In a perfect world, Ardis Krainik would have been president of the United States.
She had all the qualities the nation expects of its commander in chief: strength, integrity, fairness, intelligence, humanity, leadership. The people who worked around her at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the artists who performed with the company–all appreciated the tireless personal involvement she brought to her job. She set an example of caring and feeling in a field–opera administration–not notable for either.
When she died last week at 67, three months short of her announced retirement as general director of Lyric Opera, Krainik was one of the most admired arts executives in the nation, and, indeed, the world. She knew her worth and appreciated as much as anyone what Lyric had accomplished during the 16 seasons of her regime. But she never let it go to her head. The former schoolteacher from Manitowoc, Wis., did not have that kind of ego.
Krainik was a true Chicago original, fashioned of the guts and grit that made the city great. Like other leaders–Mayor Richard J. Daley, conductor Georg Solti, Bulls coach Phil Jackson–she caught the temper of the town and made it part of her managerial style. She got people outside the area to pay attention to Chicago as a center of world-class culture. She reinforced our civic pride.
In a real sense she grew up, learned the art and profession of opera in the very theater that now bears her name. Krainik was there from the beginning of Lyric, in 1954. There wasn’t an area of the operation–from fixing the Xerox machine to sitting in labor negotiations, from planning the seating at a Lyric dinner to persuading a reluctant European singer to appear in Chicago–that she wasn’t experienced in handling. She knew Lyric and her community, and she knew precisely what was good for both.
Krainik was loyal to her artists, in a profession notorious for disloyalty. A former singer herself who had sung supporting roles at Lyric before switching to full-time administration in the 1960s, she understood their quirks and insecurities. When she poked her head in their dressing rooms before a performance to wish them good luck, she called them “dearie.”
Having come up through the ranks, Krainik understood the importance of choosing the best people to work with and letting them do their jobs. None of America’s great opera impresarios–think of Fox, the Met’s Rudolf Bing, San Francisco’s Kurt Herbert Adler–had been team players; Krainik was, and that made her unique. She proved a major opera company could be run by enlightened consensus; in so doing, she set the style of opera administration for the ’80s and beyond: opera as a business as well as art.
And yet, when she needed to be, the woman one admiring critic called “Miss Pollyanna” could be as sharp as the winds that sweep across the Lyric Opera Bridge at Madison Street. Like the canniest CEO in the corporate world, she instinctively knew when it was time to act decisively. In that regard she proved her mettle time and again–most famously in her firing of perennial no-show Luciano Pavarotti in 1989, a business decision that won a hearty round of applause throughout the opera world.
What’s more, her years of secretarial service to Carol Fox, her free-spending predecessor, taught her how to save as well as spend money, lessons that came in handy during those first do-or-die seasons after 1981, when she took over from the ailing Fox. She rebuilt the organization, pulled the company from the brink of bankruptcy and set it on its present course of longterm financial stability.
No greater contrast in managerial style could be imagined than that between Krainik and Fox. Shucking her predecessor’s determination that Lyric be known as “La Scala West,” she welcomed the best young American singers and broadened the company’s repertory. And while Fox had to be pushed out the door at the end, Krainik retired well before she sensed her failing health would impair her ability to maintain control.
Her strong Christian Scientist beliefs gave her a serene outlook rare among people in the nail-chewing world of opera production. She read the Bible every day. “How many general directors can say that?!” she once exclaimed. She always said she listened to the small, still voice inside her.
But she also listened to her audience. When more than 80 percent said they wanted English surtitles with every performance, she gave them surtitles. When she designed Lyric’s “Toward the 21st Century” program of American opera and important European works, it was the right way, she felt, to draw attention to the Lyric as a trend-setter. When Lyric finally became a homeowner after 39 years as an Opera House renter, it was the right thing for a company that had long since outgrown its Depression-era theater. She said she got her practical nature from her Norwegian-Bohemian-German ancestry.
She knew the world of opera inside out, and what she didn’t know she freely admitted. That’s where her inner circle of “chiefs” came in. She listened to what each of them had to say before making a Solomon-like executive decision. But she also trusted them to make the intensive artistic and financial decisions themselves. And she depended heavily on the council of her artistic director, Bruno Bartoletti, in many artistic areas, especially contemporary and 20th Century opera.
Krainik believed in opera as music theater–with the emphasis on theater–and she saw nothing wrong with people regarding opera as entertainment, as long as it was done at the highest level. It would require a separate article to do justice to all the high spots among the productions Lyric has presented under her administration–standard operas made new (“Tannhaeuser,” “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Lulu,” last year’s Wagner “Ring” cycle), new operas creatively presented (Philip Glass’ “Satyagraha,” Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra”), unusual operas revitalized (Janacek’s “The Makropoulos Case”).
Few people realized the tremendous physical toll Krainik’s devotion to work took on her. Early in her tenure, when she knew Lyric desperately needed her attention, 18-hour days were commonplace. Even in later years, she was a full-time intendant, seldom spending much time at her elegant Lake Shore Drive apartment. For all intents and purposes, the company was her life. It wasn’t that she fiercely guarded her privacy; in truth, she had no time for privacy.
Still, when it was time to leave the stage, Krainik made an exit that was grace itself, accepting the tumultuous applause of soloists, chorus, orchestra, staff and audience at a gala last October put on in recognition of Lyric’s prima donna assoluta by members of her administration. Characteristically, the only dry eye in the house that evening in the newly named Ardis Krainik Theatre was her own. Though obviously touched and grateful for the honor, she wasn’t about to go out on wave of sentimentality. That wasn’t her style.
Out of respect for her wishes, Lyric will not offer a memorial service to its former chief. In a way, such a public rite would be unnecessary. The theater that bears Krainik’s name will long stand as a lasting memorial to her accomplishments. Lyric Opera is in better shape, both artistically and financially, than ever as it begins the countdown to the 21st Century. The Opera House has been handsomely renovated and expanded. A crack administrative team headed by William Mason has already made a smooth transition.
Because of Krainik, the Lyric continues to do more consistently high-level work than any other company in America. Somewhere I can hear her saying–punctuated by that famous guffaw and a raised eyebrow–“That’s memorial enough for me, dearie.”
