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Clash hastened Opera Boston’s demise

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January 15, 2012|By Geoff Edgers

Nobody knows exactly what general director Lesley Koenig (above) did to… (ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR THE BOSTON…)

They met late one October afternoon in 2011 in the lobby of the Westin Copley Place Hotel. Randolph Fuller, the millionaire opera aficionado who helped found Opera Boston in 2003, wanted to tell Jim Marko, only six weeks in as development director, that the company was being led on a doomed path.

Fuller’s target: General director Lesley Koenig, the former Metropolitan Opera staffer just 9 months into her job. She was “incompetent,’’ Fuller steamed, and he would have nothing to do with her.

Marko felt shaken. The company’s biggest donor wanted Opera Boston’s leader out. And over the next two months, Fuller backed up his words by withdrawing much of his financial support. That, along with poor ticket sales and the failure to score a $250,000 grant, led to the demise of Opera Boston, only months after the Pulitzer Prize for Music was awarded to composer Zhou Long for “Madame White Snake,’’ a production commissioned and premiered by the company.

Just before Christmas, the remaining members of Opera Boston’s fractured board announced the company would close, leaving ticket-buyers, arts leaders and even Mayor Tom Menino stunned and angry.

“Why do we find out one day they’re done?’’ Menino told the Globe. “Where is the leadership within the organization and why hadn’t they gone out and asked for help on this?’’

The leadership, it turns out, determined that the opera company couldn’t recover from losing its biggest booster. As weeks passed, Opera Boston’s deficit grew from about $250,000 in July to $500,000 by Christmas. With an expensive February production scheduled, “The Midsummer Marriage,’’ the board projected that the debt load would burgeon to more than $1 million - an unsustainable burden for an organization with a roughly $2.5 million budget.

Marko, the development director, offers a somewhat different account; it wasn’t debt that did Opera Boston in, he says, it was dysfunction. The only hope was a complete overhaul of the company’s board structure and its financing, he said, so Opera Boston would not be so reliant on a few key donors like Fuller, board chairman Winifred Perkin Gray, and board president Gregory Bulger.

“This happened for two reasons,’’ said Marko. “A board that didn’t understand governance and Randolph’s antipathy toward Lesley. It’s a dangerous situation when your three major donors are also in charge.’’

Financial troubles

Koenig’s tenure started with promise last January.

She succeeded founding general director Carole Charnow, who left in 2010 to become director of the Children’s Museum. Charnow knew very little about opera until she met Fuller in the 1990s. He gave her recordings, took her to the Metropolitan Opera and became a treasured adviser.