Various discussions on and around this post got me thinking about the issue of reward for effort versus instant gratification and what that means for audiences, critics and management. It goes something like this. Opera house schedules are dominated by relatively elderly, often unchallenging repertory. As Philip Hensher says, it’s as if The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was still the most performed piece on the straight stage. In North America these works are usually presented in a way that is unchallenging and familiar to audiences. There isn’t much new work on show and most of what there is is musically fairly undemanding. Even 20th century classics like Lulu or Peter Grimes aren’t much seen except perhaps in the very large centres. In Europe it’s a bit different. The standard works tend to be presented in more challenging productions. The 20th century classics are given more often and new work is often rather more demanding in nature; Riemann and Birtwistle rather than Heggie and Adams.
What strikes me here is that the European approach requires more effort on the part of the audience. We seem to be programmed to find tonality easier to process than atonality. More difficult idioms need to be learned to be appreciated. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found something difficult on first acquaintance only to realise after a few listenings/viewings that it’s genius. I think it’s the same with stage direction. Certain directors have a visual and symbolic language that it takes effort to come fully to terms with. I’d argue that usually that effort is worth it. This is not to say that all new operas and all new productions are terrific. Obviously that’s not true but it is an argument against automatically rejecting the unfamiliar.
Paying customers, of course, are not obliged to make the effort. If they want to persist in a world of “chips and egg every Thursday” they are free to do so. I’d argue though that those who write about opera(*) are required to make that effort and that those that are paid to do so have even more obligation. At the heart of my dislike of certain print critics is a feeling that their dismissive attitude to certain works and productions is as much intellectual laziness as dissenting voice.
Equally, it’s hard not to have some sympathy with opera company managements. In North America they have to sell tickets and attract donations. It’s obviously easier to cater to the larger, more unreflective, audience than the smaller, more adventurous, one. If government subsidy covers 75% of your budget it’s much easier to take risks! Still it’s hard not to get depressed when a company programs a season consisting of La Bohème, La Traviata and a kids version of Cinderella.
It also makes me ask if there is a real difference in the audience/potential audience in, say, Germany than, say, the US or even the UK. Most Americans (and Canadians) get virtually no exposure to opera at school or on TV. If they have any idea of opera at all it’s probably of a twelve year old girl singing Nessun Dorma into a microphone on a talent show(+). At least in Germany (and most of continental Europe) there’s opera on TV with some regularity. Familiarity, it seems to me, is part of the battle. Education too surely plays a part. Beyond that I just don’t know. I don’t want to see opera become a museum piece but I don’t know how to create the informed audience which, I strongly suspect, is the only way of preventing that happening.
(*)I’m now persuaded that bloggers are not peripheral and if we have a voice that’s heard then we have obligations.
(+)I was shocked the other day when a colleague who actually has attended a few operas said something that showed that she thought opera singers were always miked up.
Many people unwittingly contributed to this piece. Special thanks to Gianmarco Segato and Gianna Wichelow of the COC, Lydia Perovic of Definitely the Opera, Wayne Gooding of Opera Canada, Leslie Barcza of barczablog, Rob of Regie or Not Regie and The Earworm. The above was in large measure inspired by them but it’s not their fault!
operaramblings 
It absolutely bears repeating, and thank you for yet another spot-on cri de coeur.
It probably does boil down to education. If we don’t know about opera and classical music growing up and in our youth, then we won’t notice their absence in the media and won’t care if they become museum pieces. If we don’t encounter it and take to it as adults, we won’t care about its fate.
Is there something we can do to improve the situation? We could form an informal collective for opera edu and propose workshops to the TPL and schools that may be open to outside speakers. (By all accounts, TDSB is an impregnable fortress, but maybe it’s worth finding allies in it.) We can offer a lunch-and-learn wherever each of us reading this works, and gab about opera. We can have salons in our homes. We should start doing *something*.
PS You’re absolutely right about the bloggers. The bloggers’ role is growing and we have responsibilities to keep educating ourselves, keep talking and reading and going to things and being fair. We are performing a public service — it sounds pompous, but in Canada, where arts and literature coverage (ah, don’t I know it) is in a precipitous decline in every sense of the word, it’s truly come down to that.
You’re probably all bone weary of hearing me say this by now, but seriously, the general situation is way better than it was twenty five years ago. I would argue this is true in terms of cultural visibility (in spite of the decline in arts coverage that was fairly minimal to begin with), public accessibility, and quality and quantity of performance and performers. Not that there isn’t loads of room for improvement, but when has there not been?
I recommend, those of you who haven’t, going back and reading that James Levine interview in New York Magazine from 1987, a cri de coeur if ever there was. We had every reason back then to believe that opera would be stone dead and cold in the clay by now. Yet here it is. And here are all of you, with your impossibly high expectations and your envelope-pushing demands.
Et resurrexit.
Bravi 🙂
I bow to your greater knowledge of the US. I think, though, that the situation has deteriorated in the UK and Canada and it’s part of a general decline in the place of “The Arts” in society. There used to be a political consensus that The Arts were a good thing. It was a tenet of High Toryism and Municipal Liberalism every bit as much as Condescending Social Democracy. Sure it was elitist and top down but it funded galleries and opera houses and made sure that The Arts had a place in the education system and on the BBC/CBC. It produced a culture where to be educated meant to have some grasp of The Arts.
Not any more. The current dominant neoliberalism cares nothing for anything that doesn’t generate cash flow this quarter. The decline of Arts coverage on CBC has been extreme. The current eBacc proposals are entirely characteristic. To a follower of the Gospel According to Murdoch the arts have no value and education is just a job ticket.
(I wish that Canadian social democracy were more condescending these days…)
I’m not sure there’s much social democracy left since the election of Mulblair
It probably is in Britain and the US — not to mention Continental Europe — but the local situation here has been deteriorating dramatically. I envy the Brits their Radio 3 and 4 and the arts coverage in their dailies, and their free museums and London’s countless concerts and busy performance spaces from Wigmore to South Bank to Barbican and the two opera houses and and and. I envy the US the dailies like the WaPo and the NYT and the thousand magazines that seriously write about arts and culture and online magazines and the wide range of fantastic blogs and and and…
It’s us, here, that I worry about.
Fair enough, obviously I can’t speak for Canada, but I’m not sure the social and political situation with the arts is any different in the US than anywhere else. Except you may have seen a steeper decline in a shorter amount of time. We’ve been grappling with the Market Value conundrum since the Reagan era, which is about the time music programs started being eliminated from public school curricula. In fact our arts funding heyday was the Great Society, which is what produced Lincoln Center and the new Met, and it’s been pretty much downhill since then.
But in terms of visibility and the availability of voices and the overall dynamism of the opera world, I’m not being US-specific. Grim as things may look locally, there really has been a sea change world-wide. It may be that it’s entirely new media-driven, but I submit that it is not at all insignificant.