New Chief Has Big Plans for Opera Pacific

Orange County’s Opera Pacific may have less than half the budget of L.A. Opera, but under the directorship of David DiChiera, it still has managed, in its first decade, to become the 11th-largest opera company in the United States. Last month, however, DiChiera stepped aside to devote more of his time to running Michigan Opera Theatre, which he founded in 1971, and the Detroit Opera House, which opened in April.

DiChiera will remain a part-time presence in the newly created post of artistic director, and stepping in as general director is Patrick L. Veitch, 52.

Veitch’s background includes marketing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, running the Australian Opera and serving as an arts consultant.

What are Veitch’s plans for Opera Pacific? “The immediate priority is to fix the financial problems,” he said recently. “With the $700,000 deficit from last season, it will bring the accumulated deficit to about a million dollars. It’s not crippling, but it’s not good either. How am I going to fix it? I don’t know. But you fix it.

“Number two priority is to work with David DiChiera to build a collaborative relationship that will allow the artistic product to mature in certain ways. For instance, to extend the audience’s understanding of what the standard repertory is,” Veitch continued.

“The other thing is to move toward a production style unique to Orange County. I haven’t the slightest idea what the Orange County performing style would look like, but once we start to identify the direction we’re headed in, that will determine how we’re going to make this special and give our audiences something to be proud of and the nation something to watch out for, even visit.”

Opera has long been a love of Veitch’s. He was born in Beaumont, Texas, and grew up listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.

“I was a shy kid and without outstanding abilities at things like sports or any other group activity,” he said. “Somebody put a clarinet in my hand about the age of 11, and music just opened up a world for me. It meant a social life. It meant kindred spirits. And it was something I could do well.”

But not well enough to make a virtuoso career, he learned when he went to North Texas State University. “It’s one thing to be the star of Beaumont, and then go somewhere where the stars of all these other little towns have come, and your medals don’t mean very much. I started looking at alternatives--and when you don’t know what to do, you become an English major.”

Still, he wanted music to be in his life somehow, and after graduating he left for New York “to seek fame and stardom and all that. And, lo and behold, that English degree and all my enthusiasm and all my talent qualified [me] to be a key-punch operator at Columbia University.”

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Soon he moved to a job at a New York advertising agency, where he learned about marketing. When the Met reorganized after the resignation of general manager Rudolf Bing in 1972, Veitch “just happened to be the guy who walked in at the right time.” He landed a job as its first marketing director and stayed in that position until 1981.

“A quick picture of what the Met was like before I walked in: It didn’t take credit cards. You had to take the full series of 12 performances. Once a year they would mail the subscribers a notice saying, ‘Send us a check for this amount of money and reserve these dates.’ You didn’t get the [names of the] operas, the cast, anything. It was chutzpah of the first order.”

Veitch instituted a telemarketing campaign, allowed people to use credit cards and took the then-radical step of publishing a two-page ad in the New York Times announcing the full season.

“That first ad brought in nearly half a million dollars, and I think everybody thought I was a wonder worker,” he said. “So I got all kinds of freedom.”

Invitations soon came to consult with other companies, including the Australian Opera in Sydney, which he headed from 1981 to 1989 after Peter Hemmings left the post to move to L.A. Opera.

“I inherited a company that was in very good artistic shape,” he said. “Financially it had problems. But the major problem was that opera was limited to a small crowd that had the financial wherewithal to support it. The Australian public had a very strong attitude that this is an elitist art form. They felt, ‘My tax dollars are being used to support it and it’s just serving “the silver tails of the eastern suburbs,” ’ [that’s] their phrase.

“So tackling that head-on, I threw [native daughter] Joan Sutherland out into the parks to sing a free performance of ‘La Traviata.’ Seventy-five thousand people showed up and sort of overnight, something was different. Joan Sutherland is not [just an opera star] like Kathleen Battle. In Australia, she’s more like Babe Ruth. They may have hated opera, but she was ‘Our Joan.’ ”

Charges of elitism are something he has to deal with in Orange County too. “Yep,” he said. “Just [attracting] people who could afford it on an occasional basis is one thing, and then an entirely different thing is dealing with people who cannot afford it and how we can make it accessible to them. These will be at or near the top of my priority list.”

He thinks the key will be creating new productions, which is where the so-far undefinable Orange County style could emerge.

“To carve out our little place under the sun, we have to be doing new productions ourselves--productions we conceive, produce, design and plan,” he said. “They are the lifeblood of a company. I would hope as soon as possible that we can do one new production a year that is ours. Then it goes to two, and meanwhile you’re building up a repertory. It takes a while, but if we can generally keep it growing, it will find itself.

“Is it going to be a Glyndebourne? Is it going to be a St. Louis? Hopefully, none of the above. Hopefully, it’s Orange County, and some years down the road, people will say Orange County opera and it will mean something right away.”