Changing seasons. (Viewpoint).(Editorial)

For most people, December means the return of winter and the prospect of holiday gatherings. For many opera-lovers, the month is welcome because it brings the ChevronTexaco-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network back to the airwaves. For the next twenty weeks, Saturday afternoons will have a musical core, a way to avoid hearkening to the urging of the weatherman to stock up on SnoMelt or of the spouse to book a getaway cruise. December's holidays often mean family arriving en masse, a possibly stressful visitation from which one may happily retreat to listen to the Met broadcast. This year, the Met has put together an array of holiday operas that parade family frailties and rifts that would seem unimaginable to most of us: Fidelio, Il Trovatore, Elektra and A View from the Bridge. Tune in and thank your stars you're not kin to these characters.

It's comforting to be able to count on the return of the ChevronTexaco broadcasts as surely as you can rely on winter to come back. Yet one must not become complacent. Spring will come, too, eventually, but it won't bring with it Lyric Opera of Chicago's splendid run of syndicated delayed radio broadcasts, which, for many years, followed hard on the heels of the Met's season. Why? Both United Airlines and American Airlines, which had sponsored the broadcasts of opening-night performances throughout LOC's season, withdrew their support, and no alternate angel could be found to pick up the $400,000 sponsorship. There is a disturbing possibility for opera-lovers that this is just the first fallout from the imploding stock market that began thirty-two months ago.

There are warning signs aplenty that the downturn is beginning to bite. San Francisco Opera, for example, announced in early October that it finished its last fiscal year with a deficit of $7.7 million, the largest in ten years. Reduced revenues, not increased costs, were the principal contributors to the shortfall: both ticket sales and contributions were off in the crucial early months of SFO's 2001-02 season. ...