Tom's Life Bits

By Bill Hutchinson Published Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.

Any story about opera is ultimately a story both about money and about the one thing in all the world it is said that money cannot buy — love. The Susan Danis factor.

When Susan Danis was hired as executive director in 1999 by Sarasota Opera, she had a hard act to follow – Deane Allyn, who led the company for 14 years.

Under Allyn and Artistic Director Victor DeRenzi, the opera had evolved from a small, semi-professional organization into an important regional company that had attracted international attention.

But relations between Allyn and DeRenzi had deteriorated toward the end, and the board had divided into separate, and at times bitter, camps. Danis' first task was ending the acrimony and building board consensus.

Since then, she has kept the company in the black and helped it set box-office records. But for the past few years, the extensive renovation of the 82-year-old, Mediterranean Revival Opera House has been “the hyper-focus of my life,” Danis said.

She has worked seven days a week, poring over budgets and meeting with contractors and city officials. She also has courted and cultivated donors while supervising an ambitious capital campaign that has – so far – raised $19 million for the renovation. The opera has exceeded its $10 million endowment fund goal and has raised close to two-thirds of the $30 million it set out to assemble in legacy bequests.

“Susan is a tremendous leader,” said Ed Bavaria, a former chairman of the opera board. “She is exceptionally bright, self- confident and decisive, and she has the complete loyalty of her staff. She's been a dynamo at raising money and getting people excited about the opera.”

A gregarious, dark-haired woman who admits to being “at the end of my 40s,” Danis is quick to share credit with DeRenzi. “We are a team,” she said. “I couldn't do what I do if we didn't have an outstanding artistic product.”

DeRenzi said Danis “has a great understanding of all the departments in this company. She could run the development department, the marketing department; she could put on the special events if she had to.

“She also has a wonderful personality that serves her so well in this position. She really loves people, loves sitting and talking with them and getting to know them. And it doesn't matter whether they are big donors or small donors, or not donors at all. She talks to people because they seem nice.”

Danis is in the Opera House greeting patrons at every performance, as is DeRenzi, when he is not in the orchestra pit conducting. “Other staff members are there, too,” Danis said. “We're all part of the development team. I think donors and supporters can tell if someone is genuine or not. And we are the real thing. We really love this company and believe in it.”

Danis followed an unusual route to a career in arts management. A native of Waterbury, Conn., she minored in theater at Indiana University, but her major was in drama therapy. For nearly 10 years, she worked for the Young Adult Institute, a New York nonprofit organization that served the developmentally disabled. “I grew up professionally there,” Danis said.

From 1991 to 1998, Danis had leadership positions with New York's Lake George Opera Festival, where she eliminated a $400,000 deficit and revitalized educational and outreach programs.

When Danis came to Sarasota Opera, she and DeRenzi bonded quickly while discussing the company's future needs. If they have ever been at odds, those spats have not surfaced publicly.

“Oh, come on,” Danis said laughing, when asked about their working relationship. “If Victor and I didn't get along, everyone in town would know it. This is Sarasota, after all.

“We have a really strong sense of mutual respect. We made a pact long ago that if we didn't agree on something, we wouldn't go running to the board, but would try to come to an amicable compromise. And that's what we've done. I also really believe strongly in his artistic vision. I think it would be hard to have someone in my position who didn't.”

Her staff members praise Danis as a nurturing boss who allows them to grow. That sentiment was echoed by Mark Scorca, the president of OPERA America, a service organization for U.S. opera companies. (Danis is a member of the national board.) “Susan has this innate warmth, and an ability to foster good relations with staff members, board members and donors,” Scorca said. “I often ask her to give talks about how to nurture and encourage a staff, because she's so good at it.”

But Danis concedes she does have her moments. “I don't think I've ever had a huge blowup with a staff member, but I do get frustrated occasionally,” she said. “And when I am a little sharp with someone, the joke among some staff members is that they've had a 'Danis dissection.'

“But I always try to make suggestions rather than give orders: Why don't we try it this way? And it's not because I want things a certain way, but rather, because of my long tenure here, I think I've come to know what our audience likes and enjoys.”

In her rare free time, Danis likes to indulge her passion for cooking. She loves to invite a group of friends over for an evening of good food and conversation. She might serve one of the dishes she learned to make in a class in Paris, when she had to “catch the chicken, kill the chicken and cook the chicken.”

She's been eating on the run during the renovation, though. “My cooking accoutrements are hollering, 'Don't you remember us?' ” Danis said.

She is also a huge movie fan, and can be spotted often at the Burns Court Cinema, which is within walking distance of her condo. She saw “La Vie En Rose, ” the Edith Piaf biopic, five times there last year. “I'm a big fan of Piaf, and the intensity of the tragedy of her life was so poignant,” Danis said. “Maybe it was cathartic for me to get caught up in someone else's tragedy at a stressful time in the middle of the renovation.”

But don't think Danis favors only highbrow art films. “I love any of the Austin Powers movies,” she said gleefully. “Sophomoric, silly jokes are my guilty pleasure. I made Victor watch one of them with me once, and I think he thought I'd lost my mind.”

Danis said Saturday's opening night “will be one of the most important evenings of my life. To have had such a positive result with this theater, and to share it with so many who love this company, well, that's going to be an unbelievable moment.

“I'm excited as someone who loves Sarasota, too. Because I'm not sure the building would have survived a major storm before the renovation. Now it meets the Miami-Dade code. So it's going to be preserved for generations to come.”

Money first: In the midst of the worst local economy in at least a generation, the Sarasota Opera begins its 49th season this week toward the end of the biggest fundraising effort ever attempted here by any organization.

With the bills nearly all paid for a $20 million face lift of its downtown building, which will be formally revealed Saturday night with a performance of Verdi's “Rigoletto,” the opera has exceeded its $10 million endowment fund goal and has raised close to two-thirds of the $30 million it set out to assemble in legacy bequests.

Capital campaign co-chair Ed Bavaria – an operatic figure in his own right, all rich baritone and flowing white hair – predicts with characteristic brio that the opera will reach its full $60 million goal within two years.

That is 10 times its annual budget, points out Mark Scorca, president of a trade organization, Opera America, which keeps tabs on 125 companies in the U.S. and Canada. “I don't know of any other company that's managed that.”

Nor is any likely to do so in the forseeable future.

Opera worldwide is struggling in the current economy. In this country, there are fewer companies than 10 years ago, fewer performances and smaller audiences.

Nearly half of the 110 opera companies in the U.S. operate at a deficit.

The Sarasota Opera is one of a sparse handful that has remained consistently in the black over its entire lifetime.

It is also the only one that sells every one of its seats year after year, and one of a very few companies that take in more “earned income” from the sale of tickets, rentals and programs than “contributed income” from donations, grants and investments.

The success of Sarasota Opera has attracted attention from Scorco and his member companies, and generated some considerable analysis among them of how Sarasota, of all places – at 50,000 full-time residents, the smallest community in America with a resident opera company – has managed to flourish.

It helps that Sarasota Opera owns its own house, a rare distinction shared by only a dozen other companies in the U.S. This provides evidence of solidity that investors like, buffering the company from the vagaries of the real estate market, and providing a significant secondary source of income from rentals.

Sarasota Opera is widely regarded as an unusually stable operation, as suggested by the longevity of artistic director Victor DeRenzi, this week entering his 26th year at the podium. By all accounts a remarkably learned Verdi scholar, DeRenzi has drawn international applause for his plan to produce every one of Verdi's complete works. (Nine more to go.)

Smart management and a consistent artistic vision, though, are no guarantee of success, which is why Scorco calls Sarasota Opera a “reference point” rather than a model.

“Model” implies that other opera companies might enjoy comparable success by “doing things like Sarasota.”

The fact is, he says, “There is no place quite like Sarasota.”

“Kudos to the audience,” says Scorca. That's where their strength really comes from.”

Toulman: 'I just love opera'

A Sarasota widow who has given millions to the opera, symphony and theater, Virginia Toulmin is like some Lifetime Movie fantasy of a regular gal who becomes a nurse, meets a rich man through her work, marries him, and lives in a world she could only have imagined growing up in St. Louis.

“Believe me, I thank God every day for Harry Toulmin. He changed my life.”

Virginia Toulmin's home commands a 14th floor view of the Gulf of Mexico to the west and all of downtown Sarasota to the east. She lives a smart urban life of dinner at Patrick's or the Bijou, weekends in New York, and, at this time of year, a pretty much nonstop barrage of performances of one thing or another.

She is the board chairman of the Florida West Coast Symphony, and is still raving about the Asolo's “Tale of Two Cities,” but, if pressed, Toulmin might acknowledge a special place in her heart for the Sarasota Opera – for opera in general.

“Rigoletto” is her favorite. She was in the audience in 1989 when the Sarasota Opera performed it last time, and she will be front and center Saturday night when the company opens its 49th season with Verdi's mid-career masterpiece, the source of La donna e mobile (“woman is fickle”), arguably the most famous aria in the lengthy canon of Verdi's greatest hits.

The mere mention of “Rigoletto” brings a Christmas-morning glow of anticipation to Toulmin's girlishly pretty face.

“I can't wait,” she says.

“I just love opera.”

Bavaria: Sell what you love

“Rich” is a relative term.

Toulmin, wealthy by most measures, sounds as awed as a housewife on a budget when she mentions the 19 billionaires a financial adviser has told her live in Sarasota.

And only in comparison to such as Toulmin, his friend and neighbor, could Ed Bavaria be considered a man of modest means.

Bavaria spent a long and profitable career as an international sales executive for several aircraft manufacturers, and his apartment features a commanding view of the Gulf.

But, as his wife, Jane, says, “Were not like some, who can afford to give to everyone. We made a decision to limit ourselves to the opera and the church” – St. Thomas More – “the two areas where we thought we could do the most good.”

Although they have given several hundred thousand dollars to the capital campaign, their largest contribution has been the time and skill that Ed Bavaria has devoted to his work with the opera board, first as a long-time trustee, then eventually as board chairman during the years that the current capital campaign was taking shape.

Usually a nerves-of-steel type, Bavaria, who secretly flew nuclear warheads across the country in the 1950s for the Strategic Air Command, admits he tossed his way through sleepless nights over the ambitious scale of the $60 million goal.

“We knew we had some serious problems with the building that needed to be fixed,” he says. “That was going to take something north of $15 million.

“After that big an investment, you had to have some sort of endowment to make sure the doors were going to stay open.

“So we talked and we talked, and in the end somebody said, 'Oh, what the heck, let's just go for it.' ”

Which was OK with Ed Bavaria. “I'm an old sales guy,” he says. “I know you never get an order you don't ask for.”

Any old sales guy will also tell you that it is a lot easier to sell a product you love.

“Listen, this is a great company, run by exceptionally talented and dedicated people. The Sarasota Opera is the center of our social and civic lives. But, really, for me, it's about the music. It's all about the music, that's what we love.”

His long relationship with opera began with arias that his Italian-born mother used to sing around his childhood home in a Pennsylvania mining town.

It was his mother who insisted that all seven of the Bavaria children study music. Ed took up the clarinet, on which he became proficient enough to win a scholarship that eventually resulted in his appointment to West Point.

“In a way, whatever I have, I owe to music.”

Kretzmer: 'Joy and solace'

When Ernie Kretzmer says he loves music, he looks you straight in the eye, so there will be no doubt that he means what he says in a literal way.

The most passionate involvement of his 83 years began in childhood, in Germany, in the home of learned and cultured Jewish parents who sent him and his sister to America in 1940. Their parents, he says, “waited too long” to leave and were lost in the Holocaust.

Alisa Kretzmer, his wife, is a Palestinian Jew who came to the States in 1946 in part to escape the violence that accompanied the creation of Israel.

A few years older than Ernie, she has precise recall of a performance of Verdi's “Nobucco,” sung in Hebrew in Jerusalem, when she was 7.

“Mr. and Mrs. Music,” the Bradenton Opera Guild called them last month at a luncheon honoring the Kretzmers' contributions to Sarasota Opera over their quarter-century here.

Mr. Music admits that, all in all, he prefers the symphony.

There can be an element of “show business” to the opera, he says, especially on opening nights, that makes him uncomfortable.

“I'm just a regular guy,” says Kretzmer, who takes pride in the fact that he does his own taxes on the computer with $50 software.

Alisa Kretzmer, on the other hand, just as proudly calls herself an “opera fanatic,” and loves opera's fuss and grandeur and sense of occasion. “Otherwise, why not go to the symphony?”

In addition to Sarasota Opera, the couple have given substantial sums to the Florida West Coast Symphony, in fact, and lesser amounts to Sarasota Ballet and the Van Wezel.

Kretzmer is a thoughtful, careful man who likes to give appropriate consideration to every request for financial assistance, but lately it just isn't possible, he says. “Keeping track of it all would be a full time job.”

He admits to feeling beset at times by the volume of solicitations. “In difficult times, you want to be sure that you are not neglecting the social programs.

“But we believe that music contributes to society as well. It brings joy and solace,” says Ernie Kretzmer. “For that, it is very difficult to say no.”

Schmidts: Not part of crowd

“If anybody had told me three years ago that I'd be giving $4 million to the opera,” says Bill Schmidt, a plain-spoken millionaire and former fighter pilot from Indiana who last year did just that, “I'd have said they were crazy.”

He and his wife, Casiana, have attended the Sarasota Opera regularly for several years, usually on Thursday nights, which Bill Schmidt prefers as “a little quieter” than opening nights.

But their charitable giving has been devoted mostly to a private foundation involved with several national programs for young singers.

“We were not part of the opera crowd,” Casiana says, and Bill Schmidt would be just as glad to keep it that way. He likes “a low profile,” he says, and intended initially to make his donation anonymously.

Not so for Casiana Schmidt, who admits to reveling in the fact that the newly refurbished opera house auditorium will be named after her husband.

A property developer whose original wealth derives from the manufacture and sale of obscure industrial equipment, Schmidt decided to invest in the opera only after a careful review of its artistic profile and balance sheet.

“You want to make sure your money's going to something that's going to be around for a while. They are extremely solid, the opera, and I liked the fact that they were willing to dream big.

“You see the ambition in what goes on the stage. You want opera to be big – big voices, big sets, big emotions. That's what people love about it.”

Opera is emotion

Spoiler alert: Gilda dies.

Gilda is the beautiful, apple-of-his-eye daughter of Rigoletto, a hunchbacked jester in a 16th-century Italian court, and, because this is opera, she dies at the end.

Because “Rigoletto” is a Verdi opera, meaning no opportunity for heightening emotion is ever overlooked, it is her father who accidentally kills Gilda.

When Rigoletto realizes this on the stage of the Sarasota Opera House on Saturday evening, there will be few dry eyes among the 1,194 opera lovers expected in the opening night audience.

“I don't know what it is,” says Virginia Toulmin. “I know she's going to die. I've seen 'Rigoletto' too many times to count, really, but at the same point in every performance, the tears start to come.”

Alise Kretzmer will shed tears for Gilda, too, but it is Mimi's death in “La Boheme” that really gets her.

“I cry every time,” says Alise Kretzmer. “Cry, cry, cry – because it is so, so beautiful.”

This, finally, is the common ground of the opera experience, the thing that reaches beyond the $850,000 worth of sets and costumes and voices on the stage Saturday for “Rigoletto,” past the $500 patron seats (for another $500, they get dinner in a tent), all the way up to the $100 cheap seats in the last row of the balcony. (“Cheap” is also relative; seats usually start at $25, but Saturday is a special night).

“Opera is emotion,” says Ed Bavaria. “Once you get hooked on it, you can't get enough.”

As with any intoxicant, getting hooked can at first take a degree of determination. Virginia Toulmin actually disliked opera on her first experience, as an usherette in St. Louis. “It was 'Die Meistersinger,' and I thought it would never end.

“The next time, it was my 'Rigoletto,' and I was hooked. I never get my fill.”

Opera fans tend to be as passionate as the art form itself.

“There is an element of irrationality in the way people respond to opera – to any of the arts, but especially to music,” observes Ernie Kretzmer.

“It's pretty hard not to be moved to tears sometimes,” says Bill Schmidt, who keeps the grand piano in his Oaks Preserve condo tuned in preparation for visits from his sister, who had a career as an opera singer.

“Opera speaks in the language of the soul,” says Casiana Schmidt.

“I just love opera,” repeats Virginia Toulmin, as a kind of mantra. “Something so beautiful should go on forever, don't you think?”