If opera is dying a slow, painful death, as many seem to think it is, recent events aren’t helping the matter. In a piece for the New Yorker, music critic Alex Ross details the “ugly controversy” provoked by the British press involving Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught. Performing the role of Octavian in a Glyndebourne Opera production of “Der Rosenkavalier,” Erraught was singled out in reviews, according to Ross, as being “stocky,” “dumpy of stature,” and, most ridiculously, a “chubby bundle of puppy-fat.”
If you’re trying to halt irrelevancy, a fat-shaming campaign is not how you go about it. Ross, while mapping out the complex roles women have played in the classical world since the mid-17th century, also fairly notes that sexism is prevalent in all strains of popular culture, and to place an inordinate amount of emphasis on opera, when gender inequality in that discipline is not much different from that of Hollywood, is to miss the point.
He’s correct, of course, but what he fails to admit is that the classical world is already extremely fragile, lacking the firm institutional support of the pop music and film industries. In October 2013, the New York City Opera closed its doors after 70 years of operation, and just this past weekend, according to a report from the BBC, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Peter Gelb, is quoted as proposing pay cuts to amend funding issues, an idea that is at odds with the players’ union. If the company doesn’t cut costs, according to Gelb, it will “face a bankruptcy situation in two or three years.”
Peter Gelb, pictured here, overseeing production at the MET Opera / Courtesy of Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Losing the Metropolitan Opera would be a major blow to the classical world, as large and obvious a signal of the end as there could be. But based on Gelb’s quotes, the management is going about it the wrong way. Cutting labor costs (Gelb proposed changing work rules for the orchestra and chorus) will alienate the core of the company — without the people on stage and in the pit, there will be no Met. This strategy is especially irksome when, in the same breath, Gelb defends spending $169,000 on an elaborate poppy-field set for the recent production of “Prince Igor.” Fighting the union over worker costs while amping up production budgets for shows that are not making money is a simplistic and ultimately fatal way to solve the problems of the Metropolitan Opera.
And what are those problems, exactly? Well, for one, the audience for opera is literally dying and a new audience is not replacing them. While the Met is making a few smart moves toward attracting a younger crowd — such as the production of Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” last year — those in charge fundamentally lack the understanding of what a young audience wants. If people want spectacle they will go to the movies; they don’t need to see it on the stage. The Met needs to offer something to people that they can’t get anywhere else. And then, they need to let young people know what they’re offering and that Lincoln Center isn’t a giant mausoleum.
“Children are brought up to be tech wizards and to have the attention spans of mice,” Gelb told the BBC. “How do you educate new audiences to like opera, which takes three or four hours and is in foreign languages?” Let me offer a suggestion Mr. Gelb. The first step in educating a new audience is to not insult them.
