Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Opera houses have always tended to be associated with elitist art. And I remember well when going to the opera entailed wearing black ties for men and evening dresses for women. There was also the ritual of drinking champagne at the bar in the foyer, but I refer, of course, to the old opera house during the 1940s. When the theatre burned down in the early 1970s a great many fond memories went up in smoke.

The new Opera House, or more properly the National Cultural Centre, has become a more populist venue. Alongside operas and symphony orchestras more popular performances are regularly programmed.

Memories of the old Opera came back to me when I received a brochure about the formation of the Friends of the Opera association, and were further reinforced when I read several articles in the British press about attempts by the Royal Opera House to attract a younger audience.

Covent Garden is basically offering cut price tickets while the Savoy Theatre, which once specialised in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, is attempting to attract audiences to the most popular operas in the repertoire by offering relatively cheap seats.

The Savoy Opera started its season with The Barber of Seville. The audience comprised, in the words of Louise Jury of The Independent, "the normal array of critics and the great and the good [with] the bulk enthusiastic music-lovers of varying degrees of knowledge, some dressed up for their night on the town, some straight from office, a few in jeans".

The Savoy is attempting to establish a popular repertoire using younger singers with all shows in English. Presenting opera in English used to be the preserve of the English National Opera but while the ENO is subsidised the Savoy is totally dependent on box- office income.

The Savoy Theatre seats 1,100 and tickets range between 10 and 50 pounds. The repertoire will comprise The Barber of Seville (Rossini), Carmen (Bizet), The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart) and Elixir of Love (Donizetti).

Nothing could be more stark in contrast than the subsidy received by the Royal Opera House, which amounts to more than 23 million pounds annually and which sells tickets for up to 170 pounds. It has a seating capacity of 2,257 and it showcases rather more difficult works. Currently, it is producing Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Verdi's II Trovatore and Britten's The Rape of Lucretia among others.

Alongside efforts to popularise opera and draw younger audiences into the auditoriums is also a BBC initiative aimed at presenting operas on television in an attempt to reach the widest possible audience.

Peler Maniura, head of classical music television at the BBC, claims that opera on television allows a range of possibilities that are available on stage. He describes the scene of the burning of Carthage in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which they recreated by "lighting up the night sky outside a country house in West London". It was a spectacular sight, he says "and made the performance unforgettable".

He goes on to say that "there is still a minority of individuals who think that opera should be an exclusive members' club for aficionados only. But television offers a way of breaking through this exclusivity. It makes opera available to the broadest possible audience, while trying things that would be unimaginable in the theatre."

Janet Street-Porter expresses a very similar opinion in The Independent. "As far as I'm concerned opera isn't elitist. Opera, like Shakespeare, is a joyous experience that enriches your life, and how I wish more people could see it live and be turned on by it."

This interest seems to reflect a tendency to popularise what has come to be described as "high brow" art and to attract young audiences. According to statistics 71 per cent of sales have been from "first- timers", a fact that can only be healthy for the future of an art form that for too long has been seen as the preserve of a minority.