Opera on the radio

Anthony Tommasini is on holiday; in his place yesterday (the "critic's notebook" feature on the front page of the New York Times arts section), the Metropolitan Opera ran a 2,000-word fundraising drive under his byline. Or maybe he wrote it himself; if he did, the Met couldn't have wished for anything more fawning.

Terry Teachout paraphrases:

ChevronTexaco, which has been sponsoring the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts for the past 64 years, is pulling the plug at the end of the current season. (They now have other corporate priorities.) The broadcasts cost $7 million a year, and the Met doesn’t have that kind of cash to spare.

Tommasini makes it as clear as he can that it's ChevronTexaco who's the villain in this piece – he even calls down the wrath of Wotan on what he calls "the merged company that has pulled the plug". The contrast, you see, is with the virtuous pre-merger Texaco, which underwrote the broadcasts for 62 years, and whose CEO said in 1999 that "sponsoring the Met has become part of our corporate DNA".

The difference between Tommasini and Teachout is that the former clearly sees the potential demise of the broadcasts as disastrous for global civilisation, while the latter is less sympathetic, saying that "I don’t believe in sinking money into obsolete cultural ventures that have largely outlived their utility, and it occurs to me that the Met’s radio broadcasts—at least as presently constituted—may well fall into that category". His argument is that

the future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called "terrestrial radio" (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based radio, which make it possible to "narrowcast" a wider variety of programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that’s where the Met really belongs—not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I’d say that the Tony Tommasinis of today would be more likely to listen to the Met on their computers than on high-quality radios bought by their parents.

He's wrong. The Met radio broadcasts reach 11 million people – vastly more than will listen to classical music on their computers worldwide over the course of a year. Tommasini makes the point that the broadcasts "have been a cultural lifeline for generations of listeners, both those who live in places far removed from any opera company and those who may live just a subway ride from Lincoln Center but can't afford to attend". Teachout, it would seem, would restrict them to the lucky inhabitants of the affluent side of the digital divide, those with satellite radios and broadband internet connections.

Teachout even gripes that he'd "like to know how many of the Met’s 11 million listeners live in the United States" – as though non-US listeners are second-class opera buffs, about whom we shouldn't really care. Terry, those non-US listeners might well number millions in Latin America and China – people who are certainly not going to get satellite radios any time soon. Would you deprive them of what is quite probably their only access to opera just because they're not smart enough to live in the USA?

Teachout just doesn't get it: he writes that he's never listened to the broadcasts, implying that therefore there's something irrelevant about them. But Teachout is a member of the cultural elite that they aren't aimed at – the people who, if they fancy some opera, can just hop on the subway to Lincoln Center, pull out some of their disposable income, and experience it live. If those people never listened to an opera on the radio, it really wouldn't matter. It's everybody else – those without easy access to an opera house – who are the people that the radio broadcasts are trying to reach.

That said, I do agree with Teachout on the subject of what Tommasini calls "compensation to commercial radio stations" – something which accounts for an undisclosed chunk of the cost of the broadcasts. Subsidising the wide dissemination of opera is a good thing indeed, but I'm not sure it should go so far as to directly contribute to the bottom line of for-profit radio stations.

But I also think that the whole debate is a little bit overblown. For the fact is that the Saturday broadcasts will go on, even if the Met can't find a big-name corporate sponsor to replace ChevronTexaco. The Annenberg Foundation has already given $3.5 million to keep them on the air, and both Joseph Volpe, the Met's general manager, and Beverly Sills, its chairwoman, have personally pledged that the programme will continue.

Why? Certainly, it's close to their hearts for all the reasons that Tommasini rehearses. But, more prosaically, it's crucially important if the Met is to continue to receive funding from the large foundations. Tommasini's article appeared on the same day that George Hunka blogged about how "Lincoln Center Theater, in particular, has an active education department that seeks to bring young audiences into the theater (mainly for the benefit of funders and New York Times reporters, it appears)".

I'm not nearly that cynical, but I'm sure that Volpe has done his maths: if he doesn't spend a couple of million on the radio broadcasts, he would risk losing much more than that from the kind of foundations that are very keen on public outreach, and very dubious about throwing money at institutions which cater only to the rich opera-going elite. Anthony Tommasini can stop losing sleep: the Met has every interest in ensuring that these broadcasts continue.

Posted by Felix at 9:12 EST

Comments

Thank you for this post. That Teachout post felt unseemly and elitist to me in a way I couldn't find a good way to express, and you've done a great job.

The idea that only people who have broadband "deserve" opera is ludicrous. Interestingly, I grew up in the same area of the country as Teachout (NE Arkansas to his SE Missouri), but I think I'm younger. I don't remember the Met Broadcasts until I was going to college in Texas, but I will always remember what it was like to watch Leontyne Price in Aida on TV. It's one of the reasons I live in NYC today.

Posted by: barry at 14:45 EST, December 13, 2003

Very common sense advice - the broadcasting of the Met will resume. On the otherhand we need to have a lobby for classical music. Sporting does - that is why large white elephants are built to subsidize sports teams. Music and culture need to be fought for.

Added this blog to the classical music blogroll I am compiling.

Posted by: Stirling Newberry at 4:04 EST, December 14, 2003