The national press agency has just published salaries for the top jobs.
Vienna State Opera – 269,200 Euros
Volksoper – 211,000
Salzburg Festival – 233,500
Bregenz Festival – 157,500
There may be additional emoluments that are not reported.
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Good heavens-now we officially know why so many go for conducting and singing!
In America you’d need to add a zero or two. The numbers above are less than a managers expense account in the US.
Below are some examples of high salaries for arts exectuives in 2009 in the USA, as reported in the New York Times. See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/arts/26comp.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
For current numbers, one could probably estimate another 25 to 30%:
* Peter Gelb at the Met makes 1.3 million.
* Reynold Levy’s annual compensation to run Lincoln Center tops $1 million.
* Carnegie Hall pays Clive Gillinson more than $800,000.
* Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, earned $2.7 million in the year that ended in June 2008, including several one-time bonuses and the cost of his apartment in the tower beside the museum.
* Occasionally institutions will also pay bonuses tied to performance or longevity, like the $3.25 million given in 2006 to Philippe de Montebello to recognize his 30-year service to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
* On top of his $940,000 salary, Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center earned a $150,000 bonus, as well as other benefits, for 2009.
* Zarin Mehta’s (NY Phil) most recent compensation, for fiscal year 2010, is $807,500. In the fiscal year ending in August 2008 he earned 2.67 million. This reflected his salary in addition to eight years of accumulated deferred compensation.
* Timothy Rub, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art earns $450,00.
* George Steel, the general manager and artistic director of New York City Opera receives $360,000 – and from an opera house that just shut down its next season (2010) due to a lack of funds.
*Deborah Borda, Executive Director of the LA Phil makes $799,970 per year plus bonuses that raise her income to 1.5 million dollars.
By contrast, the average salary for a musician in a regional orchestra in the USA is $13k per year.
These numbers (and some of the names attached to them) are long out-of-date, and are now in all cases significantly higher.
But it is useless to compare the chief executive salaries at some of the top U.S. arts orgs (including some that are not even in the performing arts world) to the “average salary” of a musician in a regional orchestra. The executive directors of those nameless regional orchestras to which you refer usually make $60K – $80K, and only rarely top $100,000–and they often have shoestring staffs in which there are simply a director of development, a director of marketing, and a production manager, with almost no paid support staff.
These regional orchestras sometimes perform as few as four programs per season; the only “full-time” orchestral musicians are those who play three or four concerts per week for at least 20 weeks of the year, and those musicians are all handsomely compensated.
Average musician salaries at the LA Phil and NY Phil, to mention the only two orchestras to which you refer, are robust indeed. Principal salaries there are enviable. Concertmaster salaries (and perks) are obscene.
Uh, that’s the point. The musicians in ROPA orchestras (regional orchestras) have very limited seasons because the orchestras are massively underfunded. The system is obscenely top heavy.
Why? Because a system of funding the arts by donations from the wealthy concentrates arts funding in a few financial centers where the very wealthy live.
In Europe, by contrast, orchestras and opera companies are mostly owned and operated by local governments and funded publicly under the auspices of social democracy. Access to culture is thus far more evenly spread between all sizes of communities and far more democratic. The salary spread between regional and urban orchestras is smaller than in the USA by at least a magnitude
BTW, if I had a degree from Julliard or Curtis or IU or Eastman as many members of ROPA orchestras do, and were paid $13k/yr while the orchestra administrator with a degree from Tumbleweed State were getting $60 to 80K/yr, I’d be angry.
And lest there be any confusion, the issue isn’t that *regional* are overpaid. They are not, generally. The issue is that regional orchestra musicians are underpaid because the seasons are so paltry.
That should be *regional administrators.*
In Australia a reasonably successful corporate lawyer working in an international firm can earn $1M. No worries. A partner? That’s a whole new ball game.
€ 22.433,– p/mnth as a salary (Staatsoper) is obscene, entirely out of proportion, should not even be paid – with tax money – for a genius. A cultural institution of high art should not be a moneyspinner for personal gain.
Beethoven, a man upon whose hard work rests the basis of concert life, was paid, by three noblemen, a yearly pension of 4000 florins over 18 years, which comes down – in today’s value – on a monthly sum of ca. GBP 460 and € 546. On top of this he earned, irregularly, lump sums for his works, sold to publishers. There were no copyrights at the time, so: no royalties as a source of income. As an average, his income will not have been more than ca. € 1000 p/month, and due to desastrous inflation after the Napoleonic wars, this may have been temporarily reduced with ca. 50%. It has been documented that Beethoven was plagued by money worries up to his last days. He lived in two simple rented rooms, and had difficulties with housekeepers. He had no family to support, and enjoyed no luxuries, did not live in a villa with swimming pool and had no expensive cars. When he organised a concert with his works, he had to rent the hall, the musicians, and to pay for the publicity. Mostly they were financially disastrous. His holidays he spent in simple hostels in neighbouring villages, where he had his daily walks through the lands.
Compare that with the insane management fees of today.
https://www.adzuna.co.uk/blog/do-you-make-more-money-than-mozart/
Well said!
I always thought that an artiqt(musician or composer) should have suffered to create his art!
-so did Beethoven,mozart,Schumann,brahms..and most of them except may be one-the odd man out
Nowdays these “artists” suffer when wondering what to do with all that UNJUSTIFIED money.
Did Richter get paid as much????I doubt it!
Beethoven was one of the early freelance musicians. Better to compare the compensation to modern-day composers: Bruce Springsteen just sold the rights to his music for $500 million. (And yes, I know that’s more than, say, Sofia Gubaidulina could sell her rights for…)
Very true, but take this further. A CEO of a top-tier bank in Australia, with billions of capital under his control and answerable to the welfare of tens of thousands of employees earns more than Nicole Kidman. And still the shareholders of said bank are restive, as is the rest of the country!!
In my comment I wrote “earns more than Nicole Kidman”; typo, as I meant the bank CEO earns LESS than the actress.
The Beast of Belgrade isn’t worth €269,200 per annum, no way.
Not that much, really, given the scope and responsibility of the job, and that despite what the denizens of SD may think, there aren’t a whole lot of people qualified to do it. I’m sure most doctors and law-firm partners earn more. It’s far less than the leaders of U.S. organizations, though those in Europe probably don’t have to deal with fundraising.
Do you really think the director of an opera house has to do EVERYTHING all on his own? Such institutions have their experience and routine, and the director should be nothing more than the cherry on the cake, not the hole in the financial donut.
No, I don’t, just like I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg runs the whole Facebook site himself (or, on a more modest scale, Norman probably doesn’t run SD on his own). But when you’re the boss, everything is ultimately your responsibility. That’s kind of how organizations work.
No, everything goes on as before when they appoint a new boss. An opera house is not like a bank or a facebook company. I’m sure if the director of such cultural institution would suddenly stop appearing in his office, things would simply continue to be done and problems would continue to be solved, since everybody has done them before. In my dog years I have worked in music management, I know how these institutions are run. Orchestras, concert halls, opera houses belong to the most conservative organizations in the world.
It IS much, REALLY. Enough to live quite comfortably.
So arts managers at established institutions get payed lots of money.
hahahaha.
Stupid Austrians, wasting their money on the always deteriorating status quo.
Time for some new people to come along and boost culture for the common man, i.e. to further culture among the households, instead of in those institutionalized places, where it’s already in decline… solely held up by fictitious pomp… for snobbish nobodies.