Opera stars are like footballers – you get what you pay for
If opera is to be remodelled post Covid, you can’t escape the expense, says
Could the coronavirus crisis be “a chance for the opera ecology to remodel itself into something that’s more cost-effective and fleet of foot, transportable to more corners of the country and divested of some of its image problems”?
That’s the view of Mike Volpe, a no-nonsense fellow who stepped down this summer, after a quarter of a century in the job, as general director of Opera Holland Park – a summer festival in a canopied pavilion that he nurtured from nothing (latterly in partnership with James Clutton) into a season of full-scale productions, mounted to a high standard at relatively low cost and serving a devotedly loyal public.
There’s no dress code, the atmosphere is buzzy but informal and the seat prices peak at £80. In other words, Opera Holland Park has succeeded, albeit on a smaller scale, precisely where English National Opera has been failing. How did they do it?
Sponsored at arm’s length by asset managers Investec and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea rather than the nosy-parker Arts Council, they listened to their audiences, created a pleasant working environment, maintained excellent relations with the press and balanced the repertory between established favourites and novelties. They certainly had their flops, but they had plenty of triumphs too: and even when the show was rotten, Opera Holland Park was always lovable.
So Volpe has a lot of experience – and in his characteristically upfront fashion, he has drawn on it to deliver a farewell broadside, published last week in The Sunday Times.
His aim is “to wean the industry off the need for ever larger cash injections and a razor-edge existence”. He is certainly spot on in noting that a tendency to “grandiosity” is what makes opera so vulnerable.
It is the most expensive and inflexible of the performing arts – at least in terms of presenting the mainstream Italian, German, French and Russian repertory – and it suffers in addition from an apparently indelible association with privilege and pretension.
He is also right to sound the alarm. Finances on the “razor edge” may fall into insolvency if audiences (many of them elderly) are slow to return next year when the coronavirus crisis abates.
It isn’t even beyond imagining that opera will come to be regarded as hopelessly “unwoke”, and without the life support of those “ever larger cash injections”, it could just pass out of fashion and wither. But that’s not Volpe’s view. He sees no reason why demand for opera shouldn’t continue to thrive; he only proposes that costs should and can be slashed.
It’s certainly true that in some quarters there is still shocking waste and extravagance in the making of sets and costumes (wigs in particular are fabulously expensive).
Volpe believes that “a really great designer or director will respond to a slim budget with exciting creativity”. Well, yes – except that there aren’t many “really great” designers or directors around, and sometimes, as in the case of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata at Covent Garden or Zeffirelli’s La Bohème at the Met, lavish spectacle can prove a solid investment.
On the th other hand, the pointless catwalk excesses of ENO’s recent staging of Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus – given only five scantly attended performances – prove that Volpe’s strictures still have force.
The unaddressed hole in his argument is that opera is inevitably labour intensive. There are no tasks that can be delegated to robots or computers; you can’t do without chorus and orchestra of a certain size; and the integration of music and drama requires a degree of detailed rehearsal and complex preparation that doesn’t come cheap. Shoestring opera in a pub with piano and a few young hopefuls doing it for love has its place, but bless it, the result can only be a poor substitute, like a black-and-white photograph of an Old Master painting.
Where I disagree with Volpe is his attitude to singers. In brief, he doesn’t think that a Jonas Kaufmann or Anna Netrebko is worth paying extra for: “Is one singer really worth £50,000 per performance when another costs £5,000?” he asks incredulously.
Those figures are way off, incidentally. Top stars receive a maximum of £12,000 per performance in major opera houses, and most others receive a good deal less than £5,000; these rates have declined in real terms over the past 30 years, as withdrawal of government subsidy and changes to the recording industry have also reduced opera singers’ earning power.
Under Volpe, Opera Holland Park had a great record for bringing on outstandingly promising young singers such as Natalya Romaniw and Nicky Spence, but I doubt whether they have a tenth of the box office pull of Kaufmann or Netrebko (which is not to deny that the latter have their off-nights).
And just as in sport, a great voice takes opera to another level: we can all kick a football around, but not like Lionel Messi does. High fees only reflect commercial value: that’s the truth of capitalism. Volpe would have been on firmer ground if he’d swiped at greedy incompetent agents who do nothing for their 20 per cent commission and intractable unions insistent on obstructive regulations.
Opera, says Volpe, has always tended to move in a “bigger, grander, more mind-bending” direction. It can go thrillingly naked and intimate too, of course, but in relation to the standard repertory, I think Volpe’s view is correct, and that sense of something exceptional and extreme, in both its aural and visual dimensions, is essential to opera’s unique impact.
Volpe seems ambivalent about this – he admits that the grandiosity can be “overwhelming”, but he wants “to spread the money more evenly throughout the industry”. That’s a noble goal, of course, but there’s a danger here: the primary enemy of opera isn’t that association with privilege or pretension or fat ladies or foreign languages, but the half-baked and the second-rate, which leaves it seeming merely ludicrous. And that’s a risk you run if you take money away from the top and give it to the bottom.
Rupert Christiansen
The hole in his argument is that opera is inevitably labour intensive