Extreme Opera: Charm City Edition
You may have seen this item in the news last week. The Baltimore Opera Company is in Chapter 11. This is an unequivocally sad development: There will be no Barber of Seville or Porgy and Bess in Charm City this season. The house that Rosa Ponselle built in James Morris’ backyard is facing foreclosure. As an opera fan and ex-would-be singer, I’m very disappointed.
As a composer, however, I have to admit that I get a tiny jolt of schadenfreude every time a major symphony orchestra or opera company enters dire straits. This is completely irrational: It’s not like the Baltimore Opera Company would be in better financial shape if it had mounted productions of Intolleranza and Shadowtime instead of Aida and Norma. (At least, we have no evidence that it would be.) To imagine that bankruptcy is the Baltimore Opera Company’s punishment for conservative programming would require an opera-sized suspension of disbelief. Besides, they presented Dead Man Walking not too long ago; perhaps they sensed that the time was right to take a “risk” by programming a recently written work. Whether they should instead have gone all in, so to speak, on something more unusual is neither here nor there.
And clearly they felt they had other irons in the promotional fire. The company’s website offers a deal called “Extreme Opera” aimed at 18- to 25-year-old audiences; a quick scan of the accompanying blurb will say more about their demographic targeting strategy than I could ever hope to:
Yes, opera is extreme art. Opera, the original multi-media art form, features symphonic orchestras, ballets, huge choruses, elaborate productions, singers with big egos, big chests and even bigger voices and some of the most extraordinary stories this side of Reality TV. Opera is hot. Come see why.”
Given the exhortation’s cultural tone-deafness, its affected, ill-fitting X Games attitude of the sort that the Simpsons were laughing at ten years ago, and its thinly veiled come-on to the age bracket’s perennially bankable libido (big chests?!), it’s a wonder the marketing genius who penned this drivel used only one “t” at the end of the word “hot.”
Again, it would be unfair to suggest that the Baltimore Opera Company’s troubles have only one root cause and presumptuous to Monday-morning quarterback its downfall. However, I think it’s fair to say that the consumers opera companies need to attract in order to attain long-term solvency—i.e., young ones—have highly evolved authenticity sensors. They know when you’re slathering lipstick on a pig, as it were, and although they could probably learn to love the pig (an animal that, according to Winston Churchill, treats us as its equal) for its own merits, the idea that someone would tart it up and advertise it to them under dubious pretenses is nothing short of offensive. Grand opera is a wonderful art form; although the lifeworld of the 21st century differs greatly from that of the 19th in ways that only contemporary art can address, much value remains in those Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini rep chestnuts. They offer many things—insight, invention, passion, perversion—and to throw these charms under the bus in favor of “hot” is desperate at best and insulting at worst. Let’s hope that when the Baltimore Opera Company recovers from its current slump, it and its peer organizations are moved to take a hard look, not just at what they’re selling, but also at why and how they’re selling it.