Chicago Sun-Times 19 Jan 1997
Lyric Opera loses its leading lady
General director Ardis Krainik dies at 67
Ardis Krainik, the general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago since 1981 who built the company into one of the world's most artistically respected and financially secure opera companies, died Saturday at her Lake Shore Drive home. She was 67.
Miss Krainik had been ill in recent years. Last June, she announced plans to retire April 30.
"She was without peer in the field," Lyric board president Edgar D. Jannotta said. "She had such a unique combination of skills. She was a great leader. She had a lot of courage, very good judgment in terms of music and taste. A great salesman, a wonderful speaker. A tremendously warm personality."
Miss Krainik had been with Lyric for its entire 42-year existence, arriving in 1954 as a singer who also could fill another crucial role for the fledgling company, that of clerk-typist. She sang comprimario roles - those minor but necessary characters such as maids, slave girls, Valkyries - for six seasons. In 1960, she moved permanently to an office as assistant manager to Lyric's co-founder and general manager, Carol Fox.
Seeds for Miss Krainik's dual career at Lyric were planted in her childhood. She grew up in Manitowoc, Wis., the younger of two sisters whose father was a business executive. Extracurricular lessons ranged from horseback riding to elocution. She decided to pursue acting and graduated with a bachelor's degree cum laude from Northwestern University's School of Speech in 1951.
She started singing lessons after a stint of teaching drama at a high school in Racine and returned to Northwestern for graduate study in voice before joining Lyric.
"I liked singing and I was a good actress," Miss Krainik said in an interview a few years ago, "but more important to me was the running of something. All through college and high school, I was president of this and that. That was the real fun. Being head of the yearbook was much more fun than performing."
Fox launched Lyric with a major international splash, snaring Maria Callas for her American debut in Lyric's productions of "Norma," "La Traviata" and "Lucia di Lammermoor" in November, 1954. Miss Krainik learned from Fox's mistakes as well as her successes as the iron-fisted Fox shaped Lyric into one of the world's top dozen or so grand opera companies.
By the late 1970s, however, Lyric was in major trouble. Fox was ill but still insisted on making the major decisions. Budgets lurched wildly out of control, and most of the day-to-day artistic matters fell to Miss Krainik. At the end of the 1980 season, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy, and Miss Krainik had a contract to join the Australian Opera Company in Sydney as general manager.
Lyric's board abruptly fired Fox in January, 1981, and asked Miss Krainik to take the top job.
Stars had been defecting from Lyric, and Miss Krainik was responsible for wooing them back. She also worked major financial miracles, cutting more than $500,000 from Lyric's budget her first year as general manager. From the start, she enlisted the expertise of the top-flight business people on Lyric's board, people whose advice Fox had often shunned.
"Ardis had a skill with people that Carol never had," said William B. Graham, a longtime member of Lyric's board and currently its co-chairman, in a 1994 interview. "Where Carol had problems with some people she worked with and for, Ardis avoided that. This is one of Ardis' great strengths."
In her 15 years as Lyric's top executive, Miss Krainik went from strength to strength. Lyric sports an international singer roster, with such stars as Placido Domingo, Samuel Ramey, Eva Marton and Catherine Malfitano making regular return engagements. Such directors as Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson and Robert Altman worked at Lyric during Miss Krainik's regime, along such designers as artist David Hockney.
"If you put together the greatest qualities you would want in a general manager, you would have had Ardis Krainik," said William Mason, Miss Krainik's successor.
As Miss Krainik put it, "If you want to play ball with the big boys, you have to do a 'Ring,' " and in March, 1996, Wagner lovers from around the world converged on Chicago to see Lyric's first presentation of Wagner's mighty four-opera "The Ring of the Nibelung" in three weeklong cycles. With Zubin Mehta conducting a cast as fine as any singing Wagner today, Lyric's "Ring" was a rousing success with audiences and critics.
Miss Krainik also pushed the repertory - and more important, Lyric's audiences - into new artistic territory. In 1989, Lyric announced a 10-year, 20-opera project called Toward the 21st Century, in which it would present two 20th century works, one European, one American, each season through 2000.
Fulfilling a promise she made early on, Miss Krainik commissioned operas. "McTeague" by William Bolcom was presented in 1992, "Amistad" by Anthony Davis is scheduled for 1997-98, and Bolcom's setting of Arthur Miller's "A View from a Bridge" for 1999-2000. Lyric also introduced a composer-in-residence program in 1984.
In the financial area, Miss Krainik's successes were nothing short of spectacular. Since 1981, Lyric's annual budgets have slipped into red ink only once. Lyric is Chicago's hottest classical music ticket, and the company has sold more than 100 percent of its capacity for the last eight years.
In 1993, Lyric purchased the theater and offices it had occupied since 1954 in the Civic Opera House and embarked on a campaign to raise $100 million for a three-year renovation project. Work was completed last fall, and the 3,550-seat auditorium was named the Ardis Krainik Theatre at a gala concert held in Miss Krainik's honor in October.
Miss Krainik had her detractors. Some criticized her taste, calling her choices of 20th century operas undistinguished. Others considered the demolition of the lovely Civic Theater as part of the opera house renovation an act of cultural vandalism. She could be as imperious as Fox when she wanted.
But Miss Krainik's personality was tailor-made for running a major opera company in Chicago. Her no-nonsense manner, pragmatism, limitless energy and hearty laugh endeared her to the city's corporate leaders who sat on Lyric's board and wrote out large checks to support Lyric's annual fund-raising drives and renovation.
Crain's Chicago Business named her its 1990 Executive of the Year, she was on the board of the Northern Trust Corp. and president of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the first woman to hold the post.
Above all, Miss Krainik fostered a welcoming atmosphere for visiting artists, and she praised her staff as a team of all-stars. Many organizations talk about being a family, but under Miss Krainik, Lyric really was. Superstar soprano Jessye Norman called her "Auntie Ardis," and artists offered unsolicited testimonials to Lyric's relaxed yet professional backstage operation.
"This is a very difficult business for people to perform in," Miss Krainik once said. "The anxieties and frustrations take their toll. That's why performers are separate kinds of creatures, like little birds you have to take care of. They need special care, and love is the operative word."
Miss Krainik leaves no immediate survivors. At her request, no funeral or memorial service will be held.
Chicago Tribune 19 Jan 1997
ARDIS KRAINIK, LYRIC OPERA'S LIFE FORCE, DIES
Ardis Krainik, a widely respected and beloved arts executive who as general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago made the company a world leader, died Saturday after a long illness. She was 67.
A committed Christian Scientist, Miss Krainik declined to discuss her health and physical condition and kept the cause of her illness a secret even from close co-workers. Several company officials refused to comment on the cause of death. It was known, however, that she was diagnosed with cancer in 1995
William Mason, Lyric's director of operations and Miss Krainik's successor, disclosed her death to singers, staff, chorus and orchestra Saturday afternoon at the conclusion of a general rehearsal of Puccini's "Turandot." Many of those present wept openly.
Miss Krainik followed in the tradition of Chicago's great female opera directors, a tradition that began with Mary Garden in 1921 and continued through the era of Carol Fox, who in 1954 co-founded the Lyric Theatre (soon to be renamed Lyric Opera) of Chicago with Nicola Rescigno and Lawrence Kelly.
Miss Krainik was only the second general director in the company's history, appointed in 1981 as successor to Fox.
Miss Krainik's talent, artistic savvy and financial expertise made her the logical choice to head up one of the nation's major opera producers. That she had been there from the beginning also weighed heavily in her favor. Miss Krainik devoted most of her adult life to the Lyric, serving as a chorus member and supporting singer and in various administrative positions until she became company chief in a palace coup that unseated Fox.
Well before declining health forced Miss Krainik to step down from that post (she died about three months' shy of her announced retirement date, April 30), she and her administration had made the company a shining source of civic and cultural pride--an artistically and fiscally solid institution many critics considered the finest opera company in the land.
"The loss I feel, personally as well as professionally, is enormous," said Mason, who was named general director-designate in November and who has for the past several months served as the company's de facto chief.
"She was one of the great opera company directors, who combined humanity, artistic vision and a shrewd business sense that were unique. Beyond that, she was a friend, colleague and like an older sister to me. Because of her, Lyric is a great opera company. We just have to carry on the work she started."
Henry Fogel, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, said the orchestra was dedicating Saturday's concert to her memory.
"This woman was one of the few people to whom the overused word 'legend' applies," he said.
While her strength remained, Miss Krainik attended Lyric performances and other public functions in a wheelchair. Her final public appearance was Dec. 5 at a Lyric function at the Racquet Club of Chicago honoring artistic director Bruno Bartoletti for his 40 years with the company. Her appearance and spirits then appeared to be "on an even keel," according to Danny Newman, Lyric's longtime public relations consultant.
But her condition began to deteriorate before Christmas, and until her death, she remained under her doctor's care at her home on Lake Shore Drive. A friend said she was in a coma at the time of her death.
At the time of her retirement announcement last June, Miss Krainik said: "I am sorry to leave Lyric Opera, but I'm not going to get myself down (by) dwelling on (my retirement). . . . I'll have to work damned hard to continue keeping Lyric on the level it has attained. And I am proud indeed of what this company has attained."
On Oct. 13, the Lyric celebrated her achievements with a sold-out gala concert in which 25 artists and the Lyric orchestra and chorus all took part. In a further tribute, the Civic Opera House main auditorium was named the Ardis Krainik Theatre.
For the performers and the audience, it was a deeply moving occasion, and seeing Miss Krainik, beaming from her wheelchair, was worth many times the price of admission.
Her death came less than a year after Lyric wrapped up its first Wagner "Ring of the Nibelung" cycle, a $6.5 million undertaking in March 1996 that sold 42,756 seats and attracted audiences and press from all over the world.
She considered it one of her proudest achievements. Privately, she said the "Ring" made her nostalgic for the days when she sang Wagner at Lyric as a breastplated, spear-toting Valkyrie.
She also pointed with pride to having created Lyric's "Toward the 21st Century" artistic initiative, a decade long program of 20th Century opera productions that began in 1990. Also high on her list of accomplishments was the company's composer-in-residence program, begun in 1983, and the $100 million renovation and expansion of the Opera House, which was completed last year.
A native of Manitowoc, Wis., Miss Krainik earned a bachelor's degree from the Northwestern University School of Speech and did graduate work in music before joining the small staff of Lyric Theatre in 1954 as a mezzo-soprano and a clerk-typist.
She became Fox's factotum and soon was known within the company hierarchy as a tireless and dedicated employee with an uncanny gift for organization.
But early in 1981, Fox was fired by the Lyric board because she could not make headway against a $309,000 deficit that had all but drained the company's $2.5 million endowment fund. Miss Krainik, who had already accepted the job as head of the Australian Opera in Sydney, was asked by the board to stay on and turn things around.
She did, more triumphantly than anyone could have imagined. The 1981 season came in $550,000 under budget. By the end of the 1982 season, she had erased the deficit and begun to restore Lyric's sagging reputation. One year later, the company was playing to 98 percent capacity houses.
Miss Krainik's artistic successes just seemed to flow from there. Before long, critics were praising Lyric as the place to hear the best singers in state-of-the-art productions as good as or better than those of any other world-class company. No longer was Lyric spoken or written about as a mere competitor to the Metropolitan or San Francisco Operas, but as their superior.
On a wall in Miss Krainik's office on the eighth floor of the Civic Opera House hangs the sign "Wonder Woman," given to her after her first year as head of Lyric. A Tribune editorial had given her that designation because of the company's extraordinary financial turnaround.
Before long, her reputation as a hardnosed business executive spread to corporate boardrooms near and far.
Even executives who didn't know a thing about opera wrote big checks to the company. It was said she could charm a contribution to Lyric out of the most stony-hearted Scrooge.
Under Miss Krainik's stewardship, the company has played its last nine seasons to sold-out houses. She left Lyric owning the Civic Opera House portion of the 20 North Wacker Drive building and in the soundest economic shape in the history of resident opera in Chicago.
Miss Krainik's unflagging optimism and good cheer were the stuff of local legend. A portrait of her on her office wall was captioned "Miss Pollyanna."
Once, a journalist assigned to write a profile of her for a national publication desperately tried to find someone who could criticize her for some failing, but finally gave up in frustration. Discouraging words about her were hard to come by. Even after she fired tenor Luciano Pavarotti in 1989 for excessive absenteeism, she got stacks of fan letters, with people crediting her for having guts and principle.
Miss Krainik had very little life beyond Lyric Opera. It was rare not to see her in her usual front-row seat at an opera performance. Food was a guilty pleasure on the side, as were sports.
In earlier years, she shot baskets with the Lyric stagehands backstage, played tennis with Pavarotti (in the days before she sacked him) and attended Bulls and Blackhawks games whenever her crowded schedule allowed.
Throughout her tenure as Lyric chief, honors continued to come her way. In November, Mayor Richard Daley presented her with the Medal of Merit, the city's highest civilian honor. She was the first woman, and one of very few individuals, to receive the medal.
She also received high decorations from the governments of Italy, France, Germany and Austria. Seventeen colleges and universities awarded her honorary doctorate degrees. She was a past president of Opera America, a former council member of the National Endowment for the Arts, a governing member of the Illinois Arts Alliance and a member of the International Association of Opera Directors.
At Miss Krainik's request, no funeral or memorial service will be held. The family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, contributions be sent to Lyric Opera, earmarked for the sponsorship of young singers at the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.
Miss Krainik never married. There were no immediate survivors
Chicago Sun-Times 20 Jan 1997
Krainik wanted no public rites
The classical music community's response to the death of Ardis Krainik, Lyric Opera of Chicago's general director who died Saturday at age 67, was immediate.
The audience at Lyric's Saturday night performance of "The Magic Flute" observed a moment of silence in her honor. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra dedicated its Saturday evening performance of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony to her. WFMT-FM (98.7) began playing music in her memory in the late afternoon.
Lyric's chief since 1981 and a member of the company from its first season in 1954, Miss Krainik was a towering - and beloved - figure in the international opera world. But she also was a very private person, and in accordance with her wishes no public memorial services are being planned.
"Ardis made it very clear what she did and did not want," said Susan Mathieson, Lyric's director of marketing and public relations and one of Miss Krainik's closest associates. One thing, it turns out, she most definitely did not want was a public funeral or memorial service.
Miss Krainik devoted virtually all her waking hours to Lyric and readily admitted that the company was her life. She was fiercely private, however, about her life's few remaining corners, and her vast army of friends and associates respected that need for privacy.
Miss Krainik kept the details of her health problems, which surfaced with knee difficulties in late 1994, to herself. Though cancer is considered the probable cause, she told no one the exact nature of her illness.
She had a lovely apartment (where she died) on Lake Shore Drive, its main rooms decorated in dramatic chinoiserie fashion. But she virtually never used it for entertaining. Some close Lyric associates said they had never been inside Miss Krainik's home.
The privacy Miss Krainik demanded for her own impending death contrasts sharply with that of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, another Chicago icon, who died in November. Cardinal Bernardin announced his cancer diagnosis many months before his death and kept Chicagoans informed of his deteriorating condition.
Miss Krainik's desire for privacy was not a form of denial, however. She was a committed Christian Scientist who was proud of not having visited a doctor in decades. But she had the courage to put Lyric's needs above her own and sought medical help as the seriousness of her condition became clear. And unlike many leaders, including her predecessor at Lyric, Carol Fox, she did not hang onto power as her abilities and strength waned.
"The last thing I want is to hang on by my fingernails," she said with characteristic bluntness last June when she announced her plans to retire because of ill health. A few weeks later she told the audience at Lyric's annual meeting, "This is the most difficult decision I have ever had to make. But it is the right one."
"A real test of a leader is providing a successor," said Edgar D. Jannotta, Lyric's board president. "You have to give Ardis credit for providing us with a very able successor in Bill Mason."
William Mason, named Krainik's successor in November, had first worked with Lyric in the 1950s and 1960s. He had been director of operations - production and artistic - since 1981.
"It's not an easy thing to do for someone who was such a strong personality and a strong force," said Jannotta. "Her total life was Lyric, but she knew she had to deal with her retirement. She gave us a tremendous base on which to continue to build this company."
Miss Krainik may not have wanted a memorial service, but formal remembrances do give those left behind a needed sense of closure. The Lyric staff is considering some sort of observance for company members, but nothing has been decided.
"It's just too early," said Mathieson. "We're talking about something, but we want to be sure that whatever we do would be in accordance with her wishes.
"But you have to remember one thing. There is the Ard
