Guess what? New operagoers prefer old operas
OperaMemo to Peter Gelb:
Don’t read the Opera America survey of 11,000 new operagoers over four seasons and 36 US opera companies.
It will only prove you wrong and we know you hate to be wrong.
The key finding is this: Most New-to-Opera attenders initially come for a new “experience,” and they tend to stick to the classics.
Fancy that.
The reason obviously is, that ‘the classics’ treat universal human concerns with a musical language that speaks, across the ages, directly to the ‘inbuilt’ human emotional perception frame.
The idea that audiences are per definition conservative, in contrast to – for instance – cinema lovers or literature enthusiasts, is wrong. Music theatre is best served by a general humanist subject combined with a musical language that can express what is going-on at the inside of what we see on the stage. And the ‘oldfashioned’ musical languages happen to do that best.
Add to that: today’s opera composers stink.
Well said, Mr. Borstlap.
An intelligent response written in temperate language.
You’re on the wrong website.
My PA doesn’t stop saying this.
I, too, agree with you (this time), and you are on the wrong website.
Lol. You get it.
In the end, there have been very few operas the MET has commissioned throughout its’ history that made it to a second run. Gelb keeps throwing trash on the stage that he thinks is good and it proves he’s the worng guy in the wrong job. Tin ear is too nice a descriptor.
Thank goodness! I thought I might be the only one who feels this way. It seems that most of the “new opera” is more concerned with the politically correct than in timeless themes and memorable melodic lines.
This Bruce fully agrees! I still remember the hype about Copelands opera when the MET opened…gone gone gone
It was Barber not Copland. Antony and Cleopatra. But you’re correct. Gone, gone, gone. In spite of a revision for a less expensive orchestra. Leontyne Price’s recording of two of Cleo’s arias is all I need from that opera.
When the MET opened? Er, are you referring to Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra?
In addition to Antony and Cleopatra, let’s look throughout MET history at some of the dogs it commissioned that have not been heard there since the first run, which in some cases were 1, or 2 performances: Converse The Pipe of Desire 1910, Walter Damrosch Cyrano 1913, Giordano Madame Sans-Gene 1915, De Koeven, The Canterbury Pilgrims 1918, Ricitelli I Compagnacci, Hagemann Caponsacchi 1937, Walter Damrosch The Man Without A Country 1938, Rogers The Warrior 1947. Gelb has commissioned more 1 run wonders than any before him, whether they be bad productions, or the operas themselves. Keep in mind, when the MET used to reveal a new production, they used the sets for decades, keeping costs down and the public came to be awed by the grandeur.
Gelb brings in dull productions with projections in the background which have to be replaced the next season. He’s cost the MET millions with his bad eye and tin ear. If he tells you to buy a stock, don’t believe him, if he tells you to pick a horse in a race, the same advice.
Agreed. Most of the modern operas I’ve heard place little value on melody, though there are exceptions: L’amour de Loin comes to mind, but the Met hasn’t had another production of it. Traviata, Rigoletto, Carmen, Bohème … permanent favorites.
There is no reason a new opera can’t have “a general humanist subject combined with a musical language that can express what is going-on at the inside of what we see on the stage”, and indeed, many do.
That’s a quite natural choice.
Too many people working in today’s arts-cultural scene think that being modern and relevant require a sort of dark, cynical or overly inscrutable approach to aesthetics. So the music has to be like the score from an angst-ridden (or horror) movie, and the visuals have to be like from a stark, depressing oddball world.
It has become the opposite extreme of something in the arts that’s so sweet and syrupy, a person comes down with cultural diabetes.
In short, an overreaction to something that is an exception anyway.
General directors [such as Peter Gelb] don’t have the knowledge, the ability to assess a contemporary score. They look, first and foremost, for a ‘grabbing’ topic and title when choosing a new opera. They think that the public will go for the ‘idea’ of the work, the topic. For example, ‘The Shining’ is a great film, an iconic classic … but it was adapted as a poor, second-rate opera. They believe the general public will say ‘Hey, The Shining’s an opera now! Honey, let’s go see it!’… but this doesn’t happen. That’s just one example. The latest trend is to try to attract attention with one-word opera titles: ‘Champion’… ‘Grounded’ … as if it’s ‘cool’. Why not add exclamation marks à la ‘Oklahoma!’? It’s interesting to observe, while coaching singers as they learn and study their roles in world premieres: most of the singers can’t stand the operas. They took it because it’s a job, a gig. They would much rather sing music composed by composers who love/loved voice and line, such as Puccini, Mozart, Verdi et al. Can you imagine coming home after a long day at work and relaxing with a drink or a pizza to ‘The Hours’??? O General Damagers, give us something good for once!
The moment he hired a DEI administrator, his race to the bottom already begun went fast and furious.
No wonder. Nobody will see operas with weak librettos and dull music. Curiosity lasts just for the premiere. There must be a reason why we keep playing operas written two hundred years ago, and we don’t play most of the new operas written twenty years ago again…
The problem is with the music.
20C post-WW II establishment modern music focussed on sound, not on expression because that implies tonality, well-tried stylistic treatment, etc. etc. – and thus; the shivering acknowledgement that something like ‘tradition’ could be the only way to get a really good opera on the rails. So, modern opera tries to either use the sinkhole of sound art, or poppy-saturated jingle styles, or mechanical minimalist tapestries, and they all fail miserably in comparison with ‘old’ treatments.
We don’t play most of the operas written two hundred years ago, either. In any time period, it’s only a very few of the works composed that prove to have staying power.
This is exactly the type of article Mr. Gelb needs to read.
You assume he reads. College drop-out. He never developed critical thinking, only knee-jerk reactions.
And you never further any argument with personal attacks, but you seem unable to stop.
From the start, he should have sent out questionaires to his subscribers and held focus groups of known ticket buyers to understand what they want to see on the stage. But the hapless Peter thought he knew better. Now the MET has problems it will take years to dig out from under when he’s shown the door. Shame on the MET board for allowing Gelb to continue in that job.
Contrary to political pundits, people don’t go to the theater to find relevance to their everyday lives, they go to escape and entertain themselves and don’t want to be preached by political messages.
The best reason to go to the opera is, to experience universal human concerns that lift one above one’s daily life and thus offers a much broader sense of existence. So, both escaping one’s individual concerns and getting plugged into a much wider context. And if it’s also bathed in beauty and expressive meaning, one feels better on leaving the theatre, even after Wagner.
Wow, Yes! And maybe particularly after Wagner.
But why do the same opera theaters goers (who are mostly well-educated and financially comfortable) tend to seek out and possibly collect abstract (even subversive) modern art, watch indie/arthouse cinema, read modern literary novels? So many of them do try to stretch themselves in arts consumption… maybe just not with music…
The impact of bad music is stronger than the impact of a bad painting where you just need to walk to the next canvas.With art house cinema you know beforehand what the impact may be but it’s that impact that has your interest.
Modern operas are woke. The classics are often sullied by eurotrash productions. New audiences aren’t stupid. They prefer time-true classics.
Here’s a scenario for anyone who wants to write a modern classic. It’s derived from Herman Melville’s unreadable flop of a novel “Pierre, or The Ambiguities”.
Simple plot: Pierre (tenor), the young, handsome, eponymous momma’s-boy scion of a long line of wealthy landowners (and originally slave owners!), the Glendinnings of upstate New York, is affianced to the angelically beautiful blonde Lucy (light! soprano) in a fairytale world, but falls in love too with a mysterious, dark, impoverished girl who turns out to be or not to be his half-sister Isabel (mezzo), whom he must possess, the bastard daughter of his sainted father’s betrayal of his proud wife with a European refugee. The deceased father (bass) appears ghost-like à la Hamlet. Pierre refers to his loving mother as “sister” and she calls him “brother” (what’s with that?), while he treats his new-found half-sister (half-Jewish? Isabel: Hebrew–devoted to God) as his “wife.”
The ambiguities indeed! A story made for opera. And classically, everyone ends up dead: Pierre and Isabel run off to a bohemian life in NYC, Lucy joins them and dies of shock when Isabel calls Pierre her brother: ” ‘My brother, oh my brother!’ At these wailed words from Isabel, Lucy shrunk up like a scroll, and noiselessly fell at the feet of Pierre,” whereupon Pierre seizes and drinks from Isabel’s poison, which she polishes off and falls “upon Pierre’s heart, and her long hair ran over him, and arbored him in ebon [ebony] vines.”
Make it 75% Puccini, 15% Massenet, 10% Korngold. Or go for the big bucks, Andrew Lloyd Weber. There’s a fortune lodged in that book.
To be fair, some of the really old stuff, Monteverdi, is also pretty somniferous.
Monteverdi isn’t somniferous if (a) it’s well-sung (less common than it ought to be, especially in major opera houses) and (b) you can understand what’s going on. Of the three Monteverdi operas that have survived, to (Ulisse and Poppea) are so text-heavy that they’re basically sung plays, and I think there’s a good argument for doing them in translation.
No surprises at all; now if they could also add in that opera audiences also prefer more or less traditional staging.
When “re-imagined” appears on the posters or adverts, I generally move on.
Being popular is suspect among the unpopular elite.
Might this change Opera America’s own agenda to ignore the classical works and encourage amateur composers, directors, etc? Finally Marc Scorca can stop fleecing opera companies and help individual companies instead of himself and his bogus organization.
So…are opera companies not supposed to commission or perform new shows?
Don’t show this to Peter….it will shatter the delicate bubble he lives in…
The general problem is the classical establishment has abandoned “good” for “new.” If you go to a new work at the NY Phil. or Met. you know in advance that it is going to be total crap. Unless the classical establishments ends its decades old process of educating audiences that “new music” == “bad music” there will not be much of a future for it. Why does not NY Phil./Met ever ask, “What was the last new work we premiered that has received general audience acceptance?” The former would probably have to go back to the 1940’s with some Aaron Copland piece. One gets the impression that the classical music management has made “be fecal waste matter” a requirement to be peformed (once).
You have perhaps inadvertently hit upon one problem: Orchestras and opera companies rarely repeat their successes. Even if a piece goes over well with an audience, there’s not great likelihood the orchestra will repeat it any time soon, while there’s a good bet they’ll do the Brahms Violin Concerto again within two years.
Or last year the National Symphony (and several others) did a marvelous new saxophone concerto by Billy Childs. Went over great with the audience (as did the soloist, Steven Banks). What are the chances the NSO will do this piece again, ever? And even if they go over well, they don’t take them on tour (if they tour).
People like to trash new opera, but I’ve found several of the MET’s recent pieces – Thomas Ades’ “The Exterminating Angel,” Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin,” and Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” marvelous and highly compelling – especially the Saariaho. Also, yes, even Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” Will the MET do them again any time soon?
Often, orchestras and opera companies feel in between two problems: 1) the need to offer something new; 2) the need to offer something of great quality. According to 20C mythology, the new is not, cannot be, popular, i.e. embraced by audiences – then it must be old or bad, thorough philistine as audiences are supposed to be. So, if a new work by chance is received well, it better not repeated lest the institution is condemned as conservative or pandering to the bad taste of audiences. The result is a premiere culture where any new work, be it progressive or oldfashioned, bad or good, is only good for a premiere.
It’s less “old” Vs “new’ it’s more “familiar” Vs “unfamiliar”. Let’s face it, for the ticket-buying public going to something brand new is always a risk. So if an audience is even a little familiar with the work then they can be sure it’s not a wasted evening.
Perhaps contemporary composers could release an aria from a new work, let it get some airplay and then when it is staged it’s not too strange for the audience.
Before musical modernism hit the stages, risk was never an inhibition with opera audiences. In contrary: new works were looked forward to with anticipation. Even a work like Debussy’s ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ which drastically rejected all the traditions which were deeply rooted in the field, caused a sensation, consisting of perplexity mixed with being mesmerized. it was the erosion of musical language which gradually threw-up a serious obstacle.
It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that most first timers would prefer to see one of the classics. And sending a first timer back home with a bad taste isn’t likely to result in a return visit. First impressions are important where there’s a lot of competition for people’s time and money.
I remember talking to a couple who had never been to an opera, so they went to a Chicago production of Wozzeck. They never went to another.
Nothing against Wozzeck, but it’s not an ideal introduction to an art form as complex as opera. Humans innately respond to euphony, to drama, to color, to spectacle, to sympathetic characters. Given a choice between my second Wozzeck and my second (or third or fourth) La Boheme, I know what I would choose.
By this point in time, I personally don’t think Berg’s Wozzeck* is any more difficult to listen to than any number of film scores. (Not Hollywood blockbusters, mind you, but art films.) The problem with Wozzeck for first-time operagoers is that it’s so bleak and depressing
By the way, I think Wozzeck is another work that would benefit from being performed in the language of the audience.
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*Lulu is another matter.
I love Wozzeck but agree it’s probably not the best first-time opera.
Wozzeck is the worst possible choice to be introduced to the genre. It needs much developed experience of opera to understand the thing – I hesitate to use the term ‘to enjoy” here.
Just curious, was that the most recent Wozzeck or the awful David Alden one with the sleeping bags and moving wall? If you are going to challenge people with “new” music, I don’t think it’s a good idea to confuse them with a production that obscures or overlays the directors conceptions that do nothing to clarify the opera as written.
Equally, I feel sorry for newcomers who try a popular opera but encounter a production that has tinkered-with plots, fatsuits, buckets of entrails, or (unscheduled) decapitations.
Of course most people prefer the classics, that’s just inevitable when, among other things, the classic operas have already proven their worth and new operas are usually forgotten.
I don’t think this proves much of anything, since the Met under Gelb, like all opera companies, mostly puts on the classics. And I don’t think it’s crazy to assume that a company that puts on more new and topical operas will attract more new operagoers, even if most of them will prefer the old operas (because, again, they’re classics, and a new opera is unlikely to become a classic, but we’ll never get classics unless we put on a lot of new operas).
What it may prove is that if you are getting only 6 operas a year (Chicago) and 2 of them are contemporary, you may have a problem getting seats filled. Friday’s LOC production of Blue was so sparsely attended that people in the UPPER balcony (5th and 6th floors) were given mainfloar row J seats at no extra cost without even asking.
Gelb’s recent screed in the New York Times has turned him into a joke on the intenet. A man who has been in a job since 2007 who still does not understand his profession. He has put the MET in its’ most precarious position since just after World War II. He shut down The Metropolitan Opera Guild which saved the companies bacon that time. Gelb has squandered money on horrible gimmick productions which have to be replaced the next season the work is performed. He puts on operas the public does not want in order to attempt to lure in an audience that does not care about opera. Meanwhile with his cringeworthy productions, he walks operas already written, most without IP costs that the public wants to hear. The Metropolitan Opera for instance in the 1880’s and 1890’s was known as the Faustspielehaus. Why, because that’s what the public wanted and they were rewarded with top casts, top productions of Gound’d Faust. But Peter thinks he knows better and puts crap up on the stage his potential audience just doesn’t want. Peter ran off many of his ticket subscribers about 2010 when he first was able to affect the season and it has been a race to the bottom over since. Peter is no intellectual, he has bad taste and he just doesn’t get it. He is now well past his expiration date as a businessman. He’s been an abject failure.
My employment history never involved a major city, and it’s been decades since I last saw a live performance of Strauss’s “Salome.”
So I was delighted to learn that it will be included in this year’s series of Met in-theatre live simulcasts.
Until I saw a production photo with the Baptist’s headless body seated in a chair at one side of the stage, his head on a pike at the other side, a bunch of bodies writhing on an industrial staircase, some sort of lighted female figure projection thing-y on the backstage wall, and nothing that could even charitably be called scenery or architecture.
So I won’t be going to see this.
I didn’t go to the “Forza del Destino” set in a wrecked subway station, either. Or others.
If the Met is trying to attract younger audiences, it amazes me that the management seems to think this necessitates productions favoring the kind of post-industrial ugliness that anyone can read about in the daily news.
https://www.metopera.org/season/2024-25-season/salome/
New opera-goers prefer old operas?
Is there any demographic that doesn’t?
The classics are the easiest choice. Just like the easiest choice for a moviegoer would be watching the new superhero flick.