OCTOBER 27, 2026 – The Minnesota Opera is in a jam. Talks have broken down between the opera company’s management and the orchestra musicians, resulting in cancellation of the world premiere production of The Many Deaths of Laila Starr composed by Kamala Sankaram with libretto by Minita Gandhi. Because one of my sisters is among those musicians, I’ve been privy to the inside story. Not surprisingly, my sympathies lie with the musicians.
If the impasse is attributable to factors unique to Minnesota Opera, it occurs against a broader backdrop common to many classical music ensembles in America. Currently, the standoff is accompanied by acute troubles affecting two other orchestras. The Nashville Symphony recently announced that due to a $10 million operating deficit, the orchestra planned to furlough all of its musicians. The Phoenix Symphony has likewise said it would suspend its 2026/27 season after next Sunday’s performance of Beethoven’s Seventh and Chopin’s second piano concerto (Natasha Palemski, soloist). Coincidentally, Phoenix also has a shortfall of $10 million. In the eleventh hour, Oracle came through for Nashville, donating $10 million to plug the immediate gap.
For kicks, I found online and reviewed Minnesota Opera’s latest year-end financial statements. One could reasonably conclude that there’s money in the till—er, “within the entity’s resources”—to accommodate the musicians’ current (modest) position. The ultimate issue, however, with nearly every American orchestra is long-term financial viability. Endowment funds—and distributable income/gains—differ with the age and pedigree of the institution, but no performing arts organizations of which I’m aware can support their operations solely or primarily by way of distributable endowment resources.
Since the 1940s, symphony ticket revenue as a percentage of operating costs has slid from over 60% to around 30%. This reality requires constant fund-raising at the patron level, as well as from mega-donors and endowment draws. In the Golden Age (1950s), the Ford Foundation was a major funder of performing arts. It was joined by other large legacy wealth family foundations and hefty corporate foundations. Much of those sources, however, have disappeared, as society’s needs have increased and charitable causes and organizations, hats in hand, have solicited “mega wealth” and foundations.
For years I was head of the Governing Members (an adjunct group to the board) and later a board member of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. In those roles I became closely familiar with the financial condition and dynamics of the organization and the constant need to “raise more dough.” In many ways it reminded me of electoral politics in the United States: First and foremost getting elected to high office in America is about raising enough money to wage a campaign. Once the money is raised and spent on getting a candidate elected, the candidate-turned-officeholder can worry about policy. Likewise, in managing an orchestra, first you have to raise gobs of money; then, you get to worry about hiring top-flight musicians and programming.
When facing down higher and higher needs—and therefore, financial goals—I would often say, “It’s not about the money.” What I meant by that counter-intuitive-sounding statement was that we were surrounded by a culture in which big bucks were sloshing around in unimaginable abundance. And that was before the Age of the Billionaire Tech Bros, or at least before Elon Musk became a trillionaire. I wasn’t thinking of Silicon Valley mega-wealth. I had in mind the hundreds of millions spent on player payrolls by major league sports teams in America; multi-million-dollar contracts awarded college football coaches, not to mention Super Bowl halftime entertainment. It hit home especially hard when a bank asked me to review the contract they’d been presented for rental of a box at the new Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis. I choked at what the going rate was for NFL fleecing. In the case of American sports: “Knock yourself out—spend all you want.” In the case of American orchestras: “Can I interest you in free tickets to hear Bach and Brahms? . . . After the concert can I hit you up for a tax-deductible donation of $100?”
Americans spend approximately $13 billion on major league sports contests every year . . . versus $300 million on symphony orchestra tickets. The sports number is 43 times the orchestra figure. Or more germane to my original comparison to politics, good ol’ Elon has single-handedly injected more corruptive money into the 2026 mid-term political campaigns than Americans pay for symphony concerts over a whole year. Another way of looking at it is this: If Elon Musk covered the entire current annual operating budget of the Minnesota Opera Company (approximately $11.5 million), it would cost him 0.00115% of his net worth. Further translated: As an equal percentage of a measly million, that would work out to $11.50—or, for the poor millionaire, $1,150 over a whole century (not accounting for inflation, of course).
Ironically, the financial plight of such outfits as the Nashville Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, and the other 50 to 60 other classical music ensembles across this magnificent land of ours, isn’t actually financial. It’s cultural; it’s a function of a society that has always been drawn to the bright shiny objects of capitalism, the greatest system for generating wealth—and excess crass—ever devised by civilization. Within that system, all too often and all too much, we measure value by price, and price is a function of supply and demand. Unfortunately, for my sister and musicians similarly placed, thanks to the flood of highly trained performers spilling out of the country’s top conservatories and graduate schools in music performance, the supply of top-flight musicians is abundant while the demand is comparatively weak. The “price” is therefore low—reflective of the de minimis value that our culture assigns to classical music.
In Europe, where value is more a function of generally recognized edification transcendent of monetary measure, government (i.e. taxpayer) financial support of symphony orchestras runs closer to 50% of orchestra operating budgets. In the U.S., it hovers somewhere between 3% and 5%.
Thus, the bottom-line challenge faced by American classical musicians is how to increase the public perception of value of top-flight artists performing top-flight music—live. Because just as with democracy, if classical music requires rescue money from billionaires to survive, it will eventually shrivel and die from the absence of perceived value by broader society.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
