Peter Hemmings, 67; L.A. Opera Founding Chief

Peter Hemmings--the first general director of Los Angeles Opera and the man who assured a lasting place for the art form here--died early this morning at home in Dorset, England. He was 67. The cause of death was cancer.

When the dapper and eloquent British impresario took charge in 1984, Los Angeles was the only major Western city that could not maintain its own opera company.

With a budget of just $6.4 million, Hemmings launched Music Center Opera (later renamed Los Angeles Opera), mounting five productions in a first season that immediately made the operatic world take notice.

By the time he retired in 2000 to return to his native England, Hemmings had left behind a company with a $22-million budget and an eight-opera season of more than 50 performances, most of them selling out.

In the process, he masterminded several productions that became part of Los Angeles’ cultural iconography--including a celebrated version of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” designed by a fellow Briton-turned-Angeleno, artist David Hockney--and lent a new sophisticated image to the city’s cultural life.

Hemmings was also responsible for bringing Placido Domingo to the company at the outset as artistic advisor, realizing that the popular tenor’s presence assured L.A. Opera a necessary celebrity factor. That also paved the way for Domingo to become the company’s artistic director after Hemmings retired.

“Since the first day Peter was here,” Domingo said Thursday, “we were together. I learned a lot from him about how to make things happen.

“It was not easy to have an opera company in Los Angeles, but he knew that the only way to go was up,” Domingo said. “And with his wit, devotion and that straightforward and serene manner he had, he seemed to know just how to approach the board, the audiences and the artists. It is a challenge for me to continue what he began.”

Personally, Hemmings never seemed the sort to court celebrity. His own modest manner and politeness were more reminiscent of a conservative British banker than a flamboyant American opera impresario.

But that apparent conventionality served him well. It lent respectability to what had, for a century in Los Angeles, seemed a financially fly-by-night art form. His understated style also proved a useful tool in convincing operagoers to take risks. A sensation the first season was a daring production of Richard Strauss’ “Salome” that included nudity.

But Hemmings’ manner was not altogether deceptive. He did firmly believe in tradition. He was a devoted family man with five children. And he built the opera company as he might a family, scouting local talent whom he would nurture over the years, creating a strong ensemble company.

One such discovery, baritone Rodney Gilfry, sang a single line in the company’s first production, Verdi’s “Otello.” By the time of Hemmings’ retirement, Gilfry had become an international star, and he performed the title role in Hemmings’ final Los Angeles Opera production, Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd,” in June 2000.

“His legacy--an opera company of true international stature--can’t be appreciated in terms of numbers of performances and dollars,” Gilfry said. “It takes tenacity to permanently change the depth and richness of a city’s culture, and that’s what he did.”

A Brief Career as a Singer

Peter William Hemmings was born in the Middlesex town of Enfield on April 10, 1934. Although he graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in classics, his college life was closely associated with vocal music: He was a choral scholar and served as president of the University Opera Group. After graduation, he briefly pursued a career as a singer, performing with the Camden Festival and Chelsea Opera Group.

In 1958 he joined Harold Holt Ltd., a London music management firm, and a year later he became personal assistant to the manager of Sadler’s Wells Opera. No longer intent upon a singing career, Hemmings became repertory and planning manager for the company. In 1962, the newly formed Scottish National Opera invited him to become its first administrator.

He built the company, where he remained 15 years, into one of the most respected in Britain, mounting ambitious productions of epic works such as Wagner’s “Ring” cycle and Berlioz’s “The Trojans,” as well as providing a mix of classics and 20th century operas. By 1975, Hemmings was able to find the company a permanent theater in Glasgow, thus giving Scotland its first national opera house.

In 1977, he moved to Australian Opera, where his mandate was to provide the company with a national and international profile to match its new hall in Sydney. There, however, Hemmings was hindered by political infighting, and he returned to Britain in 1979 to manage the London Symphony Orchestra.

Five years later, when Hemmings moved into his office at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on Nov. 5, 1984, as the first executive director of the Music Center Opera Assn., he told The Times, he had “a clean slate,” with nothing having been planned and a minimal staff.

Stuck Curtain an Apt Omen for L.A.

The curtain started to rise on the new company’s first performance Oct. 6, 1986, and promptly stuck half way up for a few seconds. It was an apt omen, both of the difficulty of bringing opera to Los Angeles and of Hemmings’ assurances that obstacles could be overcome.

In the end, it was a triumphant night, with a theatrically vivid production by German director Goetz Friedrich of Verdi’s “Otello,” starring Domingo.

Hemmings saw his role in Los Angeles as bringing standard repertory to those who had little experience with opera, but he also thought the city was ripe for new discoveries. His idea was to mix well-known, popular operas with unfamiliar works, modern works and new works, throwing in Baroque operas and even a musical or operetta each season.

Among the new productions that garnered wide attention were those designed by Hockney (the “Tristan” and Strauss’ “Die Frau Ohne Schatten”), Berg’s “Wozzeck” (directed by the radical American David Alden and conducted by Simon Rattle), Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel” (presented in America for the first time), Berlioz’s “The Trojans” (in only its second complete production in America), and Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande” (updated by Peter Sellars).

“Unless you do these operas with a spark of something that is contemporary, it all dies,” he told Opera News in 1996. “I have always believed that opera is a vibrant, living art form with an exciting future, not simply a museum art.”

To give the company an individual style, Hemmings forged close relationships with noted directors, such as Friedrich and Peter Hall, whose work had not been regularly seen in America. And he took chances on young directors, such as Julie Taymor, whose production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” was controversial but also presaged to some the theatrical brilliance she brought to “The Lion King.”

The company’s personality also came from a core group of young singers whom Hemmings developed; besides Gilfry, they included Suzanna Guzman, Richard Bernstein and Greg Fedderly.

Hemmings commissioned several new works, often in collaboration with other companies. Joonas Kokkonan’s “Kullervo” (with Finnish Opera) and Tobias Picker’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” originated in Los Angeles. Other new operas in which the company was one of a consortium of commissioners were John Adams’ “Nixon in China” and Daniel Catan’s “Florencia en el Amazonas.” Hemmings also joined consortiums to produce Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer,” but its Los Angeles production was canceled, he said, for financial reasons.

Audiences Grow Ever Larger

Hemmings was sometimes criticized for not having top-notch conductors in the pit, but he did have a few--Zubin Mehta conducted the “Tristan,” Esa-Pekka Salonen led the “Pelleas” and Kent Nagano (now the company’s principal conductor) was in the pit for Kurt Weill’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” and “Nixon in China.”

In the early 1990s, Los Angeles Opera suffered from the national economic downturn, running up a deficit of $3 million. To save the company, Hemmings became somewhat safer in his programming. In so doing, he found that he attracted ever-larger audiences, and by his last season he was regularly filling the theater.

However, after 16 years, he wanted to return to London and take on new challenges. Last year, he was appointed to the board of the Royal Opera, where he played an active role in helping return that troubled company to its former glory. As the general consultant to the Compton Verney Project, he was also committed to building a new opera house in the English Midlands.

In 1998, Hemmings received the OBE (officer of the Order of the British Empire). He was an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London and fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music. He served as vice chairman of Opera America and received honorary degrees from Strathclyde University and Cal State Northridge.

Hemmings is survived by his wife, Jane Frances Kearnes, and five children.