Charting a Course with Sarasota Opera: Joan Lovell & Wally Kraemer

By Sylvia Whitman | Photo by Nancy Guth | January 2022

Siren songs didn’t lure skipper Wally Kraemer to the Gulf Coast, but the arias of Sarasota Opera convinced him to tie up here. 

Opera has long been Wally Kraemer’s port in a storm. “I’m a workaholic,” confesses Kraemer, 84. As a hard-charging business lawyer in New Jersey, “I would be working into a frazzle, and then I’d go over to the Met”—The Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan—“to watch an opera. When I came back to the office, it was like I’d been on a two-week vacation.” 

Kraemer’s opera-philia had bloomed slowly but magnificently. “When I was starting out, at seven years old or so, my parents took me, and I hated it,” he says. “And then I went in my 20s, and it was okay. And probably in my late 30s, early 40s, I began to love it.” He flew to Seattle and San Francisco for performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. “Now, I’ve seen probably 170 different operas, 500 performances. It’s just something I find wonderful and relaxing and delightful.”

As Kraemer phased down his high-powered career, he and his wife, Joan Lovell, wintered on their boat in the Caribbean. Seafaring was Kraemer’s other escape from the office. Chartering barebones, he had navigated the eastern and western Mediterranean and sailed solo all along the East Coast, from Maine all the way to Grenada. He even learned celestial navigation. But in the Bahamas, Kraemer developed a medical problem, something beyond the scope of care available on the Out Islands, so he and Lovell visited Sarasota and looked for a two-week rental. 

Besides seeking health care, they were weighing where to spend the winters. Kraemer stopped by the Sarasota Opera House downtown to ask questions and bumped into Sam Lowry, then director of audience development. “He was a singer before he went into the PR end of the opera,” Kraemer recalls. “I had a long meeting with him, and I was sold on Sarasota.”

Kraemer and Lovell saw an open-house sign, bought the place, and moved here full time in 2011. “It’s a love affair both with the opera and Sarasota,” Kraemer says.

At Home Among the Opera-Loving Landlubbers

Kraemer sold his boat—”too much keel depth to get in and out easily”—and took up golf. Opera has served as the couple’s anchor and entrée into Sarasota. Lovell says she doubts most people appreciate how much of a draw the opera is for soon-to-be-retirees. “Opera lovers will select a city based on a good regional opera—because they’re the kinds of enthusiasts who really want to be able to experience this art form live. It’s so special when it’s live.” Also, she and Kraemer have found the local opera community “extremely welcoming,” with opera guilds where people get together for lectures and dinners. 

Discovering a fellow opera aficionado seated next to her at a charity function, Lovell asked what he loved about opera. His answer: “’I love the people. The community here.’” 

Lovell came to opera fandom by marriage. As Kraemer tells it, he was a widower with an extra ticket to the Met walking around the office asking if someone would accompany him. “She’s the only person in the office who would go with me. I thought Joan felt sorry for me.”

 “I had studied a few operas in college and was really glad to have the opportunity to go to the Met, which I had only been to one time before,” Lovell says. 

Some couples’ courtship songs play on the radio; theirs vibrated from the stage of the Met. Once they married, “we had a subscription there with about six operas a year,” Lovell says, “so I got a solid grounding in the grand opera experience.” They also attended Glimmerglass, the summer opera festival in Cooperstown, NY.  

When they traveled, they put opera on their itinerary—in Toronto, London, even Ho Chi Minh City. Lovell lobbied for that last one in Vietnam: “I want to see different art forms,” she says. 

And still their first Sarasota Opera wowed them. “I’d probably seen Carmen five or six times before I saw it here, and it had a certain clarity I had never seen in that opera,” Lovell recalls. “Wally said, ‘That’s the first time I really understood the emotion driving those characters.’” 

Lovell credits both the performance and the staging. “Grand opera in an intimate theater environment—it’s like the best of all worlds.”

Ready Forward and Hard-a-Lee

Sarasota Opera quickly tapped Kraemer’s enthusiasm and workaholic tendencies. He joined a study committee for the organization’s first big fund drive and then ascended to the board of trustees, picking up more and more responsibilities—committee chairmanships, titled roles as secretary, treasurer, vice chair. His two-year term as chair began June 1.

A strategic plan is in the works, Kraemer says. “The other thing is dealing with our budget.” Tickets pay for about 38% of the opera’s costs. Donations are stable, but “costs keep inflating over time. As the expression goes, if you don’t increase butts in seats or donations, you’re going to have to cut things.”

Pandemic uncertainties complicate the picture, despite the “superb leadership” of artistic director Victor DeRenzi and general director Richard Russell, says Kraemer. In the fall, Sarasota Opera returned to live performances but chose “a lovely little Rossini opera to keep our costs down”—20-some musicians instead of a 70-piece orchestra, no chorus, one set. “I thought it was charming and wonderful,” Kraemer says. “Everybody I talked to who went liked it.” But sales were flat. “Someone who knows nothing about opera might say, ‘The Silken Ladder?’ Never heard of it.”   

Kraemer also attributes the smaller audience to COVID fears. And the pandemic scuttled Sarasota Opera’s usual fall Youth Opera production with a professional orchestra, conductor, and stage crew. Even with vaccines rolling out, “there was no time to rehearse.” 

Nonetheless, Kraemer’s hoping for a big turnout for Tosca in February. He’d like to reel in opera neophytes. “There are many people who’ve never been to an opera who say, ‘I hate opera.’ And you get them to go, and some of them will love it and some of them will not. But you won’t discover whether you like it or not unless you see it. It’s like someone goes to a restaurant and never tries anything new. Steak and potatoes every time.”

Lovell also observes that opera is not a monolith. People who like rock music, for instance, rarely do so indiscriminately. “They might like certain groups; they might not like others. I don’t know that many people would go to concerts of every single pop star.” She’s a fan of Philip Glass, some Wagner, some French opera, and some early operas, she says. She’s seen three productions of a certain Wagner opera—at the Met, at Glimmerglass, and at Sarasota Opera, which happens to be the one she liked the best. 

Don’t ask Kraemer, though, to name his top opera. “You’re asking which of my children is my favorite? It’s an impossible question. I can give you a core group of them. I love the Wagner Ring cycle. I love a group of Mozart operas. I could name 20 operas I love, and I can’t pick between them. There are very few I dislike.”

Aye, aye, Captain.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Sarasota Opera, please visit sarasotaopera.org or call 941.328.1300.