CHRISTOPHER KEENE:
A Memorial Tribute

by Marge Betley

Christopher Keene, who died on Sunday, October 8, 1996 was best known as general director of the New York City Opera, a post he had held since 1989. His tenure there was fraught with financial, administrative, and personal challenges, including a musicians’ strike in his first season, a $2.9 million deficit in 1992, treatment for alcoholism two years ago, and, most painfully, a diagnosis of HIV and lymphoma.

Keene, however, was a constant warrior, possessed of energy, vision, and integrity. His greatest legacy is his work as a champion of 20th-century music. Born in 1946 in Berkeley, California, Keene began producing and conducting opera as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Even there, the proclivity for 20th-century music that would form the touchstone of his career was already evidenced by a series of productions that included Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers, von Einem's Trial and Britten's Rape of Lucretia.

In 1966, Keene became assistant conductor of San Francisco Opera at the invitation of Kurt Herbert Adler; in 1967, he held the same position at San Diego Opera, where he worked on the American premiere of Henze's The Young Lord. The following year saw his European debut conducting Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street at the Spoleto Festival, where he eventually held the positions of music director and general director. As music director of the American Spoleto Festival, he conducted new productions of Weill's Mahagonny, Berg's Lulu, and Barber's Vanessa. Other guest engagements included the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, the Deutsche Oper of Berlin, and the Vienna Volksoper.

Keene was a renaissance man of the music world, extending his talents far beyond the domain of opera. An active symphonic conductor, he was founder and director of the Long Island Philharmonic and led many of the major orchestras of North America and Europe, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Berlin Radio Symphony, and the orchestras of Bonn, Basel, Nürnberg, and Düsseldorf. He was a steadfast presenter and recorder of the work of American composers, among them Philip Glass, Keith Jarrett, William Schuman, John Corigliano, and David Diamond.

As music director of Eliot Feld's American Ballet Company, Keene composed music for Feld’s ballet The Consort. He wrote the libretto for Stephen Douglas Burton's The Duchess of Malfi and was writing the libretto for Charles Wuorinen's Celia the Slave at the time of his death. Among his other published works were translations of the libretti of Mozart's Don Giovanni and Henze's El Cimarron and Natasha Ungeheuer, as well as numerous articles for publications around the country.

Ultimately it was as general director of the New York City Opera that Keene faced his greatest challenges, celebrated his most glorious victories, and survived what some would call his biggest failures. A frequent conductor there during Julius Rudel's and Beverly Sills’ regimes, he joined the staff as music director under Sills from 1982 to 1986, and assumed the general director's post in March, 1989. City Opera has often suffered in the shadow of its overwhelming Lincoln Center neighbor, the Met. It has been further challenged by a theater ill-suited to opera and unforgiving to the voices of the young singers that the company has tried to encourage. Part of City Opera's mandate has been to offer productions from the standard repertory at prices more affordable than its neighbor's, and Keene was actively engaged in the ongoing process of replacing some of those productions, which had gotten a bit shabby over the years.

Clearly, however, Keene's greatest joy was commissioning new works and producing the seldom-seen. Some of these, like Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron and Zimmermann's The Soldiers, were undisputed triumphs. Others, like this year's productions of Hindemith's Mathis the Painter, Ezra Laderman's Marilyn, or Jay Reise's Rasputin, garnered criticism that ranged from middling to venomous. Nonetheless, Keene's loyalty to contemporary opera and composers was unwavering. “Lots of producers commission new works because they think it's the right thing to do,” says Opera News editor Patrick J. Smith, “but when the bad reviews come in ... Christopher was willing not only to commission a piece, but to stand behind it. He was very interested in new work and young composers, and not just as window-dressing.”

Keene's stamp is all over this year's City Opera line-up, which includes Mathis — Keene conducted the opening night despite having only recently completed his radiation and chemotherapy treatments — and the American premieres of Mayuzumi's Kinkakuji and Meier's The Dreyfus Affair, along with Verdi's rarely-produced Attila. Unfortunately, his longtime dream of producing Janácek's Excursions of Mr. Broucek was postponed several years ago due to financial difficulties, and the work never made it back on the roster.

According to Bernard Holland in the New York Times, “Keene had a way of staking his opera house on ventures that never had much chance of succeeding in the first place, but ones that had to be tried just the same ... These new operas freed us, for a moment at least, from the masterpiece syndrome, the rather addled modern expectation of genius every time out.”

Keene was a big-picture thinker who had faith in the cumulative achievement of generation after generation of 20th-century composers. Just a few months before his death, in an interview by James Oestreich for the New York Times, he said: “I’ve always been a long-, long-, long-term planner. I had a plan for life ... which went all the way until I was 90. And I was pretty well on track. I don’t think in those terms any more.” Christopher Keene was 48 years old when he died, truly in his prime as a champion of new work. The world of contemporary music and opera can only imagine what might have emerged from this visionary life cut short — and mourn.

Marge Betley, who is managing director of the New Music-Theater Ensemble (Twin Cities) and a freelance writer, has worked in a variety of areas in opera and music-theater.