Articles : Miscellany

When the curtain went up on Act II of Leos Janác¤ek's opera Jenufa at its premiere last winter, few in the celebrity-studded first-night audience at the Sydney Opera House would have detected anything strange about the set.

Only insiders at Opera Australia, the company staging the Czech composer's gritty tale of unrequited love, face slashing, illegitimacy and infanticide, would have known that the simple, stark backdrop against which the drama was played out was not the original idea.

It was to have been something much more elaborate, a stylised representation of the interior of a bleak Soviet-style apartment block. But that, says Chris Potter, the production manager, would have blown the budget - so they simply painted the back of the set for Act I black and used that, saving more than half the $148,000 the scenery had been expected to cost.

There was a time when money was - almost - no object when staging such a spectacular at the Opera House. Superstars like Luciano Pavarotti and our own Dame Joan Sutherland were flown in at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars for a few nights' performances, whole regiments were assembled for extravaganzas such as Prokofiev's War and Peace, an 18-tonne

band rotunda and an artificial lake were constructed on stage for the fairies to cavort around in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

That was then. Dismayed by declining audiences and rocked by massive losses - Opera Australia has accumulated a $5 million deficit, losing money in six of the past seven years - Australia's largest and most expensive performing arts company has begun to feel the chill winds that have buffeted the real economy beyond Bennelong Point for most of the 1990s.

Business-school jargon like "restructuring" "margin/volume trade-off" and "yield maximisation" is heard around the boardroom table, under Sidney Nolan's scintillating drawings for the sets of Il trovatore, where once the talk was of "Joan's" famous mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, or the chance of enticing "Placido" (Domingo) for a season three summers away.

Opera Australia, the national company, is undergoing its greatest shake-up since its predecessor, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, was founded in 1954 - a rude shock to the whole opera community from the glitterati in the champagne bar sipping Yalumba D to the distinguished board and the staff cobbler and milliner labouring away in the back rooms.

Sorting through racks of "pre-loved" costumes at opera's national headquarters, a grimy barred- windowed factory in Surry Hills, its artistic director, Moffatt Oxenbould, sighs: "One of the reasons for the trend to modern clothes is that the silks and furs and velvet have become too expensive. Last Friday I fitted a cloak on a chorister that had been worn in La Bohème by Kiri Te Kanawa and Joan Sutherland."

If the lamp-lit garden through which the lecherous Count Almaviva once again unsuccessfully pursued Susanna in the final act of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro the other night looks a tad tatty, that's hardly surprising. It's the original set, built in the 1970s, and dragged in and out of the Opera House for revivals more times than anyone can remember.

Nowadays, the first question when they sit down with a director to plan a new opera, says Chris Potter, is how much money do you have? "That sometimes offends people, but it's better to face up to our limitations than wait till we are halfway down the track." Some successful productions, like Wagner's grandiose Die Meistersinger von NuÈrnberg may never be staged again, because they would cost $300,000 or $400,000 too much.

"I think the cuts have bitten deeply," says Oxenbould, who is leaving next year after an extraordinary 35 years with the opera. "I hope we are not letting the audience see that yet, but I think we have pushed it as far as we can go."

But talk to Adrian Collette, brought in as general manager last year to try to turn the opera around, and you soon realise there are much more radical reforms coming. The administrative staff has been slashed, next year's program has been stacked with "family favourites" to maximise the box office, and the opera looks likely to celebrate the year 2000 by cutting performances by 10 to 15 per cent. WHY should this matter to the rest of Australia, to the 18.4 million people who will never see an opera, let alone care about the difference between a soubrette and a pants role, a répétiteur and a rubato? In a word, taxes - years of living lavishly have made Opera Australia the most heavily subsidised company in the country, taking $14 million last year out of the State and Federal governments' arts budgets.

"The Opera House has taken $100 million away from the sick and needy to the benefit of snobs," snarled the near-century-old Jack Lang, the former socialist premier of NSW, who lived just long enough to disagree with the crowds cheering as the Queen opened Australia's greatest architectural icon in 1973. He would be spinning in his grave if he could see Opera Australia's budgets for the following quarter of a century.

In those 25 years, another $150 million of taxpayers' money has been spent keeping the opera on stage for an audience that has stagnated at between 200,000 and 300,000, dwindling, relatively speaking, during a time when Australia's population increased by nearly half. The public subsidy during that period has soared nearly 1,000 per cent, from $5 for every bottom on every seat at every performance to $49, inviting critics to brand it "welfare for the middle class".

The root of the problem is that fewer and fewer people are interested in what has been described as an antique form of European melodrama set to music, whose most popular works were first performed not just before the advent of radio, television and the cinema, but often before the invention of the steam engine. More than half the audience today consists of a declining hard core of 19,500 aging opera buffs who can afford to fork out up to $1,250 for a season's subscription.

A report by the Australia Council earlier this year on the floundering finances of our main performing arts companies analyses where the crowds are going instead - to festivals, to purpose-built venues, and to touring international blockbusters like Les Misérables, AiÈda and Riverdance.

While Janácek struggles for an audience, across town at the Theatre Royal, the musical Phantom of the Opera celebrated three years of near-100 per cent capacity crowds for eight performances a week - a million people have seen it, twice as many as attended all the operas staged in Sydney over that time.

That report also catalogues something that has become a source of bitchy jealousy among other performing arts companies - the huge bite opera takes out of the government funding cake. Of the $40 million or so State and Federal governments give to the 20 largest companies, Opera Australia takes about a third - almost as much as all seven principal State theatre companies put together. IT was obvious from the start that opera in Australia would appeal to an elite minority, and - as in Europe, though not the United States - was going to depend heavily on taxpayer subsidy. Just how heavily has become apparent only in recent years: in 1997, one-third of Opera Australia's $44 million income came from the Government, half from the box office, and the rest from corporate sponsorship.

Little has changed in the 20 years since the distinguished music critic John Cargher wrote in his history, Opera and Ballet in Australia :

"The state of opera in 1956 certainly did not warrant the construction of an opera house in Sydney or any other city. There are almost too many things about [its] creation that run completely counter to logic ... it was the money spent, not the building needed, which kept it alive ... the Sydney Opera House was just as self-perpetuating as the bureaucracy which brought it into being, and just as extravagant."

Every decade or so since, the opera has noisily announced that it is "in crisis", and up until now the solution has been a bail-out from business or (more often) the Federal Government.

It helps, of course, to have a board and an honour roll of patrons replete with the rich and the famous and the politically influential: the businessmen Terence Cutler, John Harvey, Harold Mitchell, Richard Owens and Tony Wheeler; Lady (Mary) and James Fairfax and Mrs Kerry Packer from the media world; Jill Hickson Wran, the agent and wife of the former premier; James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank.

In 1976, John Winther, the company's first general manager, shocked the blue-rinse set by announcing the opera would have to go part-time, disbanding for five months the following year, unless $970,000 could be found. Mein Gott! In the nick of time, like a damsel in distress, it was rescued by the dashing Utah Development Company.

Ten years later, disaster loomed again and Kim Williams - now head of Rupert Murdoch's Fox studios in Australia - was called in by the consultants Coopers & Lybrand to investigate. His report is a long litany of management malpractice which concluded that unless there was a cash injection of $2.5 million the company would have to cease trading early in 1986, as it would be unable to meet its legal obligations. This time the Keating Government bailed it out.

Curiously, the Labor Party has traditionally been a more generous patron than the Liberals (the "twin peaks" of Gough and Margaret Whitlam are always there, towering over the opening-night throng) - curiously because the audience comes predominantly from Sydney's wealthy eastern suburbs and the three blue- ribbon electorates of the North Shore.

Then, last year, more trouble. Once again Coopers & Lybrand arrived with its flow charts and calculators, and once again its report, handed to the board a week before Christmas, made grim reading. Opera Australia was prepared to release only a summary, but it shows that this was probably the worst mess the company had been in - costs had blown out, revenue had shrunk, audiences were dwindling.

Opera Australia was expected to lose $2.5 million in the 1997 calendar year (in fact this blew out to a record $4.6 million after some ancient sets and costumes lingering on the books had to be written off) and $2 million more in 1998. "The management of Opera Australia recognises that there is a need to address the situation from an organisation-wide perspective - a few tweaks to the budget are unlikely to rectify the financial position long-term," the accountants said.

The difference this time is that the Government is highly unlikely to throw its friends at the opera another lifeline of public money. In fact, funding has been cut under the Howard Government - like most other agencies, the opera has had deducted from its grant a 1 per cent "efficiency dividend", adding up to $1.3 million over three years.

Earlier this month, Neil Armfield, one of Australia's leading theatre and opera directors, put on record the fears that many in the opera community were afraid to voice: "A chill wind blew through many of our minds during the recent [Federal] election campaign when the [Liberal Party] ads went out suggesting a vote for Labor was a vote for the `elite' arts."

Opera Australia confirmed it had sent a briefing to and sought an early meeting with the new Arts Minister, a Gippsland solicitor named Peter McGauran. Asked whether emergency funding would be forthcoming, he was non-committal - the minister is "aware" of the opera's financial position, said a spokeswoman, and "we strongly support the company as it seeks to reposition itself in the market".

Donald McDonald, friend of the Prime Minister and now chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, had got out just in time after nine years as general manager. For his successor, Adrian Collette, it is his worst nightmare come to life - especially for someone with no experience in performing arts management.

His was a surprise appointment, supported enthusiastically by the chairman of the opera, the Melbourne businessman Graeme Samuel. Collette had started off as a principal singer with the (now defunct) Victoria State Opera, become a lecturer in English literature, then for nine years worked for the publisher Reed Books, as marketing manager then general manager.

"Opera Australia has three major revenue lines - box office, sponsorship and government funding," he reflected in an interview the other day, before jetting overseas. "It was a sobering day three or four months after my appointment when I realised all three revenue lines were going the wrong way. They kind of all peaked in 1995."

Adding to the problem was that "the performance of this art form at a satisfactory level requires very high fixed costs, and you will never change that. There is no discretion to be more efficient with how many people you put in an orchestra to play a Verdi score, or how many acts you do in a Verdi opera. [You can't] ask Sir Charles Mackerras to improve his tempi and bring the opera in 15 minutes early so we don't have to pay overtime."

It is true that opera in Sydney faces some unusual - and expensive - problems, not the least being that the smaller opera theatre at the Opera House (the main concert hall is used mostly for orchestral concerts) is a terrible venue. The hoariest joke in the business is that Australia has a great opera house - the only problem is that the exterior is in Sydney, the interior in Melbourne, and the parking in Adelaide.

The limitations of the stage mean that certain large-scale operas simply can't be performed. In some places "you have to stand on the seat and hang onto a pillar to see what's going on", says one opera-goer. The orchestra makes a muffled boom from under the stage - the orchestra pit couldn't be enlarged any further for fear of structural damage to the building. "How is it possible that a building costing over $100 million could fail to provide the basic necessities for the very needs implied in its name?" puzzles Cargher.

AS well, the great distances between Australia and the cultural capitals of Europe and the United States discourage the operatic superstars who pull the crowds. According to David Gyger, editor of the Australian newspaper Opera Opera, the great Pavarotti could only be enticed to sing at the Opera House by casting his mistress opposite him as Mimi in La Bohème. "We had six sopranos here who could have sung the role better," he says, "but this is the kind of thing you have to do if you are going to tempt people to come to the end of the earth."

But some of this year's damage has been self-inflicted, particularly what Collette tactfully calls "marginal or esoteric repertoire" planned two or three years earlier which the audiences shunned. That production of Jenufa, for instance, lost money, and even worse was the premiere of Berlioz's Beatrice and Benedick, which on its poorest night had only 717 paying customers in the 1,450 seats in the Opera House - a disaster when the opera needs to play to houses over 80 per cent full just to break even.

Next year that will change. Ignoring critics who fear he is "dumbing down" the opera, Collette and the board have ruthlessly dumped from the program artistically challenging but financially risky premieres such as Janácek's Katya Kabanova, in favour of well-worn favourites such as La Bohème and The Magic Flute, the two most popular operas ever written.

It will also be the fourth year since Opera Australia presented an Australian opera. Oxenbould - who will be replaced in 2001 by a part-time musical director, Simone Young, who will spend half the year with the opera in Bergen, Norway - says they had aimed at performing one new Australian work every two years, but with the finances in such a parlous state they cannot afford to commission one, nor take the risk it might not work at the box office.

"In repertoire terms, we are doing everything we can to engineer a strong box office," Collette says. "But the problem is we can't program the `top 20' every season." So - hold onto your tiaras and bow ties - Opera Australia is looking at bringing back popular musicals such as the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, scorned by the cognoscenti, but which Collette thinks it was "in revenue terms a mistake" to drop in 1995.

As well, the 2000 season looks like having 10 to 15 per cent fewer performances, Collette says. The idea is to make tickets harder to come by so that more people will be encouraged to buy season tickets - but there will obviously also be more staff cuts, though he promises there will be no "slashing and burning".

As far as corporate sponsorship is concerned, Collette thinks the fundraising has gone as far as it can, after a 40 per cent increase this year, short of dressing the Valkyries in Nike tracksuits. There is hardly a thing that is not emblazoned with a company logo - Channel 7 has been persuaded to part with $6 million, the largest sponsorship deal in the history of the arts in Australia; Qantas flies the cast around; Honda launches its new cars

on the forecourt of the Opera House to the strains of Madama Butterfly ; the chorus comes compliments of Deutsche Bank.

And what can't be bought is available for hire. Fancy a three- metre willow pattern plate from The Mikado? A statue of an Egyptian king from Aida? A crate of bats from Die Fledermaus? A gorilla from The Rake's Progress? A five-metre cannon from Boris Godunov? Bring your chequebook to the props warehouse in Alexandria.

On the cost side of the opera's shaky balance sheet, savings have proved more elusive. The number of people on the payroll has doubled over the years, from 160 in 1974 to 320 today, at a time when the number of performances has stayed fairly static at 230 to 240 a year.

Thirty-five administrative jobs, about a quarter, have been cut - mainly in Melbourne after Opera Australia took over the struggling Victorian State Opera. Jobs have been amalgamated - the opera's new public relations manager, the hyperactive Helen O'Neil, also doubles as marketing manager, and looks after the box office as well.

But backstage, where things are highly unionised, the number of people regarded as necessary to stage an opera is extraordinary. A typical performance of Tosca involves 242 people - 135 of them performers, the rest stage managers (three) electricians (10), mechanists, props and scene shifters (26), dressers and wardrobe staff (eight), a fireman, a wig person, a surtitle projectionist and so on.

Had he considered "privatising" or outsourcing, for instance the chorus?

Collette: "If anyone can run a chorus and pay its salaries and make a margin and sell it to me cheaper than we are currently getting I'd be delighted."

Other savings are harder to identify, since, in spite of its dependence on public funding, Opera Australia reveals far less about its finances than any public company or government department. Collette, for instance, will not disclose his salary, nor those of his senior managers - nor is the paying public allowed to know how much is spent on the opera's visiting stars.

Asked what a guest celebrity such as Bryn Terfel, the Welsh baritone who will sing the title role in Verdi's Falstaff next year, will be paid for his eight scheduled performances, O'Neil can only guess "anything from $17,000 to $100,000 per performance". Even the overall budget for fees and expenses for guest artists is a secret - somewhere between $4 million and $6 million a year is the estimate.

Although Collette is expecting a further fall in audiences when the final results are in for this year, he says the books will be "nowhere near" the $2 million in the red that had been predicted.

But ask him bluntly why 18.4 million Australians who don't go to the opera should continue subsidising the 300,000 or so who do, why the millions shouldn't be spent, instead, on social services in this time of budget austerity, and the answer is even mistier:

"You cannot measure the importance of this kind of enterprise simply through the number of people who see it ... [opera is important] in terms of the community life, the cultural life, the economic life, for our reputation as a country of cultural vitality and significance, the kinds of ambassadors we are constantly sending out into the world.

"These are all measures of a vital community. We will never win the argument about [whether] it's worth so many hospital beds."