Beverly Sills Talks About The Arts, Ideals, and Reality

By Barbara Jepson

When Beverly Sills was general manager of the New York City Opera, she hosted some of the most expensive breakfasts in town—breakfasts and other activities that helped bring over $50 million into the company’s coffers during her decade-long tenure.

As chairman of Lincoln Center’s board of directors, effective last June, she faces a more daunting challenge: making policy decisions and raising more than $16 million a year in funds for the complex, which presents or produces over 300 performances annually, at a time when the arts in America face numerous hurdles. Despite explosive growth since the 1950s in the number of regional opera companies, symphony orchestras, theaters, chamber-music series, and dance companies, arts education in most public schools has been curtailed or eliminated, arts presenters are grappling with rising costs and dwindling audiences, and the very existence of the National Endowment for the Arts has come under persistent, virulent attack.

“We used to be fair-minded people,” says Sills during an interview in her sunny ninth-floor office overlooking Lincoln Center. “Now we’re so ready to pounce on what we feel is a difference in philosophy or belief.” On her mind was the uproar last spring over a $150 grant—part of a $104,000 subsidy to the Walker Arts Center—to a performance artist who made small, ritualistic cuts into the back of an associate and blotted the blood on paper towels. “It was a disproportionate fuss,” declares the former coloratura soprano, “in relation to all the other ways in which our tax dollars are misspent. I remember when [it was reported that] the Defense Department was paying something like $750 for toilet seats and $350 for ashtrays. That was certainly a misuse of my tax money . . . but I don’t recall any Senators stepping forward and saying, ‘The Defense Department must be punished—we’re going to cut its funding.”‘

The assaults on the Endowment have occurred at a time when competition for the philanthropic dollar is greater than ever. “When I first started fundraising for the New York City Opera in 1979,” recalls Sills, “you were basically competing with other arts organizations, and the money was available. You had to do a song and dance to get it, but it was there. Today, you approach a corporation to ask for money and they ask, ‘How can I think about an opera or a ballet when I have young people in my company who have died of AIDS’’ And it’s hard to answer that . . . because at New York City Opera, we’ve had so many young people die of AIDS, too. Look at New York City—not only do you have AIDS, you have homelessness, crack babies, drugs, crime, and a whole bunch of other chronic problems that affect every major city and smaller ones as well.”

In this environment, some arts institutions are refocusing their programming with the bottom line clearly in view. For example, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, long a place to encounter emerging and established classical artists at affordable prices, has expanded its lecture series, pop-music concerts, and more readily fundable community-service projects at the expense of classical music. Not only has the Y’s number of classical concerts declined, but its highly regarded New York Chamber Symphony has been spun off as an independent entity, which will have to fend for itself in a few years when the financial umbilical cord is cut for good. Reasons cited in a New York Times article last fall include the cost of presenting the Chamber Symphony series, which covers only one-third of its expenses in ticket sales but consumes 40 percent of the Y’s classical budget. The Y’s priorities, the article indicates, “now dictate that cultural offerings not drain the budget for community services.”

Sills, who helped raise over $1 million in a single benefit for AIDS with IBM chairman Louis Gerstner, Jr., a few years ago, is also talking about community service. “We’ve got to show this city’s children,” she says, “that music, theater, and dance do not belong only to those with wealth—they belong to everyone.” Although unable to announce specific plans for Lincoln Center when this interview took place, the redheaded Brooklyn native outlines her preliminary objectives in broad strokes. “I‘d like to make arts centers like this one more user-friendly to the young,” she says. “I want to have more children come here on a regular basis. I don’t want it to be a one-shot deal, where momma dresses them up and puts them on a bus. I’m going to try hard to get the arts back into the New York City public school system.”

Sills sees the arts as both personally and socially beneficial to the young. “Do I think,” she queries, “that taking a drug addict or teenage alcoholic to the symphony a couple of times is going to change them? No, I don’t. . . . But recently someone asked me, ‘How can you talk about the arts when so many kids are going to school with firearms?’ And I said, had we talked about the arts ten years ago, there might not have been so many kids going to school with firearms today.”

Idealistic? Perhaps. Yet studies increasingly show that inner-city children exhibit improved attendance, confidence, and test scores when the arts are integrated into their regular school curriculums. Sills has started a file to help keep track of success stories like that of the St. Augustine School of the Arts in the South Bronx. A parochial school ready to close its doors in 1984 due to declining enrollment in a crime-ridden area, it was reconfigured so that arts instruction comprised 30 percent of its curriculum. Since then, its enrollment has doubled. Moreover, as of September 1993, 100 percent of its students were reading and doing math at grade level (the average in most New York City public schools is about 50 percent), despite the fact that 75 percent come from single-parent homes and 20 percent have parents with substance-abuse problems.

Similarly, the Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts in Milwaukee, which introduced arts into its basic curriculum in 1984, has been in the top three of the city’s 150 public schools for the last two school years, as monitored by the Milwaukee Public Schools Accountability Measures. Prior to the curriculum change, its educational standing was poor. Such examples indicate mat systematic arts instruction is anything but a luxury. Parents support it, judging from the results of a 1988 national survey conducted by the National Research Center of the Arts, an affiliate of Louis Harris and Associates, Inc., which found that 72 percent of Americans would be willing to pay increased taxes to ensure more arts education. Yet, as Sills notes, when spending cuts were needed, “The first thing our schools did was to cut these so-called ‘frills.’”

By now, just about everyone knows that the arts have a positive economic impact as well. In 1992, the arts directly and indirectly accounted for 107,000 jobs and generated nearly $3.5 billion in wages, salaries, and royalties in the New York metropolitan area alone, according to a 1993 study conducted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Sills points proudly to the effect the Lincoln Center complex has had on the surrounding neighborhood since it opened in 1962. “Lincoln Center has provided jobs for restaurant and boutique employees,” she says. “We’ve had an enormous economic impact. Now we need’ to have more of a social impact.”

But the most important reason to support the arts, in her view, remains an idealistic one. “When you move into an apartment,” she asks, “why do you paint your walls? Why do you turn the radio on? Why do we have in our language expressions like ‘the heart sings’ or you ‘dance for joy’’ An has always been the signature of a civilization—so much of what we know about a civilization is what they leave behind in their paintings, their writings, their decorative objects, their architectural remains. There is a need in all of us two-legged animals to feed our souls, not just our stomachs. We need to fill our lives with beauty.

“When I was young,” she recalls, “we moved a lot because of my father’s jobs. There was always a cardboard box labeled ‘momma’s paintings’ and ‘momma’s records.’ The paintings consisted of postcards of great masterworks. And the first thing that happened [when we moved to a new home] was that my mother took her thumbtacks and up came these 20 worn-out postcards. I think that the only reason I became an opera singer is because she had collected Galli-Curci recordings and she played them morning, noon, and night.”

Sills has some potentially exciting ideas for helping the students of today become the artistically literate parents of tomorrow, but at the moment she is involved in the lengthy process of seeking funds and the requisite cooperation from City agencies. Yet she approaches the task with her characteristic optimism.

“Whatever point we’re at in the arts,” she says, “we’ve brought ourselves here. Take a look at those names on the walls around Lincoln Center plaza—those are flesh-and-blood people. It is human beings who wind up paying for the beauty in their lives, and I think that’s how it should be.” The European model of government subsidization of the arts, often touted as the answer to all of the American arts community’s problems, does not entice her.

“It’s ultimately up to us as individuals,” she says. “You may be the CEO of a corporation or a concert-goer who can add a $25 contribution to the cost of an opera subscription.” She waves a check for $90,000 that had arrived in the mail that morning from an individual donor. “I don’t think anything is impossible,” she says. “It’s just a matter of setting your mind to it.”

Barbara Jepson writes frequently on classical music for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other national publications.