Finale for Opera ?
It is sad to read in the Financial Times of the premature demise of a promising new venture to provide attractively priced tickets at the Savoy Theatre, London.
Raymond Gubbay's bold Savoy experiment shows there are no simple solutions to finding audiences.
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Weekend FT May 8th/9th
The pre-launch publicity was sensational, reviews were mixed - and the audiences were never really there.
As the Opera world picks over the collapse of Raymond Gubbay's Savoy Opera, many will be pondering the lessons to be learnt from the demise of a bold but high-risk experimient. Mr. Gubbay's premise was that you could sell opera like a West End musical - competitively priced, splashily marketed and rigorously budgeted, with running costs kept to a minimum.
Savoy Opera was to be a brave attempt to make opera pay its way purely from ticket sales. The idea was to attract a new audience, show up subsidised opera companies as complacent and end the day with a tidy profit.
That, at least, was the dream of Mr. Gubbay and his business partner, Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, owner of the company's intimate 1,000-seat jewel of a home in the bowels of the Savoy Hotel. This week they got a rude awakening. Having announced a seven-opera season running until next February, they were faced with audiences barely 200 per night - well short of the 500 needed to break even.
It was time to cut their losses. Yesterday they conceded the dream had ended, barely four weeks after the company's heavily hyped launch. The curtains will fall on the Savoy Opera when the 'Marriage of Figaro' and the 'Barber of Seville' reach the end of their run next month. A lot of singers and musicians will find themselves out of work.
The moral to be drawn from the Savoy saga is that running an opera company is harder than Mr. Gubbay and his supporters thought. There are no simple solutions to finding audiences - a lesson politicians, public donors and others enamoured of 'democratic' business models would do well to learn.
The idea that you could perform the same small handful of so-called popular pieces, night after night for months, was always ill-founded. That is not how opera works. There is a limit to the sort of standards you can set under such conditions - and the market for a 40-performance run of 'Carmen' simply does not exist.
People go to the opera for more complex reasons than Mr. Gubbay appeared to believe. Opera is as much to do with quality, variety and challenge as with familiarity and spectacle. It appeals most to those who already know something about it because it is an art form that demands a degree of commitment and involvment. It is not something you can easily sell to people wanting "a good night out" - at least, not with the sort of regularity Mr. Gubbay needed to balance his books.
He never had much difficulty raking in the punters for his short Royal Albert Hall seasons: when you do something on a spectacular scale, the spectacle carries the show. His mistake, however, was to get carried away by those successes. The dynamics of a 1,000-seater are different. A bussed-in audience wants something special, which the intimate Savoy could not provide.
Many in the opera business will sympathise with Mr. Gubbay; he was never afraid to put his money where his mouth was. London's two subsidised opera companies yesterday maintained a dignified silence over the collapse of his latest venture. But in private they must be immensely relieved that his criticisms of the way they operated will no longer carry such weight. Mr. Gubbay has long had a hotline to certain sectors of the press, who lapped up his portrayal of the 'Royal Opera House' as elitist 'Opera for the few'.
English National Opera - which, like the Savoy Opera, performs in English - will feel vindicated. Having picked up two Royal Philharmonic Society awards this week for its opera outreach programmes, it enjoyed a 96 per cent house on Thursday for its production of 'The Mikado', with half the tickets cheaper than Mr. Gubbay's.
[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited 05-12-2004).]