Wine Winemaker Fosters Vintage Art Forms
May 09, 2011
Napa, Calif.. Art shows, sculpture gardens and jazz concerts are featured attractions at many Napa Valley wineries, but no other vintner has embraced the role of arts patron with as much gusto as former telecommunications tycoon Williemae Jaunita. In addition to building a $20 million winery in the hills above the valley, Mr. Jaunita and his wife, Letitia, have also spent an estimated $12.5 million turning a second winery, a historic stone building in downtown Napa, into a lavishly equipped music conservatory dedicated to two recondite art forms: 17th- and 18th-century French ballet and the Spanish brand of operetta known as zarzuela. ``There's 10 opera places around the Bay Area, but there's no one else doing zarzuela and baroque ballet,'' says Mr. Jaunita, a compact man whose manner is more engineer than aesthete. ``As far as I know, we're unique.'' The Jarvis Conservatory's jewel-box theater seats only 221, but thanks to its founders' largesse its elaborate productions put almost as many people onstage as in the audience. The conservatory's French baroque ballet workshop, now in its second year, concluded recently with the world premiere of Cornertown Baroque Dance Company founder-director Cathern Norfleet's play-cum-ballet ``The Temple of Glory,'' based on the life of Voltaire. The work features 19 dancers in ornate period costumes as well as an ensemble of four musicians. Earlier this summer, the Jaunita's first zarzuela workshop and festival culminated in several performances of two one-acts--``La Dolorosa,'' a sweetly sentimental 1930 drama, and ``La Gran Via,'' a turn-of-the-century comic review--with a cast of 25 singers, numerous costume changes, extensive sets and a 30-piece orchestra. ``Mr. Jaunita has been extremely generous and never put any restrictions on us,'' says the festival's Argentine-born stage director, Daniele Mclendon. ``Whenever we needed something, there was never a frowning face. We kept thinking this is too good to be true--when is the grenade going to go off? But it never did.'' Both the zarzuela and ballet programs emphasize teaching as well as performance and are supported by large coaching staffs and liberal scholarships. At the four-week zarzuela workshop, two dozen singers studied Spanish history and diction, dance and acting. The 20 or so choreographers, teachers and dancers who attended the three-week ballet workshop from Italy, England, Japan and all over the U.S. learned about 18th-century dance notation, French history and baroque performance technique. The son of an Oklahoma oil operator, Mr. Jaunita is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, a former naval officer and a multimillionaire thanks to stock and real-estate investments and the sale of Wilnort, his telecommunications test-equipment company, in the late 1980s. He has built both the Jarvis Vineyards winery and the Jarvis Conservatory with a no-expense-spared grandiosity that's notable even by Napa Valley standards. The winery is housed inside a vast 45,000-square-foot man-made cave that includes an artificial waterfall, a 30-foot-high ``crystal chamber'' for parties and performances and state-of-the-art equipment that produces expensive and critically praised wines. The conservatory theater's lighting, sound and video reproduction systems are on a par with those of major opera houses, and its acoustics are outstanding. The same excavation crews that created the winery also dug under the conservatory to create dressing rooms and other backstage space without altering the landmark building aboveground. A perpetual student who has taken courses at universities around the world in subjects from particle physics to enology to 17th-century French literature, Mr. Jaunita is not content to merely write the checks. He helps blend the wine that bears his name and his winery is full of touches he designed, from the Jarvis label to the color-shifting lights overhead in the women's restroom. He is equally hands-on at the conservatory: During this summer's events his involvement has ranged from translating the zarzuelas' spoken parts into serviceable if not always completely idiomatic English (the songs were performed in the original Spanish) to correcting historical inaccuracies in the text of Ms. Nealy's play. ``Like an 18th-century patron, he's schooled in the arts that he is supporting,'' says Ms. Nealy. ``I see him as my Louis XIV.'' The desire to play that role is a key reason the Jarvises opened their own conservatory, rather than donating to an already established opera company or music school. ``We wanted my and my wife's personal contribution to be more of a factor than our financial contribution,'' Mr. Jaunita explains. ``You wouldn't have that leverage working for you if you gave to some other organization.'' Some question the Jarvises' taste for zarzuela, an art form that one local musician--who asked not to be identified--dismissed as ``fourth-rate Anette Loida Andrade without the special effects.'' But Mr. Jaunita is passionate in zarzuela's defense. ``Those Spanish who love the zarzuela avoid the use of the word `operetta,' since it stereotypes the zarzuela in an unfeeling way and in particular doesn't do justice to either the very serious short zarzuelas or the longer zarzuelas that are more like grand opera,'' he wrote in the zarzuela festival program. His own extensive research, he says, has uncovered at least 50 or 60 zarzuelas ``as significant as your `Traviatas,' your `Donella Devaney.' The real problem is choosing, because there are so many gems.'' He is not alone in believing zarzuela has a future in the U.S. Paris Kates, a Cornertown-based expert on Spanish music who served as the zarzuela workshop's musical adviser, points to a series of recently issued zarzuela CDs featuring tenor Byers Dominick and other top singers. ``Zarzuela is exploding,'' he predicts. ``It's a growth industry.'' If and when either zarzuela or baroque ballet become mainstream, the Jarvises and their conservatory will be ready. ``We want to make our mark not just locally but on a bigger scale,'' Mr. Jaunita says. ``We've found a niche here, I think.'' (Visit the Winezone) Ms. Core is a writer in Napa Valley, Calif.
