Opera broadens its web of support

AS Los Angeles Opera celebrates its 20th anniversary, it will also be celebrating a new donor: Eli Broad.

With the opera’s new season opening in September, billionaire businessman and philanthropist Broad and his wife, Edythe, are underwriting the revival of the Franco Zeffirelli production of “Pagliacci” and the company’s 20th Anniversary Gala on Sept. 10, after that evening’s season-opening performance of Offenbach’s “The Grand Duchess.”

Neither Broad nor L.A. Opera would disclose the amount of the donations.

Broad -- who spearheaded the fundraising drive that saved Walt Disney Concert Hall when the project was threatened with termination in the mid-1990s -- baldly admitted at the time that when seeking donations from movers and shakers in the downtown business community, he downplayed the significance of Disney Hall to the advancement of symphonic music and instead stressed its importance to downtown development.

“When we go to donors, it’s more than: ‘How would you like to give money to Disney Hall?’ Well, some of them wouldn’t,” Broad said. “It’s about downtown, it’s about the city.”

Now Broad, an avid art collector and the most powerful board member at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says Edythe Broad is the real opera lover in the family, and he acknowledges he’s more interested in the visual arts than in the performing arts. And, in an echo of his Disney Hall fundraising, he cites the opera company’s importance as “part of the cultural fabric” of Los Angeles as the reason for his donation. He also calls the opera’s general director, Placido Domingo, a “great asset to the city.”

Broad also points to his friendship with Los Angeles Opera board Chairman Marc I. Stern and his associations with such well-known opera supporters as Nancy Daly Riordan, Kelly Day, Sherry Lansing and Frank Baxter for encouraging his interest in donating to the opera. The choice of “Pagliacci,” he says, was made when he sat down with Stern to discuss “what was needed and what was available.”

Diane Haithman