1% problems

Back to that 1 percent, and I'm not talking billionaires...

We need to stop valuing opera by celebrity singers, celebrity directors/conductors or shows that look like they're trying to be from the Met. Renee, Anna, Jonas, and Joyce and the other 'stars' who no one - NO ONE - outside of the opera world can name, don’t know how things have changed post Covid. The 1% are focused, rightly so, on their careers in the biggest houses. They don’t know what it’s like for most opera companies to scrape by and fight to exist in cities where people think opera is for the elite. Ticket sales for classical music aren't good, but the general pubic is still buying tickets - billions of dollars worth of tickets - for their local baseball, hockey and basketball teams.

Some Facts

60 years ago, opera ticket sales used to account for almost 60% of all revenue for opera companies in the United States. Now, for some it's around 16%, others 30% (if they're lucky). At last report, fewer than 3 million tickets were sold for opera, that's less than 1% of the US population. Yet according to Opera America, opera companies invest 1 billion dollars into the economy, most of it quite local. Although we're not back to pre-pandemic ticket sales, in the last few years sales have rebounded in some places more than 25%. Again, there isn't a national trend. Some local opera companies are doing really well, others are struggling to even meet tepid ticket sale goals. So it's a good news / bad news situation.

With the rise of many indie companies, and with so many new operas being produced in smaller venues, we need to stop thinking that only big opera should be of value.

Some hot takes

And here's a series of very hot takes on opera: We need to stop thinking that opera is somehow special. We need to stop the talk that opera is an elitist art form, or that it somehow takes singers who are super special god-like creatures. We need to stop worshipping celebrity opera, the Met as a career goal, and the people who teach, conduct and direct opera singers. If I see one more god damned video of a maestro (a word that needs to be eradicated from our vocabulary) waving his hands in a rehearsal of some deeply moving music with his eyes closed in ecstasy, but offering no context for those who don't know the opera, why he's in ecstasy, and especially who the freaking singers are (hello - singers have disappeared from so many season announcements and that's criminal...)

Okay - I'll stop. But it irks me to no end that we're putting our social media videos targeted to the operatic connoisseurs instead of a wider audience, a broader base. See my earlier blog discussing this, "The Cultural Extinction of Opera" here: https://coachcraft.ghost.io/the-cultural-extinction-of-opera/

More importantly, we need to stop thinking that the training is special.

By training, I mean both the academic arenas and the young artist programs.

Pretentiousness vs the Public

The pretentiousness is killing us. And to be very frank, the pretentiousness that is deeply rooted in classical music is even more deeply rooted in the academic arenas. We can no longer afford to be elitist and so we must stop talking about ourselves in that way. The most recent whine from a famous tenor (and I'm a fan btw) about not getting a phone call in the morning before he's due to work at the theatre asking how he's feeling comes to mind. My dad didn't get, or expect, phone calls every morning from the high school he taught at. What he did was just as important and special as an operatic tenor. One is just a lot rarer is all. But when the general public reads those kinds of posts, their eyes do roll and they get yet another verification that opera is not for them, it's for the elite. And it perpetuates the myth that opera singers are precious and fragile. All of us are precious and fragile. (But I have to agree with him about the need for an opera company's artistic administration to check in on their artists. That's just good business practice and perhaps our celebrity opera singers might shed light on why the skills of artistic administrators are not what they used to be.)

Along with the training, how about let's all decide to stop classifying operas into the weirdly 19th century Victorian species: grand opera, operetta, G&S, Singspiels, musicals. Again, a type of connoisseurship that reeks of elitism. So many websites describing their seasons as if they're talking only to opera goers 'in-the-know', instead of potential opera ticket buyers who might be curious. Do they need to know that "Magic Flute" is a Singspiel ?

We seem to think so. Here are a few recent examples of season announcements that include a "Magic Flute" production:

• UBC Opera (2025–2026 Season): In their 2025–2026 season brochure, UBC Opera announces Die Zauberflöte and explicitly describes it as a "Singspiel Opera in Two Acts".
• Vancouver Opera (2023-2024 Season): In announcing their season opener, Vancouver Opera described Die Zauberflöte by stating: "Originally staged in the 18th Century, Die Zauberflöte, is a singspiel, a form of opera that includes singing as well as spoken dialogue to tell its story".
• Metropolitan Opera (2024–2025 Season): The Met’s season materials for Die Zauberflöte describe the work by stating: "The story is told in a singspiel ("song-play") format characterized by separate musical numbers connected by dialogue and stage activity".
• English National Opera (ENO): In their educational materials announcing productions, they describe The Magic Flute by saying: "It's a Singspiel opera... a German language comic opera with singing and dialogue".
• Opera Atelier (2025/2026 Season): Announcing their "Season of Magic," Opera Atelier features The Magic Flute as a core production, highlighting its German "sing-play" tradition in associated announcements.
• Mooney on Theatre (Canadian Opera Company Announcement): A review of a Canadian Opera Company season announcement noted: "This is a two act Singspiel opera, meaning the musical numbers are strung together by spoken dialogue".

Somehow we need to explain to possible ticket buyers that it is not an opera, it is a Singspiel. Why? It almost seems like a compulsive need to explain something that needs no explanation. Why go out of our way to say they aren't real operas, that they have dialogue (clutching our pearls here), or that people need to know a German word to better educate themselves before buying a ticket? Are "Les Miserables" or "Sweeney Todd" marketed as "sort of opera/musicals"? Why the need to use a German word no one knows outside of us operatic nerds?

Making people feel stupid

This is just one example of how we put up barriers to the general public, especially to people curious about opera but who feel they don't know enough to really understand it. I can not tell you how many people over the years have confided in me their personal dark secret. It's usually said in hushed tones as a sort of confession: "I really don't know enough to appreciate opera."

So many of our ticket buyers feel stupid where opera is concerned. Let me correct that sentence: We've made people feel stupid for not being as educated and cultured as those of us who really know opera. We make our students feel stupid too. They feel quite fraudulent because they're studying an art form literally foreign to most of them.

What did I know about opera? Not much

I came from a deep background in classical music. As a piano prodigy, I was playing Beethoven concertos before my voice changed. I knew when Brahms lived, that he hung around the Schumanns, and that his piano pieces were - to my mind - superior to Liszt's because they weren't superficially created to wow. This was my opinion of Brahms when I was 13 years old in a small city in Iowa. I had the same sorts of opinions about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, and Prokofiev.

But did I know opera? Nope. Not at all. In fact, I saw a few at Opera Omaha during my school years. I remember being bussed in to see a matinee of "Die Fledermaus" and being mad that the pianist playing in the pit couldn't be seen. I saw a really boring "Rigoletto" (where I couldn't tell if it was sung in English or Italian) in high school. It wasn't until I got to Simpson College and heard opera first-hand in a studio and freaked out about the power of the human voice. Her name was Anne Larson, she was on faculty and singing the Witch in "Hansel and Gretel". All of the operas at Simpson and at DMMO back then were sung in English translations. I've blogged earlier about how incredible the training was because we did SO MUCH OPERA and we did it in English. We were trained how to create characters and act in opera in our vernacular and it was a spectacular kind of training. We learned that opera was about the power of the human voice telling stories. It wasn't about style, or when to embellish, or worrying whether our choices were correct (or even corresponded to the details of the score). It was about getting the voices out and over an orchestra while on an operatic set telling a story we could connect to because it was in our own language.

Nowadays, one must do the operas in their original language or risk a horde of experts, critics, faculty, patrons, board members, and students telling you why that's such a terrible idea. How could we possibly listen to a "LaBoheme" and have a Mimi sing "Yes, I'm always called Mimi, but my name is Lucia." instead of "Si, mi chiamano Mimi, ma il nome Lucia."?! I mean it's laughable! How could we possibly listen to the great Italian music be corrupted by the English language? Instead we will read those words up above the stage with our eyes that, because the screen is so high, can no longer watch what's happening onstage. We lose the character choices, the acting. In comic operas, we literally lose the comedy - especially sight gags - because people are reading the opera instead of watching the opera.

Trust me, "Cosi fan tutte" and "The Marriage of Figaro" are WAY funnier and much more poignant in English for an English-speaking audience than in Italian where they are reading 900 slides in a power point presentation projected 2 stories about the heads of the singers.

Germany has known this for ages. So many of their companies (not the big ones, but the majority of them) present pieces in the vernacular. Dortmund just did "Grease" (the musical) with German dialogue and English texts for singing. Evelyn Lear's German debut as Michaela in "Carmen" was famously in German, unbeknownst to her because she showed up only knowing it in French. "Faust" in Germany was often sung in German with the title "Marguerite". They've done "West Side Story" in German for decades. Why is that okay with those audiences (and Germany performs more opera than any other country in the world) but to sing opera in English in the states is deemed, well, beneath us real artists?

Movie Opera

We are desperately seeking to validate ourselves as relevant artists and arts companies to an audience that DOES NOT CARE but does know that they'll feel a little dumb going to an opera (but at least they can wear a great dress). I think of Lauretta (Cher) in the movie "Moonstruck" who goes to the Met. She gets her hair done, puts on the best dress in almost any movie ever, and meets Nicholas Cage by the Met fountain to see a "La Boheme" production. Romantic, yes. Just like in "Pretty Woman", the opera is reflecting the story of the movie in many ways. But both female characters admit they "don't get it", while their more knowledgeable and handsome boyfriends mansplained why opera is so great.

So we sometimes win in the movies and tv where opera is concerned. But more often we lose. Opera is the music that is played in a dark, leather-lined interior study of a rich British serial killer. Lex Luthor listens to opera. All the great villians listen to opera. It's used by writers and directors to show that the person on screen is not just evil, but smart and evil. The minute a character is shown listening to opera, I know they're gonna turn out to be evil and probably will speak with a British accent. They are a character to watch out for as they might be bad, maybe even a sociopath. We've allowed our beautiful operas to be appropriated by cinematic villains, vampires, and other elitist sexy-but-I'm-a-genius-killer characters. Believe me, when someone is sitting with a glass of scotch or red wine listening to opera, they are planning world domination.

I don't think that's what we need to sell tickets.

But I do think that some of our students wonder if they are studying an art form that is moral, or has nice people in it and attending its performances. This evil opera connoisseur permeates the genre and sits deep in our subconscious because of decades of media sending out these stereotypes, including the 'it's not over till the fat lady sings' and the many images of well-fed Wagner sopranos with horned helmets, spears, and metal bras plastered all over marketing campaigns run by young marketing directors who don't know anything about opera, so they resort to the baseline stereotype.

What to do?

I think more companies should present comedies in English. I think we need to break marketing stereotypes sending messages to potential audiences that opera is about dressing in gowns or tuxes where they'll find helmeted sopranos screaming with spears in a foreign language and then dying tragically. Present operas that have positive female leads like Adina, Norina, Susanna, Despina, Pamina (hmmm... the soubrette roles...) Show people that opera is not just about coming to the theatre as a experience, it's an everyday thing.

We need to stop worrying about programming contemporary opera or musicals, using foreign phrases to educate the public, or using English translations of the titles instead of titles in foreign languages no one understands. Our audiences don't know the difference between "The Phantom of the Opera" or "La Fanciulla del West", but they'll buy a ticket to Phantom not knowing they are hearing tons of stolen musical phrases from Fanciulla. How about "The Lady of the West" sung in English anyone? It's set in California FFS, so why sing in Italian? Is the English language so horrid and angular that Puccini's gorgeous score won't still give the emotional wallop on the listener? No one - NO ONE - hears every word of an opera sung in Italian (or in any language for that matter.) The Mozart and Rossini ensembles where everyone is singing different texts at the same time make it impossible to understand their Italian. We read the projected titles and miss the funny stuff below onstage. Sing it in English and people will be okay.

But our precious singers, how would they cope being forced to sing in - clutching even more pearls - ENGLISH?! I'd tell them to get over it and learn the translation and be glad the company was trying to reach new audiences so the market might grow and they could be hired again and maybe for a bit of more money.

It's just pretentiousness. European languages and culture is superior to ours here in North America. That's what we teach in academia, at the conservatories, in young artist programs, and what we teach our opera audiences attending professional operas. And our singers, conductors, administrators, and boards push this pretentiousness on the business even though it's pushing people away from opera.

If we want opera to live, to grow, to nurture new audiences, we must - MUST - reach out to those who've never been to the opera. We must meet them where they are, not expect them to read a few sentences on a season announcement that will educate them, not expect them to see a foreign title with a cool image on a poster or social media post and have them think "I should go see that even though I have no idea what it is or what it might be about or even if it will make me laugh or cry."

Resilience and Doubt

Re-Invent. Re-Imagine. These are forms of resilience and our business, our students, our audiences need us to be resilient and bring opera back from the brink. Doubting the data, hoping that things will rebound, giving anecdotes about a Tristan being extended one performance at the Met, will not address the core problem: our audiences are not just dying, they are fading like the Elves at the end of "The Lord of the Rings". Soon, only the legends, echoes, and myths of opera in America will left to our young people. I don't want that to happen and it's why I'm sounding the alarm through these CoachCraft blogs right now.

As someone who can sing Cosi, Giovanni, Figaro, and Schicchi in English from memory to this day, I'll leave you with this:

"To doubt Dorabella is simply absurd, completely absurd. She'll always be faithful and true to her word. She'll al --—ways be faith -— ful and true to her word."