Ive been taking time off from blogging, to clear my head and give other work some space. But when I read Norman Lebrechts attack on Peter Gelb…! I had to say something. You may or may not like Peter, and how he runs the Met. But when Norman writes that Peter is lying, when Peter says opera attendance is down in the US and Europe…wow. Thats truly crazy. Norman (and others) toss out the Chicago Lyric Opera as proof that the US opera tix sales are healthy, apparently because the Lyric just reported better sales than they had last year. But the Lyric has had a really big decline in sales since the 1990s! Really big, from 103% of capacity down to somewhere in the 80s, the exact number depending on which recent year you look at. So in fact the Lyric is a perfect example of what Peter means. But above all, theres a methodological problem, if I may talk fancy. You dont assess the trend in opera ticket sales by taking one or two examples, and say (even if you happen to be right), Hey, these guys are doing fine! Its basic statistics — and common sense — that in any collection of data, youll have a few outliers, a few opera companies (in this case) whose sales are better or worse than the norm. What you want to do, if you want a true picture of whats going on, is to find out what the norm is. And in this case, theres a picture of that (literally), in a chart I was sent by Opera America, showing an ongoing decline in attendance at performances by the larger US opera companies, from 2001 to 2012. Which isnt the whole story. The smaller companies arent represented. Opera America told me that not enough of them send in data to make the totals for them reliable. But whats happening at the big companies is an unmistakable decline, which rather strongly suggests that Peter is right. artsjournal/sandow/2014/07/the-peter-gelb-furor.html
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 19:01:03 +0000
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