The Ross Years
From the outset, Ross saw opera as something that had to be sold using similar techniques to those used to sell popular entertainment. "To sell opera…you have to get their attention with a little razzle-dazzle. You've got to be simpatico. You have to be able to communicate, and you have to deliver your message with the best possible product you can manage." In 1970, H. C. Schonberg of the New York Times contrasted the Seattle Opera's approach to marketing to the then still staid marketing of New York's Metropolitan Opera: "Out there, you see campaign buttons with the legend Opera Lives. It is in Seattle where you can look at the sky and find an airplane skywriting the virtues of Seattle Opera. There are even auto bumper stickers about opera." Further, Schonberg remarked favorably on the "air of freshness and experimentation that contrasts vividly with the dull, tried and true, tired professionalism in other opera houses one could mention."
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Famous quotes containing the words ross and/or years:
“The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady from Dubuque.”
—Harold W. Ross (1892–1951)
“You can hardly convince a man of an error in a life-time, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)