David Lyman

Special to the Detroit Free Press

Dr. David DiChiera, the unlikely impresario whose cultural developments helped lead the way to redemption for downtown Detroit, died just before 10 p.m. Tuesday at his home in the Detroit Golf Course Community, said a spokesperson for Michigan Opera Theatre. He was 83 and had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April 2017.

DiChiera was small of stature and surprisingly soft-spoken for a man who came to have such an enormous impact on Detroit’s cultural landscape. Indeed, the word people used most often to describe him was “kind,” followed quickly by more grandiose words like “visionary,” “groundbreaker” and “risk-taker.”

He was all that and more.

“David was a pioneer in the re-blossoming of cultural Detroit, especially the blossoming of opera,” said U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak, who has served in Congress since 1983. “His determination was so irresistible that he was able to accomplish things in Detroit that many of us never imagined."

As many have noted, when DiChiera was leading the charge to bring the Detroit Opera House to life in the early to mid-1990s, the now-nearby Comerica Park and Ford Field did not exist — and neither did many of the restaurants and businesses in the vicinity.

“He’s leaving a lot more to the future and to the posterity of humanity than most people who ever walked the Earth,” said longtime friend and Michigan Opera Theatre board member Al Lucarelli, retired managing partner of Ernst and Young.

DiChiera came to Detroit from Los Angeles in 1962 to join the music department at Oakland University, then known as Michigan State University-Oakland. Very quickly, he assumed the leadership of Overture to Opera, a wing of the Detroit Grand Opera Association, which presented annual touring performances of the Metropolitan Opera Company.

It was as the host of the group’s presentations, intended as introductions to opera, that metro Detroit audiences were first exposed to DiChiera’s prodigious charm.

“David was a magician,” said Marc Scorca, CEO of Opera America, a national service organization for opera companies. “Aside from the fact that everyone loved him, he understood our business in practical ways that almost no one has either before him or since.”

More:'We love you, David': Detroit pays tribute to MOT's DiChiera

DiChiera saw opportunities where others saw complications.

In 1971, he left Oakland University to become artistic director of the Detroit Music Hall, now known as the Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts. It had lain fallow for many years, and though the building was workable, many people in Detroit weren’t ready for it to reopen.

“Remember, this was just four years after the riots,” DiChiera said in a March 2018 interview. “The whole idea that we could have culture in the middle of the city was unthinkable to some people. I had friends who asked: ‘Why are you going down there? Why aren’t you coming to Oakland County? To Bloomfield Hills?’ ”

But DiChiera believed that a city’s arts anchors needed to be in the center of the city — and that they were as vital to the overall health of a metropolitan community as they were to its artistic activity.

Buoyed by the success at Music Hall, he set his sights on a building just a few hundred feet west. The 3,500-seat Capitol Theatre was built as a movie palace in 1922. Despite being in disrepair, DiChiera believed the building had the makings of a grand, European-style opera house.

Lucarelli was one of many people DiChiera approached about supporting the Detroit Opera House project. Like almost everyone else who saw the building, he was skeptical of what seemed like an unrealistic pipe dream.

“We had breakfast at the Detroit Athletic Club, and then we walked across the street to see what he was calling a theater,” says Lucarelli. “There were holes in the roof. There were pigeons flying around. It was hard to grasp what he was thinking.”

But by the time they left the building, Lucarelli had signed on to help DiChiera.

“He was just so charming,” says Lucarelli. “It was such an outlandish plan. Remember, there was almost nothing down there at the time. But his passion for it was so great, he willed you into believing that he could make it happen. And he did.”

Says Jim Vella, president of the Ford Motor Company Fund: “He was one of those people who saw what could be. And then he asked ‘why not?’ "

The 2,700-seat Detroit Opera House, now a part of the David DiChiera Center for the Performing Arts, opened April 21, 1996. The theater was packed with dignitaries and well-wishers, and the stage was filled with opera-world luminaries including Dame Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti.

“I’ve been coming to Detroit for 25 years,” says conductor Steven Mercurio, who conducted the bulk of that opening-night performance. “Whenever I'm there, I stay in the same room at the Detroit Athletic Club — right across from the Opera House. The changes I’ve seen in those years — the empty tenements being knocked down, the stadiums being built, the restaurants opening all over the place — David was, in no small part, responsible for all of that.

“He stuck out his neck in ways that other people wouldn’t. He stayed the course. He invested his life and his reputation on the resurgence of Detroit’s cultural life. He gambled. And the gamble has paid off. The Opera House is a destination. It’s used for everything — graduations, comedy shows, ballet. It has become part of downtown's renaissance.”

A hard-driving Detroit entrepreneur

DiChiera was born April 8, 1935, into a poor and decidedly nonmusical family in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. After the family moved to southern California when he was 10, he would go on to study music at UCLA and spend a year researching baroque opera in Italy on a Fulbright fellowship.

The postwar years in southern California provided a heady and optimistic background for DiChiera’s youth. They had an impact that never left him.

When it came to music, though, DiChiera had to find his own way. When friends gave the family a piano so that young DiChiera could practice, his father wouldn’t allow it in the house. The instrument was relegated to the garage.

“I had to go out there to practice,” recalled DiChiera. “But I was afraid to go out after dark. So my sisters would take turns and sit with their homework or whatever they were reading and just be there with me. It was a very special gift they gave me.”

Within a few years, his older sister, who worked as a telephone operator, set aside small amounts of her salary to buy him a piano that was regarded as good enough to be in the house.

“It made all the difference,” said DiChiera, “My dear father never did understand my music. He would hear me in the living room practicing some Beethoven or Chopin. He would come in and say, ‘Why don’t you play the accordion, it would be so nice?’ He finally gave up on that idea. He realized that I was talented and that there was something special about that. Ultimately, everybody felt that was something to be supported. I was very, very fortunate.”

DiChiera was another in the long list of hard-driven entrepreneurs that Detroit loves so much. Over the decades, Detroit has entertained many dreams. Occasionally, a few of them became reality. It didn’t seem to make much difference whether the product was Motown music or Model T Fords or, in DiChiera’s case, a derelict building that, with enough love and attention, could become a grand opera house.

DiChiera was also active as a composer. Besides art songs and compositions for small ensembles, his most notable work was “Cyrano,” a full-length operatic retelling of Edmond Rostand’s late 19th-Century tragic romance. It premiered at the Detroit Opera House in 2007 and was restaged in 2017. Besides leading Michigan Opera Theatre, DiChiera was also artistic director at the Dayton Opera and the founding general director of Opera Pacific in Orange County, California.

At a May 19, 2017, gala commemorating DiChiera’s retirement from MOT, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves stepped to the front of the Opera House stage and brought down the house with her heartfelt comments about DiChiera, who had cast her in so many memorable productions, including “Werther” (1999) and “Margaret Garner” (2005).

She offered a long list of positive traits. Most important among those, she said, was that “he is a quality human being. A dream maker. My dream maker. When God created the masterpiece of who you are,” she added, “He was just showing off.”`

Contact Free Press special writer David Lyman at davidlyman@gmail.com.

Survivors and funeral information

DiChiera is survived by a sister, Ellen Blumer (Lindsay, California); two daughters, Lisa DiChiera (Chicago), and Cristina DiChiera (Providence) and three grandchildren.

In 1965, DiChiera married Karen VanderKloot, the daughter of influential businessman Robert C. VanderKloot. When DiChiera launched Michigan Opera Theatre in 1971, she created a robust and wide-ranging curriculum of educational programs that continues today. The couple divorced in the 1990s.

A funeral will be held Friday in the Detroit Opera House at the David DiChiera Center for the Performing Arts, 1526 Broadway, Detroit. Public visitation begins at 11 a.m., followed by a public funeral at 1 p.m.

Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated how long Rep. Sander Levin has been in Congress.