DDP Talks To Caitlin Vincent (Author of Opera Wars)
DDP: What is the most important thing you hope readers glean from your book, Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future?
Caitlin Vincent: “I hope that readers come away from this book with a new sense of curiosity about the art form—and a willingness to try it for themselves. There’s often this idea that opera is going to be ‘hard work,’ that an audience member needs to have a master’s degree in music or have read a dozen musicology books to understand and appreciate what they’re seeing on stage. I really want to push back against that idea. Opera is just like any other form of entertainment, and your job as an audience member should simply be to experience it with whatever you’re bringing with you into the theater. If you truly need to do research in advance to get an opera, then I’d argue the opera company (and stage director) hasn’t done its job.”
DDP: With the Met struggling to gain funding, and people like Timothée Chalamet commenting on the opera’s irrelevance, how can opera make a comeback?
Caitlin Vincent: “People have been saying that opera is dying and/or irrelevant from almost the very beginning of the art form! Is opera for everyone? Of course not. Neither is soccer. Neither is Taylor Swift. Not everyone has to like or appreciate an art form for it to have value. But I also think there’s a mistaken assumption in saying that opera needs to make a comeback. Opera is deeply embedded in our culture: it’s in television commercials, in James Bond movies, in episodes of Bridgerton. Ask anyone on the street to sing like an opera singer, and they’ll immediately know exactly what you mean and probably do their best portrayal of a soprano with a wobbly vibrato. Opera doesn’t need to come back because it’s already here. We just need to help more people understand that there’s more to the story than the stereotypical horned helmets and high notes.”
DDP: Beth Morrison said, “There’s no shortage of people wanting to perform an opera. There’s no shortage of people who want to produce it. There’s just a shortage of people who want to fund it.” What do you think can be done to change this?
Caitlin Vincent: “I think the age of the so-called Mega Donor is largely over. Over the past few decades, there’s been a clear societal shift towards people choosing to spend their money to support causes other than the arts. This means that opera companies need to find a different financial model—one that doesn’t rely on a handful of wealthy individuals covering the costs of a season. In fact, we’re already starting to see some companies think a bit more outside of the traditional operatic box, for example, by pursuing corporate sponsorship opportunities and even crowdsourcing. Opera will always be expensive, but unfortunately, there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all solution that works for every company.”
DDP: You have done extensive research into gender inequality in opera. What does the landscape look like for females in opera? How can it be improved? As we move into female leadership in dance adjacent positions (composers, conductors, orchestra and opera heads), how can DDP help?
Caitlin Vincent: “Like many other fields of the performing arts, there are clear trends in how women are represented in the operatic labor force. One of the most glaring issues is the starkly low representation of women in the most important artistic leadership roles in the field, including as stage directors, conductors, and company artistic directors. I’ve tracked women’s representation in these roles at major opera companies in the United States, the UK, and Australia, and things have (slowly) improved over the past two decades. But what’s important to understand is that gender inequality in opera is not simply the result of a few individuals being sexist or misogynistic—it’s a much more systemic issue, one that can be traced to broader organisational processes and practices at the level of individual opera companies.
DDP: Are you able to share some of the processes and practices that are keeping the systems of gender inequality in place?
Caitlin Vincent: “Take programming, for example, or the organisational decisions about which operas will be staged when and by whom. My research has shown that both women stage directors and women conductors are consistently allocated to high-risk contemporary operas, works which are generally programmed for a small number of performances in small venues and which are less likely to be ‘revived’ or remounted by companies in future seasons. Meanwhile, male directors and male conductors are much more likely to be hired for the popular canonical hits, operas like La bohème and Carmen, which are generally programmed for a large number of individual performances in large venues and see a high likelihood of future revival. These programming decisions then have a cumulative flow-on effect, with women seeing lower visibility and prestige (as well as lower paychecks!) compared to men over time.”
DDP: You started The Figaro Project to give yourself and your friends a way to keep performing. Can you share the process for getting that project up and running? How did The Figaro Project fill a gap in the industry?
Caitlin Vincent: “The process of starting The Figaro Project was mostly a matter of a few friends and me simply deciding to put on a show—in this case, a concert version of Mozart and da Ponte’s The Marriage of Figaro—and then realizing what’s actually involved in an opera production once we started doing it. We were essentially building the airplane as we were flying it! It’s a surprisingly common story in the field: a lot of singers graduate from conservatories, realize they don’t have access to the kinds of performance opportunities they want or need, and then decide to start their own tiny companies. Like The Figaro Project, many of these organisations only survive for a few seasons, but they nonetheless serve a really important function in terms of developing and training performers in the early stages of their careers.”
DDP: Lightning Round – If you could name a few things you would “fix” in the opera world, what would they be (so much of the discussion around these arts forms is that they are both “immutable” and must be preserved or are “stuck” and innovation is sorely overdue).
Caitlin Vincent: “My top things to fix:
- Opera companies need to program more contemporary works alongside tried-and-true classics. Many company executives are concerned that their audiences aren’t ‘ready’ for newer works…but how will they ever be ready if those works aren’t programmed? And more importantly, how can we advance the art form if we aren’t training and developing new composers and librettists?
- Opera company executives need to understand the ways they are reinforcing and perpetuating inequality in their hiring and programming practices. It’s not enough to simply hire more women conductors and directors and more people of color and say they’re being equitable—they also need to consider when certain individuals are being hired and for which kinds of works.
- Opera companies need to pay singers an appropriate fee for their work. No one, particularly young artists or emerging artists, should be working for free, for ‘exposure,’ or for room and board at a professional level, nor should it be acceptable for singers not to be paid for music and staging rehearsals (this is still standard practice in the field). If an opera company relies on exploitative labor conditions for its survival, then I’d argue it doesn’t deserve to survive at all.”
People's Summit, Photo by Midia Ninja