Levy’s book, which is largely a triumphalist recounting of his engagements with mentalities more parochial and energies more negative or slothful than his own in the cause of saving Lincoln Center from itself and its constituents (there’s no low-self-esteem problem here), is entertaining and informative. For operaphiles, it includes pointed commentary on the woes of both major New York companies that is well argued and, for the most part, well taken. By all means give it a look. Of more immediate and urgent interest, though, is Michael M. Kaiser’s Curtains? The Future of the Arts in America (Brandeis Univ. Press, 2015). Like Levy, Kaiser has run a big performing arts center (the Kennedy, in Washington, D.C.). Unlike Levy, he has also run important dance companies and, most pertinently for us, a major international opera company: The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, London. ^(I) In each of these cases, he has assumed leadership in troubled times and left his institution in a more stable situation, earning in the process a reputation as a turnaround artist. His book opens with two chapters on the recent past. The first describes the extraordinary expansion of the performing arts in America in the decades following World War II. He sees those heady years as exceptional rather than normative, the byproduct of a period of sustained economic growth and a public-spiritedness exemplified by the development of the modern American philanthropic model. His second chapter charts the contraction and fragmentation that has followed. One can always quibble about emphases, but these sections bring us accurately and readably to our current situation.

The expansion shifted into neutral, I would argue, circa 1980, with a change in political direction. But it’s certainly true that (as Kaiser draws the timeline), it kicked into reverse around the turn of the millenium. He documents the important immediate causes of decline, which have included economic uncertainty; the rise of the Internet and electronic media, with their demands on increasingly scattered attention and their tempting array of inexpensive (albeit virtual) entertainment options; the valorization of the STEM disciplines and concomitant withering of arts education; the decline of newspapers (and, I might add, of consumer magazines devoted to the arts, like High Fidelity or Theatre Arts), with the resultant near-disappearance of credentialed journalistic criticism; the loss of the “symbiotic” (Kaiser’s word) benefits of the once-flourishing classical recording industry; the aging of the audience and donor pool, which is not being replenished at the rate of former generational shifts; and changes in lifestyle (more dual-income households with less predictable schedules, more overtime and business-related travel) that have seriously undermined the subscription model of ticket sales that long provided a significant measure of stability for so many organizations.