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the Milwaukee Symphony to be his development director. “We married three years later because she begged me to marry her,” he recently said jokingly by telephone. “When we decided to get married, some of the staff knew that we were dating even though we were very discrete about it. We invited the president and incoming president of our board of directors over for dinner, and I said, ‘Look, I want you to know that Ann and I are going to get married, and I imagine that you don’t want both of us working in the company.’ They looked at me and said, ‘Well, Ian, what will you do to earn a living?’ which I thought was very funny. Then they added: ‘Look, we’ve got no problem if the staff has no worry,’ and the staff didn’t -- because, frankly, Ann is a genius at her job.”

That was 21 years ago, and Spira, now Ann Campbell, has since become the company’s director of strategic planning, overseeing marketing and development. “She was always actively involved in all of the forward planning because everything is money. It’s the money that allows you to get the artists you want and put on the productions. If there’s no money, there’s no company,” Campbell said.” The couple has two boys: Benjamin, 20, who flies in from UC Santa Cruz for every opening night; and David, 18, who formed an opera club at his high school.

THE BEGINNING
Campbell, 61, was born in Brisbane, Australia. His family moved to Townsville in North Queensland and then to Sydney. “I grew up singing,” he said. When he was in his final year of high school, the drama department staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” and Campbell was cast in the lead. “I had a very natural tenor voice,” he added. Although he had no intentions of becoming a singer, his high school teacher suggested that he take singing lessons while attending university, and because his family wasn’t wealthy, she offered to pay.

Campbell had just earned his bachelor’s degree when he was asked to audition for the Australian Opera, since he had been performing in local musicals. “I did it just as a hoot,” he said, because he’d been planning to study law. Needless to say, he never became a lawyer. The company, which later became known as Opera Australia, offered him a 28-week contract, and he stayed on for eight years. “I was a comprimario and had plenty of work,“ he said, “but I was becoming dissatisfied because I really wanted to be a Nicolai Gedda or Fritz Wunderlich, but I didn’t have the instrument for that. I knew that if I continued in the secondary roles, I’d be frustrated eventually.”

He accepted a position with the Australia Council for the Arts and then went on to head the State Opera of South Australia, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He turned the company around and then became the artistic administrator at the Met, working on casting and scheduling. But he missed controlling a company. “The Met was a great experience for me because it threw me into the big world of singers that I hadn’t known, and I made a lot of relationships,” he said.

In 1983, he left the Met and became San Diego Opera’s general and artistic director.

AS SAN DIEGO OPERA’S DIRECTOR
“In most cases, the artistic director decides what operas will be performed and how they will be cast,” Campbell explained. “The general director is more focused on the funding and running of the administration, and on the survival of the institution. There are lots of artistic directors who don’t want to do fundraising or deal with the boards, but would rather just deal with the product. In my case, I would never have an artistic director separate from me or a general director separate from me because I love doing both.”

The board hires and fires the general director and sometimes the artistic director, and the general director hires and fires everybody else. “Everyone on our board [of 40] is committed to the company by not only contributing but for helping to bring audiences in through their businesses and the friendships they have,” he said. San Diego Opera board members are subscribers and donors, attend the opening night gala, and are active in fundraising and participation. “Nobody comes in thinking that their job is just to be nice,” he said. “The average donor contributes more than $25,000 annually.”

The San Diego Opera Board of Directors is a rotating board with each member allowed two two-year terms, but after a year off, the nominating committee can recommend that the board member return. “The board gets

complete budget details from me four years in advance,” Campbell said. “We’ve balanced our budget for 22 consecutive years, and part of the reason is because we work on this four-year schedule. We always know where we’re heading and can be adaptive for that fifth year if we start to see things change.”

When Campbell became director in 1983, the annual budget was $3 million. At that time, there was a Verdi Festival of two operas every summer that was draining the company’s resources. “Summer is not a time in San Diego when people want to go to the opera,” Campbell said. “I inherited a festival that had already been planned, but I said to the board that it would be the last, since we were not overly financially stable. Some of the donors were angry. I had to cut the company back from six operas to four per season, but now we’ve grown back to five.” The budget is currently $17.5 million.

San Diego Opera isn’t a conservative company according to Campbell. Since 1999, it has staged André Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Tobias Picker’s “Thérèse Raquin,” Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa,” and Carlisle Floyd’s “Cold Sassy Tree” and “Of Mice and Men.” This month, the company is premiering a new production of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” directed by Tony Award-winner Des McAnuff. Yet Campbell acquiesced that it is the San Diego market that might be somewhat more conservative.

“When you have a conservative market, you must always deliver the ‘Aidas,’ ‘Bohèmes’ and ‘Carmens,’ and you have to work them [the audience] into certain things,” he said, adding that some of the company’s more modern, innovative operas have been disasters at the box office, including “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which played to 83 percent; “Cold Sassy Tree,” to 72 percent; and “Thérèse Raquin,” to 71 percent.

The question then arises: Is it wise to produce new contemporary operas knowing that they will most likely be unsuccessful at the box office?

“Absolutely,” Campbell said. “When you budget an opera they don’t know like ‘Wozzeck,’ we’ve budgeted that for 78 percent attendance. On the other hand, ‘Samson and Delilah’ [which was staged in February] was budgeted at 95 percent. In planning a season, we just know that we will not have the same audience for ‘Samson’ as we’re going to have for ‘Wozzeck.’ We have an obligation, I believe, to expose audiences to the newer operas; operas of a more contemporary or modern style that have not been heard, like ‘Wozzeck’; and operas that are part of the standard type of repertoire of which our audience has no knowledge like, for example, Massenet’s ‘Don Quichotte,’ which we have planned for 2009.”