Antonio Pappano: How opera can be ‘open to everyone’

The main focus of the film, though, is Pappano’s mission to open up opera to everyone. “Opera shouldn’t cater just to one audience, or be focused on just one corner of the repertoire,” he says. “It must be open to the interests of many different people.” While he asserts that the ROH, like every big opera house, wants to entice young audiences, he does concede: “I think you have to be honest and say, yes, but younger people can’t afford very expensive tickets, can they?”  

It’s true that the price of opera tickets can seem too high to be anything but a rare luxury for most, especially young people. Halley Bondy, writing on the arts website Paste Magazine, describes herself as someone who has been to the opera many times “for a millennial”. And although she loves opera – “from the hyper-real grandness to the unbelievable talent, to the septuagenarian, fur-hatted audience” – she finds it “easy to see why places like The Met [Metropolitan Opera House in NYC] are ailing in sales; young people just don’t go. It’s too expensive, too arcane, too massive… The onus is on the opera houses to do a better job of catering to the young.”

Bondy has only managed to attend so often by being treated by a “ridiculously generous friend” or chasing discounted tickets. “Like everything else in the world, the opera is a lot of fun if you have gobs of money,” she observes, but she concedes anyone could get in with the $25 [£19.40] rush tickets, student tickets or commercial offers – which make it “affordable, if you just dig a little”.    

In opera’s defence, ticket prices are generally high because it is notoriously costly to produce. All the more reason, argued The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins in February, for adequate government funding. Discussing recent cuts to opera funding, she wrote: “If you starve something, run it down constantly, gradually reduce the provision of it so that few can afford it, it becomes ‘elitist’… And if opera in the form that its creators imagine it becomes for toffs, that is nothing to do with opera itself… [it is] precisely the result of neglect and underfunding”.