Public Affairs Faculty

Christopher Hunt Clinical Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs MA, History and Anglo-Saxon, Trinity College, Cambridge University (U.K.), 1961

Christopher Hunt has been opera administrator, festival director, critic, radio and television producer, writer, artists' manager, and impresario, in Europe, North America, and Australia.

Born and educated in London, his earliest ambitions were towards architecture, with archaeology, theatre, and music vying for primacy; in the end it was music that dominated. He studied oboe with Terence Macdonagh (Sir Thomas Beecham’s principal oboe in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra), piano with Michael Mullinar (dedicatee of Vaughan Williams’s 6th Symphony), and composition with British composer John Burn. Lacking enough performing talent he turned to managing the arts.

Following National Service as an officer with the Rifle Brigade in Malaya, and Trinity College, Cambridge (where he studied Anglo-Saxon and History, while playing a great deal of music) he worked on the promotion of London concerts, and for several British arts festivals, among them Coventry Cathedral Festival (with premieres of Britten's War Requiem and Tippett's King Priam); the first two City of London Festivals; and the first English Bach Festivals. He was Administrator of Youth and Music (Sir Robert Mayer’s English counterpart to Jeunesses Musicales) for 18 months, before starting his own concert and artists' management firm, initially together with Richard Gaddes (now General Director of the Santa Fe Opera). For a decade he promoted concerts in Britain, and represented internationally a wide range of artists from classical stars to Pink Floyd (their first year), Mike Westbrook's Jazz Band, the Kings’ Singers, and the master of Indian sitar players, Ustad Vilayat Khan. For his final five years as artists' manager he dealt almost exclusively with opera, representing such artists as Thomas Allen, Agnes Baltsa, Josephine Barstow, Ileana Cotrubas, James Levine, Robert Lloyd, Riccardo Muti, Murray Perahia, David Pountney, Margaret Price, Matti Salminen, and Anna Tomowa-Sintow. He was President of the British Association of Concert Agents and Vice-President of the equivalent European Association from 1973-75. In 1975 he closed his business to take a year's sabbatical. He was briefly Opera Administrator at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden (where he was chiefly responsible for the casting and production of the world premiere of Henze's We Come to the River) before leaving Britain for the United States.

He directed the 1977 performing arts season at Wolf Trap, Washington DC's summer arts venue, where the program included Busoni's Doktor Faust, and a spectacular fundraising gala with Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Liza Minnelli, Henry Fonda, and many others. He was invited to Australia to direct the 1980 Adelaide Festival where the operatic productions included Australian premieres of Britten's Death in Venice and Maxwell Davies's Two Fiddlers; theatrical events included the first visit to Australia of Peter Brook’s CICT from Paris, New York’s Mabou Mines and The Acting Company; concert-artists included James Galway, Christopher Hogwood, Gisela May, John Williams, and Cathy Berberian; there were also notable visual-arts, literary, and film programs among the 300 events. It remains the only festival in the event’s 50-year history to have ended with a surplus. Returning to the US, he lived for four years in San Francisco where he helped establish the first San Francisco Opera Summer Festival (including the American premiere of Reimann's Lear), and worked as consultant to the Santa Fe Opera and to the Opera Company of Boston, while earning a living as a writer and broadcaster on opera-related subjects.

He was particularly active in this period as interlocutor in public conversations with leading artists of the time, both in Australia and the US; among them were John Adams, Kathleen Battle, Peter Brook, Régine Crespin, Christoph von Dohnányi, Mirella Freni, James Galway, Nicolai Ghiaurov, John Harbison, David Hockney, Marilyn Horne, Charles Mackerras, Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Joan Sutherland.

He moved to New York in 1984 to direct PepsiCo Summerfare, the arts festival of the State University of New York at Purchase in Westchester, 30 miles north of Manhattan. In the next five years, until the University declined to negotiate a new contract with PepsiCo Inc., he made the festival into one of the most talked-about arts events in the United States; the New Yorker called it "the most intelligent and adventurous festival in North America”. In that time he was responsible for the American debuts of numerous overseas companies, among them Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre (directed by Yuri Lyubimov); Germany's Bochumer Ensemble (directed by Alfred Kirchner); the Stáry Theatre of Cracow (directed by Andrzej Wajda); the Frankfurt Ballet (Artistic Director William Forsythe); Russian productions directed by Yeremin and Vasiliev; the London Sinfonietta (a weekend with eight British composers), Roger Norrington’s Beethoven Experience; Frankfurt Opera's premiere production of John Cage's Europeras I & 2. There were early appearances by many now-famous American artists, among them Mark Morris, Kronos, Elizabeth Streb, Susan Marshall, Cassandra Wilson, and David Parsons. It was, however, the Festival's own original opera productions that drew the most attention, especially a controversial annual opera sequence (Handel, Kurt Weill, and the three Mozart-da Ponte operas) directed by Peter Sellars. When PepsiCo Summerfare closed in 1989, the Mozart productions were taken to Paris and to Vienna where they were recorded for television. They have subsequently been broadcast in most countries of the world, and are commercially available on London/Decca DVDs.

Since Summerfare Mr. Hunt has been consultant on numerous projects in America, Australia, and Europe, including the development (subsequently quashed by the incoming government) of a new experimental theatre for the Bastille Opera in Paris, and a similar ultimately aborted project in Washington, DC’s Federal Triangle, optimistically entitled the U.S. International Cultural & Trade Center. He has been a frequent member of advisory boards and panels for such U.S. organisations as Arts International, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lincoln Center, Opera Quarterly, Dancing in the Streets, Meet The Composer, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1992 Mr. Hunt was invited to return to Australia to direct the 1994 Adelaide Festival (for a rare second time: the Festival’s board traditionally invites a new director for each biennial event). This time his controversial program was drawn entirely from the cultures of Australia’s time-zones (with the two notable and symbolic exceptions of the first Australian visits by William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet and the Mark Morris Dance Company). Fifteen nations were represented, from Japan and Korea through S.E.Asia to the Pacific Islands, as well as a significant Aboriginal program. During this period he was also directing the Ojai Festival in California (founded by Stravinsky at the end of WWII), where his program for the bicentennial of Mozart’s death (1791-1991) combined the music of Mozart’s final six months with new works by John Harbison and Peter Maxwell Davies conducted by them. In addition, at this period, Mr. Hunt was commuting regularly to Paris as special adviser to Myung Whun Chung at the Bastille Opera.

Following the 1994 Adelaide Festival Mr. Hunt was appointed General Director of the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Germany, the city’s principal concert hall and conference centre. In Frankfurt he was also consultant to the city's Millennium plans.

Mr. Hunt is the son of the late Dr. Thomas Hunt CBE, Senior Physician at St. Mary’s Hospital Paddington and Vice-President of Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, and his late wife Barbara Hunt, a former actress and daughter of actor-manager Brian Egerton. He has two sisters both living in London, Marigold Johnson MBE (formerly Secretary of the Anglo-Irish Association, married to historian Paul Johnson) and Sarah Walden (a leading conservationist-picture restorer, married to former MP and UK Minister for Higher Education, George Walden GCMG).

Mr. Hunt was for 18 years married to San Francisco designer and photographer Dawn Aronson who died of flu/pneumonia aged 46 shortly after they moved in fall 1999 from Frankfurt to London (Mr Hunt’s return to living in his native country after 25 years abroad). He was earlier married to Ingrid Geach, who after their divorce in 1971 married Mark Fisher, MP and former UK Arts Minister. Mr. Hunt has two children by his first marriage: a daughter Francesca, who is an actor, and a son, Crispin, who is quite familiar to parts of the pop music world as a song-writer/singer/guitarist (formerly with his group Long Pigs).