Paying for Opera
If there is any art form
that cannot pay its own way, it is opera. Since the early 18 th
century, when George Friedrich Handel struggled to keep a company going in
London, opera has been sustainable only with the help of subsidies--whether
from aristocrats, governments, or corporate benefactors. Even with tickets
priced up to $125 and higher at the best houses in the United States, box
office revenues make up only half the cost of the show. In cities such as
Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, tickets can cost twice as much and contribute an
even smaller share of operating budgets. I'll get to the question of why opera
costs so much in a minute. But for the moment, assume that the problem is
incorrigible. If you want to live in a society in which opera continues to
exist, you have to decide who should pay for it.
In
European countries, the instinctive reply is "the government." But even in
Italy, Germany, and Britain, countries with long histories of public subsidy
for culture, government support has recently drawn public fire. While opera is
the most needy of the fine arts, it is also the most elitist. In the United
States, according to a just-published survey of participation in the arts,
fewer than 4 percent of the public claims to have attended an opera in the last
year (and people probably exaggerate about this, just as they do when asked how
often they have sex). Around the world, opera is synonymous with snobbery. Its
reputation in England was not helped a couple of years ago when a Tory minister
described the homeless in London as "the sort of people you step on when you
come out of the opera." Since the audience is rich snobs, people say, let rich
snobs pay for it.
That's essentially the system we have here. Wealthy
individuals and corporations make up the gap between box office revenues and
operating expenses--amounting to $223 million in 1996 according to Opera
America, the Washington-based trade association. But the idea that Americans do
not publicly subsidize opera (or the other arts) is, in fact, erroneous. We do
support them, quite generously, not through the National Endowment for the Arts
but with a law that says contributions to charitable organizations are
tax-deductible. Studies say that a dollar contributed to opera costs the
government between 40 and 45 cents in foregone revenue. In other words, opera
benefits from the public purse to the tune of about $100 million a year--more
than the entire proposed 1999 budget of the NEA. (Why don't conservatives who
want to eliminate the NEA ever make the point that there is a multibillion
dollar arts subsidy embedded in the tax code? Click for the answer.) The $62
million privately donated to the Metropolitan Opera in New York last year cost
the government something like $25 million. This is less than the direct subsidy
of 99 billion lire ($60 million) the Italian government gives La Scala in Milan
or the 87 million deutsche mark ($52 million) that Germany gives the Berlin
Staatsoper, but is slightly more than the Royal Opera in London gets.
Opera
enthusiasts in this country constantly lament the lack of direct government
support for the arts. Europeans, on the other hand, faced with a new climate of
budgetary austerity (countries are having to trim their deficits to join the
European Monetary System) wonder how their cultural institutions can attract
the private money that seems to flow so freely in the United States. With opera
fans on each side of the ocean admiring the other's support system, we must
ask: Which method of subsidizing opera is preferable?
But first, back to the cost question. Why does
opera endemically require subsidies? The short answer is that while there's
only one audience, there are multiple performances all taking place at the same
time. An opera is a symphony concert, a choral recital, a play, a ballet, a
mural, and a fashion show all at once. The number of people who work to put on
one of these spectacles--building the set, brushing down the wigs, turning the
crank that lowers Don Giovanni down into hell--is incredible. It can take 700
people, all of whom eat two or three times what normal people eat. Then there
are the supernumeraries--the spear carriers, peasants, etc. What would opera do
without supernumeraries? What would all those supernumeraries do without
opera?
People
who work in the best American opera houses tend to be well paid, but not
ridiculously so. In her wonderfully gossipy new book about Cecilia Bartoli,
Cinderella & Company , Manuela Hoelterhoff digs out some
hard-to-come-by figures. Top stars at the Met get $14,000 a performance, for
between nine and 12 performances. If you factor in three weeks of unpaid
rehearsal, Placido Domingo gets less for singing at the Met than Cokie Roberts
gets for speaking to the National Association of Manufacturers. At $500,000 a
year, Met General Manager Joseph Volpe is well paid, but not absurdly so, for
someone who runs a $150 million-a-year business and has to deal with
malingering divas instead of deferential corporate vice presidents.
Those hoping to reduce costs run smack up against Baumol's
Law, named for the economist William Baumol, who first elaborated it in a 1966
book titled Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma . Baumol's Law says
that in certain sectors, productivity cannot increase. It takes the same number
of musicians the same amount of time to perform The Barber of Seville
today as it did in 1816. (In fact, thanks to union contracts, it actually takes
more musicians--you pay an orchestra big enough for Wagner even when you
program Rossini.) In order for the wages of the skilled professionals who
perform an opera to keep pace with those in other sectors of the economy, where
productivity does improve, the cost must inflate. In short, there's no
alternative to subsidy.
Given this
state of affairs, whose system of subsidy is better? The European model has the
advantage of being forthright: The government declares that it wants more
Puccini than the market provides on its own, and it writes a check to pay for
it. Though this means that there is political oversight of artistic decisions
in theory, this structure yields considerable creative freedom in practice. But
because a third party is paying most of the bill, there's less pressure to
please the audience. This can encourage complacency, artistic mediocrity,
welfare dependency, and the rest--which may be why fans say the best American
operas companies are now of higher quality and consistency than the best
continental ones. Marc Scorca, the president of Opera America, says that the
more he learns about the European system, the less envious of it he is.
American opera companies can't sustain the mostly empty houses Scorca says he
witnessed on a recent trip to Germany. And the kind of catastrophic financial
mismanagement that has resulted in the British Royal Opera closing down for the
coming season is less likely when managers have to raise the money
themselves.
In the United States, pleasing the audience is
doubly important--not just because the box office take contributes a higher
percentage of overall revenues but also because the subscribers are
contributors, too. This incentive system keeps opera companies lean and
hungry--and American opera houses filled near capacity. The need to win private
support may encourage a higher degree of artistic conservatism--too many
performances of crowd pleasers like Tosca instead of works by
20 th century composers--and an overreliance on big-name superstars.
But it has the advantage of seeming fairer to culturephobes. The same
government benefit--a tax deduction for all charitable contributions--flows to
supporters of the Houston Opera and supporters of the Christian Coalition, in
proportion to their generosity and enthusiasm. Society gets more music than the
free market would provide, and more churches.
On
balance, I think our system of paying for opera is more rational. But then, as
reading Hoelterhoff's book will remind you, the words "opera" and "rational"
seldom belong in the same sentence.
If you missed the link
on why conservatives who want to eliminate the NEA don't make the point that
there is a multibillion dollar arts subsidy embedded in the tax code, click
.
