Courting Donors, Finding Freedom

BADEN-BADEN, Germany — A decade ago, during a speech in Vienna, the mild-mannered director of a German art museum lit into the Guggenheim for carpetbagging, siphoning money from European companies like Deutsche Bank. The audience ritually nodded.
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Andreas Mölich- Zebhauser

Quizzed later about whether he, too, had ever gone to Deutsche Bank with hat in hand, the man became offended.

“Of course not,” he said.

And there you had it. The trans-Atlantic gulf. The very notion of hitting up private companies and rich people for money, of setting up boards of trustees and answering to them, the way American cultural organizations do, appalled this director’s European sense of entitlement.

Times have changed, especially in the money-mad art world, which has compelled even prideful Europeans to start trolling for cash. But attitudes, well, they have changed less. And in the performing arts, which lean most heavily on public subsidies, Europeans still maintain a general view that public support is a social covenant and moral obligation. They’re reluctant to become too Americanized.

You can’t blame them. Many Americans would side with the German museum director about the dignity of Europe’s lavish public spending, and lament commercial pressures on nonprofit institutions and their dependence on sometimes meddlesome donors.

But that’s not the perspective from this leafy little enclave of private enterprise, whose example should make everyone, on both sides of the Atlantic, think twice about cultural economics and the costs of achieving true quality in the arts.

Here at the very heart of subsidized Europe, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden is a nonprofit venture, or the German equivalent without American-style tax breaks. It receives not a cent of public money, save for a long-term payoff for the construction of its 2,500-seat hall — an unlovely but functional barn, behind the old railway station, designed by Wilhelm Holzbauer, a Viennese architect. Opened in 1998, the hall has turned out to be an acoustic coup. The Festspielhaus now fills it year-round, about 120 times, with the cream of the crop of today’s musicians and dance companies.

The New York Philharmonic arrives in early September, to celebrate the festival’s 10th anniversary, although the actual anniversary was April 18, a date better ignored. When the Festspielhaus started, it almost instantly went belly up and became a laughingstock across Europe. Bailed out by donors, it gradually reinvented itself.

Today it banks its reputation on heavyweight opera productions. A new version of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” will open in July, on the same night that Bayreuth opens “Parsifal” — a coincidence of rivalrous consequence. Lately, Baden-Baden has outshone the creaky Wagner shrine.

Occasionally it also books cash cows. The other night a full house turned out for a concert by the violinist Nigel Kennedy. Before an audience of aged Germans, he did his punk shtick, which like him is getting old. He found a stranger named Vicky near the front row to pretend to flirt with, cursed, kicked a soccer ball into the first balcony, pounded his chest and fiddled “Danny Boy” for an encore. (The program was Mozart and Beethoven, by the way.) Patrons gulped Champagne and ate soft pretzels in the V.I.P. lounge, and (another American-inspired marketing touch) ushers clutching bouquets handed roses to women as they exited. Concertgoers looked perfectly content strolling into the night.

The problem, a decade back, was that with no audience yet to speak of, the Festspielhaus’s first managers naïvely presumed that simply hiring the Nigel Kennedys of the world, and charging $500 for tickets, would make a going endeavor. Baden-Baden became proof to skeptical Europeans of the folly of importing the American model to this side of the Atlantic.