By ALLAN KOZINN

Thirteen years after her last opera performance and five years after stepping down as general director of the New York City Opera, Beverly Sills will return to the world of arts administration as chairwoman of Lincoln Center. She was elected unanimously to the unsalaried post yesterday at a special meeting of the Lincoln Center board, and is to succeed George Weissman as head of the arts complex on June 13. Mr. Weissman will become chairman emeritus.

Miss Sills is the first woman elected to the post and the first chief trustee who had not been a board member. She is also the first to approach the job from the performance world rather than from a corporate position. As one of America's most popular opera singers from the mid-1960's until her retirement in 1980, she is a household name. Her visibility will be useful to Lincoln Center in winning attention for the arts, both from the public and the corporate and government circles where she will be seeking financial support for Lincoln Center's programs.

In an interview yesterday, Miss Sills, who is 64, played down the public aspect of the job. "This is not going to be Miss Celebrity time," she said. "It's an interesting and complicated job, and I'll have to spend time at it. I'm not going to be doing anything more or less than what George Weissman did, and I think that once the novelty of my appointment wears off, it will be just like the directorship of the New York City Opera. I'll be doing a job, and I'll be working hard."

Indeed, Miss Sills's experience at the City Opera may be one of her most important qualifications. Having directed one of Lincoln Center's constituent organizations, she is aware that the relationship between the center and its constituents is complex and often tense. Lincoln Center is in the anomalous position of being its constituents' landlord as well as a direct competitor and a clearing house for certain kinds of financial support.

Certain Rights Are Surrendered

The constituents -- among them the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet -- pay rent to the complex. But they also share in the Consolidated Corporate Fund. As participants in the fund, they surrender their right to raise money separately for unrestricted expenses, although they can solicit support for specific projects.

The most irksome aspect of the relationship for the constituents, though, is that Lincoln Center Productions, the center's own presentation arm, produces some 300 events a year, including the Mostly Mozart Festival, Great Performers, Jazz at Lincoln Center and several other series. These programs compete with the constituents' offerings for both audiences and financial support.

"I understand those tensions," Miss Sills said yesterday, "because I used to be one of the people complaining. But I do not want the relationship between Lincoln Center and its constituents to be adversarial. I think the problem has been a lack of communication, not only between Lincoln Center and the constituents, but the constituents and each other."

As chairwoman, Miss Sills will be an intermediary between Lincoln Center and its constituents, and also between the center's board and its president, Nathan Leventhal. The responsibility for programming and the day-to-day operation of the complex remains with Mr. Leventhal, but both he and Miss Sills said yesterday that they expected to work together in what Miss Sills called "a team endeavor." Indeed, questions of policy were already playing on Miss Sills's mind.

"Most of the houses in Lincoln Center are dark from the end of May through the end of September," she said. "But the rent, utility bills and salaries still have to be paid, so anything that can be brought in for the summer is in the constituents' benefit. It's time we looked at those big empty theaters and worked with the constituents on ways to fill them."

Possibility Arose in November

Miss Sills was not a serious candidate for the Lincoln Center post until early this month, although Mr. Leventhal broached the subject in November, when he and Miss Sills met at a seminar at the Museum of Television and Radio. Mr. Leventhal proposed Miss Sills to the search committee a few days later.

The chairmanship does not have a specific term. The post was held by John D. Rockefeller 3d, from 1961 to 1970; Amyas Ames, from 1970 to 1981, and Martin E. Segal from 1981 to 1986.

Miss Sills said she planned to remain on the boards of the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater. "I think the closer I am to the constituents, the more valuable I can be," she said. Mr. Leventhal said he did not think her board memberships would create a conflict, and pointed out that one of her predecessors, Mr. Ames, was chairman of both Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic concurrently.

She is also currently on the boards of Time-Warner Communications, Macy's, American Express and Human Genome Sciences, and is the chairwoman of the March of Dimes.

A Good Fund Raiser

During her years at the New York City Opera, Miss Sills's charisma and her high profile as an opera star helped her raise the money the company needed to keep afloat, and sometimes to escape from dire financial straits. She left the directorship in 1989, but remained on the board until 1992. Since then, she has said she does not want to continue raising money for arts organizations, and when she joined the Met board, she made it clear that she would not knock on foundation doors for the company.

But although Lincoln Center has its own development department to raise money, attracting large corporate grants has always been a central part of the chairman's job. Miss Sills said yesterday that she was ready to take on that role again. All told, the complex needs to raise about $16.3 million this year, including $6 million for the Consolidated Corporate Fund, $5.2 million for Lincoln Center Productions, as well as support for the "Live From Lincoln Center" television series and the Lincoln Center Institute, the center's educational arm.

"Probably the greatest difficulty we are going to face," she said, "is that there are social problems today that didn't exist 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago you may have been competing with another arts organization. Today when you're trying to raise money you find that companies have other obligations: the homeless, AIDS, teen-age pregnancy, drugs. It's a major job to convince people that the arts are not a frill. But look at what Lincoln Center has done for the West Side, for the restaurants, apartment buildings, office buildings and employment in the area. Lincoln Center has been a huge octopus, and its tentacles keep spreading and spreading."

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company