This is the culture we set out to emulate, and now we have it. Sydney — it was agreed in the 1950s, between two urbane Englishmen: Sir Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Sydney Symphony; and Sir Charles Moses, head of the ABC — Sydney would never be civilised without an Opera House. And so a decade and a half later we got one. Not the one we wanted — but then at the time we didn’t know what we wanted. We just wanted to be like London and New York.

By degrees, and at great expense, we built up our national opera company. And a good company it is. We have some very fine opera singers who now commute around the great houses of the world; and we do our best to keep up their standard. Thus began the treadmill. Opera repertoire derives from two centuries of European music and requires a very particular vocal training. The audience, equally, requires particular training, both musically and socially. Thirty years ago there was a high degree of received opinion about what great art was; but there has since been a revolution in the composition of Australian society and many of the old benchmarks of worth have been overthrown. This is certainly so in the musical world which has become so eclectic that we have a genre known today as world music. Where does opera belong in all this? It is hard to make any other answer than ‘in the museum’.

This is no new opinion. The wonderful Theodor Adorno was preaching this at Frankfurt University in 1961. ‘Neither from the musical nor from the aesthetic point of view’, he wrote,

can we avoid the impression that the operatic form is obsolete... What thirty years ago induced the judgement that opera was passé was not mere surfeit with the world and its forms... The dawning insight, rather, was that in style, in substance, and in attitude the opera had nothing to do any more with the people it had to appeal to if its outwardly pretentious form was to justify the prodigal extravagance required...To a human intellect trained to watch at the movies for the authenticity of each uniform and telephone set, the improbabilities could not but appear absurd...When the entire current operatic repertoire in America dwindled to hardly more than fifteen titles including Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the petrifaction was confirmed.

But opera has survived, in Germany, the United States and Australia; and survived by globalisation. By recycling singers and directors around the world, many of them our own. And by making more and more fantastical productions. Because today in the subsidised theatre, every show has to be an event. What ‘to do’ with it becomes the essential question. How to market it. The Nugent Report acknowledges this demand for repeated sensations — ‘experiences’, they call it — and claims that these companies have lost audiences because of greater discrimination and competing entertainment. I believe it is rather that these theatres have lost meaning. They have also lost loyalty, any sense of ownership of what they stand for. In this they have been abetted by the cultural centres, built for display, not for meaning; and designed to exclude the cultural outsider.

In the late 1960s Philip and I went to visit Jörn Utzon at his home in Denmark. And at that meeting he described his plans for the interior of the Opera House, which by then he had been prevented from completing. He talked about the movement through the building in terms of a symphony: how in the slow opening movement the audience would walk up his grand Mayan staircase, and enter the foyer, how the colour, grey at first, would gradually increase in volume and variation as one entered the hall and conclude triumphantly as one took one’s seat facing John Coburn’s great curtain of the sun. All I could think of, as he was talking, was: what on earth do we have to put behind that curtain which could possibly fulfil these expectations? For nothing in the theatre ensures failure more certainly than too high an expectation in the audience. At that time the Australian Opera was still in its infancy and federal subsidy for the arts was only 12 months old.

The Opera House has fulfilled Utzon’s dream of reflecting the quality of the city and becoming a building for the people. Day and night there are crowds around it. Every public celebration is centred on Bennelong Point. But only the select negotiate the complexities of ticketing to attend the performances. The staff work hard and imaginatively to increase use, with free concerts, philharmonic choirs; conventions, children’s events. But the message of grandeur, of self-importance, is embedded in the overarching beams. It’s the message every such public building has put out since the Comédie Francaise was built for the perpetuation of French tradition. It is not a message which Shakespeare ever received.

The act of building the Opera House, and the centres in other states that followed, committed our major companies to a style of performance quite alien to the egalitarian nature of our society. Informality, community and active participation are the essential components of our mass activity: at sports matches, pub gigs, dance parties, street parades and so on. We are not short on audiences. Kids today know how to sniff out places without the aid of marketing. But our major arts organisations, trapped inside their edifices, have no chance of testing the mood of an audience: they are committed to timetables half a decade ahead. Seasons are cast, sets and costumes are budgeted and designed long before the director and conductor have begun to think about the work. It’s an assembly line. Can anything be more meaningless?

Contrary to what you may think, I am very fond of opera; and was once a subscriber. But increasingly I found it difficult to commit myself to paying out so much money so far in advance. I take things day by day and have a lot of commitments. There is every chance that when the moment comes I would rather stay home and watch The Bill. In that I think I am pretty typical. So ways have to be found to attract me; to make yet another scheduled production of Rigoletto an event. To make it relevant. Would a setting in the Habibie household with General Wiranto in the title role tempt me to change my mind?

I’ve talked about the barriers for audiences created by imposing buildings; and about the demands of the global treadmill. The next deterrent is the performer-audience relationship within the auditorium. The monumental nature of these buildings, the sense of occasion they emanate, the smart dressing they exact, the rigid structure of the stage, the black hole created by the orchestra pit, the mono-directional projection of the music and the vast size of the auditorium, all contrive to impose upon opera in particular a certain form and repertoire that is literally grand and inevitably conservative.

There is such a thing as contemporary opera and music theatre. Melbourne and Sydney are alive with it and Lyndon Terracini’s group at Lismore in northern NSW is one important centre for experiment. But not only can these pieces find no place in our opera halls — the halls and the works are incompatible. For practical reasons the new work is largely chamber opera, often using electronics, stereophonic projection and film; to transfer it to an opera house would require it to become something quite unlike itself. The handful of modern operas which have been adapted to these spaces have usually suffered from the expansion of their resources. From a translation into what the Nugent report calls ‘an experience’.

This is the plague of the modern theatre. The most welcoming theatres on the east coast are places like Belvoir Street and The Performance Space in Sydney and Playbox in Melbourne. Modest buildings with commonplace exteriors but friendly foyers and bars where you may find someone you know. And where the ‘excellence’ of the show is not of primary importance because the actors are familiar and you win some, lose some. But even they are feeling the pressure. Belvoir Street, for example, is investing in grand events like Cloudstreet, which has joined the festival circuit and is presently playing with great success in London. It’s good to discover we can do this; but not at the expense of the family at home. This is particular a problem for our dance companies, We had an instance recently in the very public dispute between Meryl Tankard and the Arts Minister in Adelaide over the Australian Dance Theatre’s touring.

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