This is my expert

Further, highbrow/lowbrow has more to do with cultural status than with money. In his recent NYT Op Ed, Alex Ross, while acknowledging the hard to shake “pince-nez image” of opera, claims that opera-goers are “a motley middle-class lot” and that the Met ticket prices are on par with tickets to a Rolling Stones concert.

Finally, strikes are often not about dividing profit. Public school teachers, bus drivers and other municipal employees, for example, regularly go on strike, although they are fully supported by public funds. The Met, on the other hand, is supported almost entirely by ticket sales and private donations.

A typical strike is about how to divvy profits between those that supply human capital and those that supply fiscal capital. In this case though, there is just not enough demand for these people’s services. Nonetheless, they feel they worked hard all their lives and have a skill that not many other people have. Therefore, having studied music and not economics, they feel they ‘deserve’ more compensation.

As the market started to shrink, they could raise prices. That is part of what made classical music an elitist art form. This has reached its limit now. Even with taxpayer-funded support for certain select art forms blessed by the lords of culture, we just can’t keep these people in the lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to.

2. Your comment relates well to Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow point. I believe a work’s difficultly does not necessarily limit its public appeal. While we see Shakespeare as a pinnacle of difficult and sublime literature, Levine shows in 19th century America it was pop culture. And while 20th century classical music isn’t easy listening, either is Wagner’s—but in the early 20th century his operas were the rage. It is possible that mondern composers were no longer writing with a larger public in mind.

3. It is interesting that in the first part of the 20th century opera, operettas, musicals and variety shows all coexisted as popular entertainment. I think it would be fascinating to do a similar large-scale data analysis of musicals on Broadway and look at their programming history over the last century. While Broadway musicals are still going strong (they are billion dollar a year industry), there are hints of the repertoire becoming more standardized. Stephen Sondheim says, “You have two kinds of shows on Broadway – revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles….It has to do with seeing what is familiar…. I don’t think the theatre will die per se, but it’s never going to be what it was…. It’s a tourist attraction.”

It is interesting that the manager at the Met, Giulio Gotti-Casazza remained the same for several years both before and after 1920 (from 1908-1935), and was considered very successful during his tenure. The Met was financially in very good shape from 1915 until the depression hit, even as their programming changed.

I’m sure composers were affected by their shifting audiences, and some, as you suggest, chose to write in other genres. The Hammerstein family offers an anecdote of the shifting times: Oscar Hammerstein II, the famed musical librettist of the 1940’s and 50’s was the grandson of Oscar Hammerstein I, who successfully ran the Met’s rival opera company in the early 20th century. Many classical 20th century composers continued to compose and premiere operas—these works just didn’t make up the majority of the opera seasons.

1. The introduction of the microphone.

Before microphones, singers needed a lot of training to be able to sing loudly enough for everyone in the theatre to hear them. Once the microphone came in, breathier, softer, smoother, and more “natural” and untrained (or differently-trained) voices could fill big halls with ease. Many people have come to find the operatic sound unpleasant and aggressive – especially compared to many of the ultra-wispy voices of some popular singers today.

2. “Serious” composers started writing music that is much more difficult to immediately appreciate.

Lots of operas got written in the 20th century, but it’s hard to sell tickets to people who aren’t “serious” opera buffs. Listen to ‘Lulu’ (which dates from the 1930’s) and you’ll quickly understand why. Opera composers didn’t stop experimenting – quite the opposite, actually. But the results of their experiments took them much further away from the popular taste than before.

3. The rise of musical theater

Opera is really just one form of musical theater, and musical theater as a genre is still going strong. Broadway composers took the popular parts of opera – stage drama with catchy tunes and dancing – and ditched the parts that were becoming dated – high-powered vocals and lengthy recitative. Old-style opera, and modern opera, for that matter, are now a niche interest. And sometimes, catering to a niche is an excellent business plan, as the Met has discovered!

(1) The people viewing the operas.
(2) The people running the Met.
(3) The people composing operas.

If opera rapidly became highbrow in the early 1920s, were Met planners immediately sensitive to the preferences of the market, and have composers of the last century simply acquiesced in their obsolescence? Or couldn’t this also be a story about talented composers themselves leaving for other new artistic fields, and skilled season planners leaving for other venues?