During her visit to the Capital Region last month we shared lunch at Jack’s Oyster House in downtown Albany.  I thought the conversation would be  about opera repertoire and casting (and wondered if I’d be out of my league).  In an unexpected role reversal, I was the one being peppered with questions. Zambello wanted to hear about the local economic and culture scene and to learn where else she should go and who else she should talk to in order to build support for Glimmerglass.

“I’m the artistic director but also the associate development director,” she joked.

Beyond fundraising, another priority is building ties to other cultural and civic organizations with the goal of reaching new audiences. For this coming summer, Zambello is setting in place collaborations with regional groups as diverse as the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art Museum and the Ommegang Brewery, all in Cooperstown, as well as the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica and even the local penitentiary (with the notion of getting inmates to help spruce up the grounds).

Opera also came up, of course, but Zambello didn’t give any hint as to what’s in store for future seasons. She said that the programming decisions for her entire three-year contract are in place and that more big name artists can be expected.  The headliner for this coming summer, of course, is Deborah Voigt in “Annie Get Your Gun.” Zambello’s close associations was such major artists was one of the reasons she got the job.

Though Zambello never suggested that the Cooperstown-based company is exactly on the ropes, she conveyed a palpable urgency and determination.  Tight finances, she said, are common throughout the field. “As a director,” she said, “at every company I work at, the question is how to do things better but for less money.”

You can hear more of Zambello’s history and plans for Glimmerglass at the company’s website, which has an audio recording of a talk she gave this summer in Cooperstown.

Photos courtesy Glimmerglass Opera.

Martin’s frustrations with the music business are common, of course. After all, not everybody can be a John Corigliano or Jennifer Higdon.  It’s a given that being an artist in our society requires a healthy dose of fortitude and self reliance.  But one’s storehouse of such inner strengths can run low at times.

In 2008, Martin’s comic opera “The Good Friar” received a workshop performance by the Center for Contemporary Opera. “The audience loved it,” he recalls. “Afterward I got mad at the universe for not responding with a fuller production. So after a year of licking my wounds I figured out, once again, that I have to work even harder and that the answer isn’t going to come from out there but from inside me.

And thus is born “Martin Hennessy is Dead.”

But the subject of death has more resonance with Martin than just the fact that he’s a composer.  He’s been HIV+ for more than 20 years.

“When it came to naming the project the first thing that popped into my head was ‘Martin Hennessy is Dead!’  It cracked me up and felt so good and liberating. Not only because of the obvious joke of a composer only getting an audience posthumously but it just felt good to dump all the baggage of HIV and ego and desire for success into one succinct declaration.”

Shedding the labels of HIV and AIDS is actually quite a turn around, since it was through accepting and embracing his HIV status that Martin turned more deeply to his art and transformed from being a pianist to a composer.

Hennessy lost a lover to AIDS in 1986 and received his own diagnosis in 1988, which precipitated a long emotional bottom.  But in 1993 he went public. Way public.

“I told my parents and friends. I would tell people on line in the bank.  I was so renewed by the truth of ‘I am HIV positive.’ And I realized that the ‘HIV positive’ didn’t even matter, it was the ‘I am’ that fed me.

“I sublet my apartment and went to Philly to live with my sister and her lover. Bought an old piano at the Salvation Army in Manayunk and started writing songs and a musical.

“Let me die,

Let me always die;

Let me be an ever dying creature falling inexorably towards the earth.

For only then can I soar surely to the heights of my original imagination!

“I wrote these words during my time in Manayunk. An imagination of death can be a valuable trope for letting go, for transformation and change. Death of ego is a big one for me.”

This was also the dark era when, perhaps ironically, the labels of HIV and AIDS brought artists more attention.

“In the 90’s I was presenting some of my first work with the concert series Positive Music but I couldn’t get it done in other AIDSy sort of venues because I wasn’t dead. I distinctly remember a sort of hierarchy of sickness among composers and artists in which the sicker you were the more compelling your work was found to be and more urgent to be done. Damn! I had thrush and an AIDS diagnosis but only had shingles, boils and a recurring ear fungus and facial skin that was constantly flaking off.”

“Now in the post-AIDS world I am just a dime a dozen composer/pianist. At those networking meetings for the American Music Center or Opera America when you have to put on a name tag, I feel like jotting down ‘No One.” Or better yet, ‘Beware! Desperate Composer!!!’”

One of Hennessy’s techniques to keep desperation at bay is spiritual practice. Since 1995 he’s attended annual retreats sponsored by the Helios Foundation, based in London.

“Their process uses a simple technique of focusing on a particular point or chakra over and over until one sort of digs a hole through to the essence of being. Gradually during the three days one observes the preconceptions and the tricks of the senses fall away and what remains is a deeper, closer connection to your unique truth and sometimes even the grand event: Enlightenment.

“I used it as a tool to stay ahead of the virus and have brought other HIV’ers to the process as well. I noticed a beneficial side effect was an increased creative energy. I would accomplish my composition projects and get things done so easily afterwards.”

Current Hennessy projects include a cycle of 13 songs for soprano and baritone using Edna St. Vincent Millay’s long poem “Renascence.” Also a song cycle to AIDS-related poetry written by a gay American poet who died a few years ago (rights are currently being negotiated).  That should be a nice follow-up to another AIDS-themed work, “A Letter from East 11th Street,” a two-part chamber opera to a libretto by Mark Campbell.

Besides composing, Martin is also active as a vocal coach and accompanist, working regularly with soprano Marnie Breckenridge and mezzo-soprano Heidi Skok.

With typical effusive candor, he declares: “I want to start writing an obituary now by performing my music with wonderful artists and building an audience for my work in concerts presented by Martin Hennessy is Dead!”

Martin Hennessy is Dead! is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Martin Hennessy is Dead! may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Click on the link to read more and make a contribution.

Following recommendations of friends, he spent that summer in the young artists program at the Seagle Music Colony outside the little Adirondack village of Schroon Lake in Essex County about 90 miles north of Albany.  Founded in 1915 by renowned baritone Oscar Seagle, the colony has offered generations of young singers a haven to study and grow before venturing on to professional careers.  It’s transformed Darren Woods’ life at least a couple of times now.

Woods did go on to a respectable singing career, performing with the New York City Opera and numerous other companies. But it was the role of J. Pierrepont Finch, the deft wheeler dealer in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” which he played during that one summer at the Seagle Colony, that really pointed to how Woods would ultimately make his mark in the operatic world.

First, in 1996 Woods returned to Schroon Lake to take a one-season appointment as general director of the Colony. He has remained its guiding force ever since and is widely credited with transforming an organization that was on the brink of closure.

Next, in 1999, Woods ended his performing career to become head of the Shreveport Opera in Louisiana. In a tenure of just 24 months he also saved that outfit from near extension.  And as general director of the Fort Worth Opera since July 2001, Woods has again brought vigor to a company once written off as provincial and moribund.  In a profile of Woods in its July issue, Opera News Magazine referred to his “national presence” and called him a “turnaround master.”

In addition to his duties in Fort Worth, Woods regularly gives master classes at universities across the country and frequently serves as a judge of auditions for the Metropolitan Opera National Council, the Richard Tucker Foundation, and other organizations. But he still summers at the Seagle Colony, where he now holds the title of artistic director. We spoke recently over coffee in Sarataga Springs.

“Opera is in me to the corps of my being,” he says. “I’m a servant to the art form.”

Such lofty language might suggest that Woods is working from some lyric libretto and longs to be back on stage. But his pronouncements are given with a sincere and matter of fact tone and spill out of him as fast as a Rossini overture.  Whether its identifying and encouraging good singers, knowing the vast operatic repertoire, or finessing rich folks out of their money, Woods seems always on his game.  His respective companies are the beneficiaries.

The year he took the reigns of the Seagle Colony, it gave three staged productions over five weeks, and operated on a budget of roughly $30,000.  This year, there are six productions, a nine-week season and a budget of nearly $575,000.

One of Woods’ first outreach efforts for Seagle was to churches — offering free music on Sunday mornings. “Mr. Seagle belonged to the Community Church and we provided soloists there since time immemorial,” explains Woods. “I thought, well why not sing in the Catholic Church too? I walked over and there were like a 1,000 people, while the Community Church had about 40. Soon the priest was announcing our performance schedule.  Now we sing at so many churches, everywhere from Putnam to Keene Valley, we can only provide (each congregation) about two Sundays per season.”

Education was Woods’ first focus in Shreveport. “I dreamed up a program to take opera to little kids in the sticks where there were no arts,” he recalls. “I made up a study guide and a brochure and we got literally $300,000 worth of bookings. So then I hired three singers and a director and we had the ‘Piped Piper’ and ‘Little Red Ridinghood’ and did everything I had laid out in the brochure. And it underwrote the mainstage productions.”

Though the job in Louisiana paid considerably less than he had been making as a singer, Woods thought the experience could serve as the equivalent to a masters degree in arts management. By the time Fort Worth came calling, he had developed considerable confidence.

“I went through a four-hour interview and was blatantly honest about what I knew of the company. The quality was in the tank,” he says. He went back to Shreveport thinking that was that.

Some six weeks later, in the midst of a summer at Seagle, he got a call back. This time, he spoke not just of impressions but gave assessments based on research.  “I said your repertoire here is old school and boring and if all you want to do is the top 20 operas just send me home now. You’ve not done Handel or Britten or anything 20th century except ‘Turnadot’ and that hardly counts. Plus you can’t afford the season you planned.”

In addition to the tough talk, he also passed around copies of a five-year plan.  And he got the job.

Woods has countless stories, both amusing and horrific, about rebuilding the board and the nearly 24-hour charm offensive it takes to raise enough funds to keep an opera company in the black.  But his results speak for themselves. He’s grown the company from a $2 million budget to the current level of about $4.5 million.

In 2007, with support from the local chamber of commerce, the Fort Worth Opera abandoned its traditional spring and fall seasons and concentrated its efforts into a compacted two-week “festival season.”  This past May, the lineup featured Bizet’s “Carmen,” Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” and “Dead Man Walking,” an acclaimed 2000 adaptation by Jack Heggie of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Sr. Helen Prejean about counseling a death row inmate.

After the season concluded, Scott Cantrell of the Dallas Morning News (former staff writer for the Times Union and a notoriously tough critic), wrote, “Fort Worth Opera has become one of the country’s premier opera festivals. No kidding… Give the credit to Darren K. Woods, who eight years ago took over the fragmented mess that was Fort Worth Opera.”

The recent Opera News article about Woods went further and voiced something that others in the field also foresee:  that in the coming years, Woods will likely be heading up one of the country’s major opera houses, such as Seattle, San Francisco or Houston.

While not dismissing the talk, Woods puts it as only a singer could: “There are some high notes I’ve still not hit.”

Yet he assured me that his connection to the Seagle Colony will endure.  With its centennial coming up in six years, some in Schroon Lake are talking of building a new theater.  Woods wants to build an endowment that will keep the program’s focus on young singers. And as the saying goes, he’s put his money where his (very active) mouth is. “This place is in my will,” he says.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Times Union.