional structures are secure. “There’s been a great growth of American opera companies, but we’ve come to the point where they aren’t proliferating anymore,” Krainik says. “The ones that are extant are getting more solid.”

Whereas when it comes to dance companies or theaters, few have the unwavering base of an opera company. “In other categories (of the arts) there are so many more smaller groups,” says David DiChiera, general director of Orange County’s conservative Opera Pacific. “Their support structures are more fragile because they’re more grass-roots oriented.

“Because of the inordinate amount of support opera companies need to have, they have developed strong substructures of support,” DiChiera says. “So when you get into times like these, you just have to intensify those support systems.”

Those support systems also provide a layer of padding. “Even with the downturn in the economy, most of the companies have had sufficient financial stability to enable them to weather a few years of storm,” Hemmings says.

In any year, some opera companies will still have deficits, but they are not generally fatal. “In terms of measuring this year with the immediate past, it is a harder year,” Scorca says. “In a good year, 40% (of U.S. opera companies) have a deficit; in a bad year 55% have a deficit. Certainly in that superficial measure, it’s been a bad year.”

Opera’s comparative stability exists despite the fact that opera companies expect--and get--little funding from state and federal government sources. With the NEA reordering its funding priorities and state arts councils strapped, public funds are nearly a moot point. At the Houston Grand Opera, for instance, state monies dropped by $132,000 over a period of four years.

Instead, opera banks on a consistent fiscal and organizational development that predates--and exists apart from--the pools of public funding on which other forms are so dependent. In the United States, this began when generations of European immigrants and their offspring formed the core of a patron base.

That base was intact by the time arts institutions proliferated. “We have recently been through a period of great economic prosperity in this country, which means that in the ‘60s and ‘70s more and more opera companies were started,” Hemmings says. “That coincided with an increasing difficulty in touring operas.”

The traditional opera audience--based in the European immigrant generations--is often thought of as upper-middle to upper class, Anglo and educated, if aging. It is not, by most estimates, the group hit hardest by this recession.

“It’s a known fact that the bulk of supporters of opera tend to be the more affluent members of society,” says the NEA’s Hernandez.

That suggests opera’s stability is partly because its audience is suffering disproportionately less. “The poor have been hurt by the recession, but (they) have probably not been a meaningful part of the support system (for opera),” DiChiera says.

Scorca and general directors like Hemmings and Krainik, however, dispute the notion that the opera audience is any less affected by the recession than the audiences for the other performing arts.

“I don’t think there is a measurable difference in the effect of the recession on our audience versus, say, the dance audience,” Scorca says. “It may be a little different at the fringe, but it’s the same core audience.”

Whatever the tea leaves hold for the economy, opera is, at least for the moment, able to look to its future. Increasingly, that means international cooperation, with Americans much stronger players than has traditionally been assumed.

Music Center Opera’s new “Rigoletto,” for instance, is a co-production with France’s Opera de Lille, a company that doesn’t technically exist yet. “Lille hasn’t had an opera company for five years, but they are now re-establishing and we’ve suggested this (co-venture),” Hemmings explains.

“There are a number of companies around Europe that we are developing associations with apart from the opera centers like Paris and Berlin,” he says. “It’s not all going from Europe to here. It’s going the other way now.”

On the domestic front, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Opera for a New America program, for example, will be building on the success of Opera America’s Opera for the Eighties and Beyond, another body bent on promoting the creation of new American operas.

“Financially, of course, we’re under some stress,” says Opera America’s Scorca. “But we are excited about the increasing development of the American profile in the world of opera.”

DiChiera, who chaired Opera for the Eighties and is a past president of Opera America, says the aim of Opera for a New America is “to support opera companies in developing new works that are related to--and often are created by--specifically targeted new constituencies.

“In California, it would be appropriate to bring together a team of Hispanic artists (who) relate to the Hispanic community,” DiChiera says.

Opera for a New America grants this year include projects with a multicultural bent, such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “Nzinga” and New York City’s Music Theatre Group’s “Diary of an African-American.” On the other hand, grants also went out in support of the Canadian Opera Company’s “Nosferatu” and Houston Grand Opera’s “Desert of Roses,” based on the “Beauty and the Beast” tale.

Music Center Opera is going ahead with plans for a new opera in the 1993-94 season--in Spanish--based on the life of Simon Bolivar and featuring the company’s artistic consultant Placido Domingo in the title role. Other commissions are also in the works, although the company is not yet ready to announce them.

Zarzuelas have also been discussed over the years, although Hemmings has expressed concern that the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion may not be a sufficiently intimate venue. A smaller venue also means it would be harder to make money.

Ethnically based or not, however, all of these new operas share a potential for enticing younger patrons to an art form whose traditional patron base may be aging. A key component of any longevity program is cultivating these new generations of aficionados, preferably from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

“In the next 10 years, you’re going to see many opera companies creating works which build bridges into groups in the community which have not heretofore played a great part in the makeup of opera audiences,” DiChiera says. “In the 21st Century, opera companies will no longer be simply the repositories of European-styled works. They’re going to reflect the changing makeup of our cities. There’s no doubt we’re going to have a very different repertoire--one that’s reflective of our times.”