Broadcom Founder Gives $5 Million to Opera Pacific

In one of the largest single grants ever to an Orange County arts organization, technology executive Henry Samueli and his wife, Susan, announced Monday that they are giving $5 million to Opera Pacific.

The Samuelis’ gift, in addition to $1 million given last year, is in Broadcom Corp. stock. The grant was announced by Susan Samueli, a member of the opera board, at the opera company’s new headquarters in Santa Ana.

“Opera Pacific’s education and community outreach is a big part of my reason for making this gift,” she said. “I’ve always felt that the performing arts are a very important part of a child’s education.”

Opera Pacific, founded in 1986, is the county’s only professional opera company and stages four productions a year at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The opera operates on a $6-million annual budget, which places it among the top 15 opera companies in the United States.

In a separate ceremony attended by Gov. Gray Davis in Irvine Monday, Henry Samueli, co-founder of Irvine-based Broadcom Corp., a manufacturer of high-speed communication chips, and long-time business rival Dwight Decker, chairman of the Newport Beach chip maker Conexant Systems Inc., donated $6 million on behalf of their companies to the UC Irvine School of Engineering.

The shared gift will establish the Center for Pervasive Communications at the school of engineering, which already bears Samueli’s name.

The Samuelis’ gift to Opera Pacific, which will occur in August, will be split in two parts. One-million dollars will be used to wipe out an accumulated debt of $600,000 and the remainder wil go to the operating fund. The other part of the grant will seed the company’s first endowment campaign, with a goal of at least $20 million, according to Executive Director Martin G. Hubbard.

“This is a springboard to help us raise money broadly in the community and to tell the community that we’re not only alive and well, but actually getting rather strong,” Hubbard. said Monday.

Hubbard also announced that the opera company will move into its new, 20,000-square-foot facility at 610 W. Warner Ave., Santa Ana, in August. All the company’s operations will be housed there, including administrative offices, a rehearsal space the size of the Performing Arts Center main stage, storage space and a costume shop. The company now leases space in three locations in Irvine and Costa Mesa.

The company has raised nearly $1 million of the $1.5 million needed to buy and renovate the building through gifts from Clifford Heinz of the C.S. Heinz Foundation, from Opera Pacific former board chairman William Roberts and his wife, Barbara, and from others.

Opera Pacific was formed 14 years ago by David DiChiera, who also ran Michigan Opera Theatre. DiChiera stepped down in 1996 to devote himself full time to the Michigan company and to running the Detroit Opera House. Patrick L. Veitch, formerly with the Metropolitan and Australian operas, took over.

Facing a deficit of $700,000, Veitch cut back the number of performances of each opera, eliminated the company’s policy of “double casting,” in which more than one singer performs in a role, and cut back outreach programs. Veitch left abruptly in December 1997, with finances looking bleaker than ever.

Hubbard, a retired venture capitalist, became executive director in 1998 at an annual salary of $1. That “salary” has just doubled, to $2, Hubbard said on Monday.

He promoted John DeMain in 1998 to artistic director, cut staff by half, moved the offices to smaller space and initiated an intense fund-raising campaign.

The company desperately needed money. It had run out of funds before the weekend performances of Puccini’s “La Boheme” in January 1998, board chairman Patrick T. Seaver said Monday.

But Hubbard’s efforts and improving productions began turning the company around. Last year, Opera Pacific was able to reduce its accumulated deficit from $900,000 to $600,000 and posted an operating budget surplus.

Susan Samueli joined the board last year, shortly after she and her husband helped underwrite the company’s production of Hans Krasa’s “Brundibar” at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in June.

The opera originally was staged by children in 1943 at Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

The Samuelis backed Opera Pacific’s production, Susan Samueli said Monday, as a tribute to her husband’s parents, who survived the Holocaust.

“Brundibar” was part of the company’s renewed education and outreach program.

Many of the company’s outreach efforts were eliminated during the cutbacks in 1997, even though the program had reached more than 100,000 Orange County children earlier in the decade.

In January, the company hired an education manager to develop new outreach programs.

The Samuelis aren’t the only Orange County arts benefactors.

Other large monetary gifts to Orange County arts organizations have been made by the Segerstrom family, which, in addition to land valued at $13.2 million, gave $6 million toward construction of the Performing Arts Center in 1983. This year, an anonymous donor gave the center $3.8 million.

In 1995, William J. Gillespie gave a total of $6.6 million to various groups, including $2.8 million to the Performing Arts Center, $1 million to the Pacific Chorale and $1.2 million to the Pacific Symphony.

Last year, another major gift was given by Henry Samueli’s business partner, Henry T. Nicholas III, co-founder of Broadcom Corp. Nicholas gave South Coast Repertory a $1.3-million grant.

The two founders of Broadcom have lent their support to a variety of non-arts causes too--including the gift Monday to UC Irvine.

Their grant to the university will be used to hire four professors and a director for the communications center and to support as many as 20 new graduate research fellowships in areas of cutting-edge communications technology. The limited availability of engineering talent in the labor pool prompted the gift.

“When you give money to the school, everyone thinks you’re being philanthropic,” Henry Samueli said. “But here we’re being greedy capitalists. We had to do it.”

Earlier in the day, at the announcement in Santa Ana of the $5 million gift to Opera Pacific, Susan Samueli described a very different--but still educational--motivation:

“It’s important for children to stretch their imaginations and to develop creative ways for solving problems,” she said. “The arts often help us explore the human condition, nourish the soul and find beauty in the world.”

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Also contributing to this report was Staff Writer Karen Alexander.

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Opera Pacific’s New Home

Opera Pacific, which Monday received a $5 million grant, will move in August into new headquarters in Santa Ana. The opera company is buying a warehouse-style building which will house offices and rehearsal space in a single location for the first time.

A gift from Susan and Henry Samueli of $5 million to Opera Pacific was announced Monday. Previous large gifts of cash or stock to Orange County arts groups include:

* $6 million cash gift from the Segerstrom Family for the original construction of the Performing Arts Center in 1983

* $3.8 million anonymous cash gift to the center in 2000

* A multimillion donation to various organizations in 1995 from philanthropist William J. Gillespie, including $2.8 million to the Orange County Performing Arts Center, $1 million to the Pacific Chorale, $940,000 to South Coast Repertory, $680,000 to the Philharmonic Society of Orange County and $1.2 million to the Pacific Symphony.

* $1.3 million to South Coast Repertory, the largest gift in the theater company’s 35-year-history, from Henry T. Nicholas III, president of Broadcom Corp., Jan 1999.

* $607,500 in Motorola[cq] stock to Pacific Chorale from Newport Beach arts philhanthropists Mary and Phillip Lyons, 1999.

* $550,000 to South Coast Repertory from the James Irvine Foundation in 1998,

* $516,500 in Motorola stock to Pacific Symphony from the Lyons, 1999.

* $500,000 gift to UC Irvine to upgrade the school’s student theater from Oscar-winning actress Claire Trevor Bren, in 1999.

* $500,000, over five years, to the Orange County Performing Arts Center from Edison International, 1999.