September 11th at NYCO
The Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001.
New York City Opera went bankrupt a decade later in 2011; and here we are in 2021, the company having reconstituted itself into a shadow of what is was on that fateful day twenty years earlier.
Many of the diaspora of NYCO have posited that September 11th, 2001 was the beginning of the end. That’s when patrons stopped purchasing season tickets; general director Paul Kellogg was spending a lot of cash on building a smaller opera house; and the perfect storm of mismanagement called Susan Baker was poised to make all the wrong decisions as head of the board.
You can read all about it in Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America by Heidi Waleson.
Students sometimes ask if I miss singing since I am not performing with the company and my life is taken up with teaching. My answer? I don’t miss the many hours of rehearsal even if I do miss hearing an orchestra, being onstage, and applause at the end of a show.
Yeah. Applause. It’s a special drug.
Thinking back to September 11th. It was supposed to be NYCO’s opening night. It didn’t happen, of course. The show did go on four days later, the company standing onstage to sing the national anthem before its first performance of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman.
That was hard. Really hard. I had to go face a wall backstage and get it together afterwards, the yank of feeling from the audience pulling my heart out of my chest.
I get why monuments are erected to commemorate events, people, and great accomplishments. They can provide focus for our feelings and a way to process what happened.
But there is no feeling of closure for me for that day. No place to go. It’s as raw now as it was then, which is why I can’t bring myself to watch the news.
And now it’s getting on towards evening. Twenty years ago at this same time, I saw people covered in white dust walking up Central Park West.
They walked the whole way.
