Opera lovers have never had it so good. Last December alone, I saw Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Harteros star in Martin Kušej's new Bavarian State Opera production of La forza del destino, watched Piotr Beczała booed at the opening night of La Scala’s new season and experienced the Metropolitan Opera’s Eugene Onegin – all without leaving the house. Webstreams from Munich and Milan, plus a radio relay (and a ridiculously late night) from New York, meant I could share in the thrill of live performances from across the operatic globe. I also saw The Met’s Falstaff, but had to ease myself out of the armchair and toddle to my local cinema for that one.
Beaming opera into cinemas has become a big business since the Metropolitan screened The Magic Flute in 2006. Nearly 15 million tickets sales later, The Met: Live in HD shows no signs of waning in popularity, with other opera companies clambering aboard the bandwagon. Screening opera is an expensive business, however. The Royal Opera relays a number of its productions onto the big screen and yesterday announced that more people will see its performances next season in the cinema than will attend performances at Covent Garden. Opera Australia relays its popular Sydney Harbour extravaganzas around the world, while Glyndebourne has been screening a number of its productions since 2007, as well as offering webstreams during the course of its season. I doubt interval picnics can be quite the same at the back of the Odeon though.
Even English National Opera has recently made its first foray into HD opera, less than two years after John Berry, its Artistic Director, told The Stage, “It is of no interest to me… this obsession about putting work out into the cinema can distract from making amazing quality work.” (1) Berry claimed “It is not a priority. It doesn’t create new audiences either.” So why the change of heart? It transpires that opera companies like to claim cinema relays are part of their outreach work, drawing in newcomers to the art form at affordable prices. Can these claims be verified or are established operagoers buying up these tickets instead, possibly at the expense of visiting the opera house itself?
When asked for evidence that opera in HD can attract new audiences, opera companies remain rather coy, responding that there is a lack of hard data to support or counter any claims. George Bruell, Glyndebourne's Head of Commercial Development admits “More work needs to be done to understand the audience profile for these broadcasts. In our experience, the cinema experience is complementary to the live theatrical experience and the two are not mutually exclusive. We often hear from people who have seen a live opera they loved at Glyndebourne and choose to enjoy that opera all over again at their local cinema a few weeks later. Equally, for some people the cinema screenings are their best opportunity to see Glyndebourne’s work or an affordable and convenient way to try it for the first time.”
Statistical data for this is scant. There has been a study, undertaken by OPERA America, in cooperation with the Met and Shugoll Research (2) which suggests that of a (small) sample of attendees in the United States who responded to a questionnaire at two Met relays, 20% hadn’t attended live opera for the previous two years. Of these, 27% had never attended any live opera – about 5% of the overall sample. What is clear is the high return rate of the Met screenings, with 74% having previously attended a transmission. There’s a loyal audience, but I suspect it’s an aging one.
My own experience makes me sceptical. When I first visited my local cinema for The Met in HD, I wasn’t in the least surprised to see an overwhelmingly elderly audience. One lady bewailed that we didn’t receive relays from The Royal Opera (a situation now remedied). “But London is only an hour away on the train,” I countered. “Ah, my husband is disabled and we can’t really get up to London any more,” was the entirely reasonable response. Cinema offers a way for those no longer able (or willing) to travel long distances to get their operatic fix.
Victoria Dietrich, Press Officer at Staatsoper Berlin, suggests, “We should take into consideration whether opera HD relays in cinema primarily reach ‘opera strangers’ and should be considered as a means for developing new audiences, or if their target group is not rather the opposite – an opera aficionado audience – an audience eager not to miss what is going on internationally.” Cinema offers a means of catching star names in big budget productions around the world, making it an attractive proposition for seasoned operagoers.