Beyond performance: Fundraising helps pay the bills

The 1,400 or so attendees, who will have paid 1,500 euros to 5,000 euros (about $1,700 and $5,700) to attend, will make their way into foyers filled with bouquets and garlands where champagne and canapés will be served. Later, those with higher-price tickets will sit down to a post-show dinner where each course will have been prepared by a different chef.

This year’s main course will be by the chef Tatiana Levha; past culinary contributors included the patissier Pierre Hermé, and Bertrand Grébaut, head chef at Paris’ Michelin-starred Septime. The evening will end with a strobe-lit, DJ-led after-party in the basement rotunda, where the director Sofia Coppola shot a scene from her 2006 “Marie Antoinette.”

The gala, which was started in 2015 by Benjamin Millepied, who was the director of dance at the time, nets around 1 million euros for the opera house, according to its organizers, AROP (Association pour le Rayonnement de l’Opéra de Paris). The association was started in 1980 by a handful of French business leaders.

“In the 1980s, the financing of culture in France was the exclusive domain of the state and local government, so the idea came up that individuals or companies could participate,” said Jean-Yves Kaced, AROP’s longstanding director who is also the Paris Opera’s development director.

“Initially, philanthropy was used as a stopgap solution: We would ask patrons to contribute because there was a funding shortage somewhere, or because the director of opera wanted to develop a project and couldn’t afford it.”

Since then, philanthropy has become a much bigger source of income for the institution, generating some 18 million euros a year, Kaced said, twice what it did six years ago. That’s as the French government, faced with deficit-cutting pressures, has slashed funding for culture. The Paris Opera now gets 95 million euros in subsidies, 10 million euros less than it did in 2010, or just more than 40 percent of its annual budget.

AROP has benefited from a 2003 law that has made philanthropic donations tax-deductible. The association has also become more proactive and inventive in its fund-raising efforts since the 2014 arrival of the Paris Opera’s director Stéphane Lissner, who has sought private funding for a larger number of projects.

Today, AROP has 4,700 individual members and 180 corporate members. There are more than 25 fundraising dinners each year for the corporate donors, at which companies buy tables. Themed donor clubs have also been set up, costing more but offering extra perks, such as the Cercle Berlioz (for lovers of French music), or the Cercle Noverre (for dance aficionados and named after Marie Antoinette’s ballet master). A seat-naming initiative has separately brought in 650,000 euros, Kaced said.

He acknowledged that some of these new packages and programs were inspired by other major opera houses, such as the Royal Opera House in London, which has a mix of government and private funding, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. “We watch what our friends are doing,” he said.

The AROP board is led by Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, the chief executive of BNP Paribas. Another key board member, who is the Paris Opera Ballet’s biggest supporter, is Jean-Luc Petithuguenin, who runs Paprec France SA, a recycling and waste management company.

Benefactors such as these can now expect to hobnob regularly with top talent. “Fifteen or 20 years ago, it was hard to get opera singers to play the game by meeting donors,” Kaced said. “Now, when we invite them, they come and attend the patron dinners. They know that the future of their discipline depends on public success but also on donor contributions.”

In its fund-raising efforts, AROP gets help from a sister foundation across the Atlantic: the American Friends of the Paris Opera & Ballet, set up in 1984 when the dancer Rudolf Nureyev was director of the Paris Opera Ballet and was starting the company’s first New York tour. Michel David-Weill, an investment banker, was the chairman of the foundation at the time, and today it is overseen by Olivia Tournay Flatto, a New York-based philanthropist.

Its board includes prestige names including Lee Radziwill (sister of the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), and the avant-garde American stage director Robert Wilson. Depending on the program, the foundation has 70 to 150 members who support specific projects.

“We’re approached a lot more often than we used to be, and there’s a lot more communication with Paris,” said Flatto, adding that the foundation raised $500,000 to $1.2 million a year for the Paris Opera.

The American Friends’ mission is bridge building between the United States and France, so they pick productions with American talents or themes for their fundraising campaigns, said Mélite de Foucaud, the executive director.

Trips to Paris are then organized for patrons each time, where they see productions, are invited to lavish receptions and get backstage tours and exclusive visits.

This year, the foundation is supporting Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots,” starring the tenor Bryan Hymel of the United States, which is being staged for the first time in a century at the Paris Opera. Past performances they backed include a production of “Tristan und Isolde” directed by Peter Sellars, with video projections by Bill Viola.

The New York-based foundation’s aim is to reach out to potential donors across the U.S.: in California, Florida, Chicago and Washington.

Back in Paris, AROP is busy planning its next big fundraiser: a gala in May 2019. It will mark the 350th anniversary of the Paris Opera, with commemorative exhibitions on and off the premises, and feature a performance with star soprano Anna Netrebko.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Beyond performance: Fundraising helps pay the bills

When guests in tuxedos and long dresses arrive for the gala opening of the ballet season at the Palais Garnier, there will be much more than dance on the menu.

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