Opening Session and Keynote Address

Our Opening Session and Keynote Address kicked off the first full day of conference programming. It was exciting to see an enormous ballroom packed with our conferees ready and eager to begin.

Bob Heuer, general director of Florida Grand Opera, started us off by welcoming all of the conferees to Miami and thanking all of us: conferees, Florida Grand Opera staff and volunteers, and OPERA America staff for planning, facilitating, and attending the conference.

Charles MacKay, general director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, made a brief speech in Spanish (with projected titles in English!) and then focused (in English) on the state of the industry in general, including the ideas of lowering costs to patrons in contrast to and in conjunction with increasing interest in patrons, finding ways to make opera companies more welcoming to both artists and patrons, and how opera companies — on a national level — can embrace innovations developed by individual companies in order to strengthen both opera companies and opera as a whole. He asked each of us to think about how our work can improve both our opera company and opera as a whole.

Marc A. Scorca, president and CEO of OPERA America, also made a short speech in a language other than English — this time the language was French. He then focused briefly (once again in English) on how Canada welcomes diversity through bi- and multilingualism, citing playbills that include French, English, and Mandarin texts. Then he brought us around to an idea presented by Malcom Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: “thin slicing.” As per Malcom Gladwell’s Web site, thin slicing “says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience.” By telegraphing conflicting messages to the public, i.e.: programs to draw in an audience with lower-priced tickets contrasted with special privileges for high-status donors, we might give people unfamiliar with opera an opportunity to make an inaccurate assumption based on a thin slice.

The Keynote Speaker, composer Osvaldo Golijov, asked us to think of opera as a forum for a communal lament and prayer. That opera can allow everything of importance to be transformed into music and song. That opera cannot solve all of the world’s problems but that it can help us to make sense of personal and interpersonal (planetary) conflict. That if opera is as meaningful a medium today as it was a hundreds of years ago then we should recognize that opera encompasses the entire range of human emotion and has explored these emotions fully. That opera can both transform and memorialize human emotions. That opera is the past, the present, and a testimony to the future. That opera is not for pleasure only, but there is possibility in this transcendental work. As one of our conferees was overheard to say, “He’s like a holy man.” Wow.