Double Standard

One of my favorite young composers, Nico Muhly, was writing last week about the marked differences between working with instrumentalists and singers (specifically, opera singers,) and his take made me think about the seemingly widening gulf between the concert hall and the opera house.

Muhly's post was mainly about rhythmic accuracy, or the lack of it, which he experiences very directly as a composer working both with orchestral-type musicians, who prize rhythm above nearly everything else, and rely on accurate counting to hold the ensemble together, and opera companies, where singers (who control the ensemble in the end) focus more on the overall shape of musical phrases than on the specific rhythms that have been written for them.

But orchestras and opera companies have been growing apart in less musically specific ways, too. I wrote a bit about this a couple of weeks back, after the Met's new production of Tosca was roundly panned by critics and audience alike. What I was thinking (but didn't write) at the time was that I really am in awe of the ability of major opera companies to turn literally everything that happens to them, good and bad, into a buzz-generating event that somehow makes opera yet more popular at the end of the day. Those downright lousy reviews of Tosca might have led a few people to stay away from the production, but I'd be willing to bet good money that the larger impact was to once again place the Met squarely in the center of New York's cultural life as the Most Important Classical Music Institution In The Greatest City In All The World.

To extend this idea, let's think about those wildly popular high-definition simulcasts the Met's been doing at movie theaters around the world for the last couple of years. From a PR perspective, this has been a dramatic and hugely successful extension of the company's brand - the movie theater shows, which are priced at more than double the rate for a normal movie ticket - sell out almost everywhere, and in some cities, you have to get your tickets days in advance of the Saturday afternoon showings.

But from a fiscal perspective, it's been written that the Met is actually losing untold millions on these simulcasts, and doesn't really have a plan for making them financially sustainable in the future. Now, imagine that this were a symphony orchestra doing this - beaming their concerts all over creation and charging $25 a head for people packed into a theater in Las Vegas or Paris to watch us play. Then imagine that the New York Times found out that said orchestra was going to run a multi-million dollar deficit this season because of the cost of production. Can you imagine what the reaction would be?

I can. The orchestra would be roundly blasted by everyone from critics to consultants to its own board members for behaving as if money grows on trees, the simulcasts would most certainly be canceled immediately, a feeble plea for funding to save them would go out to the usual corporations and foundations, and in all likelihood, would fall on deaf ears because there's a massive recession going on, donchaknow. And I can't really say that this wouldn't be a defensible reaction from all involved.

But because we're talking about the opera world, none of this seems to happen. Opera (at least grand opera presented by large companies) seems to get a near-total pass from the folks who are constantly harping on orchestras for being clueless, elitist organizations who pay their musicians and conductors too much and can't seem to make a budget sheet balance. Maybe it's that our vision of opera is so bound up with images of opulence and wretched excess that it somehow seems okay for opera companies to shoot for the stars even when it's dangerous from a bottom-line perspective.

I could go on for quite a while about the orchestra vs. opera double standard. (Just for instance, why is that when an opera company deigns to commission a new opera to squeeze in between their 187th and 188th production of Rossini, it's talked about breathlessly in the press for months, but orchestras which commission multiple new works every season are still regularly lambasted by composers and critics for a perceived lack of commitment to new music? Why was it okay for the musicians of a certain high-profile opera orchestra to flatly refuse this summer to redo their contract to save the organization some money in the worst fiscal crisis America's seen in 70 years, but orchestras around the country which did reopen their contracts and take substantial pay and benefit cuts are still portrayed as greedy and short-sighted for deigning to draw a salary at all?) And I'll admit that a lot of this comes down to basic jealousy on my part - I often think that it must be nice to work in a corner of the classical music world that isn't constantly being told how useless and stuffy and culturally irrelevant it is.

But my larger frustration is that I just don't see a way out of the current paradigm. Orchestras are treading water furiously right now just to stay afloat, and no one sees that changing for the better anytime soon. And if the public perception is that opera companies are supposed to spend gobs of money and orchestras are supposed to be frugal, well, spending a lot of money on some splashy new project probably isn't going to change anyone's mind.