Columbia Opera House, Part II

By Temple Ligon
June 28, 2013

The feasibility of a first-rate opera house in Columbia was discussed last week, but the term opera house might have been a bit misleading. Columbia’s three ballet companies would perform far more often in the opera house than the Palmetto Opera or traveling opera troupes.

Charlotte produces three grand operas a year, as does Atlanta, while both cities usually get multiple performances out of each production over two weeks, mostly on weekends.  And neither city has an opera house, a facility designed and built primarily for opera. Charlotte and Atlanta use suitably flexible performing arts halls for opera.

Columbia should aspire to a schedule similar to the performance calendars in Charlotte and Atlanta. In January the Palmetto Opera will produce a Pavarotti-style concert in the Midlands Tech Harbison campus theater, and in March at the Koger Center there will be a full grand opera production of Carmen, one of the world’s most popular operas. That’s two opera events, but that’s not three grand opera productions, not yet.

Columbia’s three ballet companies call both the Township and the Koger Center home. Problem is, the Township is not an ideal ballet venue, and neither is the Koger Center. In both houses the stage is too far from the average seat.

Around the world, ballet loves the opera house, where the distance from the stage to the ticket holder is on average much less than in a symphony hall – or a music house, as it’s called – such as the Koger Center. George Balanchine, head of the New York City Ballet, had a heavy hand in the design of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Consequently ballet is happy there. Opera is not.

When Beverly Sills took over the New York City Opera, she kept her productions at the New York State Theater and began putting out the word her opera needed a new home. In other words, ballet loves the opera house, but opera does not necessarily love the ballet venue.

Across the piazza at Lincoln Center is the Metropolitan Opera House, where the American Ballet Theater happily performs.

In London, the Royal Opera House is home to the Royal Ballet. And in Paris, the Paris Opera Ballet has taken over the Paris Opera House since the Bastille Opera House became home to the Paris Opera upon opening in 1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Point being, opera houses all become homes to ballet.

As was observed last week in these pages, between Washington, D. C., and Houston, Texas, there is not one really great opera house, the real deal. Everything available for opera is called a performing arts hall or a theater. Columbia, then, should fill a void in the American cultural scene and consider becoming home to the best opera house in the South – hell, the only opera house in the South.

Hotels love opera houses. The prestige of the opera house typically draws deluxe hotels into tight proximity with the opera house. Tony restaurants and elegant shops follow, eventually.

To begin, Columbia needs to get creative in raising the money, big bucks, to build and maintain an opera house. The best illustration of what’s possible is Chicago’s Civic Opera House put up by Sam Insull, head of the power company, while he also put up a 42-storey office building facing the Chicago River downtown and enveloping the opera house. The office building absorbed the cost of the site, and the office rents collected put Chicago’s opera company on an impressive revenues stream for the long haul.

Insull’s opera house opened in 1929, year of the Crash. Insull financed the opera house by selling bonds to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and by selling preferred shares of stock to opera lovers. The common shares were held in trust by the Chicago Music Foundation, an institution formed by Insull for the occasion. Once the bonds and the preferred shares of stock were retired, the foundation owned the building and benefitted from its rental revenues.

It’s all very impressive and very intimidating at the same time. How can little Columbia try this? Not by conventional means, obviously. Even Sam Insull couldn’t hold on. The front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune, September 14, 1932, said, $226,000,000 INSULL LOSS. The Insull Utility Investment Company was wiped out.

Columbia’s opportunity to stand out well ahead of the rest of the South with a bold cultural gesture is to collect mixed uses for a huge mixed-use real estate development with tenants and occupants and their buildings that want to locate and identify with the opera house. Instead of property taxes, this compound would pay the going millage to itself to finance the opera house, something of a fee in lieu of taxes.

Careful: An opera house meeting the standards of the Kennedy Center in Washington or the Wortham Opera House in Houston can easily cost $50,000 a seat, or $100,000,000 for 2,000 seats.

If a major mixed-use development hits $200,000,000 in value, an annual collection of three percent, say, comes to $6,000,000, which readily services the debt and requisite opera operations subsidies of that same 2,000 seats.

All this needs to be isolated yet still in the middle of downtown. It needs to be part of a real estate development where the land is being created out of thin air, where taxable land continues as taxable land.

Remember The Bridge?

Temple Ligon: [email protected]

 

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