Follow the money: Lyndon Terracini’s survival plan for Opera Australia

Lyndon Terracini’s bold plan to save Opera Australia horrifies purists. Can he pull it off?

ingpin: Lyndon Terracini. Picture: Nic Walker

A sticky midsummer afternoon never feels like the right time to dress in formal wear, but that’s the ­tradition on opening night at the opera in Sydney. People start arriving at the Opera House when the sun is still full of the day’s heat. They come up the stairs of the Joan Sutherland Theatre and spill out onto the balcony to enjoy the breeze and the stunning views of Sydney Harbour. Lyndon Terracini, Opera Australia’s artistic director, is greeting guests as they mingle in the foyer. He’s dressed in a tuxedo with a velvet jacket and a black face mask, his hair swept back like a grandee. With him is his glamorous wife, Swiss-born soprano Noemi Nadelmann, wearing a floor-length evening gown in royal blue.

It’s an opening night unlike any other. Opera Australia is back on stage with a full production for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic closed theatres nine months ago. As required by NSW Health, everyone arrives wearing a face mask, giving the occasion the air of a rather bizarre masquerade. As the bells chime, people make their way into the auditorium for the performance of The Merry Widow, taking their places at socially distant intervals and leaving half the seats empty.

As Terracini moves among the masked crowd, there’s little sign that OA is a company in crisis. In fact, the Joan Sutherland Theatre is one of the few places anywhere that has an opera on stage. The Royal Opera in London, the Vienna State Opera and New York’s Metropolitan all are closed.

The following day Terracini, 71, reflects on the strange spectacle of singers ­performing to an audience of face masks and ­eyeballs. “We all want to have people on their feet screaming and ripping the seats up but you’re not allowed to do it,” he says. “So it becomes a more subdued response to what we’re normally used to, and that’s hard.”

Opera Australia is the nation’s biggest performing arts company and one of the world’s busiest opera companies, giving more than 700 performances a year. The pandemic forced it to cancel hundreds of shows, not only at the Opera House but on its Sydney Harbour outdoor stage, in Melbourne and Brisbane, regional theatres and schools. Its last performance, before The Merry Widow’s short January season, was of Verdi’s Attila, on March 14 last year. Terracini has kept his ticket from that evening as a reminder of his responsibility to the company and the hundreds of people – from wigmakers to technicians, accountants and musicians – it employs. The cancelled performances last year amount to $75m in lost ticket revenue; OA now faces a multi-million-dollar deficit. Staff were stood down and by August job cuts and asset sales loomed. Fifty-six employees, including 16 musicians from the OA Orchestra, were made redundant. These cuts, in particular, have been condemned as shortsighted and have brought OA before the Fair Work Commission.

But with the management team, led by chief executive Rory Jeffes, Terracini insists he has a plan to put the company back on track. Lowering the cost base is one part of it – the other is scheduling more crowd-pleaser spectacles to boost the depleted coffers. Much will be riding on a musical that will soon enter OA’s repertoire, The Phantom of the Opera. Dual productions of Phantom, yet to be announced, will be at the Opera House and on the Sydney Harbour stage. Terracini says the changes he’s making are all about trying to save the company. He’s not one to back down, or even to express doubt. He pulled OA out of the doldrums when he arrived there a decade ago. Can he do it again?

No one could say Terracini isn’t committed to the cause. He says he has no hobbies; his life is the opera. At the Opera House, you can usually find him in row G in a seat that’s close to the stage and the orchestra, a spot that allows him to assess singers and musicians across different nights. Entertaining VIPs is part of the job, too. Mel Gibson attended a few performances and Scott Morrison came to see his favourite singer, Tina Arena, in Evita. A more unusual guest was Bob Dylan, who arrived at the Opera House a couple of years ago wearing a hoodie; he came to see a performance of Rigoletto and was so impressed that he asked ­Terracini to explain some of the finer points of operatic singing, amazed that the singers could project their voices at such volume without using microphones. ­Terracini affects a Dylanesque croak: “How do they do that?” “I said, ‘You know, you study, you position your voice like this.’ I ended up giving him a singing lesson in the stalls… what I found surprising is that he knew virtually nothing about operatic music and singing. It’s as though he’d landed on Mars.”

We’re talking at Terracini’s home, a terrace house in Sydney’s Redfern a couple of minutes’ walk from OA’s offices and studios. There’s a grand piano in the front room, paintings on the walls, and a framed copy of a piece written for Terracini by his mentor, German composer Hans Werner Henze. Nadelmann comes in – she and Terracini call each other schatz, the German equivalent of “darling” – and offers to make coffee, returning with a tray with espresso cups and a plate of ginger biscuits.

Early last year, before the pandemic, Terracini was in a good place, personally and professionally. He and Nadelmann had recently married; they’d first met in Switzerland in the early ’90s when they were both singing in The Marriage of Figaro. Terracini was married at the time to Liz, with whom he has two daughters. He and ­Nadelmann had a long-distance affair, then decided the relationship couldn’t continue. They reconnected in 2011 when Terracini was in Zurich on business, and he and Liz separated the following year.

Reconnection: Nadelmann and Terracini on their wedding day

Nadelmann moved to Australia in 2013 to be with him. Their wedding was in a picturesque ­village in Switzerland in 2019, two days before Terracini’s 70th birthday. “I never thought that would happen,” he says of remarrying later in life. “I never ever thought I would get divorced; I suppose there are a number of reasons for that. The pressure of this job is pretty intense, and puts a lot of strain on relationships. I’m not saying that’s the only reason.”

At the opera, too, Terracini could see his somewhat controversial business model was producing results. Ticket income – boosted by the popular musicals and Sydney Harbour operas – hit $73m in 2019, contributing to a $6.3m surplus. Financial stability allowed Terracini to present some more adventurous repertoire, including 20th century classics such as King Roger and Wozzeck, and there were exciting new developments including international partnerships and digital operas. The production of Attila last March was emblematic of Terracini’s ambition. It was a grandly imposing co-production with Milan’s famed La Scala, with live horses on stage and projections to give the opera a potent political context. There were international singers, but also two local artists Terracini has nurtured for such full-voiced, dramatic roles – tenor Diego Torre and soprano Natalie Aroyan. When Attila was cancelled after only the second performance, starting a domino effect of shutdowns, Terracini could feel a dark hole opening. It wasn’t only that the year’s opera season was wiped out. It was as if his strategy for rebuilding OA since 2009 was back at square one.

It may not have been obvious that a career in opera beckonedwhen Terraciniwas growing up in Dee Why, on Sydney’s northern beaches. But he grew up in a strongly musical family with Italian roots. The ­Terracinis originally were Jewish and took the name of their town, Terracina, near Rome. One of the Terracinis, Umberto, was a founder of the Italian Communist Party. Lyndon’s great-grandfather Jacob Raphael Terracini emigrated from Genoa and settled in ­Melbourne, where he married and had 10 children. He continued in the Jewish faith but his children converted to Christianity and joined the Salvation Army.

When Lyndon was born in 1949, the eldest child of Vita and Shirley, the extended family was fully committed and active in the church. Their weeks were occupied with Salvation Army meetings and band practice. Lyndon started on the cornet before progressing to flugelhorn, trombone, euphonium and timpani. The entire family was involved: younger brothers Winston (now a senior defence barrister) and Paul (a composer and conductor), and sister Elizabeth, who played piano.

“It was probably verging on being fanatical,” ­Terracini says of his family’s involvement in the church. “You didn’t have anything to do with outsiders, as they were called, outside the Salvation Army. When I was playing sport at school – I wasn’t particularly talented but I liked it – I wasn’t allowed to play on Saturday morning.” He mimics a censorious voice: “‘You’ll be mixing with the wrong type.’”

His brother Paul remembers him as an out­going and confident kid, but there also were signs of withdrawal and depression that would recur later in life. Terracini says his parents would tell him to snap out of it. “We had a gum tree in the front yard and I would climb up the tree and just sit up there for most of the day. Well, it’s hardly normal behaviour,” he says. “It doesn’t really work when you say, ‘Snap out of it.’ You say to yourself, ‘I’m just being soft.’ But it doesn’t solve the problem.”

As a young adult Terracini made two big life changes. He decided he could have more fun if he left the Salvos – “You realise there are women, and something to drink” – and he discovered opera. He studied music at the University of Sydney and became a young artist with the Australian Opera, as OA was then called. His first proper stage role there was Sid, a butcher in Benjamin Britten’s opera Albert Herring. Paul played trumpet in the opera orchestra and Vita and Shirley would come to the Opera House to see their sons perform.

Intense: Terracini performing early in his career.

Terracini would go on to sing baritone roles from the repertoire such as Mozart’s Guglielmo and Figaro but from early on he made a speciality of highly dramatic performances involving extreme vocal effects. And his brooding good looks and dark hair were the right fit for ne’er-do-wells such as Don Giovanni, Sweeney Todd and Lord Byron. He certainly made an impression at the 1976 Adelaide Festival when he played an escaped Cuban slave in Henze’s El Cimarr ó n. Music critic Andrew Porter, writing for The New Yorker, described ­Terracini’s performance as “smouldering, explosive, shrieking, whispering, singing, expansive, fierce, suddenly sly… tremendous”.

Meeting Henze in Adelaide had a profound influence on Terracini. The young singer dared to offer the composer advice on how to adapt his music to an English translation of the text. Henze, a major figure in classical music, accepted the ­suggestion and took Terracini under his wing, inviting him to his summer music festival that year in Montepulciano, Tuscany. The Inter­national Construction Site for the Arts, as the festival was called, was a utopian experiment that involved the whole town. Its centrepiece was a reworking of an 18th-century opera, Paisiello’s Don Chisciotte della Mancia (Don Quixote), staged in the piazza decked with windmills. Local women stitched costumes, children made posters, and the brass band played alongside a professional orchestra. Terracini saw the energy and community spirit that was unleashed when a town got behind a project such as this. Through the 1980s he and his then wife Liz lived in Palanzo, near Lake Como, where daughters Catherine and Alexis were born. He continued to sing professionally but he was thinking about the next phase of his career as an artistic director.

After the family returned to Australia and ­settled on a property in Lismore, northern NSW, Terracini became the founding artistic director of Northern Rivers Performing Arts. As well as presenting popular touring shows such as Tap Dogs and Bran Nue Dae, he started to produce the kind of community-based arts projects that he had experienced in Montepulciano, including his live-action version of Peter Weir’s The Cars that Ate Paris. The Queensland Biennial Festival of Music, where he became artistic director in 2001, and later the Brisbane Festival, gave him a much bigger canvas. Concerts and opera were part of the program, but so were community projects, such as an event in Barcaldine for which 150 local people made and played their own marimbas. He loved the way these events brought people together in a spirit of celebration.

Spectacular: Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. Picture: Lisa Tomasetti

Terracini says he never sought the artistic leadership of OA. He was headhunted in 2009 during a disastrous period for the company amid the global financial crisis. When Terracini arrived it was with a strong streak of pragmatism, intended to restore OA’s finances. To bring audiences back he programmed a steady diet of reliable crowd-pleasers such as La Boheme and The Magic Flute. Contemporary opera and anything too challenging was out, but to the excitement of seasoned opera-goers and the disappointment of some homegrown ­talent he started to bring in more international singers. Within a few years Terracini had remade the company into a production powerhouse. He didn’t necessarily go deeper into the repertoire but he diversified OA’s activity, with opera on TV, ­digital opera with LED screens, and opera on the beach and the harbour. The Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour presentations, launched in 2012, are his crowning glory. The stage seems to float on water, music fills the air, and the Sydney Opera House and city skyline are the backdrop as night falls. Backed financially by enigmatic Japanese businessman and religious figure Haruhisa Handa, the outdoor productions quickly became a fixture in the city’s cultural calendar.

The same year, Terracini staged a New York production of South Pacific in the Opera House, starting an annual season there of Broadway musicals, and took OA to Brisbane for the first time in 20 years with The Magic Flute and Baz Luhrmann’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The company was on a high. Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle was staged at Arts Centre Melbourne in 2013, and there were new ventures with a made-for-TV opera, The Divorce, and a new family opera, The Rabbits, featuring pop artist Kate Miller-Heidke.

Not everyone was happy. Local singers complained that Terracini was denying them roles as he continued to bring in foreign artists. And while the musicals were box-office gold, soon accounting for half of all ticket revenue, they took precious dates in the Opera House that were previously for opera, upsetting the purists. In 2014, then arts ­minister George Brandis announced a review of the four federally funded opera companies including OA, which receives more than $20m in federal subsidy a year. It attempted to put some guidelines around OA’s ambitions for growth, including the musicals and interstate seasons. Among the recommendations were fines of $200,000 if an opera company (that is, OA) failed to hire an appropriate balance of Australian and international singers.

Terracini has not cut back on foreign artists but, with seeming impunity, has hired them in increasing numbers, from eight in 2010 to 33 in 2019, while some well-known local singers no longer get a look in. It’s a source of anguish but few are willing to speak out publicly – the opera community in Australia is small and Terracini is its undoubted kingpin. A change.org petition in 2016, signed by 230 opera-goers, attempted to have him removed, saying he was more interested in catering to tourists than in showcasing Australian singers, artists and composers.

Terracini says he expects to be on the receiving end of frank opinions from opera patrons and ­others whose livelihood depends on the company. His view is that audiences for traditional opera are shrinking and OA would be reduced to a part-time operation without the changes he’s made. Unlike the heavily subsidised European opera houses, OA must earn the larger part of its income at the box office. The musicals and Sydney Harbour spectaculars underwrite performances of traditional opera and it’s not always possible to find local singers for the most difficult roles.

He rejects the accusation that he doesn’t support Australian artists, naming sopranos Nicole Car, ­Stacey Alleaume and Anna-Louise Cole, among others, as singers he has successfully nurtured. “I don’t get offended about that many things. People can decide I’m an arsehole and the rest of it,” he says. “But I have spent a lot of time with Australian singers, and trying to develop Australian singers.”

Terracini has climbed to the top rungs of the arts in this country. In 2019, as he marked his ­decade at OA, the board extended his contract to 2023, when he will be 74. He’s not talking about retirement just yet, although he and Nadelmann recently bought a weekender at Millthorpe, in rural NSW, where they plan to live one day.

The next three years are crucial for OA and for Terracini’s legacy. As 2020 unfolded and the lockdown cancelled hundreds of performances, he was devastated. “You’ve got to do something about getting the company out of the hole. It’s not an easy task.” Rather than commit to a ­traditional, year-long opera season, he has put in place a ­festival-style model of separate, self-contained events. The summer season starting with The Merry Widow will be followed by Verdi’s Ernani, another co-production with La Scala, then Tosca and ­Bluebeard’s Castle. Opera on Sydney Harbour will return in March with Stacey Alleaume in La Traviata; another event is planned for Sydney’s Cockatoo Island. A Melbourne season is planned, and the world’s first fully digital Ring Cycle – involving stage scenery on giant LED screens – will open in Brisbane in October.

In a move that will have opera purists rolling their eyes, Terracini has secured the rights to stage The Phantom of the Opera at the Opera House and on Sydney Harbour. The Andrew Lloyd Webber blockbuster removes any pretence that OA’s musicals are about reviving classic Broadway shows that commercial producers wouldn’t touch. “We need to make a lot of money,” Terracini says, “and Phantom is the most bankable musical there is.”

The festival model means OA can be flexible and cut its losses in the event of future lockdowns but the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance sees it as an excuse to casualise the workforce. Within weeks of redundancies being announced in September, OA was advertising for temporary staff to work on its theatre and outdoor events.

OA has been forced to pay out former musicians who settled unfair dismissal claims, and oboe player Mark Bruwel is taking his unlawful dismissal case to the Federal Court. He says OA’s plan was always to reduce numbers in the full-time orchestra. “This is not just a short-term thing to get through Covid,” he says. “It’s an ideological shot at orchestras.”

Terracini says the job losses are “awful” but the company has to cut costs. The orchestra, he adds, will be boosted with freelancers and graduates from the Australian National Academy of Music.

Meanwhile, he continues to look for new opportunities. He wants OA to be an inter­national opera centre, making productions that can be sold to other major companies. He talks about plans for opera using animation and games technology. There’s mention of future projects with one of the world’s leading houses, the ­Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where Australian ­Barrie Kosky is due to direct Der Rosenkavalier.

As Terracini enters the crucial final act of his career, it’s clear he has lost none of his enthusiasm for opera and its possibilities.

“Fundamentally I’m still a singer, my heart will always be in an opera company,” he says. “It’s ­distressing when you see the situation worldwide, and what’s happening to opera companies… it’s about finding ways we can preserve the artform – it’s too easy to roll over and say we’ll be part-time. That would be catastrophic for everyone.”