Opera Australia’s diamond jubilee doesn’t erase funding challenges

Opera Australia celebrates its diamond jubilee as it faces crucial questions on funding, repertoire and audiences.

Opera Australia’s Carmen is being performed at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

The national opera company established 60 years ago was a Mozartean touring party, if you can imagine a road trip with characters such as Don Giovanni, Figaro, Don Alfonso and Papageno. The company was set up under the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and, ­because 1956 was the Mozart bicentenary, it presented four operas by the composer. The tour began in Adelaide and involved 169 performances overall, travelling to Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.

A show reel through the decades would ­include the company’s opening performance at the Sydney Opera House in 1973 with Proko­fiev’s War and Peace (and a possum that ran across the stage). There was the long, glorious reign of Joan Sutherland through the 1970s and 80s; Baz Luhrmann’s 1990 triumph with La Boheme; Simone Young’s homecoming in 2001; Lyndon Terracini’s spectacular operas on a floating stage on Sydney Harbour.

But the company known today as Opera Australia is unrecognisable from the one that started 60 years ago. A small touring ensemble has morphed into an entertainment hybrid. Its business is no longer strictly opera. This winter, it will do Cosi fan tutte, then flick the switch to My Fair Lady. Not confined to the opera theatre, the company also performs on the beach, in remote Aboriginal communities and on the big and small screen.

If Mozart were around he would be thrilled to see that opera could be a popular entertainment as well as an art form of refinement. And we would probably puzzle, as so many have, about what it meant to be an opera company in the 21st century.

Tomorrow evening OA will celebrate its diamond jubilee with a gala concert at the Joan Sutherland Theatre. Young will return to the company for the first time since her eviction in 2003, and popular singers — from rising star soprano ­Nicole Car to newly Australian tenor Diego Torre — will show the company has the goods in the vocal department. Holders of a $1000-a-head ticket will follow the concert with dinner at the Ivy Ballroom.

The festivities are happening as OA awaits the recommendations of a ­national opera review, commissioned by the federal government and headed by former OA board member Helen Nugent.

The review panel already has produced a forensically ­detailed discussion paper examining the finances, audience and repertoire of four federally funded ­companies.

Reading it gives an insight into an incredibly complex business. Opera companies are dealing with a sluggish economy, rising costs, disappearing subscribers and a market that ­increasingly doesn’t care. People ask why the lion’s share of performing arts subsidy — $25 million a year, $20m from the federal government — goes to OA and a so-called elitist art form.

The story is similar at opera houses worldwide. But rather than crumple under pressure or retreat behind the curtain, OA has transformed its business. Since Terracini arrived as artistic director in 2009, turnover has jumped from just under $70m to more than $100m (dropping back to $95m last year). He has not only invested in prestige productions such as the Melbourne Ring cycle but reached into the entertainment market by touring classic Broadway shows and mounting operas on the Sydney Harbour stage.

OA is certainly among the world’s busiest opera companies, ranked No 3 by classical music website Bachtrack. If all of its various activities are included — musicals, schools and regional performances — OA could be the busiest of all, giving an astonishing 781 performances last year.

A fly-through of the company gives a sense of its enormous productivity. In the wardrobe department at the Surry Hills Opera Centre, women are cutting and hand-stitching costumes for Cosi fan tutte and The Love for Three Oranges. Wig­makers painstakingly are threading strands of hair, each wig the product of 40 hours’ labour. At the Opera House, makeup artists are completing the transformation of singers into the larger-than-life characters they portray on the stage.

A decade ago, subscribers would begin their winter of opera-going with the ­anticipation of a varied and stimulating repertoire. The 2006 season had everything from the baroque (Handel’s Julius Caesar) to a new Australian work (Richard Mills’s Batavia), via Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan and Janacek: in all, eight operas in a run through to November.

This year, half as many operas are on offer: Carmen; a revival of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges; the completion of director David McVicar’s Mozart trilogy with Cosi fan tutte; and Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, featuring Torre and Italian soprano Barbara Frittoli.

In Melbourne the shortfall is even more acute. In November OA again will stage its four-part Ring cycle, boosting the count of individual operas to seven. But last year Melbourne saw only five operas from the company. They included Elijah Moshinsky’s grand staging of Don Carlos and McVicar’s Marriage of Figaro: terrific artistic achievements. But Terracini has not come good on his promise of big German opera in the non-Ring years.

The repertoire has narrowed. Baroque masterworks by Handel, 20th-century dramas by Britten and Janacek, and contemporary American operas were, until recently, a feature of OA programming. The most popular operas — The Magic Flute, La Boheme and Madama Butterfly — appear in high rotation, while contemporary Australian opera has been more or less banished from subscription seasons. The last to be seen on OA’s main stage was Brett Dean’s Bliss in 2010, commissioned by Young in 1999.

Instead, Terracini has outsourced contemporary opera to other platforms, quite successfully. The four-part made-for-TV “soap opera” The Divorce, by Elena Kats-Chernin and librettist Joanna Murray-Smith, attracted 1.1 million viewers on the ABC in December. The Rabbits, featuring Kate Miller-Heidke, was a hit in festival programs. Terracini also is restaging Alan John and Dennis Watkins’s 1995 opera The Eighth Wonder (now called Sydney Opera House — The Opera) on the Opera House forecourt in October. But Terracini, a baritone who cham­pioned contemporary music when he was a singer, these days regards contemporary opera as poison to a main-stage program.

There’s also the inescapable fact audiences for main-stage opera have collapsed. Attendances in Sydney and Melbourne have fallen by more than 100,000 in the past decade. In Melbourne, houses have been so poor that OA downsized its State Theatre residency to just 33 performances last year. Sydney recorded an increase of almost 12,000 tickets last year but the overall trend is down. Terracini says the company has cut back its Sydney season because the “audience wasn’t there”, a decline hastened by the global financial crisis and rapidly changing demographics in the city.

But the opera review suggests another reason for the decline: audiences have lost interest because fewer operas are on offer. Or, to put it another way, OA’s attempt to attract new­comers with popular works has alienated ­experienced opera-goers.

“I’ve heard all of these opinions,” Terracini says over lunch in the Opera House Green Room. “The only reason we had to find a solution to the winter season is because the audience wasn’t there and ticket sales had declined dramatically. We had to find a solution or face being a part-time company. Once you start that, that’s the end of the line.”

Another aspect of OA’s response to cost pressures is especially galling to opera’s true ­believers: the replacement of half the winter season with musical theatre. Since the terrific 2012 production of South Pacific, each year OA has staged a musical with commercial producer John Frost and taken the show on a ­national tour. Terracini says classic Broadway has a place in the repertoire of modern opera houses, much as Gilbert and Sullivan did in the past.

These ventures are now thoroughly embedded in OA’s business. Half the company’s box office last year, almost $25m, was from commercial activities including the musical Anything Goes, Aida on Sydney Harbour and concerts. These ventures, and a reduction in costs, helped OA reach an operational surplus last year of $1.4m.

Terracini says OA is filling a gap in the market by presenting musicals that wouldn’t be seen otherwise — though he acknowledges that commercial producers recently have done classic fare such as The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof. “We are doing pieces that we ­believe have integrity and should be part of the operatic canon,” he says.

A point raised by the opera review is that OA, as a subsidised company ostensibly in the opera business, is competing with commercial producers in the musical-theatre market. The argument is similar to that made by commercial media companies about the ABC’s advance into 24-hour news and digital platforms. Terracini says “not a cent” of OA’s contribution to the musicals is public money.

There’s also the nature of musicals themselves: they are related to opera but they are not opera. Musicals are based on songs, are amplified and call for performers who can sing, dance and act. An opera is a more fully integrated piece of music, performed with orchestra and relying on singers with the artistry and lungs for vocal projection.

Opera singers have been engaged for the musical seasons — Teddy Tahu Rhodes is an audience favourite — but a side effect of OA’s reliance on musicals has been the displacement of opera singers. This, and OA’s ­increasing engagement of foreign artists — more than 30 this year, according to one estimate — has demoralised the local singing profession.

More challenging times are ahead for OA. Next year, the Joan Sutherland Theatre will close for seven months while the Opera House does essential upgrades to ageing stage machinery. OA will give concerts and use alternative venues such as the Capitol Theatre. But the closure is likely to harm ticket revenue, and so far OA’s bid for compensation from the NSW government has fallen on deaf ears.

There’s also the outcome of the opera review. The review panel has yet to make its recommendations to government — a report is expected this year — but it surely must address the cost dynamics and government support for the four federally funded companies in Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and OA. Whether it leads to more funding remains to be seen — especially if there’s a change of government next weekend — but OA already has been making the case for an increase. In a ­response to the opera review circulated to supporters, chief executive Craig Hassall says the company requires a higher level of funding if it is to continue as a flagship company.

Indeed, management speaks of OA as the performing arts equivalent of the National Gallery: a kind of living repository of singing, music and stagecraft.

The question for stakeholders is not whether to invest in opera but how the $25m subsidy should be used. Do we want an opera-musicals hybrid with diverse sources of income, like a National Gallery with a restaurant and gift shop? Or should the company focus on opera, staging superlative productions with the most alluring singers, conductors, directors and ­designers? Should OA be an international company resident at the Sydney Opera House or a truly ­national outfit that presents main-stage productions in each capital city?

“We are struggling to be able to service Melbourne and Sydney on the level of funding that we get, let alone go anywhere else,” Terracini says. “It’s a question of whether or not the federal government wants to have a national opera company. And if they do, they need to fund it properly … If the sky was the limit, and if the ­national opera company was funded to the level it should be funded, we would have a season in every state.”

Guests at tomorrow’s anniversary gala will hear some of the great moments in all of opera, from the Anvil Chorus of Il Trovatore to Nessun Dorma from Turandot. These are stirring ­reminders of opera’s special ability to move the soul and excite the imagination — the reason we collectively invest in the art form.

Opera Australia’s 60th should be a celebration of past triumphs but also a call for serious thinking about the company we want it to be.

Opera Australia’s 60th Anniversary Gala Concert is tomorrow night, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House.