Lend us a tenor: Italian opera houses in need of funding
The grim joke told with increasing frequency among Italian opera
buffs is: “When is bankruptcy not a bankruptcy?” The answer: “When it
affects an opera house.”
With most lyric theatres in Italy unable to pay bills or wages,
the financial crisis afflicting the birth place of the art form appears
more serious than ever – and is prompting those involved in opera to
call for a rethink on how its theatres are funded and operated. Florence Business News
John Allison, the editor of Opera Magazine, will argue in a
a coming editorial that Italy needs to either embrace large-scale
corporate sponsorship, as in the US, or provide generous state
subsidies.
“At the moment Italy is doing neither, and it’s not working. Many
of the major opera houses would be officially bankrupt if they were
normal businesses,”
Italian opera houses in need of funding
“One of the only three Italian opera houses that is currently able to
pay its bills is Turin (the other two are Milan’s La Scala and Venice’s
Fenice), and I suspect that’s not unrelated to all the corporate
sponsorship that’s available in this very industrialised city. It’s
different, say, for Florence.”
Francesco Bianchi, the government commissioner sent in to rescue
Florence’s Maggio Musicale Opera house, agrees that the piecemeal nature
of funding, based on a range of diminishing state, regional and
municipal grants and limited corporate sponsorship, had made the
situation very difficult for Italian opera houses. Florence News
“The only way the Metropolitan Opera in New York is able to survive, for example, is through corporate sponsorship,” he says.
Some observers say changing tastes and diminishing attention
spans have been bad for the elaborate art form. There is a general
feeling that three decades of trash TV from ex-premier Silvio
Berlusconi’s Mediaset empire has dumbed down Italy – and made opera less
mainstream than ever. Florence Political News
In 2010, the last centre-right Berlusconi government passed a law
aimed at reforming the country’s archaic and cash-strapped opera
houses, which not only demanded more budgetary discipline but cut back
further the amount musicians and performers could earn, provoking
protests.
But Mr Bianchi says appalling management and unreasonable,
over-powerful unions are another factor behind the financial crisis
afflicting Italian opera. “Most of the 14 opera foundations (one for
each opera house) have been very badly managed,” he says. “If they
hadn’t been, then they wouldn’t be in the state they are now. And
nowhere else in Europe are the unions so powerful.” Florence Press Release Distribution
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