Here’s something I’m told (by a highly
reliable source) that Peter Gelb said, at the press conference last week, at
which he announced what the Met will do next season. He said that when he started
his job, the Met’s subscribers were 65 years old —
and that this age this age had shot up from 60 in the five years before that.
This, Peter said, he took as a wakeup call. The audience was aging, rapidly;
something had to be done.
For those who are finicky about statistics
(as we all should be) I don’t know whether Peter was talking about the average
age, or the median age. Nor, of course, did he confirm what I’ve
been saying here, that in past generations the classical audience used to
be drastically younger. But he did give us this — the experience of seeing
someone who runs the biggest classical music institution in America say that
his audience has been getting older, fast, and that this is a serious problem.
Bravo, Peter. Especially since he’s really doing something
about it.
***
As a further footnote, I might say that I
continue to be amazed when people take the old line, and confidently state the
audience has always been the same age it is now. This is the conventional
wisdom, I know, and conventional wisdom is hard to change. But there isn’t any
data supporting it! Or at least none that I’ve found,
or that anyone has been able to find for me, even the people who say the
conventional thing most strongly. So I’m going to post a challenge to everyone
who still says the audience has always been the same age. Either support what
you say, with solid data, or stop saying it.
And of course if anyone has such data —
please let me know! I’ll post it here immediately.
***
About the distant past, by which I mean
everything up through the 1950s…there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that the audience
used to be younger. Just recently, for instance, in the first of Geraldine
Farrar’s two autobiographies (Geraldine
Farrar: The Story of an American
Singer, published in 1916), I came across a very satisfying story —
satisfying to herself, I mean –about how in her early days, when she became a
big star in Berlin, young men flocked to the opera house to see her. Would they
have done this, if they weren’t going to the opera anyway? They came more often
when she was singing — but they were there in any case.
And the same must be true of the “gerryflappers,” the girls who came to scream for Farrar later
on, when she sang at the Met. They can’t have been the only young women in the
opera house. Could we imagine such a thing today? The Metropolitan Opera, full
of 65 year-old subscribers, and suddenly, when Cecilia Bartoli
comes on stage, the house is full of women in their 20s, shrieking? That just
doesn’t compute. The gerryflappers weren’t the only
women their age at the Met; they just were more than usually enthusiastic.
To these stories I could add E. M Forster’s
famous account of Beethoven’s Fifth, in Howard’s
End, in which he describes the reactions of six people who hear the
symphony, five of whom are in their 20s. He was imagining a concert given at the time he wrote the novel, in the early
years of the last century. Would the people he describes have been the only people their age at
the concert? Forster doesn’t even hint that their presence was unusual.
These examples could be multiplied. (If
anyone has more of them, please tell me.) And they pose yet another problem for
people who believe the classical audience has always been middle-aged. If it was
younger than that in the 1900s, and the 1910s, and the 1920, when did it get older?
There’s absolutely no account, at least that I’ve ever seen, of such a thing happening.
Compared, for instance, to right now, when the painful absence of younger
people is so widely lamented.
In a study conducted for the 20th Century Fund in the 1963-64 season, Professor William Baumol, then of Princeton, found that the median age of the performing arts audience (using a sample of 25,000 respondents nationwide weighted about 50/50 theatre versus music/opera/dance)was 38 years compared to 30 years for the urban population (the cities in which the 20th Century Fund study was conducted). More to the point, 9% of the performing arts audience was over 60 compared to 13% of the urban population.
I don’t have comparable statistics nationwide today, but my impression is the median age for theatre and all the performings arts, save dance, perhaps, would exceed 38 years. At the same time, I suspect the median age of the urban population has risen above 30 years as well. Baumol is still around at NYU.
Hello Greg. In 1920, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso came to Havana to sing Aida at the Teatro Nacional. When the performance was about to start, Caruso ordered the doors of the theatre open so that the crowd that had congregated across the street could also enjoy the performance (Peter Gelb was not the first populist!)
Among the crowd gathered just outside the theatre along the Paseo del Prado in Central Havana, was my late father- age 16 – getting his free opera experience.
Years later, he and my mother met at the Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical, next to the Auditorium in the Vedado section of Havana, and there joined the guitar ensemble led by the late Abel Nicola.
Years later, when I had grown up to be a young teen about town, I got my first taste of live opera at that same theatre, hearing Tebaldi in La Traviata.
I don’t think I was the younger member of the audience, nor was my late father the youngest member of the crowd standing outside the Nacional in 1920. It really was a younger audience then, Greg
Hello Greg,
I first attended Met performances in the early sixties during their annual visits to Atlanta. Herb Blayman, principal clarinetist would sometimes let me sneak in the side door where the orchestra took their breaks. I spent most of the operas in standing room.
The ushers were all from Georgia Tech, as were the extras in operas such as Aida. The audience was younger than it is today.
My college singer friends from FSU in Tallahassee would drive 250 miles and spend the entire week of the Met visit. The operas were all presented in the Fox Theater and the atmosphere was that of a festival.
Yes, I think it is pretty well accepted that the audience is growing older — a sea of gray heads on the orchestra floor.
But the reason that is not so bad, at the moment, is that those gray heads are living longer, staying active longer, and coming to concerts longer than was possible in the past.
In one of his novels, James Fennimore Cooper describes “a well-preserved man of 37.” He’d be dead in a few years. Now, I have friends in their 80s who hold season tickets and go to concerts regularly. (One very dear friend of mine goes with his wife, who is physically incapacitated and sits thru the concert in her wheelchair.) These are people who would not have been in the audience some 20 or more years back.
All hail Viagra!
The viewpoint from my soapbox is that we need to keep this audience coming while we figure out how to restock the seats with younger addicts.