BlogEssays & Ideas

For the Australian music world it's as if Apollo, god of music, woke abruptly in December with the corona virus and sent classical musicians and opera practitioners off to their rooms to examine a world without music, as we witness opera companies close down one by one, orchestras send their players home on extended leave, and arts venues shut their doors. It is an extraordinary time in world history, and as we are pivoting away from the past and re-imagining our future, it is imperative that we strive for lasting change.

Opera is a 400-year-old archaic, misogynistic dinosaur: a most magnificent beast with shiny, glamorous scales and a mesmerising roar, with a magical song line linking us and reminding us of its European cultural heritage. It is awe-inspiring; mystical; and riveting on first, second, and perhaps even third meeting for those who are introduced correctly to this expensive and otherworldly monster. However, we need to reimagine the dinosaur.

Currently, Opera Australia receives approximately $25 million per annum from the Federal Government. The various state companies also receive millions each year in funding. Every time an opera ticket is bought, the taxpayer pays $45 towards their experience at Opera Australia. For struggling Opera Queensland however, the federal and state governments combined have contributed $194 towards the cost of the ticket.

In 2014, a National Opera Review was commissioned to analyse the financial viability, artistic vibrancy, and audiences of Opera Australia and our state opera companies. With a worldwide decline in audience numbers for opera and the impact of the Global Financial Crisis, opera companies have been, and remain, in a state of crisis. In recent days there has been press about Opera Australia selling off its assets and staff being retrenched to stay afloat. If our major opera company falls, the future is grim for opera in this country.

An American neo-musical theatre rebirth has occurred within Australian opera companies, due to declining audience numbers and the expense of producing opera. These 'Golden Age' American musical-theatre works are propping up the companies, providing a safe programming option that guarantees box-office sales to mitigate the risk of programming traditional operatic works. Moreover, Opera Australia also now presents HANDA Opera on Sydney Harbour (HOSH). These productions are designed to attract tourism dollars, placing an iconic art form against an equally iconic backdrop in a city that suits large-scale outdoor performances. These two strategies, according to the National Opera Review, have contributed to increasing audience numbers for Opera Australia since 2015.

The Problem of New Australian Work

The National Opera Review also claims that the development of new works is too costly for companies. Yet Australian artists tell important stories that link today's Australians to their heritage and help them connect more deeply to themselves. We have the oldest continuous living culture on earth, but we are still waiting for regular, new major operatic works to be commissioned by our opera companies which draw from the vast and profound wisdom of the Indigenous people of Australia and from Australian culture since settlement. Creating and incubating new, authentic works is a national imperative for the genre to survive.

Yet there are committed, independent artists working tirelessly — like composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham — who are successfully composing using classical forms such as opera, oratorio, and song as vehicles for Indigenous stories and performers who have never been granted support by our opera companies. Another recent exception where a female composer has been given a major commission in the Australian opera world using Australian content was the Opera Australia commission of the opera Whitely by Elena Kats-Chernin.

For over 100 years, American and UK composers and lyricists have been incubating their own unique styles, where their Australian counterparts have very few opportunities to develop. The National Opera Review states: "the renewal of the repertoire and Australia's distinctive voice is not being heard and seen to the extent considered desirable. That trend is being amplified because new productions of existing works are increasingly being brought in from overseas or developed in partnership with an international company, which usually is the lead commissioning partner."

The development of new works is a vital part of Australia's cultural identity in the world. It requires all levels of institutions, companies, and governments to adopt major incentives or infrastructures that enable the creation of new Australian-centric work, told from a balanced perspective of both genders. We are now at an unprecedented moment in history where the major companies will have to look to the small-to-medium sectors for new work to survive. Fundamentally, we require a radical shift in thinking and bold new leadership to effect such changes.

Women's Roles in Opera — On Stage and Off

For opera to have a future in Australia, we must be honest about what it has represented culturally for women. Our opera companies need to embrace inclusivity and diversity and look beyond what has already been done. New and younger audiences could be garnered if opera were reframed away from its sinister indoctrination and reinforcing of gender stereotypes. It is imperative that we encourage positive female narratives from composers and lyricists.

Several articles penned by Blackwood, Lim, Polias, and van Reyk in 2019 put forth a series of demands for opera in Australia to evolve in response to the male-dominated NOW opera workshops. Their call for a better, more inclusive vision for opera as an art form was both timely and necessary. The Australia Council, the Australian Music Centre, and APRA AMCOS responded with a round-table invitation-only discussion in December 2019 titled the Gender Equity and Diversity in Opera Summit. Time will tell if strategies can be implemented to effect systemic change.

Roles for women in opera are largely limited to roles of submission on stage. Catherine Clément's work challenges and reframes the representation of women of opera. She writes that the music of opera lures the audience into the operatic experience, causing them to forget the violence perpetrated against women. Examples include Butterfly committing hara-kiri; Puccini's diva Tosca and the grim unfolding of suicide, murder, execution, and yet another suicide; the nuns in the final scene of Dialogue of the Carmelites who sing a beautiful chant as they are sent, one by one, to their deaths by guillotine.

In the 2018 Opera Australia season, only 23 of the 138 creative roles were filled by women, which equates to 16.6%, a decline from the 2017 figure of 18.2%. Their 2020 Sydney season over eight productions employs 85 creatives, 12 of them are female, a total of 14 per cent, again with a predominance of costume designers rather than other creative positions.

A radical response is to commission new endings, re-structure narratives, create pastiches of well-known works and re-write some of the music for works in the operatic canon. Tosca could fake her own death and choose instead to live; Madam Butterfly could run off with Suzuki and her son and start a new life; Carmen could kill Don José instead, and the return of her music at the end of the opera could signify her triumph over a violent ex-lover. Such fresh and bold new treatments could create a new following for opera.

Puccini's Turandot was unfinished at the time of his death in 1924 and was completed in 1926 by Franco Alfano. The first performance included only Puccini's music, as Maestro Toscanini interrupted the performance where Puccini's work terminated, but the second performance included the new ending — the version we know today. All this is to say that it is possible to rewrite, redirect, and re-interpret endings of operas and experiment with narratives with acceptance from classical-music audiences.

It's not just on stage, but off stage too. Of the 28 arts-organisation chairs in Australia, 20 are men, yet consumers of the arts in Australia are predominantly women. Dr Josephine Caust notes that "in a sector where women represent the majority audience as well as the majority of its participants, the low level of female artistic leadership is significantly out of tune with contemporary expectations." Furthermore, our boards are lacking members with direct experience of the machinations of an opera company, creating a dangerous imbalance whereby artistic power and decisions lie with only one or a few.

Australian Talent Overlooked

The other elephant in the room is Australian talent — trained here, often with massive taxpayer help — being overlooked for work, with opera companies employing second-rate offshore artists. It's not just singers. Talent from every facet of the sector including directors, composers, instrumentalists, designers, and technicians are being consistently overlooked in favour of people from overseas.

The 2016 National Opera Review states that the number of performances by Australian singers in leading roles at Opera Australia plummeted from 778 to 383 between 2010 and 2016, a decline of 51 per cent. At the same time, the number of performances by international singers in leading roles at the company has grown more than four fold, from 60 to 251.

In the London-based classical-music publication Bachtrack, internationally renowned Australian tenor Stuart Skelton recently criticised Opera Australia for flying in "every second-rate singer from anywhere to sing stuff when we've got people in Australia who sing those roles just as well." Principal Australian tenor Rosario La Spina and his wife, mezzo-soprano Milijana Nikolic, became so frustrated with the lack of opportunity they abandoned their home base of Brisbane and moved back to Italy mid career.

The Path Forward

Our conservatories need to examine these numbers and consider if it is ethically responsible to continue to accept and train large numbers of vocal undergraduates. With declining career trajectories and opportunities available for our young operatic graduates in Australia, the economic realities of a career as an opera singer are becoming ever more challenging. The selection of talent for undergraduate and postgraduate courses needs to become more competitive and numbers should be limited.

With the revival and trend for musical theatre to prop up the box offices of our opera companies, there is a real need for our singers to diversify their training. We must be training our singers to cross over into singing in other genres — such as musical theatre, jazz, and contemporary singing — to prepare them for the real world of freelance singing. A suitably trained singer for the 21st century needs to sing across multiple genres, act, analyse text, dance, speak, and translate multiple languages, be strong and fit enough to take on roles with significant physical demands, and interact effectively with colleagues.

If opera is to survive, our opera companies need to fearlessly examine the roles that women play in opera. We must be simultaneously pushing the boundaries and fighting to reinvent it. We are now at an unprecedented moment in history where bold new leadership, genuine inclusivity, and a commitment to Australian voices — on stage and off — is not just desirable. It is essential.