MUSIC CULTURE MARKET

THE DAY I got hooked for life on the Dallas Opera was the Sunday afternoon in December 1975 that I saw Tristan und Isolde. The Music Hall was packed to the rafters, which I could almost reach out and touch from my seat in the third balcony. I sat with my knees jammed against the seat in front of me, and even now, six years later, the sensation 1 associate most vividly with Wagner’s opera is how the seat scratched. I got pretty toasty in my winter suit, perched so high up in the nosebleed section, and my pants felt so scratchy and warm against the bristly chair that I thought at any minute I would just stand up and scream.

Seemingly a half-mile below was the stage. Standing on a huge, gray, light-flecked disk were Jon Vickers, Roberta Knie and Nicola Zaccaria. Together with the orchestra they were pouring forth an ocean of sound and emotion. Before long I lost myself and my prickly sensations to this entrancing phenomenon. I realized I was witnessing more than just another production of a Wagner opera. These singers had embodied Wagner’s marriage of music and myth in a way that transcended all ordinary notions of time and space. I remember that at the end of the performance I had to force myself out of a waking dream that was more real than my physical discomfort in row DD.

I had been to other Dallas Civic Opera (now Dallas Opera) performances, dutifully studied recordings and libretti and picked out single productions here and there that 1 could afford to see. 1 wasn’t a fanatic yet, though. But Tristan und Isolde was unlike any musical experience I’d ever had. It confirmed me. If this was the essence of music, I had to have more – not in the third balcony, either. So, to get the best view of the next season’s productions, 1 did what the opera management hopes all its single-ticket buyers will do: I subscribed.

I joined perhaps the most passionate, even fanatical, group of people in town: the opera crowd. Of course, you would be hard-pressed, I think, to call Dallas an opera town. Chicago, yes. San Francisco and New York, of course. But Dallas? Dallas is a football town, an oil town, a banking town. A city in which the local opera company plays for two months and dies for 10, where the only other opera is the Metropolitan’s lightning-quick visit – four operas in three days – each May, is hardly what you would call an opera town.

That is, unless you get caught up in the opera crowd. The fact is that every November and December about 15,000 people in Dallas go crazy for opera. During the 10 months that Dallas opera is dormant, opera people bide their time-reading libretti, listening to recordings, trading gossip and angling for the best tickets. But those last two months of the year they get involved in something not unlike 17th-century Dutch Tulipmania. The most dyed-in-the-wool Texas-OU fan’s reaction to a last-minute touchdown is a mere whimper compared to the hoarse, roaring clamor of a Dallas Opera audience demanding Marilyn Horne’s fourth curtain call – pelting the stage with bouquets, banging in unison on the wooden barrier around the orchestra pit, hanging around for half an hour to give one more roar of gratitude, adoration, worship for the star.

But after 25 years of enjoying one of the world’s finest companies, it’s not so strange that all these people let it all hang out for opera once a year. Still, this is supposed to be the city with ice in its veins and a bank vault for a heart, a place where passion is kept strictly behind closed doors, the city whose style for years was embodied in the coolly rational persona of Tom Landry.

Until Larry Hagman.

Every red-blooded opera company manager, like every sports team owner, drools at the prospect of multiplying its roaring multitudes. To lure more people through the turnstiles, an opera company has to get its newcomers or occasional single-ticket buyers to come out of the opera house feeling thoroughly entertained by La Bo-heme or Tristan und Isolde. It helps, though, if that “I’ll-try-it-once” buyer also comes out feeling a little worried that the next time he orders a ticket, he may hear, “Sorry, we’re all sold out.” No two words chime more musically in the ears of an opera manager. No matter what the event – whether it be organized sports, theater, ballet or opera – the name of the game is season tickets: subscriptions.

To understand why the Dallas Opera has made so much noise in the media these last two years, you must appreciate how crucial subscribers are to the continued growth of the organization or to that of any arts group. The man to whom many of these groups (including, at least for a while, the opera) listen – the man who, as they say, wrote the book on the importance of turning single-ticket buyers into subscribers – is Danny Newman. Newman is the flashy, street-tough press agent for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which under his guidance has boasted something like a 95 percent subscription rate for more than 20 years. There are people in arts management who are capable of quoting from memory entire chapters of his rousing book, Subscribe Now!. Newman’s message is simple: Offer discounts, give away premiums, assure the potential subscriber he’ll have the same or better seats next season – use any means available to turn every person who’s even vaguely considering coming to the performances into a subscriber. As a manager you’ll have to sell that seat only once, not all season long. Your subscriber will feel he’s made an investment, so he’ll buy again next year. He may even feel so good about you that he’ll make a contribution. Subscribers stabilize your cash flow. They permit you to plan; they allow you to expand. To an arts manager, subscribers are not people who fill his seats. They are his family.

Newman’s philosophy might be called a kind of aesthetic utilitarianism: By subscribing, the greatest number of people enjoy the greatest good. The way to achieve this Utopia is through what marketing people call “the shotgun approach,” which is what the Dallas (then Dallas Civic) Opera tried last year. Newman advises arts managers to sink their advertising budget into multiple mailings of a brochure emblazoned with the injunction “Subscribe Now!”. Blanket the city with not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands of brochures. If you have 5,000 seats to sell, mail out half a million pieces. That way, even if the rate of return is only 1 percent, you’ll sell out. For example, at say, 12￠ apiece, you’ll spend $60,000 filling your house, and if you do your job well, you shouldn’t have to spend a dime attracting the single-ticket buyer.

In 1979, Plato Karayanis, the Dallas Opera’s general director, started thinking how he could make this year’s 25th anniversary the biggest in the company’s history. The problem, as he and the board saw it, was two-fold: The opera needed to appeal to a broader audience and at the same time regain its international reputation. Karayanis needed to convince a lot more people in Dallas that opera is not just a bunch of fat ladies with horns; it has Dallas-style sex and intrigue and Cowboys-style action. But he must still show the critics and peers in the opera world that this was still the same company created by Maria Callas, sustained by dream casts for dozens of productions, and illumined by American debuts by the likes of Joan Sutherland, Jon Vickers, Gwyneth Jones and Franco Zeffirelli and an artistic staff brought in by a direct pipeline to La Scala.

Karayanis set out to accomplish the first goal by hitching the Dallas Opera to the fastest rising media star since Lucky Lin-dy: Larry Hagman. “It’s got passion, fightin’, ecstasy, treachery…whew, it’s just wonderful,” says Hagman on the TV public service announcement (psa) put together by the opera’s ad agency, Wells, Rich, Greene. Johnny Cash chimed in as to how he too liked opera: “Great music. Why, some of these opera tunes have been on the charts for a hundred years.” And, to capture the football lover’s fancy, Tony Dorsett made his pitch: “It’s just like a big game. Action, excitement, crowds. But if you haven’t got your tickets yet, you may have fumbled the ball.”

All that hoopla, Karayanis says, didn’t result in many more subscribers, but it boosted single-ticket sales, and the campaign itself attracted a lot of attention. “It changed the perception of the opera, making it seem more egalitarian,” he says. “And that happened even as we presented the most radical season in our history.” The 1980 season wasn’t exactly sure-fire box office, but it did draw universal critical praise. Turandot was made in a spectacular style that would have made any European state-supported company proud, and was followed by a production of Lakmé that The New Yorker’s Andrew Porter flatteringly compared to the La Scala production of 20 years ago. The opera then performed the first Vivaldi opera ever done in America, Orlando Furioso, with a brilliantly chosen cast; the opera also assured itself an international audience of critics and scholars by co-sponsoring (with SMU) a symposium on Vivaldi. And it closed the season with Jon Vickers’ overwhelming portrayal in Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten.

Mass mailings, TV and radio spots with Hagman, international attention – still, 1980 was only a prelude to the anniversary season. The programming this year is aimed at clinching even bigger box-office successes. This season’s works are calculated to appeal to a wider audience, with operas that, as Karayanis points out, “the public can more readily identify with.” Even though Charles Gounod may not be a household word, his Roméo et Juliette will certainly draw many people who know little about 19th-century French opera, but with which the Dallas Opera has had a long string of successes. Who could resist Madama Butterfly? As Dallas Opera’s artistic director Nicola Rescigno points out, probably not a week goes by that Puccini’s great opera isn’t performed somewhere in the world. In its 25th season, the opera takes its third step into German repertoire, an area it broke into with Tristan in 1975. Roberta Knie will star in the first and most popular installment of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Die Walküre. Ending the season is an early Verdi opera, Ernani.

This year’s jubilee season subscription campaign fine-tuned last year’s: a classic Madison Avenue soft sell – Danny Newman with dignity. The emphasis was on quality, not egalitarianism. The opera started out by asking why people didn’t subscribe. Wells, Rich, Greene conducted focus groups – interviews with occasional single-ticket buyers who fit the opera’s demographics, but for some reason didn’t buy the whole season. The agency’s discussions and follow-up questionnaires addressed these people’s perceptions and opinions about opera in general and the Dallas company in particular. What they discovered was that many of the interviewees had little idea that the Dallas Opera’s achievements were world famous. When they thought of opera they thought of superstars- Beverly Sills, Renata Scot-to – and didn’t connect these singers with Dallas. The opera had to turn that idea around.

Secondly, the agency and the opera test-marketed dropping the word “Civic” from its name (the interviewees had said they thought the Dallas Civic Opera was an amateur company). The name produced a negative response. The rechristening was adopted in due time, drawing howls of protest from The Dallas Morning News’ music critic, John Ardoin, who said, “DCO appears to be playing down its glorious history rather than capitalizing on it.” Even Maestro Rescigno seemed chagrined at the change, saying, “I personally feel attached to the old name. It was born under that name, and I thought a lot was accomplished under it.”

Thus renamed, the Dallas Opera traded in Newman’s shotgun for the “rifle shot” method. Instead of trying to unmask the image of opera as an elitist art, the opera capitalized on its international reputation, which the previous season had done much to revive. But the opera still needed a voice, a celebrity to carry this new message to the now-targeted constituency. Gone was the bowing to popular tastes with Hagman, Cash and Dorsett. Then, marketing director David Woolf came up with the idea of using actor John Houseman as the opera’s spokesman. Houseman was not only familiar as the dour but kindly law professor in The Paper Chase, but also had the added connection with Dallas of having directed his first opera, Otello, for the Dallas Civic Opera in 1962. “We wanted to go for the dignity, and let’s face it, we got the dignity,” says Woolf. (Perhaps that’s why they rejected their second-choice celebrity, Miss Piggy.)

This year’s handsome four-color brochure set out very deliberately to dispel misperceptions about the Dallas Opera and to convince opera fence-sitters to subscribe. A photo of Houseman presiding with professorial solemnity appears on both sides of the mailer next to this year’s slogan: “At this stage, we’re world famous.” To correct the idea that Dallas doesn’t attract stars, head shots of this season’s singers aren’t captioned with the operas they’re singing in; instead, they’re captioned, “Ghena Dinitrova – Also with La Scala, Vienna, Teatro Colon,” or “Paul Plishka – Also with Covent Garden, Paris, La Scala and the Met,” and so on.

The slogans, “At this stage, we’re world famous,” and “You’ll find us just a little west of La Scala” are also coordinated with television psa’s and radio spots on WRR and KRLD, and full-page ads in both Dallas papers as well as in Time, Texas Monthly and Dallas magazine. Together with 400,000 brochures, the whole effect is aimed at producing 8,400 subscribers, or 82 percent of the house. That’s up from 7,000, or 69 percent, last year. A month before the first performance, the opera was 100 shy of its goal, and the management is almost certain to announce that the subscriber increase justifies the next major step in the company’s growth: the addition of a fourth performance to each production.

The whole business of rifle-shot marketing, focus groups, celebrity spokesmen, full-page ads, glossy brochures and TV spots, are nothing new in the promotion of ticket sales, but they might be criticized as hype when associated with art – the promoters may be seen as hucksters invading the temple of culture. You could argue that all this hustling simply creates growth for its own sake; after all, the opera is doing fine as it is with only 12 performances each season. Why should it generate a larger audience artificially by using seductive marketing techniques in order to convince itself it needs to put on four more performances? The answer is that the well-thought-out, two-year ad campaign wasn’t designed just to rack up impressive subscription statistics, but also to bolster the artistic product: Singers don’t like to re-hearse for two months and then perform an opera only three times. Being able to offer contracts for more performances will attract even better singers than before. Once the new symphony concert hall frees more time in the Music Hall and the Majestic Theatre reopens, a spring opera season can materialize. In any event, the opera management felt the time had come to conduct its marketing at a level commensurate with the level of professionalism the world has come to expect from the opera on stage at the Music Hall. (David Woolf, hired last year, is the first marketing director at the opera.) The amazing thing about the recent campaign is not that it is successful, but that before last year, the opera had never done anything remotely as sophisticated.

Successful marketing pays off for fund raising, too. The ratio of earned income (ticket sales, program advertising, boutique sales, etc.) was 34 percent compared to 66 percent for contributions. More than $1 million, or 40 percent of the total budget, was raised through private and corporate contributions. A healthy box office (and good fiscal management of the proceeds) persuades donors they’re backing a winner. Corporate contributions quintupled to $500,000 between 1977 and 1981; in the same period the percentage of subscribers who contributed jumped from 12 to almost 50 percent.

The opera’s fund-raising efforts have as much flair as its subscription drives. This spring, in making its request at the 500 Inc.’s annual presentation meeting, Philip Miller, president of Neiman-Marcus and president of the opera board, decked himself in Annapolis dress whites as Lieutenant Pinkerton, thus serving as a visual reminder to the members of the 500 Inc. that the opera was making its bid for the underwriting of Madama Butterfly. In addition, the 500 got a preview screening of Wells, Rich, Greene’s John Houseman TV spots before they went on the air. (Many of the other supplicating organizations had to settle for narrated slide shows in a room that was too brightly lit by huge windows to allow adequate projection.)

Whether or not the citizens of Dallas identify themselves with their internationally regarded opera company, the Dallas Opera certainly identifies itself with Dallas.

“This is a pioneer society in many ways,” says Karayanis. “It’s flexing its muscle, its economy. But it takes a long time for a city to mature and to get a sense of itself – to get an understanding of who it is and where it is going and what role the arts and humanities play in its growth and development. It’s part of the maturation process. History judges us by what we leave behind, and the arts are a city’s greatest measure of a society’s success.

“There are people of vision and understanding here. The arts should flourish and grow. It’s up to us to present the highest quality of entertainment and to build audiences. There’s a tremendous opportunity for growth – we can triple the number of our performances. What it takes is quality programming, quality entertainment.”

Dallas may be further west from LaScala than we think, but at this stage theDallas Opera is world famous.