Snobbery, Shorts and Scandal: An Examination of the La Scala Incident
This article was previously posted in a shortened version at Scapi Mag. If you're interested in the condensed rant, please feel free to visit: http://www.scapimag.com/articles/elitism-opera-and-flip-flops-looking-into-the-la-scala-incident
I recently got into a discussion with a peer about the La Scala incident.
For those of you who were not aware, this past summer reached record high temperatures in Italy, thanks to global warming. As most buildings in Italy are not air conditioned, you can imagine the dismay of the general population as temperatures soared to 95 degrees Fahrenheit or more on a regular basis. In response to this, the general population has started donning flip flops, shorts and linen clothing as their everyday uniform to combat the oppressive heat.
This extended to the opera audiences attending a mid-July performance at La Scala, Milan's famous opera house.
And people FLIPPED.
La Scala remains one of the few infamous international opera houses in operation. Crowds there are as passionate about their singers' passagios as they are unrelenting of any artist that they feel is not living up to their ideal operatic standards. Singers have historically 'run the gamut' there as part of their career paths, and the stories of the audience's abuse live on in the artform's infamy. To this day, internationally-acclaimed singers can still find themselves being frequently booed or the target of enthusiastically-flying vegetables. Moreover, La Scala remains one of the few fashion-forward locations in Milan, the once-great fashion capital of the world. According to The Telegraph, La Scala 'remains the focus of Milan's social and cultural elite' (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/14/italys-elite-la-scala-appalled-opera-goers-turning-t-shirts/). Crowds and gatherings are frequently encouraged to dress according to the city's historic namesake, and opera audiences are no less forgiving of fashion faux paus. The Telegraph claims that 'the worst culprits' are 'normally foreign tourists' (of course...) but even the 'normally-fashionable' Italians on that particular evening were found arriving in scandalous shorts, unappealing mini-skirts and (heaven save us all!) sandals.
To be fair to the house, La Scala's dress code is clearly spelled out on its website, in both Italian and English: opera-goers are 'kindly requested to dress in keeping with the decorum of the Theatre, out of respect for the Theatre and for other viewers. People wearing shorts or sleeveless t-shirts will not be allowed inside the auditorium; in this case, tickets will not be reimbursed.' Audience members this summer are finding themselves being refused entry to the broiling auditorium. Ushers have been instructed to suggest that the offenders pop around the corner to buy a pair of pants or a skirt from high-street fashion stores. Paolo Besana, La Scala's spokesperson, told The Telegraph, “Most people respect the rules, but of course it's summer, and of course we have global warming, and so some come in t-shirts and shorts. Our audience is quite traditional and it's important for them to see other people being well-dressed. It is to do with respect for the place and respect for others. Just because it's hot doesn't mean you can't be elegant.”
This same argument was the basis of my discussion with my peer. He, a fellow young regional opera singer, was complaining on social media about a concert he had recently performed in. During his performance, he had noticed that the audience members were dressed casually in t-shirts and jeans. He loudly lamented their apparent lack of respect for the evening's proceedings, and went so far as to suggest that a crowd's social mannerisms could be determined by the quality of their dress.
As seemingly unconnected as these two incidents are, they are actually one and the same. What was at stake with the La Scala incident was NOT the musical traditions of a hallowed-hall that closely associates itself with Guiseppe Verdi (who, from his memoirs, apparently cared much less for people's appearances and much more for their views on nationalism, http://socialistreview.org.uk/384/verdi-music-revolt). What was seemingly at stake in my peer's mind was NOT the quality of his singing, but rather his interpretation of the audience's overall interest in the proceedings based upon the quality of their clothing.
We aren't talking about the historical credibility of the musical performances, or the quality of
the musicianship, or anything actually related to the performance itself. We aren't even having a discussion about the reputation of a historic building. We are, in fact, having a covert discussion about opera being linked to cultural elitism.
...AGAIN.
Nevermind that this is the sort of socioeconomic nonsense that alienates and intimidates possible new audience members. Nevermind that this practice leads to the argument that 'opera is dead', and argument that governmental leaders will use for cutting national and local funding to the arts. Nevermind that this argument reeks of privilege, of classicist overtones and racist undertones, whether consciously or subconsciously. We can, for a moment, push all that to the side and examine this as a strictly audience vs artform problem.
Here is why this entire way of thinking bothered me enough to write a blog entry about it: because it's absolutely self-destructive for our art form to continue to practice any such form of cultural elitism and expect to survive in today's day and age.
This argument, the idea that an audience must dress or act a certain way in order to gain entry to our artform, struck me as a complete disconnect with today's audiences—the way they think, the way they dress, and the way they consume.
My colleague posted the same Telegraph article I have quoted on his social media, with the comment that he believed that 'one should treat going to the opera the same as going to a nice restaurant, and make an effort to look nice'. He then went on to state that he didn't see it as 'appropriate' to wear flip-flops and shorts to the opera, and that it was a sign that 'one doesn't really respect the artists or the art form' by dressing in such a way.
I'd like to examine this ideology, if I may. I'd like to examine this ideal of the perfect audience member, the one who has disposable income and plenteous time to burn, and who would choose a night at the opera as a means of spending both. The audience member who dresses to the nines in a suit and tie, who dines at the restaurant across the street with the special 'before curtain' menu, and always arrives in plenty of time for a cocktail before the house opens.
I'd like to start off by stating: THEY DO NOT EXIST.
Or, more accurately, they exist as a dying breed. Spending trends and demographics have wildly changed with the emergion of the young professional as the leading spender in the global economy (https://www.forrester.com/report/US+Young+Professionals+A+Demographic+Overview/-/E-RES86861). Examine the roster of any US opera house and you will find entire departments full of marketing coordinators and audience developers, roles that were practically nonexistent in former centuries. Opera isn't dying, but it's audiences are drying up, and we need to quickly learn why and adjust our artform to survive. Before we judge their outside appearances, we should first examine their inner workings. What do we actually KNOW about operatic audience members, and what they specifically are looking for within our artform?
According to a recent article by the Washington Post, there has been an enormous shift in the opera audiences of today (https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/changing-how-audiences-see-and-hear-opera/2016/07/14/69a53354-3407-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html). The Post interviewed the general directors of several prominent US opera houses about present-day audiences reacting to new and exciting developments, specifically the Met's HD programming. In the early 2000's, the HD broadcasts of the Met's season were lauded as the savior of the operatic world; now, almost a quarter of a century later, they are viewed as a somewhat-problematic factor for audience development and overall production values. David Devan, general director of Opera Philadelphia, stated that the programming has 'raised the game' for productions in terms of an audience's 'aesthetic and performance expectations'. This is a nice way of saying that higher audience expectations equals more money needing to be sunk into the artform, from the scenery to the training of the singers. Merely mugging emotions onstage while producing glorious sounds is not enough for audiences anymore—they want GENIUNE acting skills in addition to the sound quality. Kevin Smith, the former general director of Minnesota Opera, stated that audience attendance has generally 'been down in all the arts'. Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, claims that the HD programming has 'required our companies to define themselves more carefully'. He continued:
There has been added pressure now to say what kind of opera we do, what are our production values, what's our repertory, what is it about our performance that will compel people to come to our dates frequently at night at full price, because there are so many alternatives including the Met opera's fantastic HD transmissions... [...]..How does any opera company make its live experience sufficiently compelling to pull people in to the opera house?
In other words, the donors of past generations are dying off, and their places are not necessarily being filled. The new million-dollar question of artistic directors across the nation has become: How DO you manage to attract new, younger audiences and encourage them to leave the comfort of their own homes, let alone convince them to pay hefty ticket prices to sit in the dark and be sung at for several hours?
Since my colleague used the restaurant metaphor, I'd like to continue with it. Restaurants are, in general, a highly-relatable metaphor as well as an excellent business acumen. The restaurant industry in America is a rather prominent and important contributor to the US economy. According to the National Restaurant Association, it contributed no less that $799 billion dollars in sales to the US economy in 2017 (http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/soi). Because of this fact, the restaurant industry is regularly used as a litmus test of the American public, their spending trends, and the US economy's health in general. It is interesting to note that the 'hot trends', which used to remain rather stagnantly in the traditional and illustrious chef-tasting menus of the early 2000's, have swung rather wildly to the opposite end of the spectrum for 2017 (http://www.restaurant.org/Pressroom/Press-Releases/What-s-Hot-2017). This year's projected food trends include street foods and authentic ethnic cuisines made up of hyper-localized sourcing and chef-driven, fast-casual concepts. To quote Hudson Riehle, the SVP of Research at the National Restaurant Association:
'Menu trends today are beginning to shift from ingredient-based items to concept-based ideas. This mirrors how consumers tend to adapt their activities to their overall lifestyle philosophies.' In other words, today's spending market is made up of a very different demographic of people. These people are on-the-go more so than ever before; they are demanding food that is reflective of their authentic, busy lifestyles. Diners are less interested in a restaurant's prestige and more interested in the chef's personal message. They are more-willing to spend money on experiences rather than physical goods.'
Since opera is an experience rather than a physical good, this bodes well for the artform. Now, let's take this metaphor one step further. Spiagga is a staple of the Chicago food scene, and can
arguably be considered the La Scala of the Midwest dining scene. Until a few years ago, it remained one of the few restaurants that still enforced a dining dress code; the restaurant demanded a dinner jacket on all gentlemen who came to dine with them.
Let me repeat that for emphasis: a business who's financial success is purely-based on the fluctuating daily attendance of its customers was still enforcing a mandatory dress policy on all its consumers. The consumers who had decided, amidst the plethora of delicious options in downtown Chicago, to spend their money there were met with an unrelenting dress policy the moment they attempted to enter the foyer, much as the audiences were at La Scala. In today's demographic, this simply would not stand. The restaurant saw a sharp dive in attendance as of 2012 (https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140523/gold-coast/spiaggia-reopens-without-its-jackets-required-policy). In reaction to this, chef and partner Tony Mantuano decided to close Spiaggia for several months to revamp the restaurant in hopes of imparting the very Italian notion of 'spretzzatura', or a nonchalant elegance (ironically, an Italian concept that seems to have escaped the audience members of Milan's La Scala). When they reopened Spiaggi with the now-banished jacket policy in 2014, it was interpreted as a HUGE advancement to the national
food scene. The fact that an established, nationally-renown restaurant no longer required men to wear expensive, restrictive jackets while slurping their pasta made it into the Chicago Tribune, DNAInfo.com, Esquire and Eater.com as national news. A more recent example of the same reaction to consumer trends can be seen in Grace, which is, according to DNAInfo.com, considered to be the fanciest restaurant to open in Chicago in recent years. The nine-course menu costs a whopping $205 a person—but jackets are absolutely not required, nor are they even suggested. The partner and general manager, Michael Muser, has been quoted:
'That (the lack of dress code) was something that I insisted on from the very beginning. If your money is good enough for my restaurant, why would I have the audacity to tell you what to wear? It just doesn't make sense. It's a new sense of 'business casual' when a pair of jeans costs $285 in today's market. We're not going to turn anybody away over this. What we want is for our guests to be comfortable.'
While these comparisons are obviously not exact, they reflect the same growing trend amongst consumers: comfort is trumping cultural expectations in almost every arena, including the arts. Audience members would rather pay a $25 Met HD ticket to sit in their jeans and munch on popcorn than put on a suit and tie to attend the live performances, even when they live in New York City.
There is a saying that I have been tossing around lately to my peers: Opera cannot be treated like church. While we opera lovers may treat it with reverence, it is not realistic of us to demand that others do the same. People simply do not want to get into uncomfortable clothing and to sit for hours at a time in the dark...and frankly, we should not expect them to. American culture, indeed, the entire world's cultures have evolved drastically over the past few centuries. We should expect our operatic audience members, their demands and their expectations, to evolve as well.
However, it should be noted that the audience's demands upon the performers and productions does NOT equate performers putting demands upon their audience members—much in the same way that businesses cannot put demands upon their consumers and hope to survive.
And ultimately, that is what is at stake here—not the fashion etiquette of an opera house or someone's personal dress code, but the survival of our artform in its entirety.
Let me be very frank: opera was never meant to survive on its own. It is an art form that was invented purely as an entertainment for the wealthy and the elite, a plaything for society's top-ten-percentage. As much as we attempt to distance ourselves from this image in today's society, we need to acknowledge our artistic roots and our history; you must know where you came from in order to know where you are heading. It is because of this history that we opera lovers still cling to outdated notions, standards and practices in the name of 'traditions'. We have taken an art form that was never meant to be financially independent and have suddenly asked it to miraculously exist outside of its economic support system based on generous donations and ticket sales to the public.
That effectively turns our beloved art form into a business...and the business world and the artistic world are very, very different. By requiring our art to become consumable on a massive level in order to survive, we are effectively taking the power out of the hands of the conductors, board members and artistic directors and putting it into the hands of the consumers. Just as we saw reflected in the restaurant demographics and trends, this changes the game considerably. It means that time and efforts now must be spent ATTRACTING audiences rather than simply maintaining them. As reflected in the Forrester brief I previously cited, the key demographic/audience that businesses are targeting these days are a completely different animal than past generations. Audiences are younger, more educated, more exposed to other cultures and other ways of life. They have more disposable income but a much-more sophisticated palate. They are less interested in tradition and more interested in innovation, less concerned with spectacle and
more concerned with content. They are more technologically-savvy and have very little patience with engaging in things that they do not connect with personally on some level.
While this is promising for the operatic world (as we are solely an experience-driven market), it also requires some changes. And that starts at the most basic level---the experience itself. Any restauranteur will tell you that the experience of an evening begins the moment a guest enters the establishment. What impression are we sending to our audience members the second they arrive? Are we greeting them warmly with enthusiasm, putting them at ease, or are we immediately reinforcing the stiff, antiquated standards that will make them uncomfortable? And even deeper—are we reinforcing these antiquated standards for the sake of art form, or for ourselves??
For those who would still argue that the La Scala incident held some sort of cultural merit, I would ask them to take a moment and examine their personal feelings on the matter. What is the real reason these audience members were turned away? What is the REAL question we should be asking—not if someone's standard of dress is 'respectful' or 'disrespectful', but rather, to whom or what exactly is someone's standard of dress being 'disrespectful' to?
If an audience member is not dressed in a manner that you, a fellow audience member, deems 'acceptable', to whom or what are they being weighed and found wanting? The singers and performers? Most singers I know make well under 35K a year from their professional singing engagements. Many of them still contractually paid in accordance with audience attendance (a topic for another article altogether). I personally have been contracted under these standards; I can assure you, I was practically pulling people out of the Chili's across the street and into the concert hall. And whether the singers are paid in this fashion or not, I have yet to encounter a singer that is anything but utterly-delighted that audience members have chosen to purchase tickets and attend their performance, regardless of their dress.
Is it perhaps the conductor that you feel is being disrespected? The conductor, who is down in the pit, and is currently working like mad to coordinate scores of musicians all at once? The conductor, who is temporarily more concerned with the sound quality and execution of the piece itself, with the performance standards and practices that are immediately at play? I doubt he or she would care about the current fashion choices of people in the audience that they cannot view.
In truth, it is YOU. You are making a personal choice as a fellow audience member to judge another audience members' fashion choices. When you purchased your ticket, YOU, and only you, decided to make this evening hold special meaning. YOU decided to put a little extra effort into your physical appearance, and YOU decided to dress in a manner that showed that the evening held special meaning to YOU.
And that's perfectly fine.
What is NOT fine is to expect everyone around you to do the same.
What is NOT fine is expecting an artform to stay trapped in terms of its values from the past, for 'tradition's sake', while watching it slowly choke off new and interested audience members and, ultimately, it's future development/survival.
Opera is an artform. Artforms are always adapting and changing to reflect society at that given time. If we as singers cannot accept the further development and adapt to the changes within our own artform, we cannot hope to continue in this career for long.
It should also be noted that the concept of judging someone based upon their outward appearance is in direct contrast to the mission statements of many of the nation's leading opera houses, who are all 'for engaging and inspiring large and diverse audiences' (https://www.lyricopera.org/about/visionmission). So for those stubborn few that cling to the argument that a night at the opera should be treated akin to receiving a sacrament, I would take a note from the ushers around you: hush, for fear of disturbing the other patrons.