Opera is labour-intensive and humans cannot be substituted
Rupert Christiansen on whether people will choose to keep the leaky opera ship afloat and whether there are any hopeful signs for the artform.
It seemed all too grimly appropriate last week that Opera Europa - the umbrella support group and talking-shop for European opera houses - should be holding its annual conference as a sideshow to the Wexford Festival.
The reason? This small coastal Irish town contains what probably ranks as the biggest operatic white elephant in the EU: a spanking new theatre, with all mod cons and superfine fixtures, planned and built while the Celtic Tiger was roaring, but opened just as it fell silent.
Today, with Ireland’s economy still struggling out of the bog of recession, the project looks like nothing but a tragically extravagant folly. The two-week top-of-the-range opera festival no longer sells out, and the building struggles to justify itself for the remainder of the year by programming occasional one-night gigs and community events.
Almost entirely staffed by volunteers (the festival as a whole relies on contributions from nearly 400 of them) and often closed for weeks on end, it is a financial dead weight round the town’s neck and a continuous headache for Eire’s Arts Council, which can barely provide a modest ration of opera to the rest of the country (Dublin ranks as the only European capital without an operatic establishment).
Wexford’s problems resonate throughout Europe. Governments are less and less willing to provide taxpayers’ money for a high culture which remains identified with the socially privileged, and audiences are drifting towards convenient cinema HD relays from the flagship international houses (potentially a game-changer for regional companies over the next decade) and away from the more expensive and inaccessible “real thing”.
It seemed all too grimly appropriate last week that Opera Europa - the umbrella support group and talking-shop for European opera houses - should be holding its annual conference as a sideshow to the Wexford Festival.
The reason? This small coastal Irish town contains what probably ranks as the biggest operatic white elephant in the EU: a spanking new theatre, with all mod cons and superfine fixtures, planned and built while the Celtic Tiger was roaring, but opened just as it fell silent.
Today, with Ireland’s economy still struggling out of the bog of recession, the project looks like nothing but a tragically extravagant folly. The two-week top-of-the-range opera festival no longer sells out, and the building struggles to justify itself for the remainder of the year by programming occasional one-night gigs and community events.
Almost entirely staffed by volunteers (the festival as a whole relies on contributions from nearly 400 of them) and often closed for weeks on end, it is a financial dead weight round the town’s neck and a continuous headache for Eire’s Arts Council, which can barely provide a modest ration of opera to the rest of the country (Dublin ranks as the only European capital without an operatic establishment).
Wexford’s problems resonate throughout Europe. Governments are less and less willing to provide taxpayers’ money for a high culture which remains identified with the socially privileged, and audiences are drifting towards convenient cinema HD relays from the flagship international houses (potentially a game-changer for regional companies over the next decade) and away from the more expensive and inaccessible “real thing”.