# Leon Botstein on The Future of Opera (2014)



## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/97/3/353/1011653


----------



## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

> will not succeed if it is based on the narrow repertoire that dominates today.


Ridiculous conclusion, I see and that is in the cinema when "popular operas are performed a full house, all seat sold out, when tey did Ades I believe 10 seat remain seated. Give the people what they want.


----------



## alan davis (Oct 16, 2013)

There is some truth in what he writes. I was a subscriber to our State Opera Company here in Adelaide (South Australia) for three decades but chose not to renew in 2013 because the same productions kept coming around in increasingly shorter cycles. Lets face it how many "Madama Butterfly's" and "Tosca's" can you tolerate? And it's not as if the company were completely unadventurous. Jake Heggies "Dead Man Walking" and "Moby Dick" had played to rapturous audiences in the past. However the only thing that has dragged me into an opera house in the last couple of years was Szymanowski's "King Roger" that was held in Melbourne last year.


----------



## mountmccabe (May 1, 2013)

I agree with a lot of what he says. it also makes a lot of sense that he would think this way, given the rep that he leads (as he mentions in the article).

But I also think there needs to be a balance. It can be fulfilling to see certain works over and over, to hear different singers take those familiar lines. To see new interpretations of the characterization, and different ideas for the sets.

But for me, at least, the list of works I want to hear over and over is much shorter than the list of works I've never seen but want to. And often for me to really want to see something standard again (or even for the first time, it turns out) I tend to need a really exceptional cast and/or intriguing staging.

But I've seen nearly every new work I could. I also tend to go out for rarely-heard rep. This all is one reason I'm thrilled that there are a number of small companies around me performing operas and that they tend to focus on works outside the standard repertoire. Of course occasionally the reaction is "wow, I want to see this done by a professional company with a full orchestra" and so on.


----------

