For decades, the South Florida arts scene was Judy Drucker's stage.

From the humble concert series she launched inside a Miami Beach synagogue in 1967 to the blowout performance by Luciano Pavarotti that drew 120,000 fans to South Beach in 1995, Drucker was the dealmaker most responsible for bringing the biggest names in classical music and dance to what had been a cultural desert.

A homemaker turned impresario, she brokered blockbuster presentations, cultivating friendships with dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, composer Leonard Bernstein and pianist Vladimir Horowitz.

But the cultural landscape beneath Drucker's feet has tilted. Today's South Florida arts scene is ruled by fiscally minded boards and publicly funded institutions, not swashbuckling producers.

Drucker, the self-described ''cultural maven of the community,'' a woman who catered to every whim of temperamental artists -- whatever the costs -- finds herself, at 80, on the outs.

She holds her thumb and index finger about an inch apart, and says, ``I feel like this after what's happened to me.''

VOTED OUT

In the past six months, the Concert Association of Florida, founded by Drucker to present classical music and dance, filed for bankruptcy liquidation, unable to reverse a steep drop in ticket sales and donations. She had been voted out as president a year earlier following years of budget deficits.

Then the Florida Grand Opera, for which Drucker served as an artistic advisor, canceled her contract, saying her concert series was too costly to produce during a particularly difficult year.

''I was heartbroken,'' Drucker says, sitting in the kitchen of her Miami apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay and appointed with a concert Steinway grand piano and autographed photos of Pavarotti and Horowitz.

Drucker's are not the only performing arts organizations in turmoil over the past six months. Miami City Ballet laid off dancers and canceled live music for performances, then announced that it would roll back the budget from $14.8 million this year to about $11 million next season.

In some ways, though, Drucker's role has been diminished by the very cultural scene that she helped to establish.

Robert Heuer, Florida Grand Opera director since 1986, says Drucker is the last of a breed of impresarios who presented classical music and dance in rented theaters when there were few cultural offerings in Miami.

Since about 1980, though, new performing arts centers have opened from Newark, N.J. and Orange County, Calif., to Denver, Philadelphia and Miami. These centers have emerged as more efficient and capable presenters.

''They're just equipped to take over that tradition and to market and sell performances,'' Heuer says.

Drucker says she is pleased that the publicly owned Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts will present more classical music in the absence of the Concert Association.

''That's where it belongs,'' she says.

There is no single reason Drucker now finds herself unattached to a local cultural organization, but part of the explanation has to do with her consuming passion for the arts.

At the Concert Association and the Florida Grand Opera, Drucker frequently neglected the bottom line when reaching for the best.

During her last three years at the helm of the Concert Association, the organization carried a deficit of $1 million to $2 million.

The three-concert series she produced for the opera this season -- headlined by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Marcello Giordani and Bryn Terfel -- lost more than $250,000, mostly to low ticket sales and weak fundraising.

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