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.
That’s a quite natural choice.