City Opera History

Founded in 1943, New York City Opera, dubbed “the people’s opera” by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, was seen as the alternative to the high-class and high-priced Metropolitan Opera. City Opera operated with a fraction of the budget of the Met, and was interested in developing the work of new American composers and singers, and often used it’s stature to prove it made the better platform for these works. Behind the scenes, management struggled for many years, with strong artistic voices combatting the purse strings of the board of directors, and it wasn’t until the late 1950’s, with the appointment of Julius Rudel to the role of general director, that City Opera saw it’s designations as “one of the leading opera companies in the US”. Over the
Rudel, Ms. Sills held the position of lead soprano in the opera company for the 22 years Mr. Rudel was in charge, and became the general director upon his retirement. By former board members, Ms. Sills’ tenure is often looked back as on as the golden years of management for City Opera; Robert Wilson, former chairmen of the board, remembered “Beverly's arrival [as] the start of a new era, that she would manage the company well”. She used her history with the company, and with it’s audience, to alleviate a $6 million deficit, and leave behind $3 million upon her retirement, but “nobody else could hope to duplicate her fund-raising success – Sills was the very face of American opera; the donors who coughed up for New York City Opera were giving money to her.” Ms. Sills retired from City Opera’s management in 1989, after a decade-long tenure at its helm, and there hasn’t been a financial upswing for the company
To appeal to the millennial mindset, and potential new and small donors, they opened a Kickstarter campaign to raise 1 of the $7 million needed to keep doors open for just September. It seems they chose Kickstarter due to its “cachet among a certain young and affluent demographic, a group that arts organizations struggle to reach”. However, they failed to reach that audience of “young, solvent donors” and the campaign failed, reaching only $300,000, less than half of its goal. The issues with using Kickstarter are two-fold; most Kickstarter campaigns recognize contributions by offering a physical gift in kind, whether it be a pre-release copy of a film or video game or new software, which makes using this medium to simply fundraise for the longevity of a company quite difficult. The other conflict, and this one is more important given the motto of the City Opera being that they are “of the people”, and more specifically of the people of New York, is that Kickstarter campaigns are appealing for their broad reach, their national, even global scale. Platforms like Kickstarter, whether they be IndieGoGo or GoFundMe, aren’t designed to cultivate local philanthropy, which is what the focus of the City Opera campaign should have remained. The reality of the situation is