According to Svenska Dagbladet, Italy's main opera houses face bankruptcy and close down. And the Berlusconi government will not save them this time. Surprised, anyone? Gunilla von Hall writes : "A generation ago most people in Milan knew what was played at La Scala, Maria Callas was a household word, taxi drivers still hummed the most well known arias. This is history in Berlusconi's Italy, where young people grow up with his private TV-channels filled with soup operas and quiz games."
Of course, medias' capitulation to commercial mass culture is very much to blame for the middle classes turning away from the arts and serious culture and for the under-privileged not even getting to hear about it. In Sweden, the days are long over when "everyone" knew Jussi as well as Snoddas (or Elvis, for that matter). When Birgit Nilsson recently died we probably bade farewell to the last personality from classical music who at least was a name to "everyone" in the country. But if Italian opera houses in Venice, Genua and Naples bleed and face ruin and even Milan's La Scala is threatened, is this only the fault of Berlusconi and his vulgar culture for the masses concept?
At least twenty years ago Italian musicians and critics pointed out that the opera business in Italy was rapidly losing the popular base it had profited from for so long. Firstly, opera was never that much "of the people". Verdi and his followers were the artistic patrimony of the middle class, closely linked to the unification of the country and a 19th century model of bourgeois democracy. My friend, director Renzo Casali of Comuna Baires fame, used to say that Teatro alla Scala was the only national symbol as it appeared on the lire bills as long as Italy had its own currency. For the rest there was not much unifying the nation. But for years, Italy's remaining opera houses and the cultural and tourism entities supporting them, put their faith in tradition and tourism. For decades unefficient organisation and a parody of union militancy gave the theatres a bad name, especially among opera lovers, Italians and foreigners. I remember the 70s and 80s as a frequent guest in Milan. When could you count on that La Scala should give any of its rather few advertised performances - apart from the grotesquely publicised season openings in December? Would the professori of the orchestra choose to play tonight? Would the stage hands be on strike again or demonstrate in slow motion? This has been much improved in later years but probably much too late. The damage was already done. How many times I have heard internationally experienced Italian musicians point out the difference between Italy and e.g. Germany, "dove si fa spettacolo ogni sera" - where there is a performance every evening.
Compared to opera theatres in Central Europe, Great Britain or Scandinavia, Italian houses perform very litlle. Apart from La Scala, not one opera house has what somebody from North of the Alps would describe as a full season. The theatres mentioned in Hall's article have planned to give between 40 to 60 opera performances in their main theatres in the now already curtailed 2005/06 season. This is less than half or a third of the number of opera performances presented on the main stages of each of the opera houses in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki. And far less than what many German houses do in cities and towns with smaller population than Naples or Genoa and certainly no tourism to speak of, compared with Venice. The rest of the time the houses remain dark or host concerts that in most European cultural centers would be the affair of separate institutions, concert houses with their own orchestras and full seasons.
The prices of Italian opera tickets have long been much higher than in Germany or Scandinavia. If you visit the home pages of the three Italian opera houses cited in Svenska Dagbladet, you find that at least the Carlo Felice of Genoa has a very ambitious "programmazione" for young people and children as well as for the general public. A good slice of what Scandinavians would call "folkbildning" - "popular education" or with a more modern term "cultural animation" by educational departments for new age groups and hopefully for others with less experience of high culture. But what is the point of going to workshops on Mozart's Cosi fan tutte or Donizetti's La favorite if you can't afford to see the production? Of course, thera are reductions for young people and old age pensioners. But in Italy compared to Germany or Scandinavia, the prices of highly subsidized opera tickets are inaccesibly high for most tax-payers. The "popular" - in both senses of the word - Italian opera is more than ever a spectacle for the most affluent citizen or tourist. The world of Italian opera, much more than the opera houses in any country where the art form was an import, for too long rested on their laurels and never bothered to educate any type of new audience. And so, does it really help that some of my colleagues at Sicilian opera houses with very limited seasons send me beautifully edited booklets on their productions with articles also in Arabic! It this was to make opera more accessible for North African immigrants or a celebration of Sicily's Arabic heritage, I was too polite to ask.
Scandinavia today can boast of recently built modern opera houses in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Gothenburg, soon to be followed by Oslo. Even in Stockholm, a new house for opera and ballet is finally discussed as a possibility. This does not mean that we can dismiss what is happening in Italy as the fault of a political regime, which outside Italy is often described as corrupt and even criminal. Opera as we know it is a threatened art form in the country of its origin, where most outsiders thought it safe, because of its great tradition and alleged popular roots, now long withered in a society where commerce dictates the taste of the masses. Instead we should look closely at how this could happen. How some of the world's most famous opera theatres for so long failed to notice the seriousness of their own position and the weakness of their own cultural policies.
Comments