"If you know that you can get Roberto Alagna or Angela Gheorghiu or Bryn Terfel or Colin Davis, you find out when you can have their time and that goes into the diary, up to five years in advance. "There are certain artists we want a piece of," says Padmore. This is entirely unlike the small, domestic market of, say, British theatre. From the centre of the maze, she deals with another reality of opera: if you want the biggest stars, you have to compete in a huge international marketplace, vying with houses from Seattle to Milan. Her office lies deep in the honeycomb heart of the Royal Opera House, past windows giving out over rehearsal spaces large enough to take entire stage sets. Some of the glitziest and most expensive stars to grace the British stage are booked by Elaine Padmore, head of opera at Covent Garden. It's not like the theatre, where two-handers, or even one-person shows, are perfectly viable.Īnd then there are artists' fees. Even the very small-scale chamber works staged by Almeida Opera in London each summer are likely to have between two and 12 singers on stage, an orchestra of up to 13, and a conductor. The same house's key production this season, War and Peace, involves a staggering 58 named roles, an 80-strong chorus and 17 actors. Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, staged this summer by ENO, required 210 people on stage and in the pit. These make the largest theatre productions, even those with vast Shakespearean crowd scenes, look underpopulated. And the most popular repertoire - Verdi and Puccini, say - tends to be scored for big choruses. There will always be, in addition to the singers, an orchestra - numbering perhaps 80 players - and a conductor. For a start, there are the sheer numbers involved. In last year's revival of Katya Kabanova at the Royal Opera House, for instance, Trevor Nunn's otherwise intelligent production was marred by the appearance on stage of a horse and cart, which shouted pointless spending.īut discounting such extravagance, the simple fact remains: opera is inevitably an expensive artform. But since Glyndebourne receives no public subsidy, it can arguably do as it pleases.ĭo opera houses spend money like water? Sometimes, it's true, they present over-the-top spectacle for no very good reason. Glyndebourne provides the ultimate cliche of grand people dressed in ballgowns and quaffing champagne there you will pay between £10 (standing) and £137. A night out watching Chicago at the Adelphi Theatre, by comparison, will cost between £11 and £38.50. At ENO you can also buy a ticket from £3, while prices are capped at £52.50. You can go to the Royal Opera House for as little as £3, though top-price seats will set you back £155. As long as you can bear the possibility of restricted views, or at worst standing, you can usually see opera for less than it would cost you to go to the movies. We feel opera is unnaturally expensive to mount, and unnaturally expensive to go to.Īre ticket prices really astronomical? Well, not always. When Covent Garden threatened to collapse in the late 1990s, it seemed to confirm the suspicion that opera was run by a collection of dangerously disorganised decadents. Some opera houses live up to the image, too, with their dickie-bowed waiters and expensive champagne at the bar. It is regarded as a lavish entertainment for nobs, whisking public money away from the many to pander to the tastes of the few. It's hardly surprising, then, that opera makes people cross.
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