Opera’s Shrinking Audience

Earlier this Fall, the Lyric Opera of Chicago suffered through a short musicians’ strike that caused the cancellation of a few performances, but a quick resolution was reached and productions are back on.  However, the cause of the strike was proposed reduced employee compensation that the Lyric said was necessitated by the fewer performances and reduced revenue as a consequence of its shrinking audience.

I've been wondering about this development and why it is so.  Multiple factors seem at play.  Certainly the wide availability of high-fidelity opera CDs and DVDs has made an impact.  Perhaps even more importantly, opera seems generally much less familiar to most people than it was decades ago.  The general dumbing-down of our popular culture has had an impact – rarely do opera stars appear in general entertainment and public venues as they did in the past.  For example, years ago opera stars could be seen on widely-watched TV variety shows and Johnny Carson-like late shows, but programs like that are no longer common, and the late-night shows have degenerated into junk time hosted by smug, smirking, and sarcastic personalities offering sophomoric entertainment to pseudo-adults stuck in perpetual adolescence. 

So what can opera companies do in the face of these secular trends?  By themselves, unfortunately perhaps not much.  But they can redouble efforts to promote opera and their performers in the broader culture and in the media.  Add perhaps some programming shifts.  How about adding a few evenings of great scenes from a number of operas?  Tosca Act 1, La Traviata Act 2 Scene 1, and La Boheme Act 3, for example, with narrative introductions that explain each scene.  Solo concerts are fine, but they lack the beautiful mixture of voices in duets and trios and scenes, and lack as well the costumes and the sets that make opera such a wonderful visual experience. 

What about being more aggressive in offering smartly-edited performances of operas that perhaps don’t get shown because they’re too long or too complicated.  The Lyric’s recent complete staging of Bizet’s The Trojans (Les Troyens) was wonderful, but it is very long; some opera companies eliminate the first two acts which are frankly not the more musically-pleasing parts and are severable plot-wise.  Although I like having an opera produced in its entirety, if length and cost prevent its production an opera is much better being trimmed than never being seen.  Rossini’s William Tell is another candidate.  Ballet sequences, where they exist in some operas, are now often omitted in the interest of time, so the precedent of editing operas is already established.

Finally, I wonder if opera selection has been a factor in recent years.  The current Lyric management seems to have a tilt toward German, Russian, and modern operas.  Of course those operas have their fans, but I have known few casual opera lovers to pine for a German or Russian opera, or hum a tune from an atonal modern show.  In the professional opera world and among the intelligentsia that may be true, but for many of us in the hoi polloi German and Russian operas remain better in theory than they sound in practice.  A good example of the recent selection tilt is the 2016-2017 Lyric season, which featured two German operas and one Russian among the eight produced, and, remarkably, no Verdi or Puccini.  Don’t get me wrong – it featured some wonderful productions – Norma, Carmen, and a premier of Berlioz’s masterpiece The Trojans.  But no Verdi or even Puccini? 

I realize that some in the high-brow set love to love not-very-popular operas, and I am certainly not arguing for Boheme, Butterfly, Tosca, and Traviata every year or two, but can the Lyric find room for more Italian classics?  In its 64 seasons, including the current one, the Lyric has put on Puccini’s beautiful Manon Lescaut just four times, just once since 1977 and not since 2005-2006.  What about Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, put on just three times over 30 years ago, or his Luisa Miller, done just once in 1982.  How about more Bellini, whose version of the Romeo and Juliet story, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, has appeared just twice.  And never on the menu in 64 years are such notables as Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers and I Lombardi, Bellini’s Il Pirata, and Rossini’s William Tell.

My ideas might not help the Lyric and other opera companies much, and even then perhaps only at the margins.  Opera as an art form is swimming against the cultural current for the first time in its history, and it’s a tough slog.

R Balsamo

Il Trovatore at the Lyric Opera

Il Trovatore is an operatic treat, musically and visually, and the missus and I were delighted to take it all in the other day at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.  We last saw it four years ago to the month at the Lyric, and it was just as fresh and wonderful this time around.  Its music to me is as beautiful as any Verdi wrote.  After its world premiere in Rome in 1853, according to The Lyric Opera Companion, a music critic wrote:  “The music transported us to heaven ... because this is, without exaggeration, heavenly music.  The public listened to every number in religious silence and broke into applause at every interval.” 

As remarkable as Trovatore is, given the wealth of the Verdi repertory it is only the fourth most-shown Verdi in the Lyric’s 64 seasons, appearing nine times, after Traviata, Rigoletto, Un Ballo, in that order, and tied with Aida.  The first production was in 1955 with none other than tenor Jussi Bjorling and soprano Maria Callas.  How’s that for casting?  In fact, in November of 1955 alone, when the Lyric’s season was very short and very, very sweet, opera lovers had not only Callas (in three operas) and Bjorling (in five!), but also Giuseppe Di Stefano, Renata Tebaldi, Tito Gobbi, and Carlo Bergonzi, plus Chicago (Melrose Park) native Carol Laraia, stage name Carol Lawrence, in no less than six productions.

Trovatore has not been everyone’s cup of tea, puzzlingly.  Highbrow critics slam it for its allegedly confusing libretto, but, assuming the knock is even true, few opera lovers have read the libretto, and the plot seems straightforward to me, and with supertitles at a performance the narrative is quite understandable.  Those same critics also look down their noses at Verdi’s supposed retreat in Trovatore from the musical “advances” of Rigoletto (which premiered two years earlier) toward the ideal – loved by the cognoscenti – of the Wagner-like “numberless” opera – in other words, music that’s better than it sounds, as Twain supposedly phrased it. 

Il Trovatore is a wonderful opera, and the Lyric put on a great show.  Highlights of the performance were soprano Tamara Wilson as Leonora, mezzo Jamie Barton as Azucena, baritone Artur Rucinski as Count di Luna, and Roberto Tagliavini as Ferrando.  On tenor Russell Thomas I plead the 5th.  The choruses were terrific, as usual at the Lyric.  And the sets were visually arresting and appropriate to the storyline, and a welcome step up from the less-expensive offerings (however understandable) that occasionally pop up.  Costuming was fine enough for the leads, but the Lyric seemingly ran out of gypsy costumes, for most of the gypsies in the Anvil Chorus gypsy camp scene, set in 15th century rural, northeastern Iberia, were dressed in relatively-dressy 17^th century clothing, including some in top hats; well, there always has to be some transgressive functionary who likes to poke the audience in the eye, highlighting the need for constant adult supervision.

Stephanie von Buchau writes in The Lyric Opera Companion that “Il Trovatore is the quintessential Italian opera, its drama propelled by the human voice.”  In fact, it is so quintessential that it was chosen as the opera backdrop for the zany antics of the anarchist Marx Brothers in their film masterpiece A Night at the Opera.  High praise indeed.

R Balsamo

A post on the 2014 Trovatore at the Lyric:

https://criticalthoughtsblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/il-trovatore-at-lyric-opera.html

One Hundred Years After the Armistice That Paused the Carnage

This day marks the one hundredth anniversary of the armistice that paused, for about twenty years, the senseless slaughter of World War One.  It was called “the War to End All Wars,” and would that only to have been true, it might have been worth it all – but it did not and so it was not.  The most prosperous culture in the world, one that certainly should have known better, descended into madness and almost destroyed itself in quick time.  Scores of millions died, all over the world, in the two-part war that only ended in 1945 and whose effects are very much with us today.

As I wrote last year, in the primitive film of 1914 we can clearly see the pompous, murderously-incompetent, half-decrepit generals and the effete, smarmy, oily politicos all parading about in herky-jerky motion, full of themselves, festooned like peacocks with their gaudy European plumes and sashes, leading the world into war for their own petty, obscure, and erratic purposes.  It was all so absurd, so comical if not so unspeakably sad, so utterly infuriating, so unimaginably tragic.

When the war began in 1914, certainly few, if any, however foolish they might have been, could have imagined the horrific carnage that was about to come.  But soon they suffered full well the harsh reality of it all and no doubt most, if they could go back in time, would have none of it.  Yet after almost three years of this madness, revealed to the world in newspapers, in film, in photographs, and in letters, in June of 1917 the Americans crossed an ocean to join in.  They disembarked in France to cheering crowds, smiling while shouting back, it is said, “Lafayette we are here.”  Then over one hundred thousand of them died, and to this day we don’t really know why.

For years afterward mothers and fathers roamed battlefields looking for sons who never returned.  Nonpareil writer Jan Morris evokes the profound sadness of inconsolable loss: 

In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: “God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will.”

Canadian physician John McCrae, serving as a front-line field surgeon in France, wrote a short poem after the burial of one of his friends killed in battle.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row, [....]
We are the dead, short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

McCrae never returned home either, dying himself later in the war.  He was buried near where he fell.

Western culture paused in the slow suicide it had begun just a few years earlier, one hundred years ago today, and we still bring out the poppies to pretend it all stopped just then.

R Balsamo