My book report: Curtain coming down
Heidi Waleson, Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America, Henry Holt and Company, 2018
It is impossible to relate the full history of New York City Opera, the "People's Opera" founded in 1943, in less than three hundred pages, but Heidi Waleson does a fine job of outlining its scrappy origins, improbable rise to respectability and prominence, and final collapse as a victim of the 2008 financial panic. Perhaps because she is the long-time music critic of The Wall Street Journal, she is particularly impressive on the financial side -- production costs, union contracts, endowments, box office revenues, and the unending search for cash (the book's epigraph is "The only thing more expensive than opera is war"). NYCO filed bankruptcy in 2013, but is slowly coming back to life despite the lack of a permanent theater or full-time chorus and orchestra. Its favored business model seems to be people leaving it bequests in their wills.
City Opera's history mirrors that of the city around it. The initial audience was European immigrants, chiefly Italian and Jewish, who grew up with opera but could not afford the Met, together with American-born teachers, civil servants and office workers who probably heard the Met Saturday broadcasts and were intrigued with this exotic art form. These loyal subscribers allowed the company to survive and grow, and its musicians and singers to enter the middle class with decent (not luxurious) salaries, pension plans, and ultimately even health insurance. The company gained a national profile with the 1964 move to Lincoln Center (which carried with it the seeds of future calamity), but by the 1970s the original audience was declining with age. NYCO began to overreach itself, importing European directors accustomed to state subsidies and finding itself unable to hold on to bankable singers. (Beverly Sills grew up in the company and remained to the end of her singing career; people like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Tatiana Troyanos were quickly snapped up by the big house next door.) The question Waleson doesn't really address is, where has the audience gone?
Basically, there are two ways people come to opera: their parents take them, or they learn about it in school. My parents were not opera-goers; after television was invented, I don't think they even went to the movies. But I had music class from junior high school on, and in seventh grade I saw my first opera, Barbiere di Siviglia at the old Met on 39th Street. The Met used to do student matinees several times a year; it gave second-string casts and covers a chance to sing the major roles and put some money in the box office mid-week. More important, it gave a few thousand kids their first glimpse of this astonishing, maddening art form. Our music teacher, Miss Masui, played excerpts and talked about the plot and the conventions of aria and recitative, so we were somewhat prepared. I had had years of piano lessons by then, and I vaguely recall tuning in to the NBC Opera -- yes, they did opera in English with real singers like Leontyne Price -- so I was more primed for it than most; I think I still have the program somewhere. The next year we went to La Boheme, and the following year there was a dress rehearsal of Cosi fan tutte (Leontyne Price again!) in the new house at Lincoln Center. I was hooked. By the time I moved to New York and discovered the reasonably-priced City Opera, there was no turning back.
By then, in the 1970s, public education had begun its long retreat. The Cold War had seen it stuffed with money to prove we were superior to the Soviets in the arts as well as science after the big Sputnik scare, but the Nixon administration chose to give the states cash to spend as they saw fit instead of earmarked for education. Predictably, belts were tightened and the first things downgraded were "frills" like art and music. Miss Masui and her colleagues found themselves asked to cover entire school districts, or retired and were never replaced. Gradually all of public education sank to today's level, with dilapidated schools, underpaid teachers forced to buy their own supplies, bare-bones libraries, and students who understand how little they matter. The Met no longer gives student performances; the New York Philharmonic has abandoned its Young People's Concerts. It's been two generations since students were routinely exposed to music, except as the background to television commercials. (We're supposed to be impressed if they even learn to read.) So there were no riots in the streets when the City Opera went bust. Just another elitist entertainment for rich snobs, an ironic fate for the People's Opera. NBC Opera is long gone, though the network still presents something called "The Voice," where aspiring divas compete to give the best imitation of Whitney Houston.
There are some bright spots. Operas continue to be composed and produced. The Met preserved its radio broadcasts after Texaco bailed, sponsored now by an outfit that builds McMansions for hedge-fund managers. I have some issues with Peter Gelb, but his initiative of putting live HD broadcasts into movie theaters has been wildly successful, selling out all over the country; it has replaced the long-ago spring tours, which used to bring the Met to the heartland. The company's streaming service means I can binge-watch the Ring like Game of Thrones with less nudity. Opera has always been a protean art form, evolving from pseudo-Greek drama in the late Renaissance to aria-driven Baroque excess to Mozartean classicism and so on up to today's eclectic post-verismo. It works. When the first opera was performed in Florence, Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. By changing to fit needs and tastes, opera has outlasted blank-verse tragedy, madrigals and motets, oratorio, the classical symphony, and many other cultural artifacts. Its reach is wide enough for Elektra, Jerry Springer: The Opera, Sweeney Todd and The Who's Tommy. I closed Heidi Waleson's book with the sense that even New York City Opera will be back one day.
It is impossible to relate the full history of New York City Opera, the "People's Opera" founded in 1943, in less than three hundred pages, but Heidi Waleson does a fine job of outlining its scrappy origins, improbable rise to respectability and prominence, and final collapse as a victim of the 2008 financial panic. Perhaps because she is the long-time music critic of The Wall Street Journal, she is particularly impressive on the financial side -- production costs, union contracts, endowments, box office revenues, and the unending search for cash (the book's epigraph is "The only thing more expensive than opera is war"). NYCO filed bankruptcy in 2013, but is slowly coming back to life despite the lack of a permanent theater or full-time chorus and orchestra. Its favored business model seems to be people leaving it bequests in their wills.
City Opera's history mirrors that of the city around it. The initial audience was European immigrants, chiefly Italian and Jewish, who grew up with opera but could not afford the Met, together with American-born teachers, civil servants and office workers who probably heard the Met Saturday broadcasts and were intrigued with this exotic art form. These loyal subscribers allowed the company to survive and grow, and its musicians and singers to enter the middle class with decent (not luxurious) salaries, pension plans, and ultimately even health insurance. The company gained a national profile with the 1964 move to Lincoln Center (which carried with it the seeds of future calamity), but by the 1970s the original audience was declining with age. NYCO began to overreach itself, importing European directors accustomed to state subsidies and finding itself unable to hold on to bankable singers. (Beverly Sills grew up in the company and remained to the end of her singing career; people like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Tatiana Troyanos were quickly snapped up by the big house next door.) The question Waleson doesn't really address is, where has the audience gone?
Basically, there are two ways people come to opera: their parents take them, or they learn about it in school. My parents were not opera-goers; after television was invented, I don't think they even went to the movies. But I had music class from junior high school on, and in seventh grade I saw my first opera, Barbiere di Siviglia at the old Met on 39th Street. The Met used to do student matinees several times a year; it gave second-string casts and covers a chance to sing the major roles and put some money in the box office mid-week. More important, it gave a few thousand kids their first glimpse of this astonishing, maddening art form. Our music teacher, Miss Masui, played excerpts and talked about the plot and the conventions of aria and recitative, so we were somewhat prepared. I had had years of piano lessons by then, and I vaguely recall tuning in to the NBC Opera -- yes, they did opera in English with real singers like Leontyne Price -- so I was more primed for it than most; I think I still have the program somewhere. The next year we went to La Boheme, and the following year there was a dress rehearsal of Cosi fan tutte (Leontyne Price again!) in the new house at Lincoln Center. I was hooked. By the time I moved to New York and discovered the reasonably-priced City Opera, there was no turning back.
By then, in the 1970s, public education had begun its long retreat. The Cold War had seen it stuffed with money to prove we were superior to the Soviets in the arts as well as science after the big Sputnik scare, but the Nixon administration chose to give the states cash to spend as they saw fit instead of earmarked for education. Predictably, belts were tightened and the first things downgraded were "frills" like art and music. Miss Masui and her colleagues found themselves asked to cover entire school districts, or retired and were never replaced. Gradually all of public education sank to today's level, with dilapidated schools, underpaid teachers forced to buy their own supplies, bare-bones libraries, and students who understand how little they matter. The Met no longer gives student performances; the New York Philharmonic has abandoned its Young People's Concerts. It's been two generations since students were routinely exposed to music, except as the background to television commercials. (We're supposed to be impressed if they even learn to read.) So there were no riots in the streets when the City Opera went bust. Just another elitist entertainment for rich snobs, an ironic fate for the People's Opera. NBC Opera is long gone, though the network still presents something called "The Voice," where aspiring divas compete to give the best imitation of Whitney Houston.
There are some bright spots. Operas continue to be composed and produced. The Met preserved its radio broadcasts after Texaco bailed, sponsored now by an outfit that builds McMansions for hedge-fund managers. I have some issues with Peter Gelb, but his initiative of putting live HD broadcasts into movie theaters has been wildly successful, selling out all over the country; it has replaced the long-ago spring tours, which used to bring the Met to the heartland. The company's streaming service means I can binge-watch the Ring like Game of Thrones with less nudity. Opera has always been a protean art form, evolving from pseudo-Greek drama in the late Renaissance to aria-driven Baroque excess to Mozartean classicism and so on up to today's eclectic post-verismo. It works. When the first opera was performed in Florence, Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. By changing to fit needs and tastes, opera has outlasted blank-verse tragedy, madrigals and motets, oratorio, the classical symphony, and many other cultural artifacts. Its reach is wide enough for Elektra, Jerry Springer: The Opera, Sweeney Todd and The Who's Tommy. I closed Heidi Waleson's book with the sense that even New York City Opera will be back one day.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 11:16 AM
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