40 Years of Running the Show: Sarasota Opera’s Maestro, Victor DeRenzi

By Sylvia Whitman | Feature photo by Nancy Guth | February 2022

---

Victor DeRenzi will don his tux for photos in honor of his 40^th season presiding over Sarasota Opera, but please don’t ask the maestro to pose air-doodling with his baton. “You want to take a picture of a doctor holding a scalpel?” Bosh. 

“Here I am holding the stick, which actually doesn’t do anything unless I wave it. And even then, it doesn’t do anything unless somebody’s over there. And even if they’re there, unless they have music and know what I’m doing ….” DeRenzi’s voice trails off, impatient that anyone might mistake the rosewood tool of his trade with a wand à la Harry Potter.

Yet opera aficionados might argue that DeRenzi has performed magic during his four decades as Sarasota Opera’s artistic director and principal conductor. He arrived at age 32 with “a very specific way that I wanted to do opera,” as he puts it, just as the Asolo Opera Company was transitioning from The Ringling grounds into the former A.B. Edwards Theater in downtown Sarasota. A new era occasioned new names: Sarasota Opera and Sarasota Opera House.

The possibilities tantalized DeRenzi. “I was coming to a city where the old was not applicable in any way and we were going to start from scratch, with a new venue and a new way of doing things,” he says. “I thought this would be good because nobody could say to me, Oh, you can’t do that. We didn’t do it that way.” 

For one thing, Sarasota Opera House had greater capacity than the historic Asolo Theater. Thinking big, DeRenzi planned to stage full operas rather than chamber productions and to develop a festival season—in winter, of course, instead of the usual summer opera fests elsewhere. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, two years after DeRenzi’s hire, the opera house was refurbished piecemeal, the orchestra section (around 700 seats) first and the balcony later. Now at 1,100 seats, the theater remains intimate, but also elegant and functional, thanks to a $20 million renovation completed in 2008. 

Along the way, DeRenzi founded a year-round youth opera program and added an apprentice program that serves as a bridge between school and stage. Apprentices who have recently earned undergraduate or graduate degrees in opera train and perform with the company, singing small parts and in the chorus. A separate studio artist program nurtures vocalists farther along in their careers; they take on larger supporting roles and understudy for principals. Both groups do outreach in Sarasota, bringing high notes to local classrooms and senior centers.  

“I’ve always felt that opera is about making a community,” DeRenzi says. In any given season, the extended company numbers about 250, about 60% of whom are newcomers. “We build this community, which is based around a consistent aesthetic, and then we perform for two communities. One is the Sarasota community. The other is the world opera community, people who travel here from throughout the States, but also from Europe.” 

The Making of a Maestro

Although not exactly a Horatio Alger story, DeRenzi’s journey from a working-class Italian-American family in Staten Island, NY, to the opera stratosphere conjures up the American Dream. His father was a dock worker; his mother, a mother. (“That was her job. She was very good at it.”) Although his father crooned pop songs around the house, neither of his parents had any great interest in music. But they believed in education for their only child. “My father said, ‘I don’t care what you do, but you’re not going to break your back for somebody else.’ As long as I got an education, it didn’t really matter what I did.” 

DeRenzi’s seventh-grade teacher built sets for a tiny opera company—“the sets he built were pieces of wood that he stapled cardboard to and painted”—and kept asking DeRenzi and friends if they wanted to see a performance. Finally, they said yes. “We thought if we went, we could say we don’t like it, and he would leave us alone,” DeRenzi recalls. “And my friends all said, We don’t like it; leave us alone, and I went back and started helping him with the sets.”

From then on, DeRenzi attended every opera he could, including at the Met. At first, his father didn’t want him to commute alone into Manhattan, so, promising to buy the tickets, DeRenzi “would lasso some old person” to accompany him. As a teenager he attended three or four shows a week. “You saved all your money, or gave a dollar bribe to an usher, and you got in. I didn’t buy orchestra seats. It was standing room.” He saw the same operas over and over. “You were a fan of a singer or certain singers, and you went to hear them perform, as well as to see different operas.” His favorite star at the time was Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi. “Opera made me love opera, but she made me love singing.” 

Unlike pop stars, opera singers don’t rely on microphones and amplifiers; they use their voice alone to project lyrics and emotion over an orchestra. “To really love opera and love conducting opera, you have to love singing,” DeRenzi continues. “You can’t separate the two of them. If you don’t like singing, then there’s no reason you should even show your face in an opera house.”

DeRenzi majored in music theory at Queens College, City University of New York. He also studied privately—piano, theory, conducting—and at 20, he started conducting with a very small opera company, thanks to a good word put in by a friend. (Looking back, he marvels at his own “arrogance; I thought I knew everything.”) In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, New York had a number of these companies. After ten months and 56 performances—“all of them very bad”—DeRenzi moved to a slightly bigger and better outfit, working his way up and out to regional opera companies in other states until, at age 28, he conducted seven different productions at New York City Opera.

The Making of a Mission

DeRenzi took a gamble on Sarasota. “I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know if Sarasota was capable of that as a city…It was not like it is now.” Despite its reputation as an arts town, Sarasota had no ballet and a then-undistinguished orchestra. DeRenzi wanted “to do opera in a romantic, traditional way,” evoking the wonder he felt as a kid when performances transported him to a different place and time—Egypt, Spain, Paris on Christmas Eve. He also wanted to introduce the community to a broader-than-usual repertoire, historic pieces that may have premiered to great acclaim but had since been overlooked. 

Sarasota Opera grew along with its audience and the local arts community. They nourished each other. In his early years with the company, the maestro continued his freelance conducting, nationally and internationally. “But then I realized, I’m not a multitasker,” DeRenzi says. “I could do what I want do, the way I want to do it, in this company. So, there’s no need for me to be traveling all over and doing opera in a way that I don’t really like.” And although DeRenzi first imagined reincarnating the winter festival of 250 strong in a summer venue beyond Florida every year, as the company’s reputation soared, he didn’t need to take the show on the road. Far-flung fans were traveling to the Gulf Coast to enjoy Sarasota Opera.

High points? DeRenzi can’t list them all. Certainly, his Verdi triumph stands out: over 28 years, Sarasota Opera performed every work by the renowned Italian composer. “That was a major event in my life, but also in the life of some of the performers along the way,” he says. Italy knighted the maestro for helping spread Italian culture beyond the boot. 

Even before that, Sarasota Opera was generating headlines as an “innovative company” with a reputation for “novel repertoire.” In 1995, for instance, the Danish ambassador flew in for the opera’s stage premiere—in Danish—of Carl Nielsen’s Maskarade (1906), about an arranged marriage in Copenhagen. That made front pages in Denmark. In 2007, when Sarasota Opera featured the 19^th-century Polish national opera Halka, by Stanisław Moniuszko, Polish Americans from across the country came and wept through the performances “because they thought they’d never see this in an American theater.”

DeRenzi arranges the programs. He also conducts the fall production and two of the four operas in the winter festival. He studies all the works so that he can weigh in about the many elements that go into each production. A typical day during the opera season? “I wake up. I come to the opera house. I go home at 10:30 at night.”

The day starts with meetings, followed by rehearsals. DeRenzi’s creative staff sometimes includes his wife, longtime stage director Stephanie Sundine. “We rehearse the music first; then we rehearse the staging in a room.” Orchestra and chorus follow. “There are a lot of pieces that come together, that have to be done a certain way so that we don’t waste time.” 

Collaborating with Richard Russell, Sarasota Opera’s general director, DeRenzi handles administration, too. Budgets matter. Because of 9/11, and then the financial crisis of 2008, the Verdi Cycle had to be slow-tracked for a few years. “We have limitations like any other theater,” DeRenzi says. “There’s always someone who’s saying, Oh, why don’t we do some ridiculous opera that we can’t afford to do. People in America have become used to very big theaters because we have this idea that if it’s bigger, it must be better. But most European theaters are the size of our opera house.” A modest stage means that a grand opera like Verdi’s Aida requires creative workarounds.  

Sarasota Opera aims for classic but accessible. DeRenzi pooh-poohs opera stereotypes—that it’s elitist, for instance, or “a bunch of fat people on stage.” In fact, he points out, today’s opera singers may be more svelte than the average American. As for ticket prices—been to any sporting events lately? Just try sitting close to the action. Sarasota Opera tickets range from $25 to $145. “Baseball games are much more expensive,” DeRenzi says. Thanks to patron support, the company can keep tickets affordable. For diversity, “look at the performance on our stage. We come from all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of people.”

Although the pandemic lockdown of spring 2020 qualifies as a low point, it also showed off some of the opera’s finest qualities. The company had to cancel more than a week of performances. Yet, unlike the Met and other companies, Sarasota Opera honored all its payroll contracts. “Richard and I both felt that was important, and we managed to make that happen. It meant a lot to people,” DeRenzi says.

After 40 years, in such tough times, might the maestro be contemplating retirement? Not yet. “I wouldn’t know what to do,” DeRenzi says. Except write, which he does already, especially in the opera off-season. He’s got notes everywhere for articles and books, one about Verdi, another about the training of singers, “because universities aren’t doing their job in training performers.” 

For now, though, Sarasota Opera still commands his full intention. The winter festival launches this month [February] with the maestro conducting Puccini’s Tosca. 

As DeRenzi looks back—briefly—he expresses no regrets. “When I was a teenager, I wanted to move to Italy. But then I wouldn’t have met my wife. I wouldn’t have my daughter. I have a philosophy that if I left my house 10 minutes later this morning, my whole life could be different. Who knows?” 

A great opera may churn with misery and melodrama, but not a great career. “I don’t want to change things,” DeRenzi says.