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FEATURE RE-Imagining OpERA IN AUSTRALIA To broaden its audience and justify its public funding, Opera Australia must change with the changing demography of the nation and relinquish its elitist nature, says Lyndon Terracini hen an artist understands how assumed no longer. We can blithely ignore this, to weave the text and the music and many practising artists in classical music are together to communicate every already doing so, or we can change. individual moment within a There is a small but passionate group musicalW and dramatic context to the audience, of people who believe only their opinions it is a wonderful and often awe-inspiring regarding the role of ‘their’ opera company are of experience. In fact there is nothing more importance. ‘All of Sydney is talking about it,’ one moving or thrilling than total music theatre. of them said to me recently, about a particular As the largest performing arts organisation production that, while artistically successful, in the country, Opera Australia is a leader in the sold only slightly more than 4,000 tickets. When cultural life of Australia; it not only delivers I pointed out that there were many more than the operatic art form to the widest possible 4,000 people living in Sydney, the response was, audience but also contextualises what the ‘Well, all of my friends have seen it.’ And that operatic form means to contemporary is the fundamental problem: everyone at my Australians. However, the current volatile ‘club’ has seen it and bugger those who aren’t cultural environment and artistic inertia have members of my club. diminished the importance of the making of This sense of patrician entitlement is not only art, particularly opera, and its connection with at odds with the Australian way of life but also the broader community. with contemporary Australia. Peter Brook, one of the greatest stage directors It is simply not acceptable in a democratic of his generation, in his extraordinary book in society for an arts organisation receiving $20 1973, The Empty Space, said, ‘Everything in opera million per year in funding from government must change.’ But while the rest of the world to play only to a few members of an elitist club. has changed dramatically, very little in opera In fact, any arts organisation receiving public has changed since the nineteenth century; in funds is obliged to justify that funding by many ways, the form has become captive to its including all members of society. Of course, own traditions and is peculiarly unaware of the a large audience does not necessarily equate with changes that have taken place around it. Lyndon Terracini is the Artistic Director of Elitist exclusivism Opera Australia. This in an edited version of Opera companies and orchestras worldwide the speech he delivered as the 2011 Speaker are closing at an alarming rate for a number of reasons (including the global financial crisis), but at the Annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address. the lack of change in the fundamental structure The entire text of the speech can be found of opera companies is an extremely important at the Opera Australia website contributing factor. We live in a very different (http://bit.ly/PGHAddress2012). time and the expectations of the past can be POLICY • Vol. 28 No. 1 • Autumn 2012 43 RE-IMAGINING OPERA IN AUSTRALIA quality, or vice versa for that matter, but it is divided by race and income: comfortable white unacceptable from a purely equitable standpoint. suburbs and economically depressed black We at Opera Australia do our utmost to play suburbs (the western suburbs in Sydney) on one to as many people as possible (about 500,000 side and the northern and eastern suburbs on people in 2012). Fewer than 70 of our 1,600 the other. Ignoring these changes will see our employees are employed in administration; audiences decline dramatically. and 337 of the 354 performances planned Our food culture has voraciously embraced across Australia in 2012 will be on the main the changing demography; some of the most stages in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Our innovative eating in the world can be found in programming is popular without being populist Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. It’s a hybrid so that opera can once again be regarded as of extraordinary eating experiences. So why a popular art form in the context of a new haven’t the creative artists in music and theatre Australia. After all, it is a very different Australia replicated the success of our creative culinary we are living in compared to a few decades ago. colleagues—why are we so protective of our meat and three veg that we refuse to consider Changing demography the extraordinary tastes of Asia. (To be fair, After World War II, European migrants brought a number of small to medium performing arts to Australia their cultural history. They had, organisations are creating work that is much if not a regular connection to it, an understanding more representative of contemporary Australia.) of opera, ballet, chamber music, and the symphonic repertoire. More recent migrants Artistic styles do not have that same cultural or artistic The style of our performances is a complex heritage, but they bring with them very different conversation. We expect English or American artistic languages in music, theatre, dance and acting styles on our stages, and when we see indeed food. a Korean singer acting like a European or an The dramatically changed ethnic demography American we complain about over or poor of Australia’s east coast cities is not reflected in our audiences. The faces on our stages and in Figure 1: La bohème our orchestra pits do not represent accurately the faces on our streets. In fact, the narrow ethnicity of the audiences in our theatres is alarming. The successful production of La bohème, which played to 45,000 people in Melbourne and Sydney, had an African-American soprano and a Korean tenor singing the leading roles; we also had more audience members from those ethnic communities than usual. But within our major performing arts organisations, we are in real danger of creating an elitist arts community and an audience that does not represent contemporary Australia. As the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Bruce Norris, rightly said: ‘The people who go to the theatre are just like me; white, middle class, educated, small L liberals, progressive.’ This, plus ‘older and conservative’ viewers, is our audience too. While there is nothing wrong with this, it is unacceptable to presume that we should only play to that audience. Norris sees a society Courtesy of Opera Australia (2011). ©Branco Gaica 44 POLICY • Vol. 28 No. 1 • Autumn 2012 RE-IMAGINING OPERA IN AUSTRALIA acting. For example, in our recent production trying to create an opera that Alban Berg may of La bohème, the Korean lead actor responded have written if he were still alive. emotionally (particularly at Mimi’s death) the way a Korean man would. People from Anglo/ If we are serious about playing European stock may not like that kind of acting style and emotional response, but to ethnically diverse and wider that is the Asian style ... and Asian audiences audiences, we need to consider the connect strongly to it because it reflects the performance styles we employ. way they are conditioned to respond. So if we are serious about playing to ethnically diverse and wider audiences, we need to consider the Brave programming performance styles we employ and the way we The premiere performance that gets rave communicate artistically with a changing and reviews and very few ticket sales never plays very different audience. Asian artists should again—primarily because it’s too expensive not be expected to perform like Europeans and its European aesthetic appeals only to a and communicate with their ethnic audience. small audience. Some people may call it ‘brave Of course an Asian artist will sometimes programming,’ but it’s not—it’s predictable and adopt a European performance style. I’m not lacks courage, innovation and creativity. Brave suggesting totalitarianism, only that while programming invites criticism, while making a we need to balance our performance styles to genuine connection to a real audience, who will continue to satisfy our existing clients, we also become passionate supporters of the art form. need to get over this cultural cringe of desperately For too long, we have alienated audiences and Figure 2: La bohème Courtesy of Opera Australia (2011). ©Branco Gaica POLICY • Vol. 28 No. 1 • Autumn 2012 45 RE-IMAGINING OPERA IN AUSTRALIA driven them away from new operatic experiences repertoire. Most have had only a handful of because the work itself has had little relevance to performances and disappeared forever because a potential audience ... and in some cases not they didn’t connect with the audience. So why wanted to find an audience at al. Too many new don’t audiences of any significant number want operas have been exercises in indulgence for to see new operatic work? academic composers, most of whom have no We need to be informed by the culture of experience or understanding of the theatre or the today in our own backyard and create new work operatic form. that reflects the culture of our time and place. Of course we must commission new work, After all, that’s what Mozart and Verdi did. but we should be a lot more rigorous in our selection processes. Composers shouldn’t have Economics of art to follow prescribed formulas, but we also need Creating such new work is expensive and it has to create opportunities for a kaleidoscope of been virtually impossible to find an audience composers fluent in genuinely contemporary for this new repertoire.

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