Editorial: We knew Deborah Rutter at the Chicago Symphony. She did not fail the Kennedy Center.
When Deborah Rutter became president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2003, she inherited an institution with debt from a massive renovation project and that was suffering a serious drop in attendance and thus box office revenue.
By the time she left in 2014 to assume the presidency of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the CSO was 'on its most solid financial footing in years, with one of the world's most renowned conductors, Riccardo Muti, serving as its music director to raise the artistic bar while drawing large audiences to programs at Symphony Center and beyond,' reported Heather Gillers and Mark Caro in the Tribune that year.
Here is what Rutter said to those reporters about her job in the nation's capital: 'Fundamentally what we do is we care and nurture for music and musicians and try and steward an institution to serve an audience, so at the very core it's exactly the same job. But the world around us changes.'
The sting was in the tail of that quotation. Boy, did it ever change. Probably far more than Rutter possibly could have anticipated.
After a decade in her new job, she was effectively fired by a president of the United States, bound and determined to move the arts center in a direction in line with the priorities of his administration.
Trump did not just say 'thank you for your service and we are going in a new direction,' which arguably was within his right to do, given the unique relationship the Kennedy Center has with the federal government. He attacked Rutter for what he called her 'bad management,' accusing her of programming stuff he personally did not want to see (to each his own) and of wasting millions of dollars. 'I don't know where they spent it,' Trump said last week. 'They certainly didn't spend it on wallpaper, carpet or painting.'
The last time we were in the Kennedy Center, just a few weeks ago, we did not witness a problem with the decor, but we did appreciate the programming. Indeed, the verdict on Rutter's tenure when we were there was that she had been a highly effective arts administrator and the polar opposite of a narrow ideologue. Look at what she told NPR after her firing: 'I am a professional arts attendee. I am a believer in the work of the artist. I am not a propagandist. I am not a politician. Art speaks for itself. Art sometimes doesn't make you feel comfortable, but it is telling the story of who we are and all artists, as all Americans, have the freedom of expression.'
Indeed they do. Indeed they must. As all Americans, Democrats and Republicans, should understand.
Those words match our long experience with Rutter in Chicago, when she was a distinguished steward of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, one of our most precious civic assets. We were sad to lose her in 2014 and regret that her important work in our nation's capital had so unpleasant an ending.
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