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By Robert Wilder Blue

Joseph McClain

In 1986, with the support of an adventurous and enthusiastic board of directors, Joseph McClain and Dr. Walter Ducloux founded Austin Lyric Opera. No major professional opera company had existed before in Austin and with the success and prestige enjoyed by the opera companies in Dallas and Houston, a doubter might have predicted a hard go of it. But within a few seasons, ALO had defined a mission that was unique in the U.S. and that seemed to suit the community as well; it was a mission that also encompassed a commitment to American opera.

A former singer, a theater and opera director, and a man big aspirations, McClain managed the growth of the company and could take credit for its artistic and financial success. So why then, in November 2002, was McClain dismissed by the ALO Board? USOPERAWEB spoke with Mr. McClain in December about his history with the company, his firing and his reaction to the events. We also wanted to know more about his background and what had brought him to Austin.

“I was born in Oklahoma but never lived there. My dad was a Baptist preacher and that meant doing a lot of moving; so we lived truly from coast to coast. Music came into my life very early. I was a little pianist and I always thought that’s what I would do. When I was in the second grade we were living in San Francisco and on Saturday afternoons my parents always listened to the Met broadcasts on the radio. I became fascinated with all that exciting music that had these wonderful stories. Although having said that, I had no idea what the operas were about and listening to the synopsis on the radio seemed a little laborious to me, so I made up my own stories. Somewhere along the way somebody discovered that I had a voice and so I became a singer –a tenor. Eventually, I went to the Eastman School of Music as a voice major and then went for my master’s work at Indiana University where I studied with the late, great Margaret Harshaw, which became a life-long education in knowing what is going on with the voice and knowing how to tell what a voice might or might not promise.

“The apprentice programs were the thing to do in those days and the only one of any great importance at that time was at Santa Fe, so I went there. Then I went to Germany and performed there for ten years. During that time, I had an intendant, Volker von Collande at the newly built Theater der Stadt Wolfsburg who was a wonderful mentor and, looking back on it, was really insightful with me. Through my friendship with him, I had sort of unofficial permission to criticize the stage direction that went on in the theater and so he thought I might have it in me to actually direct myself. To make a long story short, he came to me one day and said, ‘McClain, there’s a production going into rehearsal in December and I want you to direct it.’ I told him, ‘no thank you.’ But he convinced me by telling me he would shadow me and see that I didn’t go wrong. By the third or fourth day of rehearsal I knew I was a fish in water. After that, I was entrusted with many ‘straight,’ spoken theater productions and I had the fantastic experience of directing some great German actors in their language in everything from Shakespeare to Brecht to Thornton Wilder.”

Susannah Glanville as Blanche DuBois in ALO's 2001 production of Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire. Provided by Austin Lyric Opera, McClain+Yu Photography.

It must have been difficult to give up singing. “It was awful and, to be honest, I was unbearable. Very often in the first days of directing I would be jumping up and down watching things happen on stage because I wanted to be up there doing it myself. But it was very difficult to be doing both at once and I was being told by my mentors to make a decision because the world would not accept me as a singer and a director. But for awhile I had it in my stubborn head that I could do both and I couldn’t let go of singing. There’s no reason someone shouldn’t be able to do both, but the mindset was clearly, ‘make up your mind or we can’t take you seriously as either.’ Four or five years passed before I decided I was glad I wasn’t up there on stage any more.”

How did McClain get to Austin and how does one start an opera company anyway? “I had been in Germany over nine years, was married to a wonderful soprano, Sylvia McClain who is now head of opera and voice at the University of Connecticut, and had two children who were not speaking any English, they were speaking only German. I wanted them to go to school in the U.S. and decided it was time to come back. I thought that having an academic position would be a very stable career move and I picked the University of Texas, which was a little weird because I knew nothing about the music school here. But I arrived and landed a lectureship in opera. One day I was driving across the city and I asked myself why Austin didn’t have an opera company. After that, one thing led to another and I found myself making plans, proposals and budgets. I pulled together a very influential and interested steering committee which was the basis for the original board and there ended up being a fantastic amount of enthusiasm. The first office was in my house and eventually I got up the nerve to quit my other job.

“We launched the inaugural production sixteen years ago, which was The Magic Flute in a production by Maurice Sendak, with an extraordinary cast: Sally Wolf as the Queen of the Night, Amy Burton did her first Pamina, David Malas was Papageno and Kevin Langan sang a world-class Sarastro. It was a huge success and, amazingly, we came close to filling a 3,000-seat house for three performances. We went forward for the next year with a larger season. From that first year, the budget grew from just under $400,000 to over $5 million today and we managed to close every year but two solidly in the black, which is an extraordinary achievement especially given the horrors of last year with the crisis of 9/11. In those short years we grew to the largest performing arts organization in central Texas.

“The vision that guided me was that I wanted to do it on a big and excellent scale. I wasn’t interested in doi ng a mom-and-pop operation. We wanted to expose a new audience to the major canons of the repertory and at the same time constantly stretch. Luckily, Austin had a wonderful stage where the company is still performing. We also began serious educational programs that reached out to every part of the community, including those that might not automatically feel they should be part of the opera. We moved our administrative offices from one space to another and eventually came face-to-face with the need for a new facility to accommodate not only administrative functions, but also provide major rehearsal space. Two years ago we completed fundraising and construction for the new Austin Lyric Opera Center, which is a wonderful 20,000-square-foot building that has first-class rehearsal space, meeting rooms, teaching studios and administrative offices. And, on top of all of that, we got the idea of opening a community music school [The Armstrong Community School], which didn’t exist anywhere else in Texas.

“Five years ago we began what I called the American Opera Initiative. We stepped very lightly into it the first year to get people comfortable with it. We started off with a wonderful new production of The Ballad of Baby Doe which I directed and which was designed by Michael Yeargan. Mark Delavan sang Horace Tabor and Cheryl Parrish sang Baby Doe and I have to say it was pretty damn hot! I chose Baby Doe because, frankly, it scared the hell out of many board members to even say the words ‘American opera.’ I wanted to do something that was utterly accessible that had ‘pretty’ music and a story that one could follow easily.

“That was followed by a new Candide, directed by Chris Mattaliano with entirely projected scenery. In choosing Candide the idea was to pull in the theater crowd, especially the music theater crowd, which is quite large here. And of course I knew that the name [Leonard] Bernstein would sell. The version we did was pretty tightly knit, as far as the story goes, and it was visually stunning enough and the singing was good enough that I really felt it would carry. Well, our audience loved it and it sold like mad!

“Then we participated in our first co-commission, which was Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree . From the standpoint of financial investment, Cold Sassy Tree was an easy step into the commissioning business for us because seven other companies were involved, enough so that our financial part was easily bearable. But we could still say that this young company had commissioned an opera. In my mind, this was a big step towards the company actually leading the commissioning of a new work. And there’s a certain young composer in San Francisco [Jake Heggie] I wanted to write an opera for us (and he knows it). On top of everything else, I felt Cold Sassy Tree was an enormously powerful work and very American. And of course it came from the biggest name in American opera, so I felt it was a very good move for us. We actually sold more seats in Austin than were sold at the world premiere in Houston, which is a much larger city and a much larger company. Austin really responded to it.

Suzanne Ramo as Stella Kowalski with Austin Lyric Opera Chorus in A Streetcar Named Desire.Provided by Austin Lyric Opera, McClain+Yu Photography.

“Then we did a spectacular new production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the first new production since the premiere. It was very different from the original. Again, I wanted a title that was recognizable by our audiences; I thought we could capitalize on that again with the theater audience in Austin. As I got to know the work, I became convinced that it was a much more powerful opera than had been seen in San Francisco. I was playing around with the idea one morning and I called Michael Yeargan who had designed the San Francisco production. I asked him what he thought about the work itself and he said he thought it was wonderful. He was not happy with the final product in San Francisco (I don’t think he’d mind me saying that), but as far as the work itself he felt there was much there that had been left unexplored. I asked him if he would be interested in designing another production and he said, ‘Absolutely, if you promise me that we’re not going to make it look like the film and we’re going to take it to a whole different level, to give another reality and let it become an opera.’ I really think that this was what the opera needed to be accepted on its own terms. Michael said that the constant point of reference for the original production was the film and I think that was deadly. Our production was very powerful. Plácido Domingo is taking it to Washington Opera next season.

“And now, the American Opera Initiative continues with Dead Man Walking this year, a work I’m very excited about, written by a composer who I think has got what it takes. There was so much good word going around before the premiere and I came out to San Francisco to see it and was pretty floored by it. Here was a dynamite subject matter, set to music by a new composer, and I thought to myself, ‘let’s go for it.’ I think it was especially important to do it here in Texas where more people are killed by lethal injection than anyplace else. When this new production came up in collaboration with the other opera companies it fit into my plans perfectly.”

What American operas did you have in mind for the future? “William Bolcom’s A View From the Bridge is a wonderful opera and there are one or two by Philip Glass I’d like to have looked at. I would love to have brought Jake’s new commission for Houston [The End of the Affair] to Austin. There are many American works that I think are important and need to be seen: Ghosts of Versailles, Vanessa, Antony and Cleopatra, Susannah, Of Mice and Men, Esther, The Seagull, Summer and Smoke, Nixon in China, and certainly there are a couple of [Dominick] Argento’s operas too, just to name a few.”

So many American operas have disappeared after their premieres. “That was really where I was going with this American initiative, to say that in the best of all possible worlds if we’re not commissioning a work, I would like to be mounting a new production of a just-premiered work. It’s a real niche and I wanted to establish a reputation for the company for doing just that. It would have been a unique thing.”

Most impresarios want nothing to do with a work that has already been given a world premiere, especially one that has received less than 100% favorable notices. “We have become such a horribly critical audience in an extremely negative way. Although, I would like to take myself out of that [he laughs]. Something about an American story, told in American English seems trivial and boring to the audience. But you take the same story and give them Italian names they’re going to be fine with it. We are unable to hear a work and be okay with the fact that it isn’t a masterpiece or our favorite opera in the world, but still be glad we saw it. I had a donor tell me how much she objected to Streetcar. She called the story ‘sleazy.’ I asked her what she thought of the actual production and she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t go!’ So what are you supposed to do about that?”

What happened last November? “I had been away for three weeks directing a production of La Traviata elsewhere and I arrived home late on Sunday evening and on Monday morning at 8:00 I got a call from the general counsel of the opera asking me to come to a meeting. I walked in and was summarily fired. My keys were taken and I was told I could not return to the building that I had built, raised money for, contributed money myself, except after hours and under escort, even to pick up my possessions. It was a very painful experience for me.

Did you see it coming? “Honestly, no. I felt that certain members of the board were being extremely difficult [and] was very close to resigning myself due to that problem, but was totally stunned to be called in and dismissed without any warning, any evaluation at all during the period of my engagement (the whole historic existence of the company!).

“There had been for the past year disagreement about whether or not American opera should be in our season. The problem seemed to center on the American repertory, but in reality it had to do with anything that was off the main track. When these objections were raised they always came to me couched in terms that they were so much more expensive. Well, we found ways to do them that were completely within our budgets and we were heavily subscribed so we had long-time opera fans willing to buy into these American works and others not in the top ten.

“The riskiest of the productions up to this point had been Streetcar and that was the only production that season that exceeded its box office budget. In terms of real dollars, it outsold the Puccini that followed it and in the post-9/11 environment too! I do know that Streetcar really appealed to the theater crowd and really surprised them too. In fact, we received an award from the affiliation of theaters in Austin for Streetcar. All of these operas appealed because of their completely contemporary theater values. Even with Dead Man Walking we went entirely to funding sources that were not available to us otherwise and we got the money. As early as last summer we had exceeded the budget goal last summer for special Dead Man Walking funding. So there was really no truth to the economic objections they were raising. I’ll play prophet now: I predict that Dead Man Walking will be the biggest success of the current season.

“Our final big subscription push last year was in the mail on September 12, 2001. Of 50,000 brochures mailed out, not a single subscription was sold from that mailing. Now we did sell subscriptions that year but not from that particular mailing. So individuals who wanted to point out that we shouldn’t do American works used the downturn in subscriptions after September 11 to justify that fact, even though there was no data to support it. But, as the post-9/11 economic forces began to hit everyone, these voices became much louder and they were also talking about things like abandoning our young artists program, which I had built into a first-class endeavor. And I simply refused. I thought that if we truly believed in what we were doing then we should go for it and raise the necessary money, not desert our vision, but be determined to find a way to make it work not because it would be easy, but because it was necessary. There was a great amount of disagreement between me and about six board members.

“The big problem here was the fact that perhaps 98% of our board was composed of wealthy people who made contributions. These people should be honored for their contributions, but the fact that they have the money to support the opera does not mean that they have the experience or intelligence to govern a major cultural treasure. We did everything imaginable in our audience development program. The programs were very well attended by people who wanted to know what was going on. I felt we did a very good job of informing our audience. But our board was not as well educated and in looking back over my years since founding Austin Lyric Opera, I would have spent a lot more time educating board members and a lot less time doing financial statements – more time talking to them, getting them exposed to newer music and convincing them of the reasons we have to have the creation of new opera.

Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Stanley Kowalski and Susannah Glanville as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Provided by Austin Lyric Opera, McClain+Yu Photography.

“We did an interesting event before Streetcar with the director and set and lighting designer and one of the artists and the audience was fascinated. The people refused to leave – they wanted to continue talking to the artists. Afterward I realized that they were better prepared for the performances than our board was. They understood the vision here better. But we spent our time with the board doing fundraising reports and financial reports and so on, that they are usually not participating in creating anyway. All of that had a place in a young company that needed to prove itself trustworthy from a business standpoint, but the real heart of what we were doing was not a big enough part of the information that the board was forced to get. They generally did not attend these wonderful audience development events because they already had attended board meetings and committee meetings and felt they were doing enough.”

One reads constantly of the need for developing new audiences for opera. Are ticket prices a barrier to this and, if so, are opera companies doing enough to make opera affordable? “If, for instance, you’re going to take on a project such as lowering ticket prices for certain performances you have to get that money from someplace. If you’re going to discount, say, $50,000, then that money is going to be missing from the budget. But maybe we need to be putting more effort into making that possible. We are all so swamped with fundraising for the basic operating costs for a season, to try to get another $50,000 dollars in order to be able to offer discount tickets seems overwhelming. I’ve never thought this though, but what’s on my mind right now is that maybe we have to get out of the idea of always producing opera in these huge theaters on these huge stages that demand an almost old-fashioned theatrical concept, meaning you have to fill the space with scenery and it has to be lavish. Even an opera like Dead Man Walking has to impress in that sense. If a repertory theater company were to do that piece it would probably be very minimalist.

“One of the interesting things we did in Austin the past two seasons was to mount one opera each season in an alternative space, because I wanted to get out of the opera house for a change. We took a large WWII airplane hangar that happened to be air-conditioned, but otherwise was a huge, vaulted, open space and we designed a theater space with seating around it. We did popular titles because I knew people would be scared to death to go to this place for an opera. It was fairly gutsy, but it worked fantastically; although it was not cheap, because we had to construct a theater from nothing. But we had an audience of about of only about 1,500 at each performance which gave us a lot more intimacy compared to the 3,000-seat hall we usually perform in. So I think that at least part of the time we need to get out of the opera house, which will take some cunning and ingenuity and risk-taking. In the opera business we feel we fight this stereotyping of the opera audience – how you should dress, who you should be, and so on, which many people like. But, we’ve somehow let opera become this sentimental trip. I hear things like, ‘I don’t want anything to do with real life, I want to come here and feel like I’m in Italy and hear pretty songs and nice voices and see a pageant of costumes. I don’t want to think or feel things that are difficult for me.’ Well, that’s a problem. Film audiences expect to see something different and most people who attend movies don’t go back to see the same movie over and over. Now both film and opera are artful entertainment at their best. One of my great frustrations is that the theater community doesn’t think opera has anything to do with theater, which is horrible. But opera has that element of the unbelievable. Unfortunately, some people want a travelogue and they don’t want to see anything that makes them really think, that puts them at conflict with themselves. And I think real art has to do that somehow.

“Opera has power to touch people deeply and to reveal new things to them and to let you see life, your life and life around you, in a new light. The combination of words, theater and music is enormously powerful and that has nothing to do with the costumes or the pageantry.”

As a director whose early experience was in Germany, do you have any observations on the state of opera production and direction? “Coming from a musical background and having been almost forced to direct spoken theater was life-changing for me. In theater without music you have to make the music through the rhythm of the scenes, the words and how they all fit together. You have to build an architecture that with, say, a Mozart opera is already there in the music. So when I transferred back to opera, I came in asking what the composer’s intentions were in a way that I had never thought of before. There is a big difference between directing theater and opera. There are issues for an opera director that one doesn’t face in spoken theater, such as having a hundred chorus members on stage and having to make their actions realistic and believable. You have to understand that when a great composer throws in three measures of music between two lines it’s not about music only, it’s about theater and in his mind he knew something was happening. I feel it incumbent on a stage director to go behind what I imagine would have been the creative process of the composer to try to discover what he was envisioning at that moment.

“Another problem can be that many directors don’t realize that an aria is like a vertical slice of time. Most often, time has stopped during an aria and it calls for a lot of focus - to allow the action to create itself, by going into huge depth of what is going on with the character but leaving it internal and trusting it. I think those moments when there is no plot action scare some directors to death and so they start inventing things that are not necessary.”

Does hindsight bring with it any particular revelations about the decisions you made at ALO? “I wouldn’t have done anything differently. We did a really good job of bringing excellent opera to Austin. We built a company that did things it shouldn’t have been able to do and reached a level of quality one should never expect from a young company in a city this size. I think looking back that I would like to have understood the difference between honoring donors and governing the organization. One does not qualify you necessarily for the other.

“I’m very proud of my accomplishments in Austin. I’ve thought a lot about it and I have a lot of new insights for myself personally and have plans for what I want to do with myself. First of all, of course, is to know what I really want to do and part of that has to do with the training of a new generation of American singers and stage directors. I’d like to be able to share my experience with young singers and directors and be involved in their development as human beings and as artists. Frankly, we need more of that. The oncoming generation has to be prepared for this world, especially the theatrical side of it. And they are not, even though we’re a hell of a lot better than we used to be. I’m working on some ideas which probably mean going out and starting something totally new. But it looks like that’s just the sort of thing I do.”