Innsbruck Forum on Music Theatre for a New Century: Stefan Johansson spoke on the necessity of a revitalisation of the solidarity between the culture sector and its biggest sponsor, the regular tax-payer.

Dear colleagues,

Sweden already in the 1990s faced more or less the same social and economical problems that Germany has to face now and which the German government for so long postponed dealing with. I work with the Royal Swedish Opera. It is not a really a Royal Opera – a pietistic King threw off the responsibilities for his Royal Theatres already in 1886 – but the title of Royal Theatre was granted to the group of Mäzenen, who built the Opera house 105 years ago. A Dreispartentheater of the German type does not exist today in Scandinavia, apart from Copenhagen.

Sweden has two major opera houses – Stockholm and Gothenburg - which cultivate both ballet and opera and three smaller ones with only opera and music theatre. I was recruited to the Royal Opera in 1997, where my job as Chefdramaturg had not existed for a century. Otherwise, our institution has lain off more or less 150 working places in the last ten to fifteen years, not because of budget cuts, rather because of inadequate increases. Our budget has been augmented every year with some percents but not enough to keep up with increasing costs.

The Royal Opera has – I speak now only of the opera section, not of ballet or concerts – a repertoire of fifteen opera productions pro season, four of them new. There might be additional productions for smaller stages, opera for children or chamber works, and we also give some tour performances. On our main stage, we present around 150 opera and 70 ballet performances, that is something like 220 performances, every season. Professionals among you will at once understand that this means we are playing some repertory operas very often, in series of twenty performances or more.

So I arrive at two themes, which I think have been absent here during these two days: The audience and new opera. Opera seems to be the only living art form, where everyone thinks it viable to attract a new audience with old works. Most other living art forms try to attract a new audience with new products. Mr Pereira, who I think knows his job well, spoke yesterday of reinventing the solidarity between finance, the capital, and the state, “die öffentliche Hand”. I think he is probably absolutely right. Even if he is not enough of a theatre historian to make the right difference between Sponsoring and Mäzenatentum. But there is a bigger problem here: The solidarity between theatres and their audiences. In German speaking lands, you have the privilege of a rich Theaterlandschaft with still an impressive number of opera houses. In this, you are both spoilt and privileged. I’m looking forward to see how this will be dealt with during the economic changes that you will have to go through in Germany in the next few years.

On the other hand I reflect on certain things that were spoken yesterday. My theatre is not in the old sense a repertory theatre anymore. If you think it necessary to rehearse an old production, let’s say of Le nozze di Figaro, for up to six weeks for a revival, you are either very stupid or very inefficient. Or you might be very much concerned with your audience and the quality of the performance. In Germany, the arts also profit from a middle class, a “Bildungsbürgertum”, which Scandinavia lacks almost totally. That was our problem from the start as Gustavus III built an opera house with more than 1200 seats in Stockholm, which in 1782 was a poor city with perhaps 75.000 inhabitants and a very small middle class. And his intention was to give public performances at least four times a week during the season. From the very beginning, the theatre king must have thought of the problem of selling tickets, opera and ballet being entirely new art forms for Sweden in these days. Today theatre marketing is a field for professionals. On one hand we lack a strong Bildungsbürgertum, which would regard attendance at the opera or ballet as a cultural duty. On the other hand, the ordinary tax payer might never visit the opera house, but are very conscious of the fact that they already paid very much for this art form, paid much of the price of the ticket over the taxes, even if they do not use it. That consciousness of art as a public service certainly sets a limit for ticket prices. Our regular audience will gladly pay for special events. For the regular opera or ballet performances, they know that they have already paid. That is the solidarity, which is so important to keep up and recreate.

One of the big artistic risks of opera and other arts management today is over-planning. Important artists have to be hired years in advance. But from this does not follow that every activity of an institution and its staff has to be settled in detail four or five years in advance. Largely the powers of cultural globalisation force – or flatter – us to do so. In this year 2005 the Swedish government - who contributes the main part of our funds - decided to make the year 2006 a "multicultural year". What can an opera house do when already most of its activities are planned in detail until 2008 or longer? Happily, we had already commissioned a chamber opera on honour killings among Middle East immigrants in Sweden. We were lucky to have this work in our plans. Otherwise the Royal Opera would have been described in the media as old-fashioned and inflexible. Especially for big institutions it will be necessary to regain a flexibility that can respond to changes in the world around them, without paying lip service to the political power. 

Of the same importance is education: This concerns both what we do to attract children and young people, and what we do for a new audience of adults. We cannot hope to attract a new audience, not used to opera or ballet, only with media events or sensational productions. Through “events”, they will not learn to recognise or appreciate regular opera or ballet productions. And how do you scandalise a new audience into understanding or appreciating an art form or a work? If they never saw Lohengrin before, how can they be scandalised by a radical interpretation? They might think, this is the way it is supposed to be, they might even like it, or they – our biggest sponsors, the tax-payers – will be bewildered and turn their backs on us. Whatever, we must revive the old idea of "Volksbildung", popular education in culture, also for grown-ups. Does it sound old-fashioned? Well, it isn’t. At our opera house, 30 % of the audience is a new one. We have to work and to fight not to lose them.

(November 2005)

This speech will be published along with a number of interventions by scholars, directors and general managers of the opera community - among them Brigitte Fassbaender, Alexander Pereira and Istvan Szabo.