18 Opera in the marketplace
I Culture and Society
In 1945, as the Second World War drew to a close, the music publishers Boosey and Hawkes, who had acquired the lease of the Royal Opera House the previous year, issued a manifesto which would have a profound effect on cultural life in Britain:
We hope to re-establish Covent Garden as a centre of opera and ballet worthy of the highest musical traditions. The main purpose will be to ensure for Covent Garden an independent position as an international opera house with sufficient funds at its disposal to enable it to devote itself to a long-term programme, giving to London throughout the year the best in English opera and ballet, together with the best from all over the world. If this ambition can be realized it is felt that it will be a great incentive to artists and composers, since it will offer to them an opportunity for experience in performing and writing of operas on a scale equal to that which has prevailed so long on the Continent but has been lacking so long in our musical life here in London.
The foresight and generosity of Leslie Boosey and Ralph Hawkes caught the spirit of a battered but renascent nation. Note that a primary purpose of the enterprise was to lay the ground for a creative burgeoning, which was harvested sooner than might have been expected. Over five successive seasons between 1949 and 1955, Covent Garden staged the premieres of Bliss’s The Olympians , Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress , Britten’s Billy Budd and Gloriana (as well as reviving his Peter Grimes ), Walton’s Troilus and Cressida and Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage – a record not subsequently equalled in London, nor in many other cities. Another noteworthy aspect of the Boosey and Hawkes vision, especially at the time when the country was just emerging from a devastating war, is its adherence to the Continental example. For the model was unequivocably the German system.
Opera as social service
Opera may have been invented in Italy, but its industrial revolution took place in Germany. To this day, no other country is remotely as productive. Historically, every princeling had to adorn his court with an opera house and resident ensemble. That responsibility was inherited by every town of stature, and the system is enshrined in the federal nature of the German political system. During the twentieth century it has survived two catastrophic wars and economic ruin. The division into East and West Germany after the Second World War strengthened entrenched positions and increased inter-city competitiveness. Yet it has even survived reunification and has so far resisted the pressures to rationalize through economies of scale. It is bred in the bone.
The underlying philosophy is that opera, at the very centre of a theatrical tradition that also embraces plays, dance and symphonic music, is a social service. It sits alongside education and healthcare as something owed by responsible citizens to the rest of an identifiable society, but it is somehow more personal than its sister services, more closely representative of the town in which it exists. At the same time, the opera aspires beyond social service. Its loftiest examples set ideals for eternity, but it also holds a licence to criticize and satirize contemporary society. It is an entertainment with a moral force. No wonder that Wagner’s Die Meistersinger , with its depiction of medieval Nuremberg, remains a symbolic icon.
This German system of ‘repertory’ opera is labour-intensive. It requires a permanent ensemble of artists including principal singers, chorus, orchestra, music and production staff and an almost equal number of craftsmen in technical and production-making departments. As an important local employer, it contributes to the economy through consumption and tax revenues. And it is dependent on state support for its survival.
State subsidy makes sense both as an economic investment and as a social duty. It enables ticket prices to be kept within reach of every citizen, and it funds enlightened access for schoolchildren. But the final decade of the twentieth century brought the strains of reunification between the consensus capitalism of the West and the bankrupt artificial ‘full employment’ of the East, leading to economic downturn, high unemployment and decreased tax revenues. Consequently the German system, which survived the most turbulent century in history and provided the inspiration for Covent Garden in 1945, is today under threat as never before.
While Germany may be the cradle of modern philosophy and its artists the legislators of society, it should be remembered that those same philosophers and artists have sought inspiration from the lands south of the Alps. Wagner owed as much to Greek drama as to Teutonic legend. Goethe, like his Mignon, yearned for the land where the lemon trees bloom. Mozart learned how to compose opera from the Italians.
At its zenith between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the Italian system was incomparably prolific and volatile. First Florence, then Venice, then Naples, then Milan enjoyed dominance, and the lack of national unity, as in Germany, was the mother of invention. Italian opera has always delighted in the sensuous beauty and expressiveness of the human voice. An impresario such as Domenico Barbaja in Naples would buy star singers as today’s top football managers collect galácticos. He signed Rossini to compose operas for his prima donna Isabella Colbran, and Rossini adapted his style to hers. Verdi was more stubborn, and his insistence on the musico-dramatic integrity of his operas foreshadowed a shift in power from the star singer towards the star conductor. Its apogee came with Arturo Toscanini, whose two periods as Musical Director of La Scala in the first and third decades of the twentieth century set an example of moral seriousness whose profound influence reached far beyond his time and beyond Italy.
Gianandrea Gavazzeni was one of Toscanini’s assistants at La Scala in the 1920s. Fifty years later, when he had become a doyen among conductors, he reminisced:
La Scala was completely re-organized for Toscanini, in respect to its rehearsal habits, to the way of conceiving its programme, to the method of making singers study, and also in respect to educating the public. The public with Toscanini during that era, was educated to consider the theatre not as something for amusement, but as something with a moral and aesthetic function, which enters into the life of a society, into the life of a culture.
(Sachs 1978 , 173)
Today, the conductor’s name is still printed larger than anyone else’s on an Italian opera poster. Riccardo Muti consciously adopted Toscanini’s legacy at La Scala. The artistic directors who plan the stagione (season) of an Italian opera house are men – never women! – of refined culture and aesthetic awareness. But they are curators of a museum. Whereas Toscanini premiered new operas almost every season, that well is now almost dry. No Italian opera since Puccini’s Turandot in 1926 has retained a hold in the repertory. Subsequently verismo declined into proto-Fascism. During the second half of the century, leading Italian composers such as Berio, Nono and Maderna deconstructed their heritage. Italian opera remains a glory, but a fading one.
If the traditional heartlands are weighed down by the burden of the past, their influence can still inspire the development of opera in a wider Europe. As might be expected, the German ‘repertory’ system has been the model for adjacent countries such as Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria, while the Latin countries have followed the Italian stagione system. Those nearer the Nordic fringes have tended to adopt a hybrid system, marrying an ensemble company with a semi-stagione approach to rehearsing productions. The vitality of opera in Europe today is best shown by examples from opposite ends of the continent.
Spain under Franco was an operatic graveyard, and its best artists worked abroad. After his death in 1975 and with the subsequent advent of democracy, Madrid’s Teatro Real could at last be restored to life after more than half a century’s slumber. Barcelona’s privately owned Teatre Liceu, rebuilt after a fire, was reopened as a public facility and has increased its subscribers fivefold. Seville’s new opera house La Maestranza will soon be emulated by the Palau de les Arts in Valencia. Spain’s operatic rebirth has run in parallel with a creative explosion in cinema and theatre, and it engaged the interest of a new audience rejoicing in the relatively recent release from censorship and relishing the expression of its new freedom.
Scandinavia is also rebuilding its opera houses. Copenhagen celebrated the new millennium with The Handmaid’s Tale by Poul Ruders, the first commission from the Royal Danish Opera for over thirty years and the first of a regular series leading up to the opening of its second opera house in 2005. Oslo’s eighty-year project for a new opera house comes to fruition in 2008. Perhaps most remarkable is the case of Finland which, like Denmark and Norway, is a country with a population of not much more than five million. Not only has it built a large new state opera house in Helsinki, but it has grown a music education system which delivers a higher proportion of musicians – singers, conductors and composers – than any other nation in Europe. Creativity is part of the curriculum.
From the New World
When
Dvo
ák landed in New York in 1892 at the invitation of Mrs Jeanette Thurber, his appointed task was to direct America’s first National Conservatory of Music, with the intention of establishing a specifically American school of composition. He repaid the compliment the next year by writing there his Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, and the F major String Quartet, Op. 96. Both acquired ‘American’ nicknames and both betray ‘New World’ influences in their source material, but they belong firmly within a European tradition.
So has it been with American opera. The First World War was an unprecedented opportunity for the former colony to plunder the bankrupt and exhausted homelands. While coal baron Henry Clay Frick bought up ‘old master’ paintings for the Collection to be housed on Upper East Side, so the Metropolitan Opera on Broadway built up its unrivalled roster of émigré artists led by Toscanini and Caruso, Destinn and Ruffo. Since that time New York has maintained its pre-eminence as a magnet for the world’s top operatic performers. No other centre has matched its economic pull over the last hundred years.
The national school of composition has proved more elusive. Black Americans only breached the Met with Marian Anderson’s début in 1955. The greatest American composer of the twentieth century was arguably George Gershwin, a white Jew who exploited a ‘black’ musical heritage and who wrote popular shows for Broadway. His masterpiece Porgy and Bess has never entered the repertory of the Met. The successful American operas of the second half of the twentieth century have subscribed to an essentially European formula, even when their subject-matter has been native. The irony is that opera in the brave new world has been consistently more conservative than in the decadent old world, not only in its creation but also in its interpretation. That is partly a function of economic dependence on private paymasters, but it is also a reflection of a taste which appreciates opera as an adornment of life rather than something integral to it.
The American contribution to opera has been, above all, in its financing, packaging and marketing. Its aggressive capitalist stance has successfully broken the hegemony of the European subsidized model. It has shown that it is not only possible to fund opera without reliance on the state, but that it may even be desirable to do so. It has harnessed marketing theory and selling techniques from the commercial sector, and applied them to shifting tickets for the opera. Forget soap opera: real opera can be sold like soap powder.
Danny Newman, at Chicago Lyric Opera, adopted the subscription or abonnement system of selling tickets across the season from the traditional operatic nations, but transformed it into American ‘hard sell’. His seminal book Subscribe Now! first became the bible for marketeers in the United States, and subsequently became required reading on the other side of the Atlantic. Subscribe, join the club, book early for privileged access; these are seductive arguments. They have helped to create a culture-owning class of supporters. Only towards the end of the twentieth century did this theory begin to be challenged.
The other great American legacy has been Development, a euphemism for private-sector fundraising. The emphasis is less on corporate contributions than on the charitable giving of individuals. It is a climate which encourages freedom of choice and tax breaks to nurture those choices. The biggest beneficiaries are religion, higher education and healthcare, but the arts have become equally dependent upon it. This system ensures freedom from state control, but it naturally incurs the possibility of the patron’s interference. And as with most things, where America leads, Europe follows.
II The Global Market
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 spelt the end of the protected socialist model. It was less a question of ideology than of accessibility. Once CNN television news could penetrate to Dresden and Gdansk, it was impossible any longer to pretend that a controlled economically self-sufficient nation or bloc could exist. Eastern Europe behind the ‘iron curtain’ was the last bastion in the operatic world, but for years before Soviet and especially satellite-country artists had been guesting in the West on ‘double contracts’, one with a low fee that could be lodged with the state cultural agency and another with the real fee in Western currency that would reach the private bank. This has not just been a struggle between communism and capitalism. Throughout the world traditional ties and loyalties have been undermined: to family, to company, to community, to nation. All can be bought for money.
At one end of the spectrum are found the United States and its Pacific Rim neighbours like Japan. Subventions from the state account for no more than 4 percent of the total revenue of performing arts organizations in the United States, whereas 46 percent derive from tax-deductible private contributions and 50 percent from earned income (Kushner and Pollak 2004 , 5). At the other end were the wholly state-owned monopolies of the socialist countries. Many non-state owned organizations in Western Europe incline towards the latter model, with a subsidy element of around 90 percent at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam and 70–80 percent being common in Germany, France and Italy. Somewhere in the middle comes the United Kingdom where the average is around 50 percent, though at the Royal Opera Covent Garden the subsidy proportion declined from 50 percent in the 1960s to 30 percent by the end of the century. In southern-hemisphere countries, like Australia and South Africa, it tends to be still lower. Yet, wherever on the spectrum a company finds itself, it today belongs to a mixed economy which increasingly operates across national boundaries.
For much of the twentieth century, nationalism was the dominant political force, and every nation was able to erect barriers to protect its own system of supporting opera. Today national identity is most strongly asserted by countries emerging into independence after generations of subjugation. For many of them the Soviet bloc is being replaced by the European Union. In any case, national identity is inevitably being eroded by an internationalism brought about by the ease of communication in the age of the internet. The ‘common market’ is the raison d’être of the European Union, but it is already being supplanted by the global market. This global market is a mixed economy, within which an opera company juggles its resources between the same four sectors: public subsidy; private donations; ticket sales; and other commercial earnings. The proportions may differ widely, but the practice applies worldwide.
World class
In 1959 the Bayreuth Festival mounted a new production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer . ‘For the first time since 1951 I have again Weltklasse ,’ declared its director Wieland Wagner (quoted in Wechsberg 1959 , 585). The Dutchman was played by the American George London and Senta by the Austrian Leonie Rysanek, two recognized stars of the Met, and Wagner’s comment was something of a reproach against the casting compromises imposed by postwar austerity during the early years of Neues Bayreuth. Today those casts seem to have inhabited a golden age, but that is another story. The phrase ‘world class’ has come to mean better or best class, somehow a cut above provincial levels of attainment.
It was not always so. When the rebuilt Vienna State Opera was reopened in 1955, it was with Mozart’s Don Giovanni sung in German. Nowadays, almost any small opera company will perform that opera in what passes for Italian from an entirely non-Italian speaking cast. The original-language revolution is the most visible sign of the new internationalism. What began as a gentle trend during the 1960s accelerated to a headlong rush during the final decade of the century. The process was encouraged by the introduction in Toronto in 1983 of ‘surtitles’ – captioned translations projected above the stage, a device widely adopted and developed by the end of the century. A handful of opera houses have held the line on opera in the vernacular: Berlin’s Komische Oper, London’s English National Opera, Munich’s Theater am Gaertnerplatz, the Vienna Volksoper and Opera Theater of St Louis in the United States; but they are a tiny minority. The irony is that these theatres have an international reputation greater than many of the more remote companies who have embraced the ‘internationalist’ solution.
During the first half of the twentieth century most singers belonged to an ensemble located in their country of birth or adoption. An elite few were able to supplement native earnings by spending several months a year in America. It was convenient that the American high season was the Fall, while the Italian seasons seldom got going much before Christmas and London’s international season was in the summer. Air travel has since made it practicable for leading singers to plan guest appearances within shorter periods. During the 1960s and 1970s a loose fraternity of artists colonized the top end of the world market. Their dominance was an important factor in the move towards original-language performances.
The final decade of the century has delivered further supplies of vocal talent to the burgeoning world market. The end of restricted travel for Soviet and East European artists has been matched by the emergence of a rich new seam of talent from the Far East. Japan, Korea and China have developed an appetite for Western music and a determination to train singers and instrumentalists to excel in performing it. The worldwide talent bank, the decreasing cost of travel and the homogenization of language policies mean that a casting director’s net can be spread wider than ever before. While some countries maintain protectionist policies, the movement towards mobility of labour is inexorable.
Opera as commerce
The discovery of a means to record sound on cylinders transformed the distribution of music and especially opera as early as the first decade of the century. Caruso’s recording of Canio’s ‘Vesti la giubba’ made both the tenor’s international career and the gramophone’s. It is cynically believed that Puccini tailored his most popular arias to fit on one side of a 10-inch ‘78’ (Harewood 1997 , 592). The advent of the long-playing record at the beginning of the 1950s made recordings of complete operas widely accessible, and many of the pioneering versions from that first LP decade remain in the catalogues as ‘standards’ today. The further convenience of the compact disc, and the decreasing cost of production, have led to an extraordinary expansion of the recorded repertory, both backwards in musical history and forwards to capture the most up-to-the-minute performances. As a consequence, opera planners and consumers have an unprecedented range of material at their disposal. But its very availability in aural, and increasingly in visual form, in the home has questioned the need for the communal experience in the theatre. Recording is a two-edged sword, at the same time a stimulus and a substitute.
The phenomenon of the Three Tenors televised concert at Rome’s Caracalla Baths for the 1990 World Cup celebrations gave operatic music a popular profile never previously attained and from which, some would argue, it has not yet recovered. Those who deplore as ‘dumbing down’ such concoctions of well-worn melodies amplified to be heard in large arenas should remember that such events have their antecedents. The short recordings of the Caruso era concentrated on a fairly limited popular repertory. His successor Beniamino Gigli increasingly specialized in concerts of familiar extracts in large halls, as did his contemporary Richard Tauber in the German opera and operetta repertory. One of the most influential of all singers from the middle of the twentieth century was Mario Lanza, whose career was not in the opera house but on records and in film.
While a good deal of money has been made by the artists and promoters involved in such events, commercial profit from presenting complete operas has been rarer. The impresario Raymond Gubbay has successfully marketed opera in the arena setting of the Royal Albert Hall, but has restricted himself to the six or eight ‘risk-free’ standard operas. His subsequent attempt to mount a commercial season in the West End ended prematurely, when ticket sales failed to secure break-even. Even the bold venture of presenting Puccini’s La Bohème , staged by the charismatic film director Baz Luhrmann, like a Broadway musical for eight performances a week ended after six months without having recouped its investment capital. Despite its impressive tenure and undoubted appeal to a non-traditional opera public, it failed to pull in the New Jersey audiences deemed necessary to transform it into a twelve-month-plus commercial success.
When Dr Johnson coined his famous definition of opera as ‘an exotic and irrational entertainment’ in the mid-eighteenth century, he allowed it no great pretensions as art. It took its place among the variety of multi-media shows vying for the public’s attention, being distinguishable for its foreignness and its extravagance. Today there are rival extravaganzas which cost more to produce than opera, but which jostle with it in an ever more crowded marketplace. Opera-as-art in the non-profit sector competes with opera for commercial profit, packaged as a marketable commodity. It also competes for the public’s attention with a multi-million dollar musical-theatre industry, and beyond that with the vastly better-resourced film industry with its justifiable claim to be the art of the twentieth century. After 400 years opera faces a dichotomy. Pilloried as the greediest monster among the traditional arts, it is now an under-resourced pygmy within the wider entertainment industry.
III A Century of Change
What we characterize as ‘twentieth century’ can probably be confined to a rather narrower span of seventy years, encompassing its third to ninth decades. The nineteenth century, on the other hand, might be said to have lasted longer than its hundred years and to have started with the French Revolution of 1789 and concluded with the Great War of 1914–18. The creative cauldron of the 1900s and the carnage at the heart of the second decade form the resonant epitaph to a century of matchless invention and discovery and destruction. If the true twentieth century begins with the Russian Revolution, its story ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The final decade and the arrival of the world wide web is the prelude to the twenty-first.
Opera in the first half of this twentieth century was dominated by its creative geniuses: Strauss and Puccini, Debussy and Ravel, Schoenberg and Berg, Janá
ek and Bartók, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, Gershwin and Weill, and the arrival of Britten. The composers set the agenda. In the second half of the century, their inspiration was more fitful and they were increasingly sidelined. Ligeti, Messiaen, Poulenc and Zimmermann are remembered for one opera each. More prolific composers such as Birtwistle and Henze are not ‘box office’. While the shift towards a ‘heritage culture’ is partly one of critical attitude, there is no doubt that it has been exacerbated by an absolute decline in the creativity of those who compose opera. So it has become necessary to reinvent the past.
The most influential operas from the nineteenth century were Tristan und Isolde and Boris Godunov . Initially Wagner’s model of symphonic development, of melodic and tonal transition, was the more dominant. Latterly Musorgsky’s more discursive structure and speech-influenced rhythms became more pervasive. Then Stravinsky consciously repudiated Wagner and adopted number structures derived from Mozart and Italian opera. The Verdi revival began in Germany in the 1920s with the reclaiming of his neglected middle-period operas. It was given further emphasis in 1951 by the Italian celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Today all of his twenty-eight operas are performed somewhere or another. After Verdi, the opera archaeologists uncovered further layers which revealed the forgotten treasures of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. The golden age of Italian opera from Rossini to Puccini now forms the foundation to many opera companies’ programmes, and it is being supplemented by lost trinkets from Mayr, Mercadante and Pacini.
The major addition during the last third of the twentieth century was the rebirth of the baroque. First came the realization that opera began not with Gluck’s Orfeo but with Monteverdi’s. Then the opening up of the Handel canon, begun in Germany in the 1920s and greatly abetted from the 1970s by the revolution in performance practice. The ‘period instrument’ movement is now the dominating force in the performance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. Its softer, vibrato-less sounds enable lighter voices and fleeter delivery to provide a convincing alternative to conventional grand opera. Its popularity with new and younger audiences has been a factor in winning converts to opera in the late twentieth century, especially in countries where its practice has taken a firm hold, such as France, Belgium and Holland.
The ability of the modern impresario to programme from a much wider range of opera then hitherto – from 400 rather than 200 years – has transformed the landscape. It has spawned specialist festivals on an unprecedented scale and a subculture of student productions with an enthusiasm for excavating the unknown. The choice may never have been greater, but there is a downside. Falling in love with the past has inevitably minimized the impact of the present.
Re-interpretation
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Bayreuth Festival was dedicated to preserving the work and performance practice of its founder. Today his grandson encourages ever more extreme interpretations of the same ten operas, in order to extract their ‘meaning’ for the present.
The cult of the theatre director in opera began when Max Reinhardt was brought in to save the premiere in Dresden of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 1911. His reward was the creation the following year of the first version of the same composer’s Ariadne auf Naxos for his ensemble to open the new Kleines Haus in Stuttgart. Reinhardt’s legacy was the Salzburg Festival, a high-minded ideal invented in 1920 to bring together the arts of song and poetry, music and drama, under the benign tutelage of a controlling director. Strauss embodied the struggle for this union in the characters of Flamand, Olivier and La Roche in his final opera Capriccio , first performed in 1942.
Five years later Walter Felsenstein founded the Komische Oper in the eastern sector of Berlin. It was a theatre in which the Director was the most powerful creative force, superior to the Music Director, the singers and the composers. Felsenstein’s method of working, with its long rehearsal periods and tightly knit ensemble, became the model followed by many companies within Germany and some beyond. Everything was subservient to the dramatic idea, researched and expounded by meticulous dramaturgical expertise. Regietheater is still the dominant influence in Germany and in many of its adjacent countries. The further away from this epicentre, the greater the scepticism, from the agnosticism of the British to the downright dismissal of it as ‘Eurotrash’ which is prevalent in the United States. Nonetheless, the creative power of the director and his licence to reinterpret the works of the past has been a crucial element in the survival and renewal of those works for much of the European audience.
Re-interpretation is part of the process of renewal. Monteverdi and the Florentine Camerata thought they were reinventing the amalgam of speech, song, dance and spectacle that was ancient Greek drama. Wagner believed he could recreate the spirit of Greek drama festivals on the Green Hill at Bayreuth. The difference today is that the composers have yielded this function to the directors. Not for nothing was Bayreuth’s centenary production known as Chéreau’s Ring .
Business or education?
‘I’m not running an opera, I’m running a fifty million dollar business,’ declared William Mason, the respected General Director of Chicago Lyric Opera, at Opera America’s conference at Pittsburgh in 2004. This sentiment, so alien to the worlds of Reinhardt and Felsenstein and Wolfgang Wagner, was not disputed by Mason’s fellow delegates. While most European directors would qualify such a statement, the reality is that the more successful among them are already adopting his methods: accurate budgeting, fierce control of expenditure, emphasis on generating income through fundraising and ticket sales.
Whereas late notification of grants used to mean that financial planning lagged behind artistic planning, leading to awkward disruptions when the grants were lower than anticipated, today even European companies expect to agree a Business Plan for several years in advance. It is no longer possible to assume increasing levels of fixed costs and a stable employment establishment. The key judgement is the accurate forecasting of income from all the main sources, backed up by a realistic contingency plan should that income fall short. It follows that many opera companies are seeking to reduce their traditionally high fixed costs, and to convert them to the variable costs attendant on freelance rather than full-time employees.
If public funding is decreasing in real terms, as is often the case, then the successful opera business must increase revenue from the private sector and from ticket sales. Instead of the historical focus on supply, it becomes necessary to build demand. In many places the capacity to supply exceeds known demand, so the business is highly competitive. Where demand falters, a company has to become expert in cutting back its costs, so that is may remain solvent and live to construct the next Business Plan.
This business cycle has led to a questioning of the validity of the long-established operatic institutions. A seasonal Festival or a low-budget touring company may be more flexible at adapting to changing economic conditions. A visionary Englishman, Norman Platt, founded Kent Opera in 1969 as a touring company with low overheads but high artistic aspirations. Singers and orchestra were engaged for specific repertory and were welded into an ensemble for limited periods. After twenty years, Platt retired and government funding was withdrawn. Today his model appears to have been ahead of its time.
According to the economist Peter Drucker, the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer. It is relatively easy, once the customer has been identified, to persuade him to buy again. A good first experience, followed by an efficient mailing service, will probably do the trick. It is much harder to seek out new customers from among those who have not yet chosen, for social, geographical, educational or economic reasons, to try a product. The task is simpler if a company enjoys a monopoly in its area, as many opera companies did within their communities before being undermined by late twentieth-century mobility. Today the audience has more choices to go elsewhere. Customers are only happy until they find something better.
Because of the competition, opera managers have become more nervous of taking risks. Opinion polls and audience surveys have an increased influence on choice of repertory and on the engagement of artists of known reputation. There is a tension between the perceived safe course of following the herd and the risk of striking an individual line which will seize attention by its boldness. It is a dilemma beautifully caught in Act III of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China , with its text by Alice Goodman. Nixon realizes that he is on the brink of something extraordinary and world-changing in his meeting with Mao-Tse-Tung, but tired and lonely in his hotel on the last night of his visit he reminisces about his time in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, when he ran a hamburger stand called ‘Nick’s Snack Shack’. It was the happiest time of his life. ‘The smell of burgers on the grill made strong men cry . . . Done to a turn, medium-rare, rare, medium, well-done, anything you say. The Customer is King.’
Of course, listening to opera cannot be compared with the mindless consumption of hamburgers, reduced to a global battlefield for market supremacy between the equivalent of McDonald’s and Burger King. Those who acquire a taste for it soon move on to sirloin steak, organic beef and even tournedos Rossini . There are plenty of chefs ready and willing to encourage experiment. Indeed, most opera companies subscribe to ‘a mission to explain’ and to lure their customers into unfamiliar tastes and territory. But during the course of the twentieth century the context has changed.
In an age when Strauss based five of his fifteen operas on ancient Greek legend, he could assume that most of his potential public had undergone a classical education. After Berg composed the five scenes of Act II of Wozzeck as a ‘symphony’ in five movements, he may have claimed that his audience should remain unaware of the musical differences between the constituent components (sonata form, fugue, largo, presto and rondo) – but he nevertheless felt justified in pointing them out in a lecture ( 1929 ). At the end of the twentieth century, most people’s education does not cover these basic areas of Western cultural knowledge. The task of the opera educators is therefore massive. An inspirational teacher here, an innovative schools project there, can scarcely scratch the surface of the widespread ignorance of the fundamentals of an art-form with such deep roots in a historical culture. Unable to turn round the education system, it has to find new entry points. One is through participation in creating musical theatre, as a replacement for the disciplines of choral singing and learning a musical instrument. Another is to recognize that the knowledge once gleaned from books may now be accessed via the internet. Another is to treat television as an educational tool rather than a diversion, and to learn from the successful history and ‘lifestyle’ programmes.
Knowledge makes the consumer more demanding but also more loyal. Radio and television have greatly increased access to opera. Subtle broadcasters can make such programmes educational as well as entertaining. The introduction of titles above or alongside the stage, first to translate foreign-language texts but increasingly also to replicate vernacular texts, is credited by many as a decisive step in conveying information which popularizes opera. The worldwide acceptance of titles has changed the way that people listen to opera.
Turning points
Looking back over the century, it is possible to discern some turning points at which opera changed direction.
In creative terms no decade can rival the 1920s, which not only produced the enduring masterworks of Berg, Janá
ek, Puccini, Strauss and many more, but also fostered the greatest idealism and belief in opera as a life force. La Scala under Toscanini, the early Salzburg Festivals, a Berlin in which three rival opera houses were led by Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Otto Klemperer. These examples were beacons for the rest of the century. Is it a coincidence that such creativity should have coexisted with a period of such political turmoil? The second turning point was the decade or so after World War Two, when opera companies were re-established on the basis of serious public subsidy as part of the welfare state. This philosophy also lasted for most of the rest of the century. Finally, the coming of the global market in the 1990s brought with it a questioning of those certainties. On the one hand, opera became available to a geographically and socially wider constituency than ever before. On the other, its importance on the map of culture was diminished.
Does opera have a future as a living culture, or has it transmuted into a branch of heritage? Can opera survive in an increasingly crowded global market? Has it changed out of recognition over the last hundred years, and can it go on changing? Musical theatre will continue in the twenty-first century. It may become more populist in search of its audience. Its practitioners will wish to harness technology as an aid to both creation and education. Traditional structures will crumble and be replaced by more flexible versions better able to weather changes in the labour market and in customers’ demands. A pessimist will acknowledge that the golden age of opera died during the twentieth century. But an optimist will remember that the periods of the French and Russian Revolutions and the Cold War were also times of great creative invention. Art thrives in adversity.