OPERA : Can He Storm the Bastille? : American conductor James Conlon takes the podium of Paris’ troubled opera. Thus far, Parisians view him sympathetically as--<i> mon Dieu!--</i> a brave maestro.

By Scott Kraft

April 9, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Scott Kraft is The Times' Paris Bureau chief</i>

PARIS — The Place de la Bastille, where one of French history’s most notorious prisons was destroyed by revolutionary mobs, has seen its share of suffering, political strife and bloodshed. And that was before the musicians arrived.

In more recent times, the fireworks have come from the high-tech 2,700-seat Bastille home of Paris Opera, one of the world’s best-known--and most troubled--music organizations.

The opera, which also runs the more intimate 120-year-old Garnier Opera theater, has been a financial, administrative and artistic wreck for much of the past 15 years. It has been plagued by strikes and political power plays, including the highly public dismissal of the last two music directors, and shunned by many of the world’s top conductors.

So it comes as no surprise that the newly appointed principal conductor of the Paris Opera, accomplished American musician James Conlon, is being viewed in Paris these days as a brave maestro deserving of sympathy.

“The past of the Paris Opera has not been rosy for the conductors who have ventured there,” the influential Paris daily Le Monde said recently. Conlon “is showing great courage,” the paper added, “but will the merciless, impenetrable bastion of rivalries and jealousies welcome this authentic artist?”

The latest dust-up occurred in September when Myung-Whun Chung, the Korean American musical director, refused a demotion and was physically prevented from entering the Bastille Opera house for rehearsals. Weeks of angry words in the news media preceded his departure, damaging what was left of the opera’s credibility.

All that had not gone unnoticed by Conlon, a 45-year-old New Yorker who first conducted the Paris Orchestra in 1980 and the French National Orchestra in 1983. When he wasn’t conducting or recording albums in Paris, Conlon could watch the antics from just across the border in Germany, where he is general music director of the Cologne Philharmonic and the Cologne Opera.

“You couldn’t miss what was going on in Paris over the past few years,” Conlon said, sipping cappuccino recently at a restaurant in Cologne. “I have tremendous respect for both of my predecessors. But the big question for me was: Why did it happen twice?”

Conlon concluded that the last men to take up the baton in Paris were dismissed over administrative disputes and not because of any doubts about their artistic programs or, indeed, their abilities, which are world-renowned.

“Could something unforeseen happen to me?” Conlon asked. “Certainly. When a city has a certain history, it can absolutely be repeated. But I’m thoroughly philosophical.

“Do I hope it won’t be repeated? Yes. Will I be crushed and devastated? Absolutely not. I’m going in with my eyes open. And I love challenges.”

One reason for Conlon’s optimism is the man who recruited and hired him, Hugues Gall. The 54-year-old Frenchman, one of the most respected opera administrators in the world, was deputy director of the Paris Opera during its sterling days in the 1970s and, since 1980, has been head of the Geneva Opera.

Gall formally takes over the Paris Opera in August. But, since February, 1994, as the director designate, he has been effectively running the show, cleaning house and making plans for the future of opera in Paris.

Among Gall’s goals is to restore fiscal order and mainstream repertory to the Paris Opera in hopes of bringing back the world’s top conductors and artists, such as Conlon. And, this time, he seems to have the unswerving support of the conservative French government.

“He’s the one person who can put this enormous mechanism into some kind of working order,” Conlon said. “I’m not sure he can do it, but I know if he can’t then nobody can.”

Gall calls Conlon “one of the most gifted conductors of his generation. James’ depth of understanding of the symphonic and opera repertoire, as well as his close relation to French culture, made him my first and ideal choice.”

Conlon will become musical adviser next month and principal conductor in August, 1996, with a contract to lead a minimum of 35 opera and orchestra performances a year. He will retain both his positions in Cologne and in Cincinnati, where he has been music director of the Cincinnati May Festival, the oldest festival of choral music in the United States, since 1979.

The conductor is eager to base himself in France, though, and within weeks he will move to Paris, where he will be joined by his wife, soprano Jennifer Ringo, and their 6-year-old daughter, Luisa, who have been living at the family home in New York.

Music critics in Paris greeted the announcement of Conlon’s appointment with a general sigh of relief for the future of the Paris Opera, suggesting that, as Le Monde put it, “some clouds have just been swept from the horizon.”

The clouds have been looming at the opera for some years now, and most of them were created by France’s complex mix of politics and culture.

In 1989, the head of the opera, Pierre Berge, who was also chief executive of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion empire, fired Music Director Daniel Barenboim. It was no accident that Berge was a close friend of the Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, and that Barenboim was appointed by the Culture Ministry, which was then in conservative hands.

In the dying months of the last Socialist-led government, Berge hired Myung-Whun Chung, giving him a rich eight-year contract and broad authority. Some have suggested that the fashion king, and perhaps Mitterrand himself, saw the long-term contract as a way to thwart the incoming conservative government from meddling at the opera.

Chung quickly earned the musicians respect by raising their profile and adding concerts, tours and recordings. His skills as a conductor were immense, but the administration was chaotic and the new cultural chiefs in government wanted to reassert control.

So the government hired Gall, granting him absolute authority to run the opera. All that stood between Gall and his assigned task was Chung, and their battle was inevitable.

In an unusually public row, Chung was presented with a new contract shortening his tenure from 2000 to 1997, freezing his salary at $660,000 a year and restricting his decision-making powers to the orchestra and chorus, preventing him from selecting operas and ballets.

Chung balked and went to court after Bastille guards blocked him from entering the building for rehearsals for “Simon Boccanegra.” A court ordered him reinstated and he later agreed to leave, with a hefty buyout, after the last performance of “Boccanegra” on Oct. 14.

Now the Paris Opera is in a transition that is welcomed by most music experts in the city. The Garnier Opera house, fictional home of the Phantom of the Opera, had been used only for ballets in recent years but is now undergoing a $50-million restoration. When it reopens in March, 1996, it will, like the much larger 6-year-old Bastille, offer a mix of opera and ballet. Between the two houses, Gall envisions a program of 365 performances a year, most of which, as at other opera companies, will be led by guest conductors.

There seems little doubt that Conlon’s lack of pretension will be a breath of fresh air for the Paris Opera. He is an engaging, slightly built man with dark hair and thick black eyebrows. Pausing from a grueling schedule of performances in Cologne recently, he slipped out of his office in an open-necked shirt and leather jacket for an unhurried interview at a local cafe, where he greeted waiters by name in fluent German.

He spoke passionately about France, a country he has loved since his first visit more than 20 years ago as a backpacking college student. He speaks French well and has a passion for the architectural landmarks of Europe, especially churches. After the interview, he invited a reporter to join him for a brisk walk through rain-slick streets to the city’s most famous landmark, the 13th-Century Gothic Cologne Cathedral, which Conlon visits regularly.

“Just magnificent, isn’t it?” he said, delightedly throwing his head back to take in the tall spires.

Conlon was born in New York City, the son of two labor union organizers who had met on a picket line in the 1940s. His late father was among the Allied troops who went ashore in Normandy, and Conlon remembers him telling of being in Paris and seeing Gen. Charles de Gaulle on the day victory in Europe was declared. (By coincidence, Conlon will conduct the Cologne Orchestra at the Invalides in Paris on the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, May 8.)

Conlon went to his first opera, put on by a small company in Queens in 1961, when he was 11, and “fell in love on the spot.” Within six months, he was taking piano and violin lessons. “My entire life had changed,” he recalls.

He went to the Juilliard School and later was a member of the faculty there. As a 22-year-old college student, he conducted “La Boheme” under the eye of Maria Callas, and two years later he became the youngest musician to conduct a subscription concert of the New York Philharmonic. His first appearance at the Metropolitan Opera was in 1976, and this season he conducted there for the 200th time.

In Europe, he served as music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the Netherlands from 1983 to 1991, adding the post of music director of the opera in Cologne in 1989. He is a frequent guest conductor around the world.

Conlon has spent several weeks each year for more than a decade in Paris with the Paris Orchestra and the French National Orchestra. Last summer, he recorded the soundtrack of a film, “Madame Butterfly,” with the Paris Orchestra.

The conductor has less experience with the Paris Opera. Although he conducted several productions at the Garnier Opera house in the mid-1980s, he has yet to perform in the Bastille Opera auditorium, which opened in 1989.

Conlon believes that his experi ence in France and Europe, and his love for Old World culture, will ease his transition.

“It’s not like I’ve suddenly just rolled out of a village somewhere, and here’s this American who’s insensitive to French culture and French civility,” he said. “I’ve spent more time in Europe in the last 15 years than I have in the States, and I have found that after a pretty short time people simply forget about where you come from and relate to you on the basis of your work.”

Besides, he added, “I’m not the type of American that thinks just because something’s American it’s good.”

Some French music critics wonder if Conlon can remain untouched by the stiletto politics that are so much a part of the Paris Opera. But he also has been described, accurately, in the French press as being from the “class of conductors who manage a brilliant career without any apparent devouring ambition.”

One thing in Conlon’s favor is his job title. He is principal conductor, not artistic director, as were his predecessors. Although some opera lovers decry the trend toward non-artist administrators in opera companies, that may well be the solution to the past problems in Paris.

The idea of a conductor with sweeping decision-making authority over the opera’s operation “is precisely what has been proven not to work in Paris,” Conlon said.

“You can’t have two people with ultimate authority,” he added. “And I don’t need the power. I don’t need it for my ego. I’m a musician, an artist, not an executive director.

“But if I get fired in the interim, it’s no problem. I have more work than I could possibly do. At my age that doesn’t concern me. I will always have work.”

Of course, no one here knows if Conlon will survive where his predecessors have fallen. But French opera lovers wait anxiously for December, when Conlon enters the Bastille Opera house, just steps from the birth of the French Revolution, and conducts his first performance.

The opera that evening will be “La Boheme,” the rich 19th-Century tale set in the Paris Latin Quarter. It’s an old Conlon favorite.