Giving and doubting: opera directors must choose their poison | Opera

OhPera’s powerful stories are not only played out on stage. The production machinery of a theater involves many people, from set builders to wig makers, choirs and orchestras, and even a lot of money. The theater company needs a lot of money: whether it’s from governments, companies that provide tax subsidies, or ordinary people whose goals are motivated by the love of the form, or not. The Royal Opera House named the hall after the American banker Alberto Vilar who pledged $10m to the company, before it was established. was convicted and imprisoned for fraud in 2010while the millions of the Sackler family supported many traditions in the US and the UK – but this source of wealth gave the world an opportunity. the opioid epidemic.

So feel sorry for the poor opera house manager, trying to deal with an insoluble problem: choose your donors, choose your poison. And pity especially Peter Gelb, who has been running the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the largest opera house in the world, for the last twenty years. Gelb is acutely facing the harsh economic reality that all opera houses, classical music organizations and orchestras face. Unlike many sectors of the economy, the services they provide have never been – and never will be – efficient. That’s what it’s known as Baumol tree diseasea term coined by economist William J Baumol in the 1960s. One of the examples he used to describe “disease” was a string quartet. It took four players in 1800 – and still, today, takes four players. How silly! It’s the same story, too cheap and too expensive for opera. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, one of the Met’s most recent productions, still needs a team of stage managers and orchestral players, still needs the same huge sets and actors as it did in 1865, all to fill the Met’s 4,000-seat auditorium.

Gelb and his board have been replacing the Met, reducing by a third in recent years. They have also been cutting jobs, cutting wages and cutting jobs. But none of that is enough to cover the shortfall the Met has to make up between its box office earnings – about $70m last year – and its own. annual operating budget of approximately $330m.

Enter the Saudis. After years of negotiations, in September Gelb announced a $200m advance from Saudi Arabia, whose terms included the removal of the Met from Riyadh’s Royal Diriyah Opera House for three weeks a year. Except what they announced last year wasn’t an agreement at all, but a “memorandum of understanding” that the Saudis have now withdrawn, citing the financial crisis of the war. “Great depression,” Gelb told the New York Timeswhich is putting it mildly. And yet this investment pales into insignificance when placed next to the amount of money the Saudis have already invested in sports, from tennis to soccer and golf (support whose future is also in doubt).

But would Gelb have been negotiating with the Saudis at all? Was he happy to owe the government to whom Women’sLGBTQ+ and human rights have not been historical or cultural, while there is no freedom of the press, the government that killed. Jamal Khashoggi and who killed the most people last year more than anything written (including a 17-year-old man when he committed his crime).

It is worth noting that Gelb has made the Met’s support for Ukraine very clear: he condemned the violence Before the live broadcast of Beethoven’s Fidelio last year: “At the Metropolitan Opera, in our fight for a civilized world, we are always committed to (Fidelio’s) principles of freedom from oppression,” he said. And Russian star soprano Anna Netrebko was not welcomed in New York.

It is easy to argue from the outside, and there are similar versions controversial political situationsUkraine and the Middle East wherever you go. Opera directors, like everyone else, have decisions to make, lines to draw and need to draw in the sand what constitutes ethical investment and cooperation, and what does not.

The argument that money, wherever it comes from, no matter how criminal or controversial, turns into a positive force when used in culture, is nonsense, as it is said on behalf of opera that the form of art is above politics. It is not; and of course without the political support for centuries from democratic, autocratic and fascist governments and authorities, there would have been no opera in the first place.

But running a theater today without spending money that is out of touch with the world’s corrupt financial markets, even national governments and their ideas, seems equally impossible. Like the victims on its steps, the world’s major theater companies are in the throes of endless crises, which are financial, political and moral.

This week, Tom has been listening to: Jordi Savall’s compositions for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Le Concert des Nations. The complete cycle of symphonies, released in 2022, is called the Beethoven Révolution, and it’s what you’re hearing: a musical journey based on exciting and revolutionary music. Hear the drums, trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon at the end of Friday, turn your speakers up to 11 and make the world shake with C great joy.