Nor has it been a particularly good week for anyone who cares about the arts, especially music. The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra lost its conductor, who had taken the orchestra to Europe in his first season, and where they were received with raves. Carnegie Hall shut down, due to a strike by stagehands, one of whom makes more than $140,000. Lastly—and this one really hurts— New York City Opera closed down. No—not temporarily, for good.
I lived only briefly in New York City—perhaps two months—and I don’t recall ever going to City Opera. But I knew the story, here told in Slate magazine:
Many of my friends were culture vultures, and culture, high culture, nosebleed high, was being made here. … The Metropolitan Opera, across Lincoln Center's plaza, was stupid. It was stodgy. It was fat, old people with fat, old money. At the New York State Theater you saw hot guys in full leather gabbing about Bev's Violetta in La traviata, or Samuel Ramey's naked chest in Boito's Mefistofeles. You met your friends there at intermission, sometimes a dozen of them. There were no cellphones, so you talked to people. Opera was high art that sometimes dickered with the dirt, but it had to remain high. It was where kings and the common people mixed, under the eyes of Phoebus Apollo, god of light and music.
It was also where young singers got their break; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:
During its nearly 70 year history, the NYCO has helped launch the careers of many great opera singers including Beverly Sills, Sherrill Milnes, Plácido Domingo, Maralin Niska, Carol Vaness, José Carreras, Shirley Verrett, Tatiana Troyanos, Jerry Hadley, Catherine Malfitano, Samuel Ramey, and Gianna Rolandi. Sills later served as the company's director from 1979–1989.[4] More recent acclaimed American singers who have called NYCO home include David Daniels, Mark Delavan, Mary Dunleavy, Lauren Flanigan, Elizabeth Futral, Bejun Mehta, Robert Brubaker and Carl Tanner.
It was also a company that took risks. Let the Met put on as many La Bohemes as they needed to make rich bored businessmen remember their first loves at Yale—City Opera caused talk and suspicion, championed new and American works, wasn’t afraid to get scrappy. In 1991, in the very worst of the plague years, how did Violetta die in La traviata? How else—of AIDS, of course.
Or consider the last opera that City Opera put on—typically, it was a new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage, a British composer about Anna Nicole Smith. Take a look—it’s about as far away from traditional opera as you can get….
It was always an opera house that was just getting by—but it was also an opera house for people who were just getting by. Which meant that a guy who was working in a record store, and living in a cockroach-infested studio apartment as he dreamed of making it on Broadway or writing the great American novel could go and watch stuff like this. (Warning, it starts off boring, but wow—does it heat up!)
OK—time to come clean: opera is an art form that, like ballet, inherently appeals to gay men. Is it the theatricality, or the artificiality, or the long and arcane history? Who knows, but if you hear two men arguing about who was better, Callas or Tebaldi—you can be sure. There’s probably a boa along with the jeans in their closet.
So what happened? That old devil—mismanagement. The old City Opera was in City Center. Then they moved to Lincoln Center, which was too expensive, and didn’t feel right. The Met—after all—was 60 feet away. And then the management decided they wouldn’t have a home, but use varying stages around the city.
It didn’t seem to work. As well, the opera had run deficits for years, as their new manager, George Steel, eventually realized. And then, they needed to raise 7 million bucks, and only got to one or two million, improbably through a Kickstarter campaign.
“Vienna spends more on its opera house than the US does on ALL of its arts funding,” went a line that was often repeated forty years ago when I was in high school. If it wasn’t literally true, it was metaphorically true. And when we do spend on the arts, we want to get something back, to make it pay. Mozart is good for the brain—all right, we’ll plunk down 18 bucks for a Mozart CD to play to baby.
But I think other cultures do it better, and smarter. I think of a story that—I believe—Frances Mayes wrote about. It was of an American soldier just after World War II had concluded. He thought he really should go to the opera, just to experience a taste of Italy before he returned home. He had, after all, spent the war seeing death, torture, carnage, deprivation, ruins, bombed-out buildings and shell-shocked, homeless civilians walking like zombies through the devastated cities. So he went to the opera…
…and had never seen anything so beautiful, or heard anything so magical. At the end of three hours of magic, he sat in his chair and wept.
And the Italians?
They quietly walked past him, each one of them stopping to place a hand gently on top of the young man’s head.
City Opera, ritorna, ritorna!
Cara sposa, amante cara,
Dove sei?
Deh! Ritorna a' pianti miei!
Del vostro Erebo sull'ara,
Colla face dello sdegno
Io vi sfido, o spiriti rei
Beloved spouse, dearest heart,
Where art thou?
Woe! Return to him who weeps!
O guilty spirits from thy Erebus beneath the furrows,
My face one of complete contempt,
I defy thee!
