Music News
Another Adler Is Flying High
BERLIN — “Adler” means “eagle” in German, but for music fans in California, it signifies “Mr. Opera.” Kurt Herbert Adler led the San Francisco Opera for almost a half a century, putting the company — and the city — on the global map of premier opera.
Kurt Herbert Adler and Ronald Adler
And now there is an Adler in an important leadership position: Ronald Adler, son of the late K.H.A., became Operndirektor in January of Berlin’s venerable Staatsoper unter den Linden, which was founded in 1742, and incorporates the nearly half-millennium old Staatskapelle orchestra. Opera and orchestra share a famed music director, Daniel Barenboim.
Interviewing Adler in his new office last week, on a day that coincidentally turned the Staatsoper (and Berlin’s musical politics) suddenly upside down, my first question was if his title meant either being an opera (stage) director or director of the company. “Neither,” Adler replied, enjoying the little perversities of the language as only a lifelong bilingual speaker can. A literal translation could mean either, and yet they are both wrong.
Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden
(On that note — this time a gastronomical diversion — machine translations are dangerous from German. We are, after all, in a country where my favorite guilty-pleasure food is Leberkäse, meaning liver cheese, although this bologna/meatloaf concoction has neither liver nor cheese in it.)
What Operndirektor is, Adler said, with a twinkle in his eye, is exactly what he was doing for decades at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where Berkeley Symphony’s Kent Nagano became music director a little more than a year ago. Did Adler have the same title there? No, he was head of Künstlerischen Betriebsbüro. Which means? “Artistic business administration.” Same as Operndirektor.
Both the language and the function are not easy to understand in the U.S. The job has to do with artist management, participating in programming, casting, hiring — together with the general director and music director — but in some cases, running the daily operation by himself. To simplify greatly, Adler said he is “the guy who makes sure when the curtain opens, there are the same number of singers on stage as called for in the score.”
It is, in fact (not that Adler complained about it), a harrowingly difficult job, especially as European houses have no regular cover singers, as is the case in San Francisco. There are hundreds of performances each season in European houses, too many to have substitutes. So people in Adler’s position must deal with crises such as finding a replacement in hours for, say, David Daniels when he realized he wasn’t well enough to perform in a Handel opera (who came to this realization a few hours before the curtain was to come up). Cancellation loomed large until Adler located, invited, and arranged the instant transportation (”we beamed her in”) of a young, unknown mezzo in Poland, who just happened to know the role. Curtain was delayed by a half an hour; the performance was a triumph.
Perhaps not every night, but with daunting frequency, the Operndirektor is faced with potential crisis management 24/7. It is a special, difficult, exciting position, requiring total knowledge of the operatic minefield, as well as good relations with everyone in a 500-mile radius. So that when the rabbit is pulled out of the hat, it’s the right rabbit (or close enough: mezzo for countertenor), within reach. Too bad What’s My Line? went off the air sometime in the last century — Adler could have been a great contestant there.
Adler is proud of his work as a manager, administrator, planner, and implementer, but he is startlingly candid about being a stage director, his first work. “I am not a particularly good director,” he said, and upon an incredulous request, he repeated that. Having worked many years as assistant to some of the greatest directors in Europe — Jean-Pierre Ponnelle was an idol for him and Adler Sr. (who made Ponnelle a virtual resident director at the War Memorial, and those were the good days) — Adler says he cannot compare with the “unique imagination and vision” of a generation of giants.
Daniel Barenboim
Just about this time, the phone rang, Adler answered, listened, ended the call, and smiled: “Hmmmm. On April 2! We were just talking about my father — that was his birthday.” The call was about an appointment on April 2 for Adler and Barenboim to meet with the Berlin city officials about allocating the funds that form the lion’s share for the city’s arts institutions. In spite of the fact that Berlin’s $32 billion budget has a $125 million surplus (after huge deficits following the enormous cost of reunification), the whip is cracked once again, and Berlin’s three (often program-duplicating) opera houses are being warned to cut back on expenses. Year after year the opera houses fight back, Barenboim threatens to resign, officials of the Deutsche Oper and the Komische Oper make noises — and then everything goes back to normal. Not this time.
What is that April 2 meeting about? “Probably what all the papers are saying today,” Adler says. If that turns out to be the case, Adler is about to tackle the most difficult job of his career. Apparently he will assist Barenboim, now facing the enormous task of moving the company out of the ancient building (more to be rescued from collapse than renovated), continue work in a smaller, temporary theater for three years (2011-2013), and then return to Lindenoper proper. In local terms, think of the 1995-1997 postquake reconstruction of the War Memorial Opera House, and the homeless company in the interim, but with a twist of then-general director Lotfi Mansouri leaving before the project occurs.
The general director in Berlin, Peter Mussbach, was told the day before my meeting with Adler that his contract will not be renewed beyond 2010, meaning that all the logistics of the move, the special programming and casting, and all the work will fall to a team to be led by Barenboim and Adler. (Mussbach, somewhat of a big spender, and the Opera’s chief financial director — a famously “prudent” bean counter — have been fighting each other for some time. They gave widely varied responses to the government request for budget cuts, and they will both be out by 2010, or before then.)
What has prepared Adler for the coming big challenge? Born in Chicago, where Papa Adler had his first American opera job after leaving his native Austria, the younger Adler was just a baby (but already bilingual) when the family arrived in San Francisco in 1943, where K.H.A. became chorus master at the invitation of Gaetano Merola. Ten years later, as Merola died on stage, Adler became head of the San Francisco company. Young Adler attended UC Berkeley, where he took music and history (”not very practical, I know”), quit to study theater in Cologne, returned to San Francisco State College for more theater and drama, but didn’t get a degree.
Having encountered K.H.A. myself, I’ve been trying to be diplomatic asking Adler what it was like growing up with the Opera’s temperamental, imperious, force-of-nature director as his father, so I mentioned how brilliant but “difficult” he could be. Adler like the word, and repeated it: “Difficult, yes.” And yet, there is genuine admiration in the way the son speaks of the father: “He had enormous energy, dedication, and brilliance. But rather than father running the Opera, it was the Opera running us (the family).”
How did they deal with that? “The best we could.” Young Adler departed for Europe, and lived there continuously from 1971, working first for the Stuttgart Opera, then — since 1973 — for the Bavarian State Opera. He kept in touch with K.H.A. (who later started a second family, and fathered children in his 70s), “and sometimes we met at European opera houses as colleagues.”
Adler — whose business is to find great new singers — is most impressed with his father’s “amazing ear.” He remembers many years ago Ponnelle telling his father about a young soprano he had just heard for the first time, and describing her because he didn’t know her name. Oh, sure, K.H.A. responded: “She sang the Fifth Maid — promising!” Adler of the opera today smiles with the memory: “That was Julia Varady.”
Is the younger Adler as “difficult” on the home front as his father? “I don’t think so, but then I don’t have his incredible intensity either. But music is in our family, too — with my job, my wife is a voice teacher, and two children (now pretty much on their own) who sang in the chorus even when they were very young. Perhaps the number of hours you spend with your children is not as important as making sure you are there when they need you, and that they know you love them.”
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
Explaining the mystery of the German opera system, a helpful reader writes:
Posted by Janos Gereben on April 2, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Story update on May 11, 2008 -
Leading employees of Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden wrote a letter to Mayor Klaus Wowereit demanding the immediate departure of the house director Peter Mussbach, the German news agency DPA reports.
Department heads of the opera house told Wowereit that Mussbach is no longer “tolerable” as the head of the Staatsoper, where Daniel Barenboim is the music director and chief conductor. Johannes Ehmann, the Staatsoper’s spokesman, declined to comment on the DPA report.
Berlin has already said it won’t renew Mussbach’s contract beyond 2010. Mussbach failed to agree with Georg Vierthaler, the Staatsoper’s departing managing director, on a business plan requested by the city in return for an extra subsidy of about 10 million euros ($15.3 million).
Mussbach, 58, has been director of the Staatsoper since 2002. His recent productions include Hans Werner Henze’s opera “Phaedra” and Pascal Dusapin’s “Faustus, the Last Night.”
Posted by Janos Gereben on May 11, 2008 at 8:58 am