Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Berkoff

Berkoff’s line is a sly jab at the romantic myth that the arts are steered by genius alone. Coming from an actor - someone who lives inside the director’s aura, and also suffers its whims - it lands as a backstage truth dressed up as provocation: the real power in an opera house is logistical, financial, and political, not purely artistic.

The intent isn’t to diminish directors so much as to puncture the cult of the auteur. Opera is the most industrial of “high” art forms: unionized labor, enormous budgets, brittle scheduling, star casting, orchestra contracts, donor demands, aging buildings, and audiences that expect both tradition and novelty. In that ecosystem, a director can make a visionary production and still fail the institution. An administrator, meanwhile, can build the conditions that let vision happen repeatedly: steady funding, long-term planning, morale, risk management, and the unglamorous diplomacy that keeps egos from detonating the season.

Subtext: artistry is fragile; infrastructure is decisive. Berkoff is also hinting at a hierarchy performers know well. Administrators decide which work gets commissioned, which voices get amplified, who gets hired, and what “innovation” is safe enough to sell. The quote carries a faint resentment toward the theater’s public-facing mythology, where directors receive the narrative credit while administrators quietly determine what’s possible.

Contextually, it reflects late-20th-century arts reality: shrinking public subsidy, rising production costs, and institutions surviving by managerial competence as much as by taste. Berkoff isn’t celebrating bureaucracy. He’s warning that without it, the grandest art form becomes an expensive, beautiful mess.