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Adrianne Pieczonka as Sieglinde (lying down) and Frances Ginzer as Brünnhilde (far right) with the Valkyries in the COC production of Die Walküre, April 2004 (Photo: Michael Cooper).
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INDEPTH: CANADIAN OPERA
Pricey performances deliver bang for your buck
Jessica Wong, CBC News Online | May 7, 2004
It's been said that going to the opera is like going to a choral concert, a symphony performance, a theatre production, an art installation and a fashion show - all rolled into one. For opera audiences, average tickets prices may be equivalent to (or slightly more than) a large-scale musical or play. But for opera producers, the money involved in mounting any one production indeed seems like a combining of several different art forms.
"Any opera is expensive," said Jurgen Petrenko, producer of CBC-Radio's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera and Choral Concert.
In addition to the expense of the orchestra - which can range from 25 members for a small, baroque opera to a mammoth 110-member, Richard Strauss-sized pit - you need to pay performance rights and, depending on the production, usually half a dozen big soloists and a chorus, Petrenko said.
"It's the infrastructure you need too: you need a director and a choreographer and the various assistant conductors. And then stagehands and all the other stuff that goes on with putting on a show."
All the other stuff can add up to a lot, considering that it can take hundreds of people - from lead singers to wig-makers to set carpenters to music librarians - to produce just one opera.
"Only the smallest productions cost less than $1 million for us," said Phillip Boswell, the Canadian Opera Company's artistic administrator. "Generally we do at least six performances, and sometimes a few more, of each opera. To do it in any one season, most operas are in the million-dollar range, or a bit more."
"And that's not for a new production - that's for either a revival of one of our old productions or for renting a production from elsewhere," Boswell added. When mounting a brand new production - factoring in things like new costumes and scenery - a company can easily add $500,000 or more to that million.
When you consider that Canadian opera companies typically offer three to six productions each season, an opera lineup easily becomes a multimillion-dollar proposition - and that's not including the overhead expenses of things like salaries; building and administrative costs; and marketing, advertising and fundraising campaigns.
"I think it was [former general director] Rudolph Bing at the Met who said 40 or 50 years ago that every artistic decision is a financial decision. You factor it all in together at the same time," said Vancouver Opera's James Wright.
"General directors like [the COC's] Richard Bradshaw or me or Bob McPhee in Calgary or the people at the Met don't make a decision independent of the financial ramifications of that decision. What you try to do is come up with a package - not only of one show, but of the season - that hangs together artistically and makes fiscal sense."
As with many art forms, maintaining both an artistic vision and balanced books is difficult, but even with higher single ticket prices than a movie or a play, an opera company's box office doesn't often make much of a dent in its costs. Even if a production sells out the house, many companies are lucky if the box office receipts make up 50 per cent of the opera's total cost. To make up the difference, Canadian companies turn to several sources: the government, corporations and private donors.
"The Canadian system is much more like the American," which relies heavily on corporations and wealthy individuals, Petrenko said. "But there isn't the tradition of public philanthropy here because we've always had the government take care of everything."
That reliance on the state, however, has never mirrored the substantial subsidies European opera houses receive from their respective governments. And with decreasing government funding, opera companies are struggling, Petrenko said, because "there aren't huge corporations that are used to shelling out bucks like that" for the arts.
"If you look in the States, the libraries were built by the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefellers," he said. "All these sort of robber barons from the 19th century would do these public works whereas here, the government would build the libraries. It's a slightly different tradition."
In the last few years, the Canadian Opera Company has been successful in attracting wider and younger audiences, who especially enjoyed operas directed by celebrated Canadian filmmakers François Girard and Atom Egoyan. A May 2004 release noted that the just-completed 2003-2004 season saw a nine-per-cent increase in attendance and a 24-per-cent increase in subscriptions over the previous season.
The recent increases, however, must scale a formidable mountain: a 1998 Statistics Canada study of Canadian participation in cultural activities found that only three per cent of Canadians aged 15 and over reported attending the opera at least once in the previous 12-month period. By comparison, 59 per cent of respondents reported going to the movies.
The COC will be able to control scheduling at the Four Seasons Centre and plans to increase the number of performances and productions each season (Rendering: AMD).
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Despite gloomy numbers like this, the Canadian Opera Company is optimistically looking towards the future in its new home, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. The downtown Toronto venue will be Canada's first true opera house, with acoustics and sightlines specifically attuned to opera performance. The total cost of the new house is estimated at $105 million and opening is scheduled for the fall of 2006.
Once it moves into the new house, the company intends to increase the number of performances it offers for each opera and, eventually, increase the number of productions featured each season, as it continues the uphill battle to build audiences and attract new donors to one of the country's most underappreciated art forms.
"Anytime we open the doors, it costs money," Boswell said, but the company wants to dispel the misconception that opera is not exciting or dramatic.
"Once you get people into opera that's done well, they love it," he said. "Once they've seen it, they want to come back for more."
The real test won't be for a number of years, said CBC Radio's Petrenko.
"Basically, when the new opera house opens, they'll sell out everything because everyone's going to want to go see what the new opera house is like," he said. "A couple of years after that, it'll probably get down to normal - whatever normal is going to be."
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