We went to the Metropolitan Opera’s Tosca last night. The singing and orchestra were excellent as always. The 2009 sets were very plain, as you might expect from an organization whose Form 990 indicates that it pays its general manager $1.5 million per year (what could they have left over for fancy sets, especially since donations were down about 40 percent?). The staging was designed to ensure maximum frustration among those who paid hundreds of dollars for box seats along the sides of the cavernous theater; for no obvious dramatic purpose singers would stand in side corners of the stage for minutes at a time. They were thus rendered invisible to hundreds of audience members. I emailed a composer friend just before the concert started and he replied with the following:
“I do not go to the MET as I am severely allergic to the smell of formaldehyde. These large orchestral organizations of this country should be tried for cultural treason, for they have suffocated the birth of our own orchestral voice. Any New Yorker or American that could give money to support these institutions has no self esteem. And why are we so concerned with the acoustics of our classical concert halls when ninety percent of the audience has hearing aids.”
Until I read James Wolfensohn’s autobiography, it seemed odd to me that donors would give so readily to cultural organizations that manifestly do not need the money. In my non-profit ideas page, I calculated that $5 million would suffice to create a free Internet library of most of the world’s classical music. But being on the board of an organization that has no fancy hall, no Chagall murals, no gala opening night, etc., is not going to advance one’s business or personal interests.
My companion summed up the evening succinctly: “I doubt that there is any other opera where such a high percentage of the characters are dead by the end.”
Phil – the good news is that a free classical music library currently containing 89.000 scores from 5,248 composers to date already exists and now includes an as yet small collection of recordings.
See http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page. and
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/arts/music/22music-imslp.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Contributions are made by anyone who can send in material free of copyright so I guess the cost borne by its 19 year old creator was very little.
As an amateur pianist I can say that the availability of these scores has made an enormous difference to my musical life as it must have done for countless others across the world.
Peter: By “classical music” I meant recordings that could be listened to (the way that the audience at the Met does), not scores that could be played after decades of study (the way that the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra does).
There are some recording on the site mentioned, however navigation is rather clumsy. I suggest looking at http://www.classiccat.net/ as an alternative.
As a musician, and person who does other things as well, there is more than one way to look at it. Or yes, I agree, but one could apply similar criticisms to, well, to Harvard… They were both first out of the gate, they were successful, they became ” the ” institution in their category… attracted donations the size of the Pacific Ocean, became bloated… what are you really going to do about it? The Met is a magnet for talent, both on stage, backstage, and in the orchestra pit. Somewhere, while athletes are paid tens of millions per year, there needs to be some institution that pays its orchestral artists $120,000, which happens to be the average salary in Manhattan, meaning for employed people in all professions in Manhattan. If it weren’t for the Met, smaller and more adventurous companies would have to re-invent the wheel. Furthermore, some of those companies are either A. on the brink of Bankruptcy B. Never pay their artists on time ( as in over 6 months behind schedule) or C. both. Also if you want to talk about accessibility, ie, broadcasts before the internet was even a concept, the Met has some good statistics.
I think it’d be great if there were a library of good free classical recordings on the web. But I don’t think that makes concert halls with good acoustics (and organizations which can run them and get excellent musicians/actors to perform there) unnecessary. If you really didn’t get any more out of a live performance than you do out of an mp3 player and home speakers, then I’d suggest it’s the performers (and director) who weren’t doing it right. Also I think a concert in a nice concert hall is (potentially) one of the more effective ways to introduce new classical music. It’s like saying that having all the Radiohead albums on iTunes where you can listen to them whenever you want doesn’t mean you’ll never have a reason to see another Radiohead concert.
Granted, classical music doesn’t command quite the following that Radiohead does. But I’d hope that the recordings library would draw people into nice concert halls and encourage classical music as a genre to grow — not make the concert halls superfluous.
Lurker; The question was not whether all funding from bricks-and-mortar concert halls should be diverted to an Internet service. The question was whether or not an extra $1-5 million per year would have more impact if added to the $billions already being spent on bricks-and-mortar concert halls or diverted to a (currently non-existent) Internet service.