In the 1940s, when Esther Rauch was growing up in Mobile, Alabama, a beloved aunt came to visit her every Saturday. Dressed up in their good clothes, the two would step into the quiet parlor, close the door and settle down in front of the Philco radio to listen to a live opera broadcast on the Texaco Radio Theater of the Air.
It was a ritual that gave rise to a lifelong passion.
“I still listen to opera every Saturday afternoon,” Rauch said in a recent interview. When she’s at home in Glenburn, she primarily listens via Maine Public Broadcasting. Once in a while she attends a live event in New York City or elsewhere.
But 10 times per year, during the performance season of the Collins Center for the Arts at the University of Maine campus in Orono, Rauch and her husband, Chick, can be found in their longtime seats at the rear of the 1,400-seat concert hall, soaking up a live-broadcast production of The Met: Live in HD. And on Sept. 17, at the Collins Center’s annual opening gala, Rauch will be honored for her role in promoting the live opera broadcasts and the performing arts overall in Greater Bangor.
Ten years ago, the Metropolitan Opera launched its innovative live-broadcast series, beaming powerful performances from the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City to local movie theaters and other venues around the country. New theater partners have signed on each year since; The Met: Live in HD now airs in more than 2,000 theaters in 70 nations.
Here in Maine, there are nine venues, including The Waterville Opera House, The Grand Theater in Ellsworth and The Collins Center for the Arts. For about $25, Mainers can enjoy current Met productions on the big screen, enhanced with detailed onstage closeups, intimate backstage interviews and other enrichments. Some people liken it to watching a pro football game at home — you miss the drama of being in the stadium, but the tradeoff in visual detail, informative analysis and convenience is worth it.
Some opera purists eschew the broadcast experience, but Rauch, who has been an ardent booster of the Collins Center for the Arts since it opened as the Maine Center for the Arts in 1986, has embraced the Met live broadcasts wholeheartedly.
“I have loved live opera all my life,” she said. “At the Met [in New York], I spend $345 for a good seat, because I always want a good seat when I’m there. But here I can spend $25. I can see everything. I have a comfortable seat. I don’t have to get dressed up. I don’t have to worry about parking or dinner and snacks.”
But despite these attractions, attendance has never been robust at the Orono opera broadcasts. “We generally draw between 100 and 150 people to each show,” Collins Center director Danny Williams said. While that would be a substantial audience in a smaller venue, he noted, it is barely a blip in the cavernous space of the Collins Center. “We’re always trying to expand and build the audience,” he said.
Although opera’s roots are in popular entertainment, it has developed an unfortunate reputation for being intellectual and hoity-toity, Williams said. So he’s grateful that in 2014, Rauch, along with a cadre of fellow opera enthusiasts, launched the Collins Opera Outreach Committee, or COOC. During the week before each scheduled performance, one of the “kooks,” as they call themselves, leads a free, 90-minute discussion of the featured production — including historical context, plot, characters, musical highlights, performer biographies and other information — at each of three different sites in Greater Bangor. The group is in its third season.
The goal of the committee, according to this year’s COOC chairwoman Beth Brand of Orono, is to demystify opera, explode common misconceptions and pique the public’s interest in the stories and the art form.
“We all know that the better prepared you are going into an opera performance, the more likely it is to be a successful experience, an enriching experience,” Brand said. She credits Rauch’s enthusiasm, deep knowledge and passion for opera with keeping the committee focused and organized. COOC talks at Dirigo Pines in Orono, the Orono Public Library and the Brewer Public Library have generally drawn 10 to 15 people, she said, and most who come also attend the opera itself.
Rauch, who earned a doctorate in 17th-century literature from Ohio State University, is an educator at heart. When she and Chick lived in northern Virginia, she managed a team of researchers at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington. But after they relocated to Maine in the late 1980s, she taught English literature and composition at Maine Maritime Academy, the University of Maine and Husson University (then Husson College), as well as fulfilling a three-year stint as vice president of the now-defunct Bangor Theological Seminary.
“I love to teach,” she said, crediting her academic inclinations to her college-educated parents. Her father, an Anglican clergyman who graduated from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and her mother, who graduated from Arlington Literary Academy, also in Alabama , raised their eight children in a financially secure household with a commitment to serving less fortunate families in their community.
“Of those to whom much is given, much is required,” Rauch said, quoting from the New Testament Gospel of Luke. “We were raised on proverbs and maxims.”
Opera, Rauch said, is nothing more than life stories set to beautiful music. Many popular tunes, including the theme from “The Godfather,” the popular “Here Comes the Bride” wedding march and the rousing theme from “The Lone Ranger,” are drawn from opera.
“People have always loved opera without realizing it was opera,” she said. Now, if they would just come to the COOC’s talks, she said, they’ll discover a new level of enjoyment.
For her dedication to promoting opera and the arts, Rauch will be presented the 2016 Wilma Award, given by the Collins Center for the Arts to an individual or business for contributions to the center and the promotion of cultural activities in Maine. The award is named for longtime community leader Wilma Bradford of Bangor.
The Met: Live in HD will broadcast Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” its first live broadcast production of the new season, at noon Sunday, Oct. 16. COOC president Beth Brand will lead a discussion of the opera from 4 to 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11 at Dirigo Pines in Orono; from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 12 at the Brewer Public Library; and from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13 at the Orono Public Library. Information about this and other Collins Opera Outreach Committee talks can be found by visiting the website of the Collins Center for the Arts and clicking on each upcoming opera or by calling the box office at 207-581-1755.
