On a different note, alokimiyeyi’s equating of David Koch to Goebbels (No. 36) is despicable. To liken everyone with whom we may profoundly disagree with the perpetrators of the Nazi horror is an insult to all who suffered during that nightmare. It reflects na immature, intemperate mentality that renders thoughtful political discussion impossible, and has no place on this website.

As for me, I look forward to parsing out the subliminal messages they will be inserting in productions of Boheme, Tosca, Giovanni, Barbiere, and the rest of the core repertory.

It will help me stay awake.

Sanford, your take on the current state of Broadway (I’ve never been — live on the opposite coast) saddens me, but it does make me think that operas could benefit from a system where new works are premiered at smaller houses so the kinks can be worked and then they’d move on to the bigger places. I understand why new works are so difficult to put on, and it’s not only that traditionalists would balk at paying to see them. They are simply too expensive to produce with a high risk of losing money. A preview system could help, like Sanford writes, to tighten up shows, make them more crowd pleasing, and to build word-of-mouth buzz.

Will such a system form in my lifetime? Probably not.

The cher public is encouraged to use the above link. Mr Koch is a friend of the arts very much in the same way that Joseph Goebbels was a friend of the arts. While such men are too sophisticated to document any quid pro quo for their support, there would of course be a subtle accommodation made to his views without his needing to ask for a thing. His involvement with the theater and the resident companies may become too big too fail, as they would say in the financial industry. At the moment, many people would say that some end justifies the means here, and I am inclined to feel that every dollar spent on decadent art in New York City is one dollar that will not be spent on any of the various anti-gay crusades around the country that are so manipulating our democracy. On the other hand, I don’t think Mr Koch will run out of funds soon, and should the arts be giving him this social legitimacy, which would appear to be motivating his generosity. As for Rufus, may his participation grace every State Theater event, as I think that this might become an embarrassment for Mr Koch. By the way, is it true that his name rhymes with a synonym for rooster? How delicious that would be.

How do we know if someone is any good as a composer, and whether they will write a good opera? You wait until they’ve done it someplace else first. That’s usually how.

Isn’t it better for someone to have tried writing The Letter than not trying new opera at all? For all that we (including me, I might add) squawked about Prima Donna, at least Rufus tried. He wouldn’t be my first choice to write an opera, but he tried.

Yes, but those revivals all started in Europe with its subsidized houses and its government-run radio stations. You need a solid institutional foundation for that sort of musical entrepreneurship, and the for-profit sector can’t provide it alone. That’s why the United States has always been a bit slow on the uptake with repertory revivals.

You’re right, works should be commissioned in good faith, ie: because we want to hear them, but today it’s rarely worth the trouble. Since the commodification of the performing arts in the early 20th century, we have made “museums” out of opera and orchestral institutions. Try as we might to get out of that situation, we can’t because the public is trained to think of them that way. I generally think we should just try to make them the best damned museums we can.

Actually, there is a parallel universe of music theater works composed entirely for the free market for that very period–the canonical repertory of American musicals from Oklahoma to Sweeney Todd. And it can stand a fair comparison to the American operatic repertory of that period.

However, before we all go off into Ayn Rand-esque ecstasies about the inherent superiority of the free market in providing art, there are a few problems here.

First of all, the American musical has not been in the best of cultural straits these past thirty years; while scattered outstanding works have been produced, the genre is no longer central to American popular culture, and is almost as much subject to crises as is opera.

Second, production costs have been mounting faster than the demand for them. For instance, orchestras have been remorselessly whittled down from forty-odd to twenty if you’re lucky. A grand spectacle like Don Carlos or Die Frau ohne Schatten simply hasn’t been commercially viable for decades; too many people. As a result, the commercial musical theater has come more and more to depend on the nonprofit theater (supported directly or indirectly by the government) for the previews that are so necessary to see what the public really thinks.

which was written in response to this by iltenoredigrazia@17: Come on, look at the bel-canto and early Verdi revivals starting in the 50’s.

I thought that some Mozart operas did languish for decades after he died, although they are now part of the standard repertoire (or “repertory,” if you prefer). And he did compose a few operas that bombed in their first runs. I guess my point here is that if we only commissioned works that we knew would be box office successes from the launch, we would have missed out on some of the much-loved classics.