|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Articles
|
||
|
Articles |
New Life for Opera? Not this time.Dateline: 9th May, 2004You may not believe it, but I take no delight in having been right about the appeal of opera (see our article New Life for Opera of 18th April). The news that, just weeks after opening, the Savoy Opera experiment has failed can please no one except the most rabid anti-opera freaks. Stephen Waley-Cohen and Raymond Gubbay are no fools: obviously they have costed the whole scheme thoroughly and set up the accounts in such a way that they have been able to recognise the signs and so have decided - probably very wisely - not to throw more money at a venture which they clearly now feel has no chance of success. It was a brave try and would, in the long run, have been good for opera - opening it up to a wider audience and giving young up-and-coming singers a chance at roles they might otherwise have to wait years (if ever) for. But it was not to be. Now we must wait and see if the Travelex tickets at the Royal Opera House will - against expectation I have to say - attract a different audience. How do you make opera popular? There was, to be sure, a short time when the Three Tenors reached the charts and when, thanks to football, practically everyone in the country knew Nessun Dorma, but that is now past and the opera world failed to capitalise on it. In fact, one felt at the time that it was embarrassed by the idea of the man in the street being able to sing along - no matter how inaccurately and even tunelessly - to one of the great arias. In fact, a friend of mine, a regular performer in amateur operetta, once enjoyed the enthusiastic applause of the entire Saturday night lounge bar population in a local pub when he sang Nessun Dorma at the end of a rather heavy drinking evening. The whole bar fell silent as he sang and the appreciation and applause were genuine. But the moment has passed, and now opera is yet again regarded as the preserve of the rich and arrogant. One problem, of course, is that musically the opera which is known to the vast majority of people is stuck in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is as if the musical had never got beyond Ivor Novello or drama beyond Oscar Wilde. Yes, of course there is Britten, Harrison Birtwhistle, Philip Glass et al, but they are in many ways less accessible than Verdi, Puccini or even Mozart. The Savoy experiment has failed. If the opera world wishes to divest itself of its élitist image, then it is going to have to find a way of appealing to the young, and I'm afraid that £10 tickets for some performances at Covent Garden are not going to do that. Opera needs to catch them young and make the idea of opera sit easily alongside Robbie Williams and Radio 1. It's a major task, and one which will require enormous commitment and a considerable investment of money and energy. Does the opera world have the will to do it? I suspect that, at the moment, it doesn't, but unless it tackles the problem soon it will become increasingly difficult to justify the huge amounts of public subsidy which it needs to support itself. Articles Indices:
|
|
|
|