# Does Opera Have A Future? [Article In May Issue]



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

In the May issue of Opera magazine there is a long piece by Rupert Christiansen where he opens with the question: 'Does opera have a future?'

A few excerpts:



> *"Opera has been told to get more entrepreneurial, to exploit itself as a brand and move out into the real world in search of wider popularity. Everything has been tried, from television relays to souvenir tea towels to evangelizing visits to sink schools, with only limited success (I have yet to meet a teenager who claimed to have been inspired with a love of opera through a project run by an education department).
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For those who do not subscribe to the magazine here is the full article:

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Does opera have a future? It's a safe assumption that if you are reading this magazine you will be a paid-up fan and inclined to answer in the affirmative. But I think it's useful to take a longer perspective and attempt to imagine how the question plays out among those beyond our charmed circle -- not least because in these outer regions lie several of the determing forces.

There's nothing new about the idea that opera is in crisis: houses and managements have always been running out of money, people have always been complaining that there are no great singers any more or that young whippersnapper composers today make an awful noise. Many great operas, now cornerstones of the repertory -- Madama Butterfly for instance -- flopped when they were first performed. So no change there. But the years since the financial crisis of 2008 have brought a fresh wave of disasters that threaten to inundate the vessel, and I don't simply mean that vital sources of taxpayers' cash have been swept away in the tsunami: there have been deeper changes in culture too, changes that have left opera looking to many like a dinosaur lumbering helplessly towards extinction. But I had better start with economics.

Opera has never stood on its own feet commercially: it has always needed some sort of patronage or subsidy beyond the box office. You can't cut many corners or use technology to make efficiency savings: the process of performing is inescapably labour-intensive and doesn't take kindly to being crammed into the back rooms of pubs. It needs the kick-start of weeks of rehearsal, hundreds of costumes for the chorus, big orchestras, masses of technical back-up -- and none of that comes cheap.

Before World War I, operas was sustained by its glamour: identified with the uppermost social echelons, it offered a space for plutocrats and aristocrats to display their wealth, status and refined sensibility. For this privilege the rich, to put it bluntly, were prepared to cough up. Postwar idealism decided that this wasn't good enough, that great art -- high art -- should be accessible to all, and that a socialist state should pick up most of the bill in the name of the nation's spiritual well-being. It was a laudable aim, which in the UK has resulted in every single opera ticket sold by the major companies (excluding the summer festivals) being subsidized by the taxpayer to the tune of about 60 or 70 pounds -- a horrifying statistic which Treasury wonks find hard to stomach or justify.

So for the last 30 years, efforts have been made to wean opera off the state's nipple and coax it to find some other means of financing itself. For a time, the corporate sector, big business and banks were happy to step in -- in the days before the Big Bang of the 1980's, the major City firms were all run by cultured people with Classics degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, many of them great opera-lovers who genuinely enjoyed taking clients to a box at Glyndebourne or Covent Garden. A few fabulously rich and enlightened families with charitable trusts (notably the blessed Sainsburys) also obliged. But the corporate sector has lost interest in opera recently -- partly because the government needs to direct their charity towards more electorally popular health, educational and environmental causes, and partly because people running City firms today aren't Oxbridge Classics graduates but hard-headed MBAs from business schools who see more return in taking clients to Silverstone or a lap-dancing club than to Der Rosenkavalier.

So now the begging bowl comes round to people like you and me, in the hope that we will join the supporters' club and throw in an extra 50 or 100 quid. Such donors may be loyal and genuinely opera-loving, but we are high maintenance and require expensive administration (the Royal Opera House employs more than 30 people on the case). The summer festivals, ignored by the state except inasmuch as they are taxed as charities, still play on their social cachet -- Grange Park or Garsington is where you can mix with a smart elite, and enjoying opera is seen as a mark of superiority -- but with the decline of class hierarchy this is increasingly difficult to sustain: you could say that we just aren't sufficiently snobbish any more.

This is a situation that obtains throughout the western world, and so far the UK has been spared the worst effects of the meltdown. But New York City Opera has gone bust, and in Rome and Barcelona life-support machines are struggling to pump blood into operatic corpses; it could happen here too. All the major British opera companies have lost about 20 percent of their Arts Council funding over the last 5 years. None of that will come back, and further excision is probably on its way in response to pressure on funding bodies simultaneously to spend more outside London and to rein in on art forms such as opera and ballet for which public demand does not justify current levels of expenditure -- not least as that demand is concentrated in that politically dodgy demographic, the white Caucasian middle-aged and middle class.

So opera has been told to get more entrepreneurial, to exploit itself as a brand and move out into the real world in search of wider popularity. Everything has been tried, from television relays to souvenir tea towels to evangelizing visits to sink schools, with only limited success (I have yet to meet a teenager who claimed to have been inspired with a love of opera through a project run by an education department). Recordings, both audio and video, now seem part of a superannuated 20th century technology, and I don't think we will see any more full-scale opera movies on the scale of Zeffirelli's La Traviata or Rosi's Carmen.

With the new millenium has instead come investment into HD satellite relays into cinemas. New York's Metropolitan Opera has led the way here, and the Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne have followed in its wake. What is offered is irresistible -- for relatively modest prices (generally 15 - 30 pounds), your local cinema is delivered star-studded performances with hyper-clear sound and picture quality, plus the add-on fun of glimpses backstage and snatched interviews with the stars as they come off stage. The 'liveness' and uniqueness of the experience is another aspect of the attraction: this is not a matter of edited recording. Older people love the round-the-corner convenience and comfort of these broadcasts, and at one level they provide a solution to the age-old problem of presenting top-flight opera beyond the metropolitan centres.

Two large buts darken the picture. The first is that the technology is involved is horrendously expensive at both ends, and although the Met's HD audiences are now edging towards a million a year and performances often sell out, neither the cinemas nor the opera houses are as yet making significant amounts of money from the process. Whether the market will reach saturation point or expand to the point at which the exercise becomes solidly profitable is a question that nobody can currently answer.

The second problem is potentially devastating. Not only are the HD broadcasts failing to make the opera houses any serious money, they also seem, ironically enough, to be draining audiences away from the 'real thing': the Met reckons that it has lost out particularly heavily in the counties surrounding New York's five boroughs, while in the UK the brunt of the impact is falling on Opera North, Welsh National Opera and particularly the valiant English Touring Opera. These latter organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to persuade people that what they offer is more enticing than being up close and personal with Joyce DiDonato in La Cenerentola or Jonas Kaufmann in Parsifal. Managements' almost paranoid reluctance to release straightforward attendance figures -- how many people paid for the tickets at each live venue for each opera -- suggests their underlying panic at the extent of the desertion.

Is the logical number-cruncher conclusion that HD relays are doing the job of presenting opera to the regions so effectively that the regional companies have become redundant? I hope not: the impact on jobs for British musicians and young singers would be catastrophic, but one cannot argue the case for the status quo on the grounds of choice or access.

Another drain on audiences has been caused by the prevalence of fashionably conceptualized productions -- Rudolf Frey's mind-bogglingly awful Maria Stuarda at WNO being an egregious recent example -- aggressively presented to audiences as though the auditorium was a hard-benched classroom in which they have to be taught a chastening lesson rather than enjoy something served up for their delectation. This vogue is now waning, I believe, but not before a substantial number of older and more conservative regulars have been estranged without an influx of the more ideologically adventurous being attracted to compensate.

Which brings us to the question of the audience. 'Where are the young?' is the battle cry -- to which the answer must be that they are there in small numbers, pretty much as they have always been. Look at any photograph of an opera audience from the early 20th century and you can see that the basic make-up remains pretty much unchanged in terms of age as well as class, although I suspect that what the ad men describe as Cs and Ds no longer patronize the gods as they did in the days of Sadler's Wells, Carl Rosa and D'Oyly Carte -- their tastes are now otherwise catered for.

There is a sophisticated young audience for opera but it is very discriminating and it doesn't want to be fobbed off with second best. It comes largely from university students in the Russell Group, and, in my experience, it is as fiercely critical of phoney pretension in matters of staging as it is of inert cliches and routine. Its members haven't been been formally educated or instructed to enjoy opera, they have simply been drawn to it by their own musical or theatrical sensibilities and aesthetic curiosity. This is as it should be, and the best that can be done for them is to ensure that there are cheap tickets available, at short notice, and that they are kept in touch via social media. Whether they exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the future I don't know, but in any case opera will surely remain an art form towards which most people gravitate in middle age. No great harm in that.

Finally, there is the question of the repertory: 1925-26 would seem to be the watershed here, the years in which Turandot and Wozzeck received their premieres and took their separate ways. Leaving aside the special 'Broadway' cases of Porgy and Bess or Sweeney Todd (and Dreigroschenoper), Turandot is the last opera to appeal to a wider public -- it will fill vast arenas, and the man on the Clapham omnibus can croon 'Nessun dorma'. Wozzeck, on the other hand, won the admiration of critics and cognoscenti, but, beyond that, its music is still identified as unpleasantly discordant and emotionally meaningless: it is a platitude but also a fact that we haven't caught up with atonal music in the way that we have with abstract expressionism.

Alas, what is true of Wozzeck is also true to a lesser extent of operas by Britten, the dominating master of the genre in the second half of the 20th century -- even Peter Grimes or A Midsummer Night's Dream have not achieved mass appeal, as the low level of Opera North's rumoured attendance figures for its Britten festival last autumn sadly confirms. Recently, I took a highly intelligent young man to a fine performance of Peter Grimes. He's been a star pupil at a top public school and taken a first in history at Oxford; he now works prominently in the media. Although he had warned me that music for him was a matter of indie and garage bands, I thought he might be blown away by the piece's furious energy and power. But no, he simply didn't get it, he simply couldn't connect: 'no beat, no tunes and I couldn't hear the words,' he said sheepishly in the restaurant afterwards. If my friend's view represents the majority of the educated young, what hope is there for Harrison Birtwistle or George Benjamin?

But if opera isn't to be consigned to an aesthetic museum where the exhibits run from Mozart to Puccini, the repertory must be open to innovation, expansion, question; clearly we must continue commission new works and cling to the hope that the ears of the likes of my Oxonian friend will eventually adjust to a musical language that has now been current for over a century. But, as yet, there's precious little sign of this happening -- John Adams Nixon in China being the only new work to have consistently attracted more than coterie audiences over the last 40 years -- and in this respect one can be very pessimistic about opera future indeed.

Enough of the doom and gloom: what reasons are there for optimism? First we have to remember opera's remarkable resilience to fire, flood, famine and old men's moans. As suggested above, the end has always been nigh. In 1834, Richard Mount Edgcumbe was unmoved by Pasta or Malibran and complained that he 'never expected to hear again... any new music, or new singers, that will make me amends for those wich are gone'; in 1906, W.J. Henderson was lamenting 'that the race of beautiful singers is diminishing with every year, and in its place there is growing up a generation of harsh, unrefined, tuneless shouters'.

This litany could be extended, but here we still are, not doing so badly with potently beautiful new operas by George Benjamin and Thomas Ades which already seem imbued with a depper value that goes beyond their lack of commercial potential or instant appeal to the Clapham omnibus, as well as the glory of Joyce DiDonato singing Cenerentola and Jonas Kaufmann our reigning Parsifal. Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker recemtly that 'the pure charisma of voice is finally what people come to opera for' -- voice allied to musical artistry and theatrical personality, he might have added -- and he is surely right. As long as talents of the DiDonato-Kaufmann order burgeon -- and there are an extraordinary number of dedicated young singers out there, motivated by passionate enthusiasm for music they feel privileged to sing -- then people will continue to batter the doors down and part with good money to hear them.

And at a time when there are so many instant gratifications available, opera's unique synthesis of music and drama, rooted in Greek tragedy, continues to speak to a substantial minority with overwhelming immediacy. Nobody who witnessed the rapt attention and ecstatic response that performances last summer such as Billy Budd at Glyndebourne or the Ring at the Proms generated could think that the game was up. Grandage's staging, Glyndebourne's chorus, Stemme's Brunnhilde, Terfel's Wotan, Barenboim's conducting all demonstrate that everything is still to play for, never mind that red-faced financial balance sheet or the absence of beats and tunes.

And, to end on an upbeat note, here is a guesstimate worth pondering: if one takes into account the HD relays, perhaps there are more people attending live opera performances than ever before in its history. Look at it from that end of the telescope, and opera isn't dying so much as growing like bamboo in the jungle.


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## Don Fatale (Aug 31, 2009)

I scarcely know where to start with this wide ranging article. When having this kind of discussion it's important to clarify which elements are specifically to do with opera and which equally apply to concerts and plays. To me, it's about the wider public's engagement (or lack of) with the arts, of which opera should be a core part.

Opera currently has a low public profile. Its PR machine is almost non-existent, and must seem completely aloof and out of touch. I can't recall the last time a singer appeared on a TV chat show. I'd love to see Anna Netrebko or Danielle de Niese on the Graham Norton show! I don't want to feel like a cultural elitist and for opera to be considered in that vein.

I recall quite a while ago when two singers had came to blows over Amanda Roocroft at Glyndebourne. This was front page news for London's Evening Standard. In a strange way it was great PR. Opera needs to generate a few more headlines.


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

> Does opera have a future?


Who needs future when you have such glorious past. Opera might just as well become immortal old geezer who stopped aging at the age of 600, placed himself on rocking chair and is going to spent eternity re-telling what he did in these 600 years of his life.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Let's face it, opera is an elitist activity in which those rich enough to afford the tickets are subsidized at the expense of poorer people who pay their taxes. It seemed to me almost obscene at the last Met broadcast that an appeal went out for funds when there are singers who often command vast fees. Often strikes one as an anomaly. Still, it has probably always been the way. Now through modern media at least more people have a chance to see the operas at more affordable prices.
Of course, one thing that would benefit all opera houses is to get rid of some of the idiot directors who appear to have their own axe to grind.


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## Dongiovanni (Jul 30, 2012)

Alexander said:


> Opera currently has a low public profile. Its PR machine is almost non-existent, and must seem completely aloof and out of touch. I can't recall the last time a singer appeared on a TV chat show. I'd love to see Anna Netrebko or Danielle de Niese on the Graham Norton show! I don't want to feel like a cultural elitist and for opera to be considered in that vein.


The treatment of opera in popular media depends much on the country. For example, in Germany Anna Netrebko has been a guest multiple times in polurar TV shows ("Wetten Das") with a performance of an opera aria. Pretty funny was co-guest Robbie Williams falling for Trebs, it's on youtube.


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## cournot (Jan 19, 2014)

I think a giant problem with this article and an attitude that pervades all of modern classical music is ensconced in the phrase: 

"...clearly we must continue commission new works and cling to the hope that the ears of the likes of my Oxonian friend will eventually adjust to a musical language that has now been current for over a century."

I'm sorry. After a century, the experiment must be reckoned a failure. It's one thing to say that old geezers are turned off but that young ones will learn to like the music. That has not been the case. There is no cultivation of the young. Indeed, it is easier to get young people to like the old warhorses than to like modern classical music. It's one thing to encourage innovation, it's another to persist in an attitude that is hostile to the tastes of even the most refined, non-academic, mainstream music lovers.

Opera survived when it functioned both as high art and as attractive entertainment for the elite and the middle class.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Alexander said:


> To me, it's about the wider public's engagement (or lack of) with the arts, of which opera should be a core part.


in some ways I think Europeans/Westerners need to revisit and embrace their cultural roots. Have more art education in schools, learn to appreciate the great achievements of our ancestors from Greek Antiquity to Modernism etc. It might sound funny coming from me, but I don't think we as Westerners have enough interest/respect for our own heritage. If we did, opera etc. would be seen in a different light. There is no way someone who enjoys music and singing would not appreciate what has been done in this field, but they need to be aware of it and from an as early age as possible.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Aramis said:


> Who needs future when you have such glorious past. Opera might just as well become immortal old geezer who stopped aging at the age of 600, placed himself on rocking chair and is going to spent eternity re-telling what he did in these 600 years of his life.


_*If it is not growing, it is dying.*_


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## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

@ David



DavidA said:


> Let's face it, opera is an elitist activity in which those rich enough to afford the tickets are subsidized at the expense of poorer people who pay their taxes.
> 
> It seemed to me almost obscene at the last Met broadcast that an appeal went out for funds when there are singers who often command vast fees.



I completely agree.... Yes, it is almost obscene when you think about the collective wealth of opera singers.

And it was Joyce DiDonato who made the appeal last week. She tweeted:



> For those who said they'd donate if I rolled in the snow, get out your check books!!



And the picture:


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/452538928390995968


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