Speaking over the weekend from Moscow, Miss Caldwell alluded to a budget of $2 million. Miss Caldwell has already announced a season of Tchaikovsky's "Eugen Onegin" with Russian sets and singers the double bill of Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" (with Shirley Verrett) and Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci," and, replacing a Leonard Bernstein "Mass" that was to have been a Russo-American co-production, a Puccini "Tosca." Sellars and his musical associate Craig Smith, encouraged by dissident board members from Miss Caldwell's company and support from local music critics, agreed to participate in the formation of a new company, the Boston Opera Theater.
The next year, the Met dropped its spring tours, creating voids in several American cities, including Boston.īy 1987, the Lyric Opera had retired an accumulated $500,000 debt that dated back four years to an overambitious Wagner "Ring" cycle presented in Boston and at the Beacon Theater in New York, and felt ready to step up to a level beyond earnest community opera. In 1985, Miss Caldwell fell ill, and while she has fully recovered, her incapacity highlighted her financial difficulties and encouraged competitors. But they have declined to support any of the squabbling local companies.īoston's near-comic operatic hyperactivity stems from the mid-1980's, when several separate events conspired. There is even a fourth group: the well-heeled Bostonians who call themselves the Boston Opera Association stage no opera performances, their primary purpose up to 1986 having been the importation of the Metropolitan Opera on its annual tours. As Bruce Rossley, the city's Commissioner for the Arts and Humanities, said about a similar situation, the Boston opera scene is like "a feeding frenzy at an empty trough." A Non-Producing Group
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