Career
Following her graduation from college, Krainik took a job as a clerk-typist with the Lyric Opera and eventually was selected to sing secondary mezzo soprano roles roles onstage with numerous opera luminaries. In 1965, under the leadership of general director Carol Fox, she became artistic administrator, a position she held until the Board appointed her general director after Fox's dismissal in 1981. She served as general director from 1982 until her death in 1997. She was appointed a member of the National Endowment for the Arts and also served as chairman of Opera America in the mid-1990s.
Under Krainik’s leadership, the Lyric Opera was able to put its fiscal house in order after many years of running in the red. In 1991 she made headlines when she fired Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti for yet another cancellation due to his being "indisposed." Krainik endeared herself to Chicago's opera patrons, who had been disappointed by one too many of Pavarotti's last-minute cancellations.
At a 1996 Gala celebrating Krainik's 43-year career at the Lyric, the 3,563-seat Art Deco house was renamed the Ardis Krainik Theatre in honor of her lifetime of contributions to the Lyric Opera, including a $110 million renovation of the second largest opera auditorium in North America (after New York's Metropolitan Opera) in 1993. The Gala, hosted by Placido Domingo, did not include Mr. Pavarotti, who had not been invited.
Read more about this topic: Ardis Krainik
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)