Dallas Opera to The Met: Our audience is younger than yours
mainKeith Cerny, head of The Dallas Opera, has picked up two stats from Peter Gelb’s recent moans and turned them on their head.
Gelb said: 75% of the Met US cinema audience is over 65.
Cerny says: 80% of TDO’s simulcast audience is under 65.
Gelb said: our cinema audiences don’t come to the Met.
Cerny says: ours do.
Read on here.
Yes but… in 2013/14 Dallas gave 21 performances of four operas while the Met gave 214 of 27… How valid are comparisons in two such different environments?
Dallas ranks 257th in the world for opera performances per year, even though it has the 14th largest metro GDP in the world. Looks like a pint size opera wants to wear a ten gallon hat.
Performance stats by city are here:
http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en&break=0&show=loc&no=0&nat=
GDP rankings are here:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1489306
For some comparison with hulking Dallas, the Freiburg Opera performs all year round in a city of 200,000. The average ticket price is about 22 Euros ($30). The most expensive seats, front row center are 51 Euros ($70). Students usually get in half price.
Little Freiburg does about 85 performances per year. It ranks 70th in the world for opera performances per year, which puts it ahead of Chicago at 97th (pop. 2.7 million) — and of course Dallas at 257th (metro pop. 6.5 million)
This month Freiburg’s doing a double bill of Bartok’s “Blue Beard’s Castle” and Pucinni’s “Il Trittico” which must be very interesting.
Freiburg ticket prices here:
http://www.theater.freiburg.de/index/TheaterFreiburg/Preise.html
And here is an example of Frieburg’s program for March 2014 which included Tannhäuser.
http://www.theater.freiburg.de/index/TheaterFreiburg/Oper.html?month=3&year=2014
Correction: That should read “Il Tabarro” (which is part of the Trittico.)
Our military cost 640 billion dollars in 2013. That comes to 73 million dollars per hour. That’s more per hour than the Chicago Lyric pays for its entire season (67 million.)
1% of our military budget is 6.4 billion. That could fund 64 MAJOR opera houses at 100 million a piece per year. Just 1%. Imagine what 5% would do for the arts.