In these days of full disclosure, it is with pride that I acknowledge my debt to Danny Newman.  Early in my radio career, Newman suggested to me that I interview one of his singers who was appearing at Lyric Opera of Chicago.  Over the next quarter century, the total number of interviews grew to just over 1600, and it was Newman (and his staff) who arranged for many of them.  Besides being on WNIB and later WNUR and Contemporary Classical Internet Radio, quite a few were published in journals and newsletters, including my own magazine, Opera Scene which ran for a year. 

These days, I am happy to be giving new life to many of them on this website.  Some of the previously-published items are here, as well as many which were only used before on the air.  The response from my guests who are still around has been completely positive, and I also get messages from readers all over the globe.  I am sure that Newman is pleased at this success, even though I do not charge anything for browsing the site.

Besides staying in touch with him often during his final years at Lyric Opera, we sat down for two conversations.  This page presents the second of those two encounters.

While promoting his book, Subscribe Now!, he wrote a brief synopsis of his path in life which he delivered as he started off his personal appearances.  I asked him to read that onto the tape, which he did with appropriate gusto . . . . .


Danny Newman:    In my sixty-six years in the lively and lovely arts, I have been intensively and often simultaneously involved on the multi-levels of publicity, promotion, management, and entrepreneurship in a wide range of activities, and with artists of infinite variety.  I’ve been in horse opera, soap opera, light opera, comic opera, and grand opera.  I have worked with crooners, pop singers, blues singers, soul singers, band singers, liturgical singers, calypso singers, torch singers, jazz singers, choral singers, and opera singers

  You can’t do that, and we would not want them to that.  We would not ask that of the artists.  But we, who have the stewardship of these projects, we who are their management and see to their promotion, we can do it and we should do it.  That’s our role.  That’s why we’re on board. 

BD:    So you do everything for the artist except perform?

DN:    That’s right.  And if necessary, I can do that, and I have!

BD:    [With a gentle nudge]  You got a good high C working for you?

DN:    [Laughs]  Well, a little short of that!  Singing is not my forte.  The problem is that I can’t keep the tune except in group singing.

BD:    But you enjoy hearing the tune?

DN:    Oh, very much, yes.  I’m a real aficionado, a devotee of vocal music particularly.  I love the voice.  It is something which I cultivated, or was cultivated for me in childhood when I began to hear voices of these marvelous cantors that we had sixty or seventy years ago.  They were some of the greatest voices you can imagine, and I was so captivated by their

W. McNeil Lowry Is Dead; Patron of the Arts Was 80 By JACK ANDERSON Published: June 7, 1993, The New York Times  [Text only.  Photo from another source.] W. McNeil Lowry, a former vice president of the Ford Foundation who made that institution a major supporter of the arts, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 80. The cause was cancer of the esophagus, said his wife, Elsa. Through his efforts, Mr. Lowry (whose full name was Wilson McNeil Lowry) helped make the Ford Foundation America's largest nongovernmental arts patron and the first foundation to support dance. The effects of his cultural campaigning were so great that Lincoln Kirstein, a co-founder of the New York City Ballet, called him "the single most influential patron of the performing arts that the American democratic system has produced." Mr. Lowry joined the Ford Foundation in 1953 to head its education program. He became the director of its arts and humanities programs in 1957 and vice president in 1964. After retiring from the foundation in 1974, he was in demand as an arts consultant, and from 1988 to 1991 he was president of the board of the San Francisco Ballet. Although Mr. Lowry, who was familiarly known as Mac, could seem mildly professorial in manner, he proved to be tough-minded and strong-willed. Modest Grants, Then Expansion Under his guidance, the Ford Foundation began to support the arts in a modest way. Yet many of its early grants were important. A grant of $105,000 in 1957 enabled the New York City Opera to present a season of American operas, and another of $210,000 that same year to symphony orchestras across the country went toward the commissioning of 18 new symphonic compositions. The foundation expanded its arts program in 1962 with grants totaling $6.1 million to nine nonprofit repertory theaters. Later grants went to writers, film makers, art schools and conservatories of music. In 1967 a Ford grant helped establish the Negro Ensemble Company. In 1963, believing that dance was an underfinanced art, Mr. Lowry spearheaded a project through which more than $7.7 million was shared by eight ballet organizations: the New York City Ballet, its affiliated School of American Ballet, the National Ballet in Washington, the San Francisco Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet, the Utah Ballet (now Ballet West), the Houston Ballet and the Boston Ballet. No foundation had ever supported dance on such a scale. Yet far from inspiring elation, the grants were greeted in some quarters with dismay. Supporters of modern dance complained that their idiom had been ignored. From within ballet itself came a second charge: that the leaders of the regional ballet groups had been connected at some point with either the City Ballet or with its principal choreographer, George Balanchine, when he was associated with other troupes. Although debates raged over the foundation's choices, Mr. Lowry's subsequent policy decisions helped make up for any lapses of 1963. Modern dance eventually received Ford Foundation support; so did companies including American Ballet Theater and the Joffrey Ballet. Moreover, the precedent of the Ford grants inspired corporations and other foundations to aid dance in their own way. Roots in the Midwest Mr. Lowry took criticisms seriously, if philosophically. Typically, in 1973, he said: "There is no way to be in this post without getting both plaudits and criticism, sometimes intemperate and inaccurate. I don't mind being put under the villains. I can look at myself in the mirror and see a villain." No matter what the artistic field, Mr. Lowry encouraged activities across the nation. He explained why in a 1962 interview in The New York Times: "I suppose the fact that I was born 80 miles from the exact geographical center of the United States has given the foundation's program a grass-roots approach." The place to which he referred was Columbus, Kan., where Mr. Lowry was born on Feb. 17, 1913. He received his bachelor's degree in 1934 and his Ph.D. in 1941 from the University of Illinois, where he taught English from 1936 to 1942. In 1936 he married Elsa Alberta Koch. During World War II, Mr. Lowry served on active duty as a lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve and as a writer for the Office of War Information. He then embarked on a journalistic career. He was editor of The Dayton (Ohio) Daily News in 1946 and 1947; chief of the Washington bureau of the Cox Newspapers from 1947 to 1952, and associate director of the International Press Institute in Zurich in 1952 and 1953. Before his wartime service, Mr. Lowry edited Accent, a literary journal, from 1940 to 1942, and over the years he contributed to publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Reporter, The Progressive, Antioch Review and Educational Theater Journal, among others. Encouraging Collaboration After leaving the Ford Foundation, Mr. Lowry helped organize conferences for the American Assembly, which had been established at Columbia University in 1950 as a public-affairs forum. He edited "The Performing Arts and American Society," a background volume for the American Assembly of 1978, and wrote "The Arts and Public Policy in the United States" under the assembly's auspices in 1981. In 1975 he directed a study of the arts in America for the American Council of Learned Societies. During his earlier years at the Ford Foundation, Mr. Lowry urged arts organizations to develop strong boards of directors, but he became increasingly dismayed by the way boards began to usurp the prerogatives of artistic leaders. One reason he agreed to head the San Francisco Ballet's board was to demonstrate how a company's artistic and managerial staffs could work together harmoniously. Mr. Lowry was given a special Tony Award in 1963 for his support of American theater. Other honors include an ANTA Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Association of American Dance Companies Award, the Capezio Award, the American Association of University Presses Award and the John F. Wharton Theater Award. He is survived by his wife and a son, Harrison Graham Lowry of Purcilville, Va.

  We have to look at it really as they do in most other places, where the arts are a part of the educational process of the whole society.  It’s looked at that way, and therefore nobody begrudges that government spends tax monies on it.

BD:    Are we getting more to the point where the general public

[From Broadway World, June 27, 2013 (text only, photo from another source)] Susan Mathieson Mayer, director of Lyric's marketing and communications department for the past twenty-five years, has chosen to leave her current position at the end of 2013, Lyric's general director Anthony Freud announced yesterday. Mathieson Mayer will work as an independent marketing and communications consultant for a variety of organizations. She will retain an association with Lyric, consulting on media-related and marketing projects. "It is an honor to work for this great company," Mathieson Mayer said. "However, I now want flexibility in my professional career so that I can spend more time with my husband, Friedrich Mayer, who is retired." Freud said that the appointment process to recruit Mathieson Mayer's successor is well underway with an announcement expected within the next several weeks. "Susan has earned an international reputation for arts marketing and is widely acknowledged as one of the leading practitioners in the field today," Freud said. "She has made a major contribution to the company during her tenure, and will be greatly missed by her colleagues, Lyric's Board of Directors, and the artists. Just as Susan had big shoes to fill when she succeeded the legendary Danny Newman, so too will Susan's successor." Mathieson Mayer joined Lyric in 1988 and has the distinction of completely selling out the season for sixteen consecutive seasons (1989/90 through 2004/2005) - a record unequaled in the performing arts field. With its 25,000 season ticket holders, Lyric remains a leader in subscription sales and audience development. Because of Lyric's expanded programming and effective marketing, Lyric just announced a 15% increase in attendance for its 2012/13 season over the previous season. Mathieson Mayer has spearheaded a wide variety of audience-building initiatives for Lyric, as well as numerous high-profile branding projects for the company, including the 2011 advertising campaign "Long Live Passion," which featured Lyric's creative consultant and superstar soprano Renée Fleming; the naming of the Lyric Opera Bridge; and a series of Lyric Operathon fundraising posters that featured celebrities ranging from Michael Jordan to Bono. In 2000, Mathieson Mayer was named one of the country's Top 100 Marketers by Advertising Age- the only professional in the arts to be nominated. Prior to joining Lyric, Mathieson Mayer headed her own arts marketing firm. She was also director of marketing for the arts festival of the 1986 World's Fair in Vancouver, where she sold out 102 of the 106 events. While at the Vancouver Symphony in the 1980s, she built the subscription base to 42,000 - at the time, the largest orchestra subscription audience in the world.

  The single ticket-buyers are why we only had four theaters, you understand!  The single ticket buyers will betray you every time.  They have no loyalty to the project.  They won’t give you any contributions.  They buy you like groceries, or like gasoline at the gas station when you need it for convenience!  They don’t understand what we do for the youth. They have no feeling for what our institutions stand for.  So then the more they do that, the more insistent the public gets, and they say that’s the fault of subscription.  Of course overwhelmingly we have the affirmative people who believe what I believe, and with good reason.

BD:    So do the companies that want to go back to single ticket-buyers wither and die?

DN:    Yes, or worse than that.  In the arts, the situation is such that companies can wither but not die.  So they remain a constant whining problem, going around with their hat in their hands begging people to give them the wherewithal so that they can pull up the curtain for the next season.  I have a different vision.  My vision has been vindicated by arts organizations that are so publicly successful, that have so many thousands and thousands of people who want to go, and do go, and who find pleasure in them.  Audiences will grow in their perceptions in those arts, and I believe that they are still the way for our future.

BD:    Is there a place at all for experimentation?

DN:    Yes, within the framework as I described.  You must understand that if I have two experimental plays or operas or ballets in a season of eight events, which is 25%, the majority of people who attend tolerate the minority of new items, or better still even comes over a little their side.  Then we can go on.  That is generally accepted and understood, though some people don’t like that system.  They would like to have all eight completely conventional and traditional.

BD:    And there are some who want eight completely novel!

DN:    Yes, however they know that if they have that we couldn’t exist.  Also, an arts organization, whatever the art is, can have two elements in its repertoire which are very special, very experimental, different, esoteric.  They could be something new, or they could be even something from the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries that nobody ever produces.

BD:    A ‘resurrected piece’!

DN:    Yes, one usually not produced because it was never successful in the past.  But because the present artistic direction has ideas, they might do a better job.  Anybody can try again.  That’s a reasonable stance.  So what happens is that those experiments have a basic audience of 25,000 people.  If you try to do them on their own strength, you couldn’t get a corporal’s guard to attend!  So this is a tremendous boon for the experiments because they get the weight of the subscription audience, which is really giving them every chance.  There are many different kinds of works which I would classify as esoteric.  They could be classics but just not popular, works which have never been really that widely accepted.

BD:    When they hear an odd piece I have played on the radio, people will often call and ask why we haven’t heard this in a hundred years.

DN:    We get letters of this type containing certain elements of the repertoire.  But remember, as far as Lyric Opera’s concerned, our system for some years has been to do eight operas in our mainstage season, not eighteen, not twenty-eight.  So we have certain limitations.

BD:    I feel you have handled the balance very well during all these many seasons.

DN:    Overall, I really think that Lyric Opera is a wonderful example of sound management and sound artistic direction, bearing in mind all of the checks and balances which must be taken into consideration.  We had twenty-five years with Carol Fox, who established the character of the company as one with great artists of the world were expected by the audience.  Then we had another large number of years by Ardis Krainik, who carried on that tradition and also entered more enthusiastically into the twentieth-century concept!  We would  always do certain more special things.  What was a little deceptive is that we always did them!  If you go back to the Lyric’s first season, 1954, we did The Taming of the Shrew by Giannini.

BD:    And Lord Byron’s Love Letter (Banfield) the following year, and The Harvest (also by Giannini) in 1961.

DN:    We always did esoteric works, except we didn’t talk about it.   We just did them, and the audience would accept it.  It’s true that once we boasted about it, the people began to become more conscious and they’d worry about it more!  But we weren’t doing anything that much different than today.

ou have to cover a lot of distance, and stop and fight in the middle of all this.  It’s a nightmare, but nonetheless I survived it, and I was equipped for it in a sense because I was a press agent.  I could walk very well, I could run very well, and move very well.  As a press agent I was always nimble in more ways than one, and so I really felt that I was equipped.  I served in the North Carolina Division where most of the soldiers were country boys who were used to shooting squirrels and living outdoors all their entire childhood.  I was a city-boy, born into apartments, and yet I stood up physically amazingly well, often ended up carrying the packs of and the rifles of the country boys who unfortunately broke down.  So I’m pretty proud of my city-boy background, and I feel that being a press agent somehow helped me.  I entered the army at the age of 25, between 24 and 25, and I had already been working in the theater for a full ten years.  I began my work as sort of a child prodigy as a press agent and theatrical manager at the age of 14, which sounds rather astonishing but it’s a fact.  So that by the time I was in my late teens, I was a thorough going professional.  I must have been 19 years old when I was the press agent of the biggest Vaudeville house in the mid-west, the Oriental theater, which has recently undergone renovation.  I became the press agent there about sixty years ago, and I remained in that position through 1955, except for the two years I was away in the army.  But I was not there exclusively.  My work all through the years has involved multiple activities, multiple employments where I simultaneously was handling six or seven or eight projects.  When I went to the newspapers each day, I carried with me six or seven or eight different envelopes containing the materials of the various projects.  I was working in the legitimate theater, in the recital and concert field, in the opera field, in Vaudeville, and in motion pictures.  I was, for many years, the press agent of one of the few art film movie theaters where we played French, Italian, Russian films, even German ones before World War II began.  We didn’t do them anymore during the World War II...  I was at the World Playhouse Theater on Michigan Avenue, right across the lobby, the same lobby, of the Studebaker Theater, where I would, at the same time, be handling a play in that 1,250 seat legitimate theater.  I could walk across the lobby to my little office in the World Playhouse, where I was working on one of the foreign films.

BD:    I get the feeling that you wouldn’t be happy unless you’re juggling several balls at once!

DN:    Well, I’ve always been involved in a number of projects, but I like it, and it also worked for me.  The economics of it were very good, and one hand often washed the other.  For instance, when I returned from the army in 1945, I began almost immediately a five-year assignment as co-producer of a daily radio show, five days a week, sort of the ‘grand-daddy’ of the celebrity interview show, where I supplied the celebrities from all areas.  [See newspaper notice at left.]  I had so many different projects, I didn’t have to bring in any other people.  I had movie stars, stage stars, sports stars.  I had everything going, and the interviewer of my program was Myron Wallace, who is now called Mike Wallace.  We spent five years together at the Mayfair Room at the Blackstone Hotel, conducting these interviews five days a week.  I supplied the celebrities and he interviewed them.  By the way, at that time he didn’t have his present personality, which I believe is now a part of him.  He assumed that of an interrogator, a sort of prosecutorial-type of interviewer, which he wasn’t then.  He was rather pleasant and gentle.

BD:    Now he’s more adversarial!

DN:    Oh yes.  It’s part of his role, and it’s important to what he does.

BD:    I remember the old series he did on television called Biography.  Those were good.  He would present the people and show film clips.

DN:    That was more along the lines of what we were doing.  That program was called Famous Names, and it was, as I say, a really a pioneering program of its type.  It worked very well.  We were sponsored by the same sponsor for five years, Walgreens, which was seeking to create a more upscale image that it had had at that time.  Such a program was what they wanted, with famous names and the Blackstone Hotel, which was then the same kind of very elegant hotel as the Drake Hotel is now.  It seemed to fit what they wanted, and we went five years on that program.

BD:    In the meantime, you were doing all of these other things, too?

DN:    Oh, yes.  Also in those years I was handling the annual Kelly Bowl football games, which I started before I left for the army and continued when I came back.  That was an annual football game in Soldier Field with an attendance of 100,000 people.  First we sold the 100,000 tickets to people who regarded them as a charity.  They gave us the money, and we resold the tickets to people who actually wanted to use them.  It was the annual championship game between the public high schools, and the Catholic high schools, and all the money went to wonderful charitable organizations.  This was in the years when Edward J. Kelly was the Mayor of Chicago.  [Kelly was the 46th mayor of Chicago from 1933-47.]  The people who ran that entire operation were all in politics, and that was a great education for me because up to that point I had nothing to do with political organizations.  But I learnt a great deal and I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I made some wonderful friends

  So we made an appointment and we talked, and I enjoyed very much working with him.  He had a wonderful man named Jack Anderson, who was one of the most politically sophisticated men that you could imagine.  I learned a tremendous amount from him just by listening to him and by watching him.  He had a special ability to deal with people and their problems.

BD:    Does it please you now that people listen to you and take from you all that you have learned, and scatter it out across the country and across the world?

DN:    Well, it’s in certainly a limited field.  Really, it is show business on one level and the more elegant forms of the arts, like Lyric Opera, on the other.  But I have great pleasure in the human side of it with all the wonderful friendships that I have made.  By the way, this causes one of my great problems because I have such a voluminous correspondence.  If I worked with somebody forty or fifty years ago, I don’t let go.  They’re my friends, and unfortunately the people of that generation are dwindling now.

BD:    [Re-assuringly]  Oh, but you’re making more and more new friends all the time!

DN:    Yes, I am making new ones all the time.  Lately some well-meaning friends of mine have asked me why I don’t just stay in Chicago all the time and sit at my desk at Lyric Opera to carry out your responsibilities there.  Well, I also go out and do lectures.  That’s something else I do a lot now.  I always did some, but I do more now than I ever did.  But these well-meaning friends don’t want me to go out on the road to all of these different places and subject myself to all the weather conditions and going without sleep and all that.  They say I should give up and consider my advanced years!  What happens is that I continue to get these wonderful letters from people I just started to work with a year or two or three ago.  One letter I got just recently was from the chairman of the board of the Opera Company of Philadelphia, which is one of my current problems.  (I call them my problems.)  I’ve worked very closely with them for the last two years, and this year he doubled the subscription; over 100% increase!  So when this man writes a letter to me, how can I deny these special ministrations which I am able to provide through these wonderful people who run the arts?  This man, by the way, is the chairman of the board of a multi-national corporation, a very big, billions of dollars corporation.  And he’s so enthusiastic as a result of my tutelage and seeing the results that he’s participated in, that he is retiring two years ahead of schedule just to devote all of his time now to the Opera Company of Philadelphia.  He tells me that I’ve inspired him, and he calls me a genius.  So when I read letters like this, why should I go off the road?

BD:    Do you ever get a chance to just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor, to enjoy the fact that there are these thriving companies everywhere?

DN:    I must say I have great satisfaction in that, and you’d be amazed to the extent I keep track of them.  I still know the figures because it’s very important to me having affected the lives and careers of so many people and so many institutions.  In these years of activities, we have built a vast network of organizations all over North America, not to mention the projects overseas.  We have given career fulfillment and livelihood to thousands of artists of every kind.  This is no small thing.  We’ve given prestige, respect, dignity, and a place in the communities involved of those arts organizations that were never occupied before.  I’ve tried to remove the arts organizations from being cheap, speculative, show business, hoping to find some rich man who will pull them out somehow and get the curtain open.  I want them to be

BD:    Two others you have cited are Italo Tajo and Ferruccio Tagliavini.

DN:    It was 1946, and at that time the artists rarely came by plane.  They all came from Europe by boat and tram, and then transferred in New York to the train.  So here these two came in together from Italy boat into New York and then flew into Midway Airport.  This was long before we had the O’Hare Field.  Tagliavini was very tiny and Tajo was about 6' 4", or more.  I called them the long and short of it!  Tajo was a major bass, a brilliant performer and stunning actor.  Tagliavini was a sort of crooning tenor with an extremely beautiful sound.  So they arrived together for the 1946 season of the Chicago Opera Company, which was headed by Fausto Cleva, later to become the head of the Italian wing of the Metropolitan Opera.  He was the general director of the Chicago Opera Company, which was a successor to the Chicago Civic Opera.  People don’t realize that we had probably half a dozen Chicago opera companies before Lyric Opera began, beginning with the first one in 1910.  There was a Chicago Grand Opera company, a Chicago Opera Association, and then there was a Chicago Civic Opera, a Chicago City Opera, and a Chicago Opera Company.  I went down with that ship at the end of the 1946 season, which by the way, converted me very strongly where opera was concerned, to the concept that if you didn’t have a subscription, you had no way to survive in the opera world.

BD:    So your experience with those companies, and that company in particular, made the success of Lyric Opera possible?

DN:    Well, in some sense it did convince me that something would not be able to survive unless you had a committed audience that would go regularly and would also become your contributors.

BD:    Did you have to teach this to Carol Fox?

DN:    Actually, no.  She knew about subscription, and it was her intention and that of her partner, Larry Kelly, to start a subscription, which in fact they did in the second season of 1955.  However it was a minor effort, and nothing really happened for subscription until a few years later, after I’d had some stunning successes with theater companies such as the Studebaker Theater Company and the Goodman Theater back in the ‘50s.  I was able to transfer that experience to the needs of Lyric Opera, and once we got going we did beautifully, and we built up to about 25,000 subscribers around the time we ran into a lot of difficulties in the ‘80s.  That was because the musicians had demanded more performances, which was understandable, and we just had to add performances that we didn’t have an audience ready for yet.  So we had a setback for a couple of years.

BD:    There was one year, 1980, when you only did five productions.

DN:    That was the final year of Carol Fox’s regime.  In January of 1981, Carol Fox retired and Ardis Krainik took over within a few days.  At any rate, we got out of the box a little because the subscription, which had been growing steadily, was stopped and didn’t grow for a couple of years.  Then we made up for lost time and it has gone well ever since.

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on January 18, 1999.  It was the second of two interviews I had done with Newman; the previous one had been held on November 26, 1984.  Portions of the first one were broadcast on WNIB in 1989 and 1994.  A brief portion of this second interview was included on the Lyric Opera website during their 50th Anniversary Season in tribute to him as a Jubilarian.  This transcription was made in 2015, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.