The real phantoms of the opera—the 76 usually unseen but indispensable members of the Lyric Opera orchestra—were in great form for last week’s opening of Gounod’s Faust. “We played our hearts out,” one of them said the next day, and the audience responded with an ovation so warm it felt to the musicians like empathy for their predicament. They’re a union crew, represented by the Chicago Federation of Musicians, and their contract expired in April. They’ve been trying to negotiate a new one since then, they say, but are no closer to an agreement now than when they started.
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The orchestra has already taken its case to the patrons. On September 26, the night of the opening gala, tuxedo-clad Lyric musicians were on the street in front of the opera house, greeting the arriving audience with a flyer. “Welcome to opening night,” it began. “We will be playing without a contract.” The three-paragraph statement said the union is willing to make concessions right now, but wants a multiyear contract with some “recovery” built in on the back end. Lyric management, it charged, wants to shorten the season and “diminish the product.”
Between 2001 and 2007, Cernota said, Lyric’s top administrators got combined salary and benefits increases averaging 35 percent while the players’ salary and benefits increased 24 percent. And if you take benefits out of the picture, he added, the discrepancy is even greater. In contract negotiations for the 2003 to 2006 period, after ticket sales dropped below the 100 percent of capacity that had been the norm at Lyric, Cernota said, the musicians were asked to share the pain and did. They took a one-year wage freeze for 2003-2004, and then a 1.3 percent increase for 2004-2005. And here’s what really rankles: while Lyric administrators were supposedly sharing the pain at that point, with three of the top four taking salary freezes or cuts, tax forms revealed that they were actually getting increases in the form of deferred compensation that apparently made up for those cuts. Lyric finance director Richard Dowsek responded at first that the deferred compensation increases in 2004 were automatic, the result of a pension program then in force; after taking a closer look, he said by e-mail, “It appears we have misclassified compensation for deferred compensation in that year. While the combined salary and benefit totals are correct, they understate compensation and overstate the deferred piece.”
The union is calling on the Lyric board to “insist on maintaining artistic excellence.” The institution, Cernota says, should increase revenues by “presenting a better product,” rather than trying to “cut back and dilute the offerings” or resorting to “amateur stuff.”
