Photo by Hitchcock CreativeThe cultural fallout from the financial crisis continues, with opera companies and symphony orchestras and other musical institutions and ensembles going bankrupt or frantically cutting back their budgets to avoid just that. Baltimore lost its opera company altogether, although the city budget continues to provide money to maintain its historic opera house.
Until now, Washingtonians seemed to have avoided the opera crunch. But although Plácido Domingo raised the Washington National Opera‘s profile during his tenure as General Director, the company has been hanging by a thread financially. Last week, both the Wall Street Journal and the Post reported that WNO was engaged in talks with the Kennedy Center about the company’s future: once Domingo’s term ends, sources speculated, WNO might merge somehow with the Kennedy Center, which would absorb its budget and make it a permanent resident ensemble not unlike the National Symphony Orchestra.
Over the weekend, another wrinkle to the story surfaces, when again both the Post and the Wall Street Journal reported that the lion’s share of WNO’s endowment, a multi-million dollar donation from Betty Brown Casey, was contingent on the company retaining its independence. In the event of something like the allegedly proposed merger with the Kennedy Center, Mrs. Casey stipulated that the remaining money would go to the Metropolitan Opera in New York instead. The money comes from one of the most unfortunate episodes in WNO’s recent history, the sale of the Woodward & Lothrop building that Mrs. Casey hoped would become WNO’s new permanent home.
