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