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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      ‘The Opposite of Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Require Fewer Seats

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      Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

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      Elizabeth Banks Swears By Rob Reiner and Finger Sandwiches

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      The actress, Hollywood power player and host of a new sex and sexuality podcast discusses classic sitcoms, summer at Tanglewood and the revelation that is canned wine.“I’ve never met somebody who said, ‘Gosh, my parents talked to me about sex too much,’” Elizabeth Banks said.Banks, 47, an actress, writer, director and producer, is a mother to two boys. And as one of them neared puberty, she knew she would have to start talking soon. To prepare, she created “My Body, My Podcast,” an intimate, chatty series that Audible released on July 29. Its six episodes explore sex, sexuality, gender and body image with guests including Laverne Cox, Lindy West and Banks’s own mother. Peggy Orenstein stops in to discuss hookup culture; Jameela Jamil puts the diet industry on blast.Banks, speaking from Dalkey, Ireland, where she is shooting the comedy “Cocaine Bear,” refers to the podcast as her “continuing sex ed” and the most personal work she has ever created. Like all of her recent projects — the “Charlie’s Angels” reboot, the “Pitch Perfect” franchise, “Shrill” — “My Body, My Podcast” centers women’s stories, without apology. “I’m trying to be quietly revolutionary,” Banks said.Huddled in a cozy sweater and drinking a glass of warm tea with a few ice cubes tossed in — “They don’t have iced tea here. It’s not a thing,” she sighed — she discussed the art and ideas that influence her current work and the cultural experiences and artifacts that bring her pleasure. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Girls and Sex” and “Boys and Sex” by Peggy Orenstein These are books in which Peggy Orenstein interviews young people about all of their sexual experiences. I read “Girls and Sex” with my book club, and we were all a little bit devastated at how Peggy presented just how little fun any young women are having. It was a total wake-up call for me as a woman, as a parent, as an advocate and as an artist. It really inspired me to create “My Body, My Podcast.” Peggy followed it up with “Boys and Sex,” which I also read, which confirms that boys and men are desperate for connection and that the standards for them are just as insanely high as they are for girls and women.2. Female Athletes I was sporty as a kid. I’m a sporty person. I just celebrate every single woman who undeniably reaches the top of her field and then uses that platform to make the world better for the rest of us. For me, it started with Billie Jean King fighting for Title IX and pay equity. U.S. women’s soccer, Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Serena Williams. Even right now with the Olympics, these are women who are doing the absolute most and best with their female bodies. And yet those same bodies are still up for discussion and dissection.3. Tanglewood Tanglewood is a music venue in Lenox, Mass. I grew up in Pittsfield, a factory town just north of Lenox. Looking back, I can see how aspirational it was to go there as a kid. I got to listen to John Williams and the Boston Pops. It was fancy music for fancy people. True bliss for me is laying on the lawn on a warm summer night bathed in music, watching the stars with family and friends by my side.4. Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty” It was a favorite album of my aunt Barbara, Auntie Babs, who passed away during the early Covid lockdown. I started listening to honor her. She introduced me to that album on a road trip that she and I took together, and the album is all about a road trip. There’s a comforting feeling of nostalgia that I get listening to it.5. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens” is a book about the history of humanity across culture. As a woman and a feminist, this book was an important reminder that we, as humans, just kind of decided that birthing and caring for babies was not as important as selling cows, tilling land, using weapons. So women don’t amass any of that wealth and power. This book clarified for me why I feel so strongly in my bones that reproductive rights are the basis for women’s equality.6. “Stand by Me” I love Rob Reiner’s films. I aspire to a filmmaking career like his. This one is an incredible treatise on the damage of toxic masculinity, which were not words when this movie came out, and the obvious antidotes, which are connection, support, brotherly love. My husband and I are raising boys, and we want them to feel connected to us, to their family, to their friends, to nature and to appreciate every day. All of those lessons are in that film.7. Nia DaCosta and Chloé Zhao There is this Hollywood narrative about men who make a small personal film that goes to a festival and then immediately get the keys to the kingdom, the big Hollywood job. The continuing narrative is that women either don’t want those jobs or can’t handle those jobs. Nia DaCosta and Chloé Zhao just busted that narrative all up. They made their personal films, and they also got the big jobs. Chloe’s doing “Eternals”; Nia is doing “The Marvels.” They’re being allowed to have ambition, which is very tricky for women in any industry. It’s that blatant ambition that inspires me the most. I want that.8. High tea I’ve recently rediscovered it, here in Ireland. Growing up, I would go to Boston and have high tea with my great-aunts. For me, it’s a scone with clotted cream and jam, finger sandwiches, petit fours, English Breakfast tea with a little milk and a sugar cube dropped in with real silver tongs. It’s something I love doing no matter where I am in the world.9. Canned wine We do so much hiking, biking, trails, lakes, rivers. And I just don’t really love beer. But I do love wine. A can of wine in the cooler floating down the river? It was like light bulbs going off. I saw how canned wine fit into my life immediately upon being introduced to it.10. Classic sitcoms David Wain, the writer-director on “Wet Hot American Summer,” we’re working on a project together right now. We just started talking about our appreciation for well-crafted jokes, starting with “I Love Lucy” and Jackie Mason. A well-crafted joke and the ability to deliver it, and the timing, it’s just something that is top of my mind as an artist right now. “Friends,” “30 Rock”? Those guys were perfect. More

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      Lincoln Center Names Shanta Thake as its New Artistic Leader

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      Shanta Thake, a theater executive, faces challenges that include helping the center embrace new genres and attract virus-wary audiences.Feeling the pressure to attract new audiences and rethink its offerings even before being upended by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center announced on Tuesday that it had chosen a theater executive with a reputation for working across disciplines as its next artistic leader.Shanta Thake, most recently an associate artistic director at the Public Theater, will assume the role of chief artistic officer at the center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, as it works to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres such as hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.Thake — who at the Public spent a decade managing Joe’s Pub, a cabaret-style venue, and more recently began overseeing Under the Radar, Public Works and other programs there — said she was eager to bring more popular and world music to Lincoln Center.“The goal is expansive reach,” Thake, 41, said in an interview. “What’s missing? What have we left out? What stories aren’t we telling that feel like they’re demanding to be told in this moment?”Lincoln Center is the landlord of the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and other independent institutions, which are responsible for their own programming. But it is also a presenting organization in its own right, putting on hundreds of events each year and running the Mostly Mozart and White Light festivals, which have been primarily devoted to the classical arts. The center and its constituent organizations have competed, sometimes tensely, for rehearsal and performance space, ticket sales and donations.Thake will oversee the work Lincoln Center presents, and said in the interview that its robust classical offerings would be maintained. “We’re not looking to erase history here,” she said.But center officials say they are still working out the future of Mostly Mozart, which was put on hold amid the pandemic, other than a few small events this week. In 2017, as it grappled with budgetary constraints, the center dissolved the Lincoln Center Festival to focus on reinventing Mostly Mozart, its summertime sibling.Thake, who starts next month, replaces Jane Moss, who played a key role in programming for nearly three decades and stepped down as artistic director last year — and who also came from a theater background. (The chief artistic officer title is a new one.) Thake joins the center at one of the most challenging moments since it opened in 1962. Its woes predate the coronavirus: It struggled for years from leadership churn and money problems.Then the pandemic wiped away tens of millions in revenue and forced the cancellation of hundreds of events. About half of Lincoln Center’s staff of 400 was furloughed or laid off, and its top leaders took pay cuts.While many workers have been rehired and indoor performances are set to resume in the fall, the center will likely be grappling with the financial fallout for years. It remains to be seen whether audiences will return at prepandemic levels, especially given the recent spread of the Delta variant of the virus.Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said the organization had turned to Thake for her experience programming creatively across genres. “We wanted someone who could kind of help us think about some new territory,” he said.Timms said the virus would continue to pose a challenge for the center’s artistic ambitions, but added that he believed audiences were eager to return. “There will be a great deal of demand for what we do and there will be a great deal of re-imagination,” he said.As infections have eased in recent months and vaccines have become widely available, Lincoln Center has started to come back to life, building several outdoor stages and transforming its plaza into a summer gathering place by covering it in a synthetic lawn. When indoor performances resume, the center plans to require vaccines for audience members, production staff and artists. Children under 12 will not be permitted to attend performances since they are currently not eligible for vaccines.Thake said she saw her mission as, in part, to “lift up the city that is still reeling from the ongoing trauma” of the pandemic. She said Lincoln Center could play a role in helping smaller arts organizations, for example by sharing best practices for reopening venues.“Hopefully we can make it to the other side all together,” she said.Thake, whose mother is Indian and whose father is white, said she was committed to presenting artists who represent a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Cultural institutions have in general been slow to respond to demands for a reckoning over racial justice in the United States. But Lincoln Center is one of the few arts organizations to show substantial progress in bringing more diversity to its upper ranks. People of color now make up about half of its leadership team. More

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      As New York Reopens, It Looks for Culture to Lead the Way

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      Broadway is planning to start performances of at least three dozen shows before the end of the year, but producers do not know if there will be enough tourists — who typically make up two-thirds of the audience — to support all of them.The Metropolitan Opera is planning a September return, but only if its musicians agree to pay cuts.And New York’s vaunted nightlife scene — the dance clubs and live venues that give the city its reputation for never sleeping — has been stymied by the slow, glitchy rollout of a federal aid program that mistakenly declared some of the city’s best-known nightclub impresarios to be dead.The return of arts and entertainment is crucial to New York’s economy, and not just because it is a major industry that employed some 93,500 people before the pandemic and paid them $7.4 billion in wages, according to the state comptroller’s office. Culture is also part of the lifeblood of New York — a magnet for visitors and residents alike that will play a key role if the city is to remain vital in an era when shops are battling e-commerce, the ease of remote work has businesses rethinking the need to stay in central business districts and the exurbs are booming.“What is a city without social, cultural and creative synergies?” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo asked earlier this year in an address on the importance of the arts to the city’s recovery. “New York City is not New York without Broadway. And with Zoom, many people have learned they can do business from anywhere. Compound this situation with growing crime and homelessness and we have a national urban crisis.”When “Springsteen on Broadway” opened its doors again in June, the fans flocked back. George Etheredge for The New York TimesAnd Mayor Bill de Blasio — who could seem indifferent to the arts earlier in his tenure — has become a cultural cheerleader in the waning days of his administration, starting a $25 million program to put artists back to work, creating a Broadway vaccination site for theater industry workers and planning a “homecoming concert” in Central Park next month featuring Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson and Paul Simon to herald the city’s return.Eli Dvorkin, editorial and policy director at the Center for an Urban Future, said, “The way I look at it, there is not going to be a strong recovery for New York City without the performing arts’ leading the way.” He added, “People gravitate here because of the city’s cultural life.”There are signs of hope everywhere, as vaccinated New Yorkers re-emerge this summer. Destinations like the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum are crowded again, although timed reservations are still required. Bruce Springsteen is playing to sold-out crowds on Broadway and Foo Fighters brought rock back to Madison Square Garden.Shakespeare in the Park and the Classical Theater of Harlem are staging contemporary adaptations of classic plays in city parks, the Park Avenue Armory, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and a number of commercial Off Broadway theaters have been presenting productions indoors, and a new outdoor amphitheater is drawing crowds for shows on Little Island, the new Hudson River venue.Haley Gibbs, 25, an administrative aide who lives in Brooklyn, said she felt the city’s pulse returning as she waited to attend “Drunk Shakespeare,” an Off Off Broadway fixture that has resumed performances in Midtown.“I feel like it’s our soul that’s been given back to us, in a way,” Gibbs said, “which is super dramatic, but it is kind of like that.”But some of the greatest tests for the city’s cultural scene lie ahead.Hunkering down — cutting staff, slashing programming — turned out to be a brutal but effective survival strategy. Arts workers faced record unemployment, and some have yet to return to work, but many businesses and organizations were able to slash expenses and wait until it was safe to reopen. Now that it’s time to start hiring and spending again, many cultural leaders are worried: Can they thrive with fewer tourists and commuters? How much will safety protocols cost? Will the donors who stepped up during the emergency stick around for a less glamorous period of rebuilding?“Next year may prove to be our most financially challenging,” said Bernie Telsey, one of the three artistic directors at MCC Theater, an Off Broadway nonprofit. “In many ways, it’s like a start-up now — it’s not just turning the lights on. Everything is a little uncertain. It’s like starting all over again.”The fall season is shaping up to be the big test. “Springsteen on Broadway” began last month, but the rest of Broadway has yet to resume: The first post-shutdown play, a drama about two existentially trapped Black men called “Pass Over,” is to start performances Aug. 4, while the first musicals are aiming for September, starting with “Hadestown” and “Waitress,” followed by war horses that include “The Lion King,” “Chicago,” “Wicked” and “Hamilton.”Many of Broadway’s biggest hits will reopen in September.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe looming question is whether there will be enough theatergoers to support all those shows. Although there have been signs that some visitors are returning to the city, tourism is not expected to rebound to its prepandemic levels for four years. So some of the returning Broadway shows will initially start with reduced schedules — performing fewer than the customary eight shows a week — as producers gauge ticket demand.And “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a big-budget, Tony-winning play that was staged in two parts before the pandemic, will be cut down to a single show when it returns to Broadway on Nov. 12; its producers cited “the commercial challenges faced by the theater and tourism industries emerging from the global shutdowns.”“What we need to do, which has never been done before, is open all of Broadway over a single season,” said Tali Pelman, the lead producer of “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Safety protocols have been changing rapidly, as more people get vaccinated, but there is still apprehension about moving too fast. In Australia, reopened shows have periodically been halted by lockdowns, while in England, several shows have been forced to cancel performances to comply with isolation protocols that some view as overly restrictive.“On a fundamental level, our health is at stake,” said Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” which is planning to resume performances on Broadway on Sept. 14. “You get this wrong, and we open too soon, and then we re-spike and we close again — that’s almost unthinkable.”Some presenters worry that, with fewer tourists, arts organizations will be battling one another to win the attention of New Yorkers and people from the region.The tourism drawn by Broadway is an essential part of the restaurant and bar economy in Midtown.George Etheredge for The New York TimesWill audiences return in the same numbers as prior to the pandemic is a question that producers are pondering. George Etheredge for The New York Times“There’s going to be a lot of competition for a smaller audience at the beginning, and that’s scary,” said Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout Theater Company, a nonprofit that operates three theaters on Broadway and two Off Broadway.Another looming challenge: concerns about public safety. Bystanders were struck by stray bullets during shooting incidents in Times Square in May and June, prompting Mayor de Blasio to promise additional officers to protect and reassure the public in that tourist-and-theater-dense neighborhood.The city’s tourism organization, NYC & Company, has developed a $30 million marketing campaign to draw visitors back to the city. The Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, is planning its own campaign. The Tony Awards are planning a fall special on CBS that will focus on performances in an effort to boost ticket sales. And comeback come-ons are finding their way into advertising: “We’ve been waiting for you,” “Wicked” declares in a direct mail piece.The economic stakes for the city are high. Broadway shows give work to actors and singers and dancers and ushers, but also, indirectly, to waiters and bartenders and hotel clerks and taxi drivers, who then go on to spend a portion of their paychecks on goods and services. The Broadway League says that during the 2018-2019 season Broadway generated $14.7 billion in economic activity and supported 96,900 jobs, when factoring in the direct and indirect spending of tourists who cited Broadway as a major reason for visiting the city.“We’ve pushed through a really tough time, and now you have this new variant, which is kind of scary, but I still hope we’re on the right track,” said Shane Hathaway, the co-owner of Hold Fast, a Restaurant Row bar and eatery whose website asks “Do you miss the Performing Arts?? So do we!!” “We’re already seeing a lot more tourists than last year,” Hathaway said, “and my hope is that we continue.”The Metropolitan Museum of Art on a  Saturday in July. It reopened last August on a reduced schedule and officials there say the visitor count has dropped.George Etheredge for The New York TimesAt the tourist-dependent Met Museum, attendance is back, but not all the way: it’s now open five days a week, and has drawn 10,000 people many days, while before the pandemic it was open seven days a week and averaged 14,000 daily visitors. Plus: more of the visitors now are local, and they don’t have to pay admission; the Met continues to project a $150 million revenue loss due to the pandemic.If the Met, the largest museum in the country, is struggling, that means smaller arts institutions are hurting even more, particularly those outside Manhattan, which tend to have less foot traffic and fewer big donors. The Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, is trying to recover from a pandemic period without when it lost millions in revenue, reduced staff and had to raid its endowment to pay the bills.The city’s music scene has faced its own challenges — from the diviest bars to nightclubs to the plush Metropolitan Opera.According to a study commissioned by the mayor’s office, some 2,400 concert and entertainment venues in New York City supported nearly 20,000 jobs in 2016. But the sector has had a hard time.Many are waiting to see if they will get help from a $16 billion federal grant fund intended to preserve music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses devastated by the pandemic. But the rollout of the program, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, has been slow and bumpy. Some owners, including Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York, were initially denied aid because the program mistakenly believed they were dead.Elsewhere, a music and arts space with a 1,600-person capacity in the heart of hipster Brooklyn, cut its staff from 120 people to 5 when the pandemic arrived. After the state lifted restrictions on smaller venues in June, it reopened and began hiring back some workers, but its owners fear it could take a year or two to return to profitability.The bar at Elsewhere on a July Saturday in New York.George Etheredge for The New York TimesMore party people packed in at Elsewhere.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe club got help in the form of a $4.9 million shuttered venue grant from the federal government, which it said would be used to pay its debts — including for rent, utilities, and loans — and to fix up the space and pay staff. “Every dollar will be used just to dig ourselves out from Covid,” said one of the venue’s partners, Dhruv Chopra.And the Met Opera is still not sure if it can raise its gilded curtain in September, as planned, after the longest shutdown in its history. The company, which lost $150 million in earned revenues during the pandemic, recently struck deals to cut the pay of its choristers, soloists and stagehands. The company is now in tense negotiations with the musicians in its orchestra, who were furloughed without pay for nearly a year. If they fail to reach a deal, the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, risks missing being part of the initial burst of reopening energy.Some cultural leaders are already looking past the fall, at the challenge of sustaining demand for tickets after the initial enthusiasm of reopening fades.“We have a lot of work to do to make sure that people know that we’re open,” said Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions, “to make people comfortable coming in, to keep the shows solid, and to get through the holidays and get through the winter.”Laura Zornosa contributed reporting. More

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      17 New York Arts Organizations Are Among Those Receiving $30 Million

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      The Queens Museum, Harlem Stage and 44 other groups were chosen to receive aid from Bloomberg Philanthropies for digital innovation.The Queens Museum is among 46 cultural nonprofit organizations selected for a new $30 million program by Bloomberg Philanthropies that is intended to support improving technology at the groups and helping them stabilize and thrive in the wake of the pandemic. A Bloomberg Tech Fellow is being appointed at each organization, the philanthropies announced Tuesday.Heryte Tequame, assistant director of communications and digital projects at the museum, was chosen as its fellow in what is known as the Digital Accelerator program and will be in charge of developing a digital project of her choice. In an interview she said that in 2020, the museum “realized where we needed to expand our capacity and invest more.”“I think now we’re really taking the time to see what we can do that has longevity,” Tequame said. “And not just being responsive, but really being proactive and having a real future-facing strategy.”The organizations don’t know exactly how much of the $30 million each will receive yet, but Tequame said she wants to use at least some of it on the museum’s permanent collection.Another recipient, Harlem Stage, selected Deirdre May, senior director of digital content and marketing, as its tech fellow.That performing arts center — which largely focuses on artists of color — aims to use the assistance in part to increase accessibility, Patricia Cruz, its chief executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “People who cannot leave their homes, for example, would be able to see some of the finest artistic performances that could be made,” Cruz said, because “that’s the core of what we do.”The 46 organizations selected for the program include nonprofits in the United States and Britain. Among them are 26 in the United States, and 17 of those are in New York City, including the Apollo Theater, the Ghetto Film School and the Tenement Museum. The chief executive of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Patricia E. Harris, said in a statement that when the pandemic hit, cultural organizations had to get creative to keep their (virtual) doors open.“Now we’re excited to launch the Accelerator program to help more arts organizations sustain innovations and investments,” Harris said, “and strengthen tech and management practices that are key to their long-term success.”As Cruz from Harlem Stage put it, “We’re ready to be accelerated.” More

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      BAM’s Fall Season Kicks Off With a Beach Opera

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      “Sun & Sea,” which won top honors at the Venice Biennale in 2019, will make its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.The Brooklyn Academy of Music is bringing the beach to you.The star of its fall season, announced Thursday, is a theatrical installation — a surreal opera set at an indoor imitation beach — that paints a portrait of sunbather tranquillity with menacing undercurrents (did you catch the aria about a boyfriend drowning in the ocean?). The production, “Sun & Sea,” which will open at BAM Fisher and run for two weeks before touring the country, won the top prize when it debuted in the Lithuanian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. This will be the American premiere.“It’s an incredible spectacle,” David Binder, BAM’s artistic director who saw it in Venice, said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “The beachgoers are just passing the day away as things are coming to an end.”Those attending will watch from a 360-degree balcony as 13 singers and approximately 25 local community members who act as beachgoers scroll on their phones, play cards and fill in Sudoku puzzles. In Venice, lines stretched down the canal and around the piazza to see it. In a New York Times review of that installation, Joshua Barone wrote that the opera, created by the filmmaker and director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the writer Vaiva Grainyte and the artist and composer Lina Lapelyte, has a “haunting simplicity that insinuates itself into your memory and, possibly, your opinions.” The audience watched from above on the upstairs mezzanine of a warehouse, he wrote, “as if observing animals at a zoo or creatures under a microscope.”“Within a single hour of dangerously gentle melodies, it manages to animate a panoramic cast of characters whose stories coalesce into a portrait of an apocalyptic climate crisis that goes down as easily as a trip to the beach,” Barone wrote.The fall season continues with creations by artists from Japan, Brazil and Portugal, all of them New York premieres.Later in September, the Japanese sound artist ASUNA will perform his site-specific sound installation, “100 Keyboards,” in which the same note is simultaneously played and sustained on 100 battery-operated toy keyboards arranged in a circle, creating waves of overlapping notes until they climax to what BAM calls “a singular resonant reverberation.”In October, the Portuguese playwright-actor Tiago Rodrigues will stage his collaborative theater experiment “By Heart,” in which 10 audience members are asked to memorize a poem. It will be his first performance in the United States since being appointed the next director of France’s Avignon Festival, the storied annual arts festival that turns the city into a giant theater each July.“The theme is that if we can remember words or texts by heart, they can never be taken away, or suppressed, or censored, or destroyed,” Binder said. “It’s very simple, but also deeply political.”It will be followed in November by the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll’s dance piece “Cria.” Ripoll and the 10-member group Suave, an all-Black company that includes transgender performers, will mix funk, samba and break dance with passinho, the dance craze that grew out of Rio’s favelas, in the company’s first United States performance. It is billed as an experience that “relocates the wild exuberance of adolescence.”While BAM typically announces its fall season all at once, Binder said that, this year, additional programs will be announced on a rolling basis as details are finalized.“There’s just a huge appetite, I think, for artistic adventures right now,” he said. “And I’m so excited to see how artists respond to that hunger.” More

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      The ‘Prince of Opera’ Bids Munich Farewell

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      The charismatic and canny Nikolaus Bachler, who has kept the Bavarian State Opera a world capital of music theater, is stepping down.MUNICH — Half an hour before the opening of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” Nikolaus Bachler took a final stroll backstage.Bachler — who has run the Bavarian State Opera here since 2008, during which time it has been the world’s opera capital for artists and audiences alike — stopped by the dressing room of his Isolde, Anja Harteros, asking whether she had slept well the night before. With a traditional “toi toi toi,” he wished her good luck.He waited to check in on Jonas Kaufmann, who was singing Tristan, because through the door he heard the conductor Kirill Petrenko — the company’s music director during much of Bachler’s tenure and a crucial ingredient of his success — giving some last-minute notes.Then more blown kisses and “toi toi toi” wishes, and Bachler took a seat in his box alongside the proscenium. He looked out at the audience, which, though dotted with chessboard-like spaces for social distancing, was as full as possible after a year of uncertainty about capacity and closures. The lights dimmed. Petrenko stepped onto the podium; paused briefly, as if in prayer; and gestured for the first note.By the opening night of “Tristan und Isolde,” the opera house was able to fill about half of its seats because of coronavirus safety measures.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesWith that, the end of an era began. The house that Bachler built with Petrenko — one of artistic excellence, destination programming and, during the pandemic, fearless advocacy — will soon undergo a major shift. “Tristan” is the last new production for Petrenko, who is now the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Bachler’s tenure concludes with this year’s Munich Opera Festival, an end-of-season marathon that has adopted the bittersweet theme “Wendende Punkte”: “Turning Points.”In the fall, the house will be managed by Serge Dorny, most recently chief of the Lyon Opera in France, and under the baton of Vladimir Jurowski. Many of Bachler’s artistic and administrative colleagues will leave, some following him to his new post, running the Salzburg Easter Festival.“We are now looking into a future that is maybe less, shall we say, written,” Kaufmann said in an interview. “You see the list of international stars — compared with not only the house’s history, but other houses of this rank — and Bachler somehow made it into one that everyone wished to be a part of.”The tenor Jonas Kaufmann, left, with the soprano Anja Harteros in “Tristan.”Wilfried HöslAudiences, too, were eager. Before the pandemic, the company’s ticket sales hovered around 98 percent capacity. Wolfgang Heubisch, the Bavarian culture minister during Bachler’s early years in Munich, said that the house was an important contributor to the city’s economy, and that “we as an audience were always excited about the next performance.” (The company is supported by extravagant government subsidies, in 2019 to the tune of 71.8 million euros, or $85.2 million, from Bavaria and the city of Munich — nearly two-thirds of its budget.)“You can sum it up in a nutshell,” Heubisch added. “Nikolaus Bachler was a true stroke of luck for Munich and the State Opera.”It is rare for the leader of an opera company to be described in these terms. In Paris and New York, for example, such managers have recently been openly criticized by colleagues and embroiled in labor disputes. Elsewhere, they may be respected, but are seldom described with the loving language that singers, directors and others use for Bachler. But he is confident it’s time for change.“You shouldn’t stay too long,” said Bachler, who is 70 but has the appearance and energy of someone much younger. “I got a lot of offers for other opera houses, but it was clear for me not to go into another big institution.”By departing now, he can look back on his achievements without feeling like he ended stuck in routine, which he considers “against art.” He is proud of his insistence on marrying the prestige of directors and singers, with high-profile names from top to bottom on most billings and small roles taken by a superb ensemble of rising artists.Bachler gained the respect of directors by not interfering too much in their work. (“My job is to take the consequences and learn from the failures,” he said.) And he won over the world’s most important singers with a personality that they have described as nurturing, honest and committed. For example, he made the Bavarian State Opera the home company of Kaufmann, who despite being raised and trained in Munich had only sung a handful of times in the house before Bachler joined.When they first met, Kaufmann recalled, Bachler asked why he didn’t want to sing in Munich. “On the contrary,” Kaufmann responded, “I would love to.” He just wasn’t getting any work there under Peter Jonas — Bachler’s predecessor, whose risk-taking laid the groundwork for what followed — and Kaufmann eventually moved to Zurich.Bachler changed that, quickly casting Kaufmann in a variety of parts, including his sensational role debut as Wagner’s “Lohengrin” alongside Harteros in 2009. Since then, Kaufmann said, “I believe we haven’t gone a year without a new opening, and Klaus has been there to help and support me.”The baritone Christian Gerhaher described Bachler as “the prince of opera”; Dmitri Tcherniakov, who directed this season’s new production of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” called him “the king of Munich”; and the soprano Marlis Petersen, onstage this summer in “Salome,” said he was “the Ariadne thread” running through each production.Among those who believe in Bachler the most may be Petrenko, a publicity-shy conductor with a monastic style, who said in an email that Bachler “is living proof that trust is possible in our profession.”Kirill Petrenko, the music director during much of Bachler’s tenure, has been an essential ingredient of the house’s success.Wilfried HöslThe two met in the late 1990s, when Bachler was at the Volksoper in Vienna. Petrenko had come recommended by an agent and was brought on as an assistant conductor. Bachler was stunned by his talent, and they developed an odd-couple relationship — Bachler the charismatic public face and Petrenko happy to let his work speak for itself.When Bachler started at the Bavarian State Opera, he prioritized bringing in Petrenko as a guest and scheduled a run of Janacek’s “Jenufa” for him. Later, when Kent Nagano’s contract was set to expire, Bachler persuaded Petrenko to become the company’s music director, even though at the time, having held a similar post at the Komische Oper in Berlin, the conductor was ready to be a freelancer.Petrenko has routinely drawn the loudest applause after performances — even during a 2018 run of “Parsifal,” when he was bowing alongside stars like Kaufmann, Gerhaher and the soprano Nina Stemme. In a news conference before his final season, he said, “My time here was and will be the highest thing that can happen to an artist.”If Bachler appears to charm everyone in his orbit, it may come from his background as an actor. (That’s also his guess for why he has enjoyed such success as an administrator: He approaches the job from the perspective of an artist.) Born to a middle-class family in Austria, and raised in a musical home, he took an early liking to theater — sometimes acting out Catholic Mass as if he were a priest.He thought he would study medicine, but on a lark applied to the Max Reinhardt Seminar for acting in Vienna and was accepted. His career as a performer took him to a troubled theater in Berlin, where he was vocal about how it could improve. So he was asked to be its artistic director.“I said yes because for me it was like acting,” Bachler said. “My new role was ‘the artistic director.’”More administrative work followed, including as the leader of the Vienna Festival, the Volksoper and the Vienna Burgtheater. From that distinguished playhouse, he returned to opera in Munich.Tcherniakov said that “as a true actor, he virtuously uses different masks to communicate.” And Bachler believes that he still approaches his job from that angle.“I feel I am the last inheritance of Molière,” he said. “I would go home and steal my mother’s chair if I needed it onstage.”Bachler backstage after “Tristan,” where he congratulated the cast between their curtain call bows.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBachler runs his house with subtle command. Observed over the first week of the festival, when his workdays can easily stretch beyond 12 hours, his meetings were conversational yet efficient and never ran more than a half-hour. He wandered through the building for check-ins because, he said, it’s best to not wait until problems arise to solve them, and while “in a meeting people don’t ask so much, in front of the toilet they are much more honest.”Before the “Tristan” opening, he gave a brief address to donors, and he hosted politicians and power brokers in his box over Champagne and canapés during the first intermission. During the second act, he took a short break in his office; more socializing would come in the next intermission.Despite the hectic schedule, Bachler’s job can be lonely. He said that he thinks often of when Germany once won the World Cup. The broadcast was full of fireworks and the players celebrating — but then the camera panned to the team’s famed coach, Franz Beckenbauer, walking alone on the field.“This is exactly what I feel,” Bachler said. “I have a lot of closeness with people, but it’s always about work. You have to accept it.”But that closeness became truly familial during the pandemic. Bachler never accepted closure as an option, first by continuing rehearsals for Marina Abramovic’s project “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” even when Abramovic’s hotel closed and she was put up in Kaufmann’s apartment near the theater.Then the company started putting on “Montagsstücke,” which amounted to weekly variety shows — chamber performances and even a reading by Bachler — broadcast from the empty theater.“Suddenly,” he said, “there was so much energy in the house, and so much value in the work.”Eventually, orchestra, singers and staff were able to gather in large enough numbers to livestream new productions without an audience. All the while, Bachler was working with physicians and scientists on research — including a study showing that with safety measures in place, zero coronavirus cases could be traced to the house — that he took to politicians in an effort to bring back traditional programming as soon as possible.“Bachler,” Gerhaher said, “was a wonderful defender of the arts in these horrible times.”Bachler said his job, while busy, can also be lonely. “You have to accept it.”Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBachler is already at work on fund-raising for his debut season in Salzburg. He also had a hand in the succession plan for the Bavarian State Opera, initially assembling the team of Jurowski and Barrie Kosky, who is concluding his tenure at the Komische Oper. In the end, Kosky chose to go freelance.His appointment in Salzburg caused a minor scandal in the classical world; the Easter Festival’s administrators brought Bachler on while also pushing out the conductor Christian Thielemann. The two will share leadership duties for the 2022 edition, which Bachler said has not been as awkward as people might expect: “All these intrigue things, they vanish immediately when you start to work.”His impact in Salzburg — which will coincide with a return to Vienna, where he has friends and family — won’t be fully seen until 2023. Some familiar faces will appear, like Kaufmann. But he also plans to bring a different orchestra-in-residence every year, a break from tradition, and perhaps to integrate the Felsenreitschule venue (a stalwart of the older and far larger Salzburg summer festival) and add dance to the programming.“I like the idea of going from this huge thing to 10 days,” Bachler said. “How to make, in such a short time, an identity, and what I can do if I can concentrate only on this.”But first, he still has to get through his final Munich Festival — including another new production, of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” and a star-studded, livestreamed farewell concert.And “Tristan.” After Harteros sang the closing “Liebestod” on opening night, Bachler rushed backstage, congratulating the performers between their curtain call bows. He smiled at Petrenko, and the two hugged.“It was quite a good finale,” Bachler whispered into the conductor’s ear.“No,” Petrenko responded. “It was a turning point.” More