Music Lane

RE: Not with you there....

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In Reply to: RE: Not with you there.... posted by Brian Cheney on May 24, 2012 at 21:09:03

Let's see: I've seen productions in Munich (many), Salzburg, Vienna, Berlin, Covent Garden, Rome, LaScala, the Met (twice), L.A. and San Francisco. Everyone in the ticket line, or seated near me, whom I bothered to ask had never seen that nite's opera before.

I'm sorry, but observational data is meaningless. I've been a subscriber to the Met Opera for 6 years; compared to the people who sit around me, I'm a virgin -- I've met countless people who've have subscriptions since the early 1980s. But I'm not going to claim that's representative of the house on all nights.

We have hard data with the Met -- an accurate estimate of their number of donors -- and in the performing arts field, the only individuals who give you money are the people who attend your shows (as someone who works in the performing arts, I can speak with some authority on this).

I know no one other than critics and a few extremely bored operaphiles who spend big money just because they have to see some new production.

What does that have to do with anything? Many, many people spend more on sports tickets than opera tickets. My Met tickets are $180/seat. Sounds like a lot, but my father's Eagles tickets are only slightly less, there are more home games in a season than shows in a Met subscription, and when the team is playing the Giants or the Cowboys, he has no problem getting 2 to 3 times face value for the tickets (and for Monday night games, the sky is the limit).

Productions are unimportant

If productions are unimportant than people would dispense with them and just do in-concert opera.

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