Curtain Call
Marc Scorca '79 is bringing opera to the masses
By Rebecca Binder '02
Some things about opera will never change. Black tie and long dresses are still apropos at the New York Metropolitan Opera on Saturday nights. The sullen, pierced teenager with baggy jeans, backwards baseball hat and hands in pockets will most likely draw scathing glances as he slinks to his seat (even if his seat is in the Grand Tier) for some time to come. But traditional opera lovers will need to get used to the pierced neophyte, because the audience for opera is not only growing, but also getting younger and becoming more diverse, both economically and socially.
Despite the fears caused by ChevronTexaco’s withdrawal from sponsoring the radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, opera in the United States is in the midst of a resurgence of popularity in nearly every strata of society. Far from being in danger of becoming outdated, a museum art form, opera is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. New works are being written. New opera companies have been established, and older ones are growing. And attendance figures are strong, too: the opera audience is the only arts audience that has grown steadily in the past 15 years, and it has also grown younger; the median age has declined, with the 18- to 34-year-old age category having the greatest surge in growth.
"Opera has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past decade,” says Marc Scorca ’79. And he should know: He is president and C.E.O. of Washington, D.C.-based Opera America, a nonprofit organization that promotes the creation of opera and excellence in the production of opera, as well as helping to strengthen opera companies and developing broad and deep audiences.
 Meredith Hall in Opera Atelier’s production of Claudio Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea. |
In March 2002, Opera America, along with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, American Symphony Orchestra League, Dance/USA and Theatre Communications Group, formed the Performing Arts Research Coalition (PARC) to study public attitudes toward the performing arts. “The act of going to an arts performance,” Scorca says, "where you see your neighbors and share a special moment with them, where you learn about yourself and your emotional reactions to what’s on stage—that transformative power is central to why we work as hard as we do in the nonprofit performing arts. So we wanted to discover how members of the public ascribe value to this arts experience.” To that end, the coalition initiated a three-year research project that will survey public attitudes in 10 regions. In March 2003, they published the results from the first five areas: Alaska, Cincinnati, Denver, Pittsburgh and Seattle. “The results,” Scorca says, “are very encouraging.”
The study found that the audience for live, professional performing arts, at least in the five cities included in the project, was larger than the audience for live, professional sporting events. (Scorca stresses the “live, professional” qualifier; one televised Superbowl would cause the arts attendance figures to pale in comparison.) Also, arts attendees tended to be more active in their communities and are more likely to volunteer. The findings that most stand out, however, suggest that the typical vision of the opera audience as “old, rich and white” is becoming more a myth than a reality. The PARC project found very little relationship between age and attendance; middle-income households attend as often as higher-income households. The only characteristic that seemed relevant, the study found, was a strong relationship between level of education and attendance; well-educated people tended to be more frequent attendees.
Why education? Nobody’s sure yet, but the topic is begging to be explored. “It may be an issue of exposure,” Scorca offers. “During a longer period of education there are more opportunities to explore the arts and do coursework in the arts. That’s something that needs to be researched.”
 The Florentine Opera Company’s production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. |
"What is very interesting is that the very high value given to the arts experience is held by both attendees and nonattendees,” Scorca says. For example, the PARC project found that between 31 and 38 percent of the people surveyed perceive the arts as increasing cultural understanding in a community, even if they don’t attend arts performances themselves. “Even if someone doesn’t go to the opera, they still appreciate it,” Scorca says. “They still understand that the arts are important and that the arts organizations in their communities are important.”
That’s exactly why Opera America has become so vital to American opera. Counting 117 American and 19 Canadian professional opera companies as its members and leaving only a handful of professional opera companies in America and Canada unaffiliated, the organization compiles the experiences of each member company into a cohesive whole. “We collect information, both statistical and anecdotal,” Scorca explained. “We do national research projects; we essentially try to accumulate the experience and wisdom of our field into a more accessible form, so it can be made available to our members, who, we hope, use it to help do their work more effectively in their community.” Opera America also works with public policy and monitors legislation’s impact on the arts, particularly immigration law that affects foreign artists’ entering the country and tax law that affects the deductibility of charitable gifts to arts organizations.
"What really attracted me to Opera America,” Scorca says, “is that I enjoy running an organization. But part of the responsibility of this organization is to think theoretically and philosophically about the art form; to think about the important intersection between the art form and community, between the art form and public policy, between the art form and new audiences.”
Opera has had its hold on Scorca since his childhood outside of New York City. His grandparents were great fans of the opera who loved going to New York to watch Enrico Caruso perform. “It’s always what I’ve wanted to do,” he said. “My parents took me to my first opera when I was in junior high, and I went to the Met countless times with my high school friends, standing room only.” As a freshman at Amherst, Scorca wrote to the Metropolitan Opera asking for a volunteer position over Interterm. “So for four years, I spent every summer break, winter break, every Thanksgiving break, every day I could,” he remembered. “I had a desk at the Metropolitan Opera, two wonderful projects that I worked on the entire time I was there, and standing-room privileges. My record was seeing 44 performances in 41 days, all standing room.”
It’s unlikely that the general opera-goer will match Scorca’s degree of dedication, but clearly the trend is toward his position. The optimistic state of opera today is all the more impressive because opera is just now climbing out of a difficult period in its history. Beginning in the 1890s, opera, unrivaled for almost 300 years, suddenly had to compete with modern technology and the mass media. In 1890, there were two ways to enjoy opera: attend a live performance, or, if you were blessed with enough talent, sing your favorite arias at the living-room piano. By 1915, though, you could indulge yourself with Caruso’s voice on 78-rpm records without the fuss, expense and inconvenience of leaving your living room for the opera house.
When cinema was introduced, opera found itself on unsteady ground. “If we look at how opera moved from being a cutting-edge art form that thrived on new works to being an art piece that was threatened with becoming a museum art form, I think we have to look at the intersection of opera and film,” Scorca says. “I’m not positing a causal relationship, but I do think that it’s something to be explored; it’s interesting to think about.”
On top of the new competitors for the opera audience, the Great Depression, World War II and a lack of funds hit the industry where it hurt: in the wallet. Scorca explains: “It’s expensive to produce an opera. It was cheaper to bring on a performance of Carmen, where you already owned the sets and costumes, than it was to build new sets and costumes, not to mention to pay for the commissioning process and the rehearsal process that a new opera requires.”
Beyond basic financial concerns, there were aesthetic reasons for the stagnation of opera in the 20th century. Some people cite the premature death of composer George Gershwin as one of several setbacks. The Metropolitan Opera in New York had commissioned Gershwin to write a new opera after Porgy and Bess; Gershwin died before completing the opera, leaving a trend toward new opera with little to feed on. In addition, contemporary classical music became very difficult music toward the middle of the century. “The composers of new music moved into a school of composition that was particularly difficult for audiences to enjoy,” Scorca says (imagine, if you can, a John Cage aria). “There was a general sense that audiences didn’t like contemporary music, and that if you did a contemporary opera they wouldn’t come. So, in addition to having the expense of producing a new opera, you would lose the revenue at the box office. It was kind of a double-edged sword.”
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So, what turned the state of opera around again? Scorca credits new trends in opera composition, a focus on more modern themes and, interestingly, another new technology: the Internet.
Today’s composers are eager to connect with their audience. “If you are writing music that only a musicologist can understand and appreciate,” Scorca says, “then your audience is necessarily limited.” In the past 20 years, opera composition has seen a return to narrative and musical themes that, if not simple, are more easily understood by audiences than are the nuances of mid-century music. Also, the past 15 years have witnessed a tremendous growth in the number of new works. But these new works don’t necessarily focus on the same themes that define the operas of the 19th century. Dead Man Walking played at the New York City Opera last fall; Dangerous Liaisons premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 1994; an opera based on playwright Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge debuted at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1999. “A lot of these new works are based on American characters or American literature or historical events in the country,” Scorca says. “So there’s a link between the subject matter of these new operas and popular culture, the modern American story.”
Scorca also attributes the recent resurgence of interest in opera to the modern expectation of a multimedia performance. “Opera is a multimedia art form in a multimedia world,” he says. “People think of multimedia as a fairly recent phenomenon; opera is a form of multimedia entertainment that was invented in 1597. The rest of the world has just caught up.” He explained that audiences—most notably younger audiences—have come to expect the fusing of words, music, movement and images. “Those basic elements describe opera as much as they describe a music video,” he says. “There is a comfort with the aesthetic complexity of our art forms among young people who have grown up with multimedia arts and entertainment. Also, many of the more popular entertainment forms deal with larger-than-life emotions: the archetypical terms of love, desire, disappointment and jealousy—the terms of opera. As I look at the connections between popular culture and opera, I see a lot of points of reference.”
Learning from the problems of the past, Opera America has turned competing media to its advantage, using the Internet to help opera reach broader and deeper audiences. Scorca stresses that the Internet—a communications platform that transmits words, sound and images—complements opera beautifully. “If we’re not thinking about how to harness this technology, we’ll be left behind by new art forms and new entertainment forms that will replace us,” he says.
One of the most effective ways to harness the technology is through education. Opera America’s research suggests that many people who don’t attend operas would, if they knew more about it. Also, frequent opera attendees indicated that they would enjoy the opera more if they had a deeper understanding of the art form’s complex layers. "Part of the responsibility of Opera America is to think of a way to keep an art form that has such a transformational power accessible to people who can benefit from the richness it has to offer,” Scorca says. To that end, Opera America has set up a distance-learning program. Developed experimentally with Boston Lyric Opera and nationally with a number of other opera companies, the program began to offer courses on opera through its Opera World website, www.operaworld.com, in the spring of 2002. When Scorca tried to think of the proper faculty to teach an online distance-learning course, two of his friends from Amherst, Roger Pines ’79 and David Jackson ’80, immediately came to mind.
"Roger Pines has forgotten more about opera than I will ever know,” Scorca says glowingly of his colleague, who is the editorial dramaturge at Lyric Opera of Chicago and who taught the first distance-learning course, on Giuseppe Verdi. “Roger’s just brilliant, and he does extraordinary work with Lyric Opera of Chicago. He’s also generous of spirit and just abundantly qualified to teach anybody anything about opera. David Jackson taught our Russian opera course; he’s one of my best friends since Amherst. His career as a conductor is developing, and he’s just an absolute expert in Russian opera and Russian arts and literature. When we wanted to do a course on Russian opera, he was the perfect person to go to.”
"It’s fascinating,” Scorca says, “because the Internet is borderless. Usually when people take one of our distance-learning courses, only about half the students are from the city where the course is linked. The other half are from anywhere around the world; it’s just been remarkable how diverse the enrollment is in each one of our classes.”
Bringing the joy of opera to the widest possible audience is really at the heart of Scorca’s work, not only because it will help opera companies, but because it makes a real difference in people’s lives. “We know from our research,” Scorca says, “that the arts help to inspire personal creativity in individuals, connect individuals to their community and foster cross-cultural understanding. We know economically that the arts are an important engine for downtown vitality and redevelopment in some cities. So the discussion can revolve around two points: the intrinsic value of the arts as a cultural expression and the instrumental value of the arts in a community. Many times, arts organizations are measured in these sorts of secondary categories of value. For example, ‘Arts organizations are important to this town because they help attract businesses, and build downtown restaurants; arts organizations do great programs at the area schools.’ We’re happy that’s true, and we believe in those programs. But the central reason we do what we do is because we believe that the arts are transformative, that the arts can inspire people.”
The Handmaid's Tale Photo: Michael Daniel
Scorca Photo: Frank Ward
Photo of The Coronation of Poppea: Bruce Zinger
Photo of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Richard Brodzeller photography, Florentine Opera Company
Opera at Amherst
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At Amherst, as in the rest of the country, opera is enjoying something of a renaissance. Most notably, in 2000, the Peter R. Pouncey Professor of Music, Lewis Spratlan, won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for the concert version of Act II of his opera Life is a Dream. The opera features a libretto by Professor of Spanish James Maraniss and is based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón. Remarkably, Spratlan himself has never heard the full work. He originally composed Life is a Dream in 1978 on a commission from the New Haven Opera Theater, but the company folded shortly after he finished the opera, and they never performed it. Spratlan and his publisher sent the score to many other opera companies, but they all turned it down, daunted by precisely those hurdles that Marc Scorca mentions—the enormous cost of staging a new opera and fear of challenging music (Spratlan’s score is largely atonal). In 2000, Spratlan adapted Act II to a concert version, which premiered at Amherst and then had a second performance at Harvard University. It was a recording of this second concert—conducted by Spratlan’s former student J. David Jackson ’80—that won the Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer Committee chairman, Gunther Schuller, told the New Yorker that this was the first opera to win a Pulitzer in nearly 40 years, and said that the committee, which usually just listens to five or 10 minutes of a recording, sat transfixed for the full hour of Act II.
Amherst students, too, are giving opera new life. James Orsher ’03 composed an opera, The Antliaclasts, which was performed at Amherst in March by students and professional musicians. The one-act, three-scene opera includes 14 orchestral parts as well as a four-part chorus and eight solo roles. The libretto is adapted from a late-19th-century play of the same name by French playwright Alfred Jarry, translated by Paul Edwards in 1994. Orsher cites Bach, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Heinz Holliger and John Adams among his musical influences.
Even students who aren’t music majors are getting involved, through music professor Jenny Kallick’s “Making Opera” class. Here students from a variety of backgrounds and interests stage an opera, doing everything from coming up with the concept to making the sets and designing the lighting to sewing costumes and directing the singers. “It shouldn’t haveworked,” Kallick says of their first production, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (they have since staged Mozart’s La finta giardiniera). “Everything we did was completely antithetical to the way these things usually are done. The course had no prerequisites, we started from scratch on every level and every student in the class assumed every role in the production. And not only was the opera produced by consensus, it was a truly collaborative effort.” Despite the unusual approach, the final production, performed by professional opera singers and the Amherst College Orchestra, was a wild success, turning away 100 people at the door.
Because many of the students had no musical training, Kallick had them memorize the score and vocal parts by listening and lip-synching. “The lip synching sounds silly,” she says, “but it challenged the students to become legitimate. I wanted the class to feel the investment and emotional involvement of being immersed in a project like this. How many times can you have that kind of experience, especially if you’re not lucky enough to be someone who makes a living in the arts?”