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History just keeps on repeating itself…

In early October, the famous sails of the Sydney Opera House were lit up by a huge advert for the Everest horse race. Protestors soon gathered, aghast at what they saw as a scandalous misuse of a cultural landmark, while Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore, called it ‘blatant commercialisation… for an industry notorious for damaging gambling.’ Possibly, though it’s not the first time classical music and gambling have enjoyed or endured each other’s company…

Back in the early 19th century, many Italian opera houses doubled up as casinos, feeding the profits made from their gambling clientele back into increasingly opulent performances – when employed as musical director at the Teatro di San Carlo and Teatro del Fondo in Naples, the savvy young Rossini made it part of his contract that he would receive a share of said profits for himself. Gambling has also made the occasional appearance on stage at the opera house in the likes of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and, of course, Prokofiev’s The Gambler. Elgar famously enjoyed a regular dabble on the horses, though composers who had a less happy relationship with gambling included Paganini, who ran up enormous debts in the process, Beethoven, who was driven to despair by his nephew’s profligacy, and Peter Maxwell Davies, who, to his horror in 2009, discovered that his trusted manager had been helping himself to his royalties to fund a badly out-of-control online betting problem.