“I’m aware of the speculation that I’m a candidate. I’m not interested in the job at New York City Opera.”—George Steel, Bloomberg News, December 22, 2008

So, after months of rumors that George Steel, Dallas Opera’s newly hired general director, was considering coming to New York City Opera after incoming general director Gerard Mortier abruptly quit this fall before even starting the job—the other shoe has dropped. Yesterday, Steel accepted the job of general manager and artistic director for NYCO, abandoning the Big D for the Big Apple and a post that might make him the opera world’s equivalent of Tim Geithner, Barack Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary. NYCO is a perfect microcosm of the economy generally: there is a mountain of problems to fix. So expectations will be set high for Steel, whom the company has chosen as its savior in a moment of crisis. For starters, as mentioned in Dan Wakin’s New York Times piece today, NYCO’s annual budget, according to board chairman Susan Baker, will be in the “30-ish” millions of dollars versus approximately $42 million in previous seasons, and the company’s endowment was a meager $22 million at the end of November, as compared with $45 million three months earlier. New York City Opera’s official press release can be seen here with a video statement from Steel.

In spite of the desperate financial situation at NYCO—whose major problems include contractual obligations to pay its orchestra and chorus this season, when it has essentially no ticket income while the State Theater undergoes renovations, as well as a disconnect between its mission of serving up “alternative” opera and a home generally considered too large to do so, and whose problematic acoustics have never served the company well—I’d say that the choice of George Steel is a good choice for getting NYCO through this rough patch. Mortier offered the possibility of innovation and excitement in terms of repertoire, which did fit nicely with NYCO’s mission, but it seemed unlikely he would have been able to do so without far more money than this scrappy company has. Yes, I would have loved to see Messiaen’s Saint Francois d’Assise at New York City Opera, one of Mortier’s big planned projects for the company, and yes, Mortier had much more opera experience (Steel has none). When his appointment was announced, Mortier seemed to be too good to be true, and as it turned out, it was too good to be true.
Meanwhile, for George Steel running NYCO will probably feel like driving an SUV compared with the subcompact Miller Theatre at Columbia University , where starting in 1997 Steel created an exciting and innovative arts series. (For instance, on February 6, the Miller Theater will host a performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’s In Vain, described as a “75-minute tour-de-force for 24 players,” featuring “constructions of micro-intervals and pure harmonics.” The work has never been performed before in the U.S.)

What New York City Opera needs now is someone practical—who can do “visionary” on a small scale, without slashing the company mission. Running an opera company will present an unprecedented challenge for Steel, but all things considered, this is a positive and hopeful step for the company.