September 2005 Archives

A few further thoughts on the New York City Opera, their $25 ticket promotion (for two special performances), and their ways of attracting a new audience.

As I wrote, I saw one of those $25 performances—the opera was Butterfly, with a greeting from the stage at the start, and video introductions to the first two acts—and thought it was quite a success. But now what? Doing this once doesn’t mean much, and in fact might even alienate the audience that the promotion attracted. “We thought they cared about us, and now…?” So what’s the followup?

Not, of course, that the company could readily charge just $25 any time they liked. They had to raise money to afford the low price for even those two performances, because (or so the conventional wisdom among marketers goes) they would have taken in more at full price even with many fewer sales.

But they have to find some way to continue this program, or something like it. Currently, they’re running a promotion similar to something I bought into at Barnes & Noble. I paid $25, and for a year I get a 10% discount on any book I buy. For me, that was a no-brainer. I buy a lot of books there.

City Opera peppily calls its version the Big Deal! (Yes, with an exclamation point. Sigh.) It’s for people aged 21 to 35, certainly an audience the company wants to attract. But the details are complicated. There are two versions of the program; one costs you $50 up front, the other costs $75. Both promise savings if you buy just one ticket.

And that, if you ask me, is where the trouble might start. There’s something counterintuitive about the whole deal, even if you really do save with just one purchase. That’s because the upfront cost is so high. “Wait …I pay you $75. Then I buy a ticket, and I give you more money. And you say I’m saving?” Well, yes, because of something you have to pinch yourself to understand, because they slip it so smoothly into their explanation: This Big Deal! only lets you buy the expensive seats. But I’ll admit I’m simplifying. Read the whole thing for yourself, and see what you think.

To me, the whole thing sounds like a con game, even if it’s completely honest. The claims don’t make sense until, as I said, you pinch yourself, force yourself to grasp the details, and maybe do some arithmetic. Bad planning, I’d say, though of course I might be wrong. The program might be a huge success. If it isn’t, though, I might suggest that it’s too complex, sounds too implausible, and in any case, just like the Barnes & Noble promotion, is most likely to appeal only to people who know they want to go to many operas. I mean, $50 in advance, plus the ticket cost, if you’re only going to go once…doesn’t sound right, even if (repeating myself here) it really makes sense. And sound counts more than substance, at least in marketing.

Footnote to the footnote: The company offers video trailers for all its productions this year. A good idea; I loved it when I heard about it. But I loved it less when I saw the trailers. I watched four. Two had no music. Now, how dumb is that? I do grant that it’s hard for an opera company to put even its own performance of something on the web; its contract with its musicians might forbid that. And using a commercial recording can be expensive, too. The two trailers I saw that

had no music were both for unusual operas that City Opera had never done before. But trust me. Watch the trailer for Richard Rodney Bennett’s The Mines of Sulphur, and wait for the part where you’re told that, even though the music is atonal, it’s pleasantly atonal (or words to that effect). Won’t you want to hear a little sample, to see if that’s true? Of course you will.

And there was also, in all four trailers, a problem of tone. Who were they aimed at? Experienced opera fans, classical music lovers who don’t often go to the opera, people new to opera and classical music? The two without music, especially, seemed pitched rather high for a general audience (somewhere in category one or category two). If that’s who the company wants to attract, fine. But I doubt that’s the point. The most useful thing these trailers could do is appeal to a new audience, and I don’t think they do that.

Here’s something good—something the New York City Opera did on the second and third nights of this season. On the second night (having opened the night before somewhat conventionally, with a new production), they had a gala. All seats were $25, and not all the music was classical. Rufus Wainwright sang; he’s a big opera fan. And the gala finished with the East Village Opera Company, who do dance versions of opera hits. (They’re hardly the only group that’s done this, but their versions—try “La donna è mobile”—are especially tasty.)

Of course, most of the music on the gala came from the company’s productions this fall, but also doing non-classical music (or non-classical versions of opera tunes) makes tremendous sense to me. I don’t know how many times I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again (and many times in the future, I fear): Classical music inhabits a world where other kinds of music also live

Then, the next night, City Opera did Butterfly, again with all seats selling for $25. I was there. The house was sold out; the audience, much of it, seemed younger, maybe new to City Opera. Paul Kellogg, the company’s director, and Cynthia Nixon, from Sex in the City, came onstage to introduce the show. Kellogg was friendly and substantial, Nixon was a little stiff, till she blew a line, laughed, and then relaxed.

After Kellogg and Nixon came a video, introducing members of the cast and backstage crew, and the conductor. (Maybe members of the orchestra, too; I don’t remember.) the video was wonderfully done, funny, lively, and informal, but also quite informative. There was another installment of it before the second act. The video, I’m sure, made people in the audience feel they knew their fellow human beings who were responsible for what was happening onstage. Certainly when the conductor came out to start the first act, he got very warm applause, because (I think) the audience already felt they knew him from the video.

I’d rate all of this a complete success. There were things I didn’t like about the performance (though the production, directed by Mark Lamos, is very effective). The two leads, especially; neither was equal to his or her role. And the conductor and orchestra didn’t really gel together till the final act. So—without real Puccini voices from the Butterfly and Pinkerton, and without firm shaping in the pit—I thought the climax of the love duet didn’t really happen.

But the crowd disagreed with me! Right as what was meant to be the climax happened on the stage and in the orchestra, they burst into applause. So what do I know? Maybe, with real voices and stronger shaping in the pit, the applause would have been louder. But certainly the climax worked for many people, and—ignoring all those silly old classical music rules—they showed their appreciation right away, as I can imagine the audience might have in Puccini’s time (or at least might have, if the Butterfly premiere had been successful).

But here’s something strange. Nobody from the music business seemed to be there. Not critics (apart from my wife, Anne Midgette, who was reviewing the performance), not executives from other big classical music institutions in New York. Nobody seemed to want to see how this substantial reaching-out from City Opera worked. Why not? We all say we want to see new audiences. And here City Opera does something substantial to bring one in. Doesn’t anybody care about whether it worked?

One caveat, though. There was talk at the beginning, from Cynthia Nixon and in the video, about how Butterfly shows the meeting of two cultures. “Just like Lost in Translation,” Nixon said, or words to that effect, referring to the wonderful Sophia Coppola film from a couple of years ago, starring Bill Murray. And certainly the Mark Lamos production made the most of this. Pinkerton, in the first act, tries to shake hands with the Japanese he meets; they shy away, as if his very western gesture struck them as aggressive. And then in the third act, Butterfly’s little child, meeting Sharpless, the American consul, reaches out to shake his hand, as clearly he’d been taught to do. It’s very sweet, and also very telling. Bravo for everyone concerned, from the director right on down to the kid playing Butterfly’s child, for thinking of this, and bringing it off so effectively.

And yet…is this really what Butterfly’s about? Or, rather, would anybody use it as an example of two cultures meeting, especially compared to Lost in Translation’s much more honest, much more contemporary version of that? I think, first, that Puccini wasn’t so much interested in that side of the story, any more than he really cared about Chinese culture when he wrote Turandot, or the wild west in Fanciulla. He mined these settings first for local color, then for pathos. Some things in Butterfly, when you look closely at them, don’t make any sense. What language, for instance, are the American and Japanese characters supposed to be speaking when they talk to each other?

Maybe Goro (the hustling Japanese marriage broker, who does business with Americans) speaks a little English; maybe Sharpless, the consul, speaks some Japanese; maybe Butterfly, preparing for her marriage, or from her work as a geisha, learned some English. But their conversations, rendered in the opera in comfortable Italian, wouldn’t, in real life, had been so fluent. And when Suzuki, Butterfly’s servant, speaks to Sharpless in the final act, and even more when she speaks to Pinkerton’s sposa Americana, Kate, it’s impossible to be believe the conversation could be easy. Suzuki, surely, wouldn’t speak any English. Puccini just didn’t bother with such things. (In the American play the opera is based on, Butterfly speaks painful pidgin English, or so I’m told).

So, for this and other reasons, I think City Opera made exaggerated artistic claims for what they were presenting. The real story, I’d think, is one the opera world faces every day. Here we have the landmarks of the repertoire. They’re what draws the audience. So they’re constantly performed. Opera companies have to make the best of that, which they often do by trying to give the works contemporary meaning. Sometimes this succeeds, and sometimes it fails; for Butterfly, I think it’s something of a stretch.

So in a way City Opera wasn’t aiming very high. The real reason why Butterfly succeeds is pathos. And opera, in the popular view, is all about pathos. Remember the wonderful opera scenes in Moonstruck? Cher goes to La bohème, and cries. The City Opera audience goes to Butterfly, and might well cry, too. It really doesn’t matter whether cultures cross or not, and in not explaining that opera can aim higher than this, City Opera itself, I think, didn’t aim very high artistically.

By the way—I love Puccini. I just think we have to understand his operas as something like old-time Hollywood movies, aimed right at our sentimental hearts (and at commercial success), without too much pretense of reality.

And one final note. Paul Kellogg is leaving City Opera. In a story on his leaving in The New York Times, he cited some frustrations:

In an interview, Mr. Kellogg said the constant work needed to entice the young and neophytes to opera was discouraging, though also fulfilling, taking note of the popularity of the house's "Opera for All" low-cost events last week.

He also said that the struggle to win ever-dwindling support from corporations and foundations was a full-time job in itself.

In other words, he’s suffering from the classical music crisis. I’m enormously sympathetic. I can imagine that he got into this business to produce opera (just as I got into it to compose, and because I loved classical music). Now he finds that’s not enough. The audience and funding both are shrinking. So the job of an opera producer expands into new areas, which—game as he might be to explore them—isn’t what he expected.

Aren’t many of us suffering from this?

Here are provocative (and very useful) thoughts from Eric Barnhill, a pianist I met when he was in one of my Juilliard courses, the first year I taught there, way back in 1997. He e-mailed me as follows (and of course I’ve posted this with his permission):

A belated [reply to] something you blogged in August re: regional groups. Not only are regional ensembles unsung heroes of classical music, I think there is a lot of untapped, appealing material with regional or second-tier groups that they can use to an advantage over "star" ensembles.

What I'm thinking of in particular here are string quartets, which I find quite poorly marketed. I remember being at a festival where the Miami Quartet had a residency. When the players walked onstage, I thought, "that's the most heterogeneous looking group of four people I've ever seen." You had Ivan, the Asian Delay-type hotshot; Cathy, the classic empathetic woman player; Chauncey, who is portly and black, and Keith on cello, who looks like an aging former football star. Their diversity both is and isn't in their playing. I find such a thing so interesting - why not use it as part of the group's identity? But all their materials say is "precise sound", "broad palette", the EXACT same thing other quartets all say.

Another example - my friend is in the Cassatt Quartet which is all women. They had a man, Marc Johnson from the Vermeer, join them for the Schubert C major. The minute they began playing, you could tell a man had walked onstage. His sound, his timing, was entirely different in a way I immediately, instinctively identified as male, and the entire ensemble shifted. I would think there's so much interesting material there. But they don't use it either.

I think these ensembles feel they would admit their inferiority if they didn't try to ape the approach of the "world-class" institutions (classic example: a promo sheet that said "Gregory Fulkerson--American Genius". Is there nothing more interesting about this violinist? How about that he kicks around rural Ohio? Does he like that? Does it impact his playing?). But I really don't think they will be lowering their sights if they skip the fatuous boilerplate about how they walk on air and talk about what they're really like. I knew a quartet that hated each other so much they drove in four separate cars to every performance. Even that, I think, is a lot more interesting to audiences than "warm tone", etc.  

In reply to him, I said I thought there’s an unspoken prohibition in classical music—performers aren’t supposed to be too individual. Students, I think, are actively discouraged (by many, if not most teachers) from expressing too much individuality. Eric thought the same thing:

I think the "being an individual" you mention is exactly it. Especially so with quartets, which are almost by nature such unique ensembles and so tied to the personalities of the players, and yet with some exceptions marketed totally homogeneously.

Similarly, though reviewers every week say "Conductor Smith is good at conducting x but bad at conducting y", how refreshing it would be to see a conductor say,"I'm good at x and bad at y! I love the colors of the French and Spanish composers. I find the Germans stiff and pretentions, it's just not me, I must have spent too much time by the sea as a kid." Same situation I suppose.

I fondly remember a recital I heard Eric give some years ago. He spoke to the audience, introducing each piece. When he came to a Poulenc work, he simply said that Poulenc enjoyed Parisian cafes, and that we could hear this in his music. To remind us, he said, he had a visual aid. And with that, he put on a classy pair of sunglasses, and played the piece wearing them.

Now he has what sounds like a richly varied life. As he tells me, “I’ve devoted designing a method of music movement therapy that synthesizes ideas from Feldenkrais and Dalcroze Eurhythmics, and I got hired by two major therapy-related institutes to teach my method this fall which does a lot for its credibility. I also run a large Music Skills program, based on Eurhythmics, for ages 4 to 9, out in Westchester.” For more, see his website, cognitive-eurhythmics.com.

I’m back in action, after what I could call a stimulating rest. It’s exhilarating to move into a new house, especially a gorgeous one (if I do say so), which my wife and I helped design. Spacious, comfortable, views on all four sides, with windows everywhere to bring the views to us, plus three decks and two porches…my reward for challenging the sacred cows of the classical music world?

Nah. The only cows  I see are the ones in the field across the road. There’s also a fox who comes around (we think she lives with us, because we’ve found what might be her burrow on our property; I think she’s a she because the burrow has been here since at least the fall, and female foxes, or so I’ve read, stay put after their babies grow up, while the males roam). We watch her from our second floor windows, as she sniffs, lopes around easily, stops to scratch herself. She doesn’t know we’re there.

As for the future of classical music…

I got very flattering e-mail from James Reel, who said that — inspired by my occasional dissection of news stories about institutions’ finances — he’d peered very closely at a recent story about financial success at the Phoenix Symphony. And under his scrutiny, the story seems to fall apart, which is a lot more important than any virtues I might have. Seems like the Phoenix Symphony balanced its budget in its 2005 fiscal year with a lot of help from funding and donations that don’t seem like they can be repeated. So how will the orchestra get by in 2006? You can read James’ analysis here (from his very lively blog at KUAT-FM, southern Arizona’s classical station (James is an announcer there). And you might also want to read his post about the successful chamber music series he helps to run.

Thanks, James, for your flattering words, but most of all for everything you write.

More coming, including more about the book I’m going to write online.