medium.com: There’s no question that many regional opera houses in the US are struggling. Corporate giving to the arts has never really recovered since the dotcom crash, private philanthropy is shifting increasingly towards education, healthcare, and religious organizations, and a lack of standardized musical education means that every new operagoer has to be taught and then converted.
2 comments:
It's disheartening to see an article about the demise of the medium of opera, something which I enjoy very much. It is, however, interesting to see an article which does not blame any number of outside factors for the decline of a particular thing or industry, but rather the very practices of the industry themselves. It seems like the surely very talented men and woment in young artist programs are being exploited very similarly to a number of unpaid or very poorly paid interns. One thing that did frustrate me about this article is that it presented all of these ways the opera industry is misusing YAP students, but iddn't seem to realize that all of these things were happening already to many interns on the other side of the curtains. However, no matter who is getting shafted by who, it is definitely a difficult world out there for most anyone in the entertainment industry and we might get our hopes up that these kinds of internships bight kick-start our careers, when in fact the exploit us.
While I love opera and I see where this is coming from, I also think that this is just similar to the way that even things like film or theater have always worked. The roles almost always favor the young, willing to work for less because they don't always know their worth and eager for new opportunities to add to the resume even if it means working for free. This has been going on for years in other industries, but the fact that opera just started having this problem means that it hasn't been addressed and actually is spreading, which can't be allowed to happen. And while they may be able to fix it in opera, we still need to focus on it here in theater and film - often, actors over 30 or 40 just won't get roles because of their age until they're old and able to play elderly roles, but since opera relies on the voice I can see why aging out too early, as with this problem, makes it impossible to work again.
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