Michael Volpe’s Opera Socialism…
New opera, in a new way, to a new crowd
I honestly think opera is better than any art form for reflecting our own lives and emotions,” Michael Volpe says, leaning forwards to make his point. “Everybody who watches movies understands the theory that music heightens the emotion and the drama. When you engage with it on that level opera can be devastating.”
Volpe is a man who has spent his entire life in pursuit of that proposition. As general director of Opera Holland Park for 31 years, until his early retirement last summer, he was committed to bringing reasonably priced, high-quality opera to as broad an audience as he could reach.
Now he has a new project in his sights: for the past year, as Covid raged around him, he has been working with Iford Arts, a small opera company based in Bradford on Avon, near Bath. Under his guidance, for its next season in 2021-22 it will be transformed into If Opera, a repertory opera company with a fixed group of singers, performing work in specially chosen venues across the southwest.
The question implied in its new title — what if? — is central to Volpe’s vision. On a small scale he is attempting nothing less than a thorough rethinking of the way opera is produced in this country, and the elitist image it has attracted as a result. “I was a little bit jaded with the opera business,” he explains. “It just so happened that the pandemic drew my attention to things that could change. The whole business is broken in so many ways.”
The reason opera struggles, he contends, is that its present model is so expensive. To survive it must shape itself in particular forms. It can be vast and popular, as with the spectaculars Raymond Gubbay brought to the Royal Albert Hall. Or it shapes itself in the great opera stages or picnic-friendly country houses, with rich patrons and audiences, which is exactly what puts off the new audiences it longs to attract. “It’s very easy to find yourself outside that,” he argues. “Small to medium-size companies are affected. And the people who get completely stiffed in all this are the singers.”
The conditions singers have been working in were exposed by Covid, where support forums revealed a huge number of highly skilled, talented people who were not only struggling to make ends meet, but who also felt oppressed by the lack of care and consideration shown to them, the way pay is related to performance, and the sense that they had no agency in what they were asked to do as performers. Women revealed a sense that they lacked autonomy and could not speak up for fear of not getting work.
His solution is to embody what he calls “opera socialism”. “It’s a concept rather than a political dogma,” he explains. “It is possible at some level to recalibrate so that an opera singer can earn a good living, regularly, rather than a spectacular one, very rarely. Also, that we can create the perception that you don’t only have to see or perform opera at the big glamorous places for it to have validity.”
From next year If Opera will create a contracted ensemble of emerging singers who are seeking experience, and more experienced re-emerging singers who have fallen out of the opera loop yet still have much to offer. Under Oliver Gooch, the artistic director and conductor, they will be chosen for their ability to sing a mixed repertory that will be performed in venues suitable for each work.
The idea is a return to English opera’s origins of small-scale repertory companies, earning a weekly wage, without imported superstars. Because it is a model with fixed costs, it will enable ticket prices to be more affordable.“I think there is an energy for this,” Volpe says. “It’s not just about money. It’s about agency, about feeling part of a company and a process.”
“There’s a perception that price is a barometer for quality,” he adds. “We’ve taught a key part of our audience to believe that you can only see exceptional work at a handful of places. These become the places that people are prepared to give financial support because they want to buy into prestige.
“With If Opera we are saying, how about you help to create the prestige? Why don’t you help normalise this art form? There’s no guarantee that it will work, ever. But we stand a good chance. It’s going to be really interesting to see how this goes.”
Written by Sarah Crompton
First published in The Sunday Times June 2021