October 30, 1997 | Read Time: 7 minutes
William Godward was able to make a compelling case as he raised funds for the renovation of the 1932 War Memorial Opera House here. If an earlier generation could build the grand Beaux Arts auditorium in the depths of the Depression, the president of the San Francisco Opera Association reasoned, how could arts patrons fail to bring it back to life in prosperous times?
The argument won the day. The opera house received more than $31-million for its renovation, and it reopened last month in a glittering evening featuring performances by Placido Domingo, Frederica von Stade, and Marilyn Horne, among many others. The donations were enough to place the opera association at No. 304 on The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400 rankings of the organizations that raise the most private money.
Mr. Godward, 83, was able to show how important it was to save the opera house because he remembers what it was like before there was an opera house. As a young man, Mr. Godward would take the 18-cent ferry ride from Berkeley, where he was a student, to attend musical events at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. Great artists would occasionally come through town, but nothing like the parade of stars that began when the opera house was built. ”It was a huge step forward, a complete leap forward,’’ recalls Mr. Godward, a retired lawyer.
”When it was completed, it was generally considered the finest opera house in the world,’’ he says, with perhaps a hint of personal bias. ”Nobody had anything else that was as plush.’’
With an excellent facility to show off, Gaetano Merola, the first director of the San Francisco Opera, was able to attract superior talent. And that standard was maintained down through the years, making San Francisco’s opera company one of the finest in the country.
But the company’s fortunes turned when the opera house was damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Engineers determined that the building would need a $50-million structural renovation to make it safe for long-term use. The city government provided the funds for the seismic retrofit, through a bond issue, but opera-house managers decided that it would make sense to raise an additional $30-million in private funds to modernize lighting and other technical equipment, to expand backstage facilities for artists, and to refurbish the auditorium.
Donors and fellow fund raisers say that Mr. Godward was responsible for much of the success of the campaign to restore the opera house to its previous luster. ”I wouldn’t have to give it a second thought: Bill Godward was the driving force every waking hour,’’ says Bernard Osher, whose gifts to the opera house resulted in the auditorium being called the Osher Auditorium.
”He gives it to you straight, and tells you what he needs, and you like him because he is honest,’’ says Mr. Osher, chairman of Butterfield and Butterfield, a San Francisco auction house. The simple fact of fund raising, says Mr. Osher, is: ”You give money to people you like.’’
By all accounts, a lot of people like Mr. Godward. He was instrumental in securing most of the largest gifts to restore the opera house, personally soliciting the contributions in many cases.
Technically, fund raising for the renovation was organized by a separate entity, the Committee to Restore the Opera House. The War Memorial Opera House is a complicated organization, with a governing board appointed by the Mayor of San Francisco, and it is home to the city’s ballet company as well. Initially, there was some hope that the ballet would help to raise a substantial portion of the goal, but its own financial troubles and previously announced fund-raising campaigns precluded it from participating in the renovation campaign, says George Hume, chairman of the renovation fund drive.
”This was really the opera’s campaign,’’ says Mr. Hume. Many of the top gifts came from opera supporters, and opera volunteers — especially Mr. Godward — were heavily involved in fund raising. ”He was instrumental in its success,’’ says Mr. Hume.
But for all the success the campaign had in raising money for the opera house, Mr. Godward says the real challenge was raising money for the day-to-day needs of the opera company, particularly during the 18 months it had to vacate the opera house.
On first glance, many people believed that there was no suitable place for the opera to perform outside the opera house. And many board members felt that it would be best for the company to simply shut down, says Lotfi Mansouri, the Iranian-born stage director who has run the company here since 1989. ”You know how volunteer boards are,’’ he says. ”They always want to take the safe way out.’’
But Mr. Mansouri felt that such a course would be suicide for the company — and an expensive suicide at that. The company would have to pay its orchestra, chorus, and stagecraft employees under union contracts. All together, the cost of doing nothing would be $14-to $15-million, but the impact would be far worse than just the money that was lost, Mr. Mansouri argued.
Key managers and musicians would probably have left, many more would have to be fired, and the company would probably have lost many donors and much of its audience. For Mr. Mansouri, it was imperative that the company find a way to perform during the period when the company was out of the opera house. ”It would have killed the company,’’ he says, if there were no performances.
”Bill Godward was the man who completely understood what I was doing,’’ Mr. Mansouri recalls. ”And he is the one who convinced the board to take the risk,’’ he says.
Ultimately, the opera decided to move to the old Civic Auditorium, where it performed more than 65 years ago, before the opera house was built. It would also perform at a smaller theater, the Orpheum, located in a less desirable part of town. But moving into the new venues would require the company to spend a lot of money to make the theaters more comfortable and to upgrade their production facili-ties.
To carry out the plans, the opera established an additional fund-raising drive — called ”Setting the Stage’’ — for $20-million. The money would be split — two-thirds for the opera, to support its production costs, and one-third for the opera house renovation campaign.
”Setting the Stage’’ got off to a rocky start, Mr. Godward says. ”When we started this, we got flak all over the city,’’ he recalls. Nobody wanted to go to the other theaters because they felt it would be too dangerous, or otherwise unappealing, he says.
Mr. Mansouri and Mr. Godward set up small social gatherings all over the city to explain, with models and pictures, their vision for a new way to present opera. But the initial response was poor. ”We started out at minus ground zero, everybody was so antagonistic,’’ he says.
At the first event, says Mr. Godward, ”Everybody wanted to get drunk, the reaction from some of our best people was so bad.’’ But with persistence, the company was able to convince enough people that the plans made sense. ”After 70 of these, we got to a point where everybody said that we could not have made another decision,’’ he says.
Ultimately, the presentations outside the opera house achieved some goals that were unattainable in the company’s home. For example, the company offered an unusual run of Puccini’s La Boheme, with tickets priced more like a Broadway-style road show than a normal opera. The hugely popular show attracted 45,000 people, 62 per cent of whom had never been to an opera before.’’
Despite the fact that it really shook our lives, it also provided us a wonderful opportunity to take the opera into the community,’’ says Mr. Mansouri. ”It also proved that opera is a wonderfully flexible art form.’’
In the end, fund raisers had to put greater emphasis on finishing the renovation campaign, and the ”Setting the Stage’’ campaign fell short by more than $5-million. Fortunately for the opera, William Hewlett, the patriarch of Silicon Valley, and his wife, Rosemary, provided a gift of $8-million to the opera that had very few conditions placed on it. One-third was destined for the renovation campaign, and the other $5.3-million was to be used however the opera deemed appropriate.
Mr. Godward recalls the Hewletts telling him that they would like their gift to be saved for the endowment, but if it needed to be used sooner, that would be all right with them.
Mr. Mansouri says that donors like the Hewletts support the opera without placing conditions on their gifts because they trust Mr. Godward to make sure that their money is used responsibly.
”They absolutely believed and trusted him,’’ says Mr. Mansouri. ”This man has such credibility, and I think that was our secret weapon.’’
