Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- I lived in Dallas in the 1980s and still keep up with the local news.

So the drama surrounding the departure of George Steel from the Dallas Opera to the New York City Opera naturally piqued my interest.

How sad were my friends? How great was the loss?

Dancing in the streets exaggerates only a bit. In Dallas, any tears shed over his departure would barely fill a thimble.

Here in New York, no flowery press release could disguise the fact that the moribund City Opera had gotten a manager with a fairly short resume. Of course, the company’s board has found hiring managers quite a challenge.

The last one, Gerard Mortier, an edgy Belgian anointed about two years ago, stayed in Paris at his old job running the Opera, and finally quit last November without ever arriving in New York. He’d noticed the company’s fortunes had sunk to an all-time low; it didn’t have much money for underwriting his grand plans. City Opera isn’t even performing in its theater this season for incomprehensible reasons.

Steel, 42, came to Texas last October from Columbia University’s Miller Theater, where he won acclaim for innovative programming during 11 seasons. He’s good with donors, which made him attractive to Dallas even though he had never run an opera company. A charmer would be just right for raising money to smooth the company’s move this October into a brand-new, Norman Foster-designed home on the $354 million campus of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. Compared to City Opera’s awful home in Lincoln Center, it’s a palace.

Stagnating

As chief drama critic of the Dallas Morning News, I spent a lot of time in the company’s original home, an ornate musical- theater barn across from the Cotton Bowl. I saw first-rate productions of modern works like Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” along with lavish mountings of the classics. In its heyday, Dallas had been the first American stage for stars like Joan Sutherland and Placido Domingo. The company had stagnated in recent years; with the move comes hope that new energy and great song will return.

Dallas hadn’t had much luck with its last two managers. Now their number is three -- but everyone seems to be coping just fine with the latest development.

“We cannot feel bad about the opera world sorting itself out in a beneficial way for all concerned,” Dallas Opera Chairman Kern Wildenthal told the New York Times.

So Long

He was speaking in Dallas’s unique patois, a dialect I got to know back in the ‘80s. If there were surtitles, Wildenthal’s comment would be translated thus: “So long. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”

Here’s how the Morning News put it in an editorial last Friday: “Dallas Opera’s new general director, George Steel, is bailing already, returning to New York to head the City Opera there. He showed up last year all ‘excited’ to be here and exits with nice words still tumbling from his lips, like saying the Dallas company is ‘poised on the threshold of extraordinary things.’ Gee, thanks. Dallas will just have to get along without the fickle Mr. Steel ...”

Steel seems to have found Dallas a struggle. No sooner had he arrived in October than reports began circulating that he hadn’t bothered to show his face at rehearsals, wasn’t out there fundraising and was “aloof,” out of town more often than not.

By early December, his own board members were actively badmouthing him. Worst of all, Steel, an early-music specialist, didn’t seem to know or care much about the standard repertoire beloved of subscribers and donors.

Mainstream Mozart

Morning News music critic Scott Cantrell also gave him a tart sendoff: “(Steel) evinced little interest in the mainstream Mozart-to-Puccini repertory that fills seats and pays bills,” he wrote. “One person close to the opera wondered whether Steel could name the top five characters in the five most popular operas.”

Through it all, Steel vigorously denied rumors he was leaving. Refuting a Bloomberg News report that he was talking to City Opera, he called me “insane.”

Well, like Steel, I know something about being a New Yorker in Dallas. It can be a silly city. It has skyscrapers outlined in green neon. It’s deeply obsessed with how the rest of the world sees it.

Yet its self-confidence can be infectious. Tennessee Williams found refuge and solace there. Margo Jones practically invented theater-in-the-round on the same Texas State Fair grounds as the opera and guitarist Charlie Christian played electric jazz in the speakeasies of the Deep Ellum district. You just have to show a little curiosity to find the there there.

Addio, Addio

Now Steel is in a win-win situation: If City Opera goes under, no one will blame him. (And who in their right mind in this climate would give money to this place?) Yet if it survives, he’ll be the hero.

Back in Texas, however -- where the Columbia wunderkind did to the Dallas Opera exactly what Mortier did to the New York City Opera -- Steel has already been excised from the company’s Web site. Don’t expect any lawsuits challenging his departure. Just shouts of “Addio! Addio!”

(Jeremy Gerard is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 22, 2009 00:00 EST