A Farewell Conversation with Welz Kauffman on 20 Years of Running Ravinia
By Dennis Polkow
In pre-pandemic early March, Welz Kauffman sat down for a wide-ranging interview looking back at his 20 years as President and CEO of Ravinia Festival. He steps down this month, succeeded by Jeffrey P. Haydon. Although Kauffman’s 20th season was not to be, due to COVID-19 forcing its cancellation in May, here is that interview as it happened six months ago, a companion to the episode of RaviniaTV dedicated to celebrating his tenure.
Are you able to sum up for us how you are feeling about leaving Ravinia after 20 years? Can you give us a sense of your mindset and how long stepping down may have been crossing your mind?
I’m feeling oddly at peace. I say oddly because I’ve never had a job longer than five years anywhere; the idea of 20 years just baffles me. Thinking about these two decades here is very satisfying, quite overwhelming, and a mixture of “Boy, what a great place to work” and wondering if there are other things that I would have liked to have accomplished. But I rarely have that feeling anymore because I have been thinking about this for about three or four years. My husband and I, who are both in our late 50s, have been talking about, Is there a next chapter?
About seven or eight months ago [in mid-2019] he said to me, “Do you have a kind of milestone in mind? Something that you want to present or produce?” And I said, “Probably 20 years, because that is a nice round number.” And he said, “Well, when would that be?” “It would actually be 2020.”
It clicked. I spoke to some European friends—agents, artists, managers, artistic administrators—and they were all very matter-of-fact about it: “Twenty years is when you should leave.” “Well, what do you mean by that?” “If you stay longer, everything will start to go to hell.” One wonders about redundancy and repetitiveness when you’ve been at a place for a long time. But in the context of a 116-year old institution, 20 years isn’t that long, and arts folks in the Midwest tend to stay longer than they do on the coasts, where I’ve previously worked, so 20 years felt like a nice median.
I’m feeling, more than anything else, like I did my best to take care of this beautiful place. And not just as a steward, but as someone who, I hope, saw potential, something to unlock. When I came to Ravinia, it wasn’t as if people were asleep at the post, far from it. But one of the reasons I felt fortunate was that I was coming in with fresh eyes at a time when the Ravinia Family was concerned, “Millennium Park is coming, what’s going to happen? How will Ravinia fare against a Frank Gehry–designed space downtown?” That galvanized me in a certain way to think about what was unique about this particular place.
The train?
Absolutely! Our beginnings as an amusement park, built by a train company, and we’re the last private train stop in Illinois. I did a “listening tour” when I got here, met with Trustees and members of the Women’s and Associates Boards to hear what they thought of the place and why they were involved. About half of them mentioned, at one point or another, “That damn train, you know?” And I’d say, “Well, what’s wrong with the train?” And invariably they would recite Sir Thomas Beecham’s very funny 1940 quote: “Ravinia is the only train station in the world with a resident symphony orchestra.”
You know, when Christoph Eschenbach made his Ravinia debut in 1973 as a pianist, with no less than Riccardo Muti also making his Ravinia debut on the podium, he was playing the Schumann Piano Concerto. The slow movement begins very, very softly. So, he lifts his hands to start—and the train goes by. And Christoph says to himself, “I will never come back here again!” And then, of course, two decades later, he becomes music director! Those are train stories. There are lots of them like that.
I honed in on the train thinking about Ravinia’s centennial, in 2004. At the time, many Ravinia Family members considered 1936 our first year, when we reopened after the Depression and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra officially began its residency. I asked, “Then what’s 1904, when the place was actually built? Why wouldn’t we want to celebrate ourselves as an amusement park?” I thought that was incredibly fun. And it was a way of being able to say, “We can do anything we want because we started with a baseball diamond, a calliope, an electric water fountain, restaurants, dancing—and the train.” It wasn’t that I wanted to uncouple us from the CSO—it’s why I came to work here, and that history goes back nearly as far.
Frederick Stock and the CSO at Ravinia in November 1905 (click to enlarge)
With Theodore Thomas really wanting to grow what the CSO was, the orchestra has had a long and illustrious career here. It gave its first Ravinia concert in 1905, and it will be here even longer moving forward, which excites me. When I say that I hope I took good care of this place, one of the things I feel really good about is making sure that there would be longevity for the CSO here. This is the greatest orchestra in the country and one of the best in the world. The orchestra is a great magnet for great conductors, and many of its great relationships started at Ravinia. Danny [Barenboim], Riccardo [Muti], Solti. And it’s a pretty common scene, right? Like Tanglewood for the Boston Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, even concerts in Central Park for the New York Philharmonic.
Can you recall your first visit to Ravinia and your initial reaction to it?
Zarin Mehta had me come out to brief him on the New York Philharmonic, which I had just left and he was just going to [in the same role, as President and CEO]. And at the end of our time together, Zarin said he would drive me back to the airport. As we’re driving around, I’m thinking, “This is longer than it took me to get here!” and suddenly I realize we’re driving up and down Sheridan Road. I asked, “Are we close to the airport?”
Welz and Zarin Mehta at Ravinia’s 2007 Gala
“No, I thought I’d just show you the neighborhood and what a spectacular place that Ravinia is located in.” As he’s dropping me off at the airport, he says, “I think you might want to throw your hat in the ring for the job.” And then he very gently put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You won’t get it, they’re looking for someone completely different, but I think you’d really, really like these people. [They’re] extraordinary in terms of power, passion, financial acumen, all those good kinds of things.” I said, “Well, Zarin, that’s lovely, I appreciate that, but I just started at the LA Philharmonic.” I had only just returned to the LA Philharmonic, following Deborah Borda from New York. “I need to talk to Deborah.” “Of course, go talk to her.” Back in LA, I went to her office, a little sheepish, a little terrified, and told her about the conversation. “Absolutely, you should take the interview,” she said without hesitation. And then she added, “You’re never going to get the job,” that they are looking for this, that, and the other thing, “but they’re really nice people.” And then three months later, it happened.
Were you surprised?
Completely surprised, yeah. It was the easiest interview process I had ever been through. They brought me back out here maybe three times. I just thought, “I’m not going to get it. If the guy who was running it, and my boss”—who was a legend in arts administration—“say I won’t get it, but I should do it and get to know these people, I’m going to get to know these people.”
Because Zarin and Ed Gordon, your two predecessors, were mainly classical music impresarios, do you think part of why they hired you was because you had a wider, more diverse background than that?
I think they caught wind of that and were suspicious, so part of the interview that I loved was them checking out if I knew what a Köchel number was. And how many symphonies did Beethoven write? [Laughs.] There were little tests like that. I actually had never been deeply connected to producing non-classical performances, other than my time at the Getty Trust where the Hollywood Bowl does everything. My time at the New York Philharmonic was pretty straight-ahead, though we did Sweeney Todd and things like that, which for the time was like, wow. I had a garage band and they all liked hearing about that. We did covers—I can still sing all the Commodores hits and play the theme to Rocky because we played dances, basically.
Keyboard?
Keyboard, and I operated the fog machine. Very important. And I had a VW bus so I could take the Fender Rhodes in it. These are big deals. See? This is how you get in a band. It was called Sphinx. The fact that I knew who The Commodores were, I think, was heartening to some people in the interview, and baffling to others.
I’m tugging on this thread because one of your many accomplishments in these 20 years was booking non-classical acts that were top tier.
It took a lot of persistence. The trick, if there was one, was either returning non-classical offerings to what they were in the late ’60s and early ’70s, or starting anew. I prefer to look back and say that I continued the tradition of Ike and Tina Turner, the Carpenters, Janis Joplin being here. Unbelievable. So I had the question, Why can’t we do that again? What’s wrong?
The very first thing I did was rather mundane: I cut off capacity, which had never been done here before. I remember asking somebody, “We have a fence around the place, how could we not know what our capacity is?” But would get looks like this guy’s a complete idiot: “We think of the Lawn as a place where you just keep selling tickets, which means you just keep making money.” But then you find people who can’t get to the park because the traffic is so bad. Or they get here but can’t find a place to park. Or get into the park but can’t find a place to sit.
On the other side, if you don’t cut off capacity, you can’t tell an artist how much money they can make playing your stage because their fees are based on what the gross receipts are going to be. You can’t tell them what gross receipts are going to be if you don’t have that number. And they’d be right to look at you like you’re a complete idiot.
Santana at Ravinia in 2012
The next mountain was getting artists like Santana, who told me he would never come because his audience wouldn’t come. It wasn’t that they thought the place wasn’t pretty or didn’t have a good stage or wonderful stagehands—they knew that would all be in order—they thought it was a classical house , which would mean that their audience wouldn’t come.
I didn’t try to disprove that so much as to say, “Audiences today, Mr. Santana, are omnivorous. They like everything. Including classical music audiences. The days of siloed audiences that only like orchestral music or opera, or original instruments and vocal recitals, or jazz or ’70s rock, that doesn’t happen anymore. People like everything. And Ravinia can be everything because the place is so beautiful. Don’t think of it like, ‘Will my audience come?’ but rather, ‘I’m going to grow a new audience.’ ” And that’s how the unlocking happened with the artists and their agents. It never dawned on me that we couldn’t have it all.
Continue Reading: PART 2 of All’s Welz that Ends Well
Award-winning veteran journalist, critic, author, broadcaster, and educator Dennis Polkow has been covering Chicago-based cultural institutions across various local, national, and international media for more than 35 years, including both decades of the Welz Kauffman era at Ravinia.