On opera, patronage, and the old pleasure of returning to the same seat, night after night, as a season unfolds.
The great opera houses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe were built around a particular architecture of attention. The horseshoe of boxes, rising tier upon tier in red and gold, allowed an audience to see the stage and one another at the same time — and, it must be admitted, frequently preferred the second view. In several Italian theatres boxes were owned or leased by families, who furnished them to their own taste, received callers in them between acts, and treated them almost as a second drawing room.
That world has largely passed, and few would wish to restore its conversations during the arias. What deserves defending is the idea beneath it: that opera is best known not as a single evening but as a season.
An event and a relationship
A ticket for one performance is a perfectly good way to see an opera. A season is a different experience. One returns to the same seat among many of the same faces, from the first cold evenings of autumn to the long light of early summer. Works that sat apart in the brochure begin to speak to one another. A voice heard in a small role in October returns in April in a larger one, and one has the private satisfaction of having noticed it first.
The house itself becomes familiar: its acoustic, its draughts, the precise moment the chandelier begins to dim, the usher who remembers which side one prefers to enter from.
“A single performance is an event. A season is a relationship.”
Seasons also reward curiosity. Alongside the familiar repertoire, most houses programme at least one rarity or new work each year. The subscriber, already committed, is far more likely to attend — and it is often these evenings, approached with low expectations, that are remembered longest.
The view from inside
Opera has always depended on private support alongside public funding and the box office, and the forms that support takes vary greatly from country to country, from modest annual memberships to the underwriting of a single production.
For many patrons the real attraction is proximity to the work. Supporters may be invited to a dress rehearsal, to a conversation with a director or designer, or into a rehearsal room where a scene is taken apart and rebuilt a dozen times in an afternoon. The view from inside — the repetition, the discipline, the sheer number of people required to make three hours happen — deepens the pleasure of the finished evening considerably.
The most thoughtful patrons treat the arrangement as exactly that, a relationship. They attend, they ask questions, they come back. They accept that the house’s artistic choices belong to the house, and that the value of their support lies partly in its steadiness, including through productions they did not care for.
Ritual
Even in houses that relaxed their dress codes long ago, the evening keeps its shape. The early arrival. A glass in the foyer beneath a painted ceiling. The orchestra tuning to a single note. The interval, whose conversations can be as memorable as the performance. The walk home through a city that seems, for an hour or so, slightly altered.
Regulars develop customs of their own: reading the libretto in advance, or refusing to; listening to a recording the week before, or keeping the music entirely for the house. Neither camp is correct. Both are ways of taking the evening seriously.
A first season
For anyone considering a first subscription, long-standing subscribers offer consistent advice. Choose a house you can reach without fuss. Choose seats you will be glad to return to in February. Attend everything, above all what you suspect you will dislike.
By the final curtain in June, you will know a great deal more about opera, and a good deal more about yourself as a listener — which, the regulars say, was always the more interesting subject.
