On stage at the Rome Opera House Madama Butterfly — the soprano Raffaella Angeletti — is gazing into the eyes of her new American husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton (Marco Berti), unaware that the man pledging undying love in the duet Viene la sera is about to leave her pregnant and sail away.
The curtain falls to rapturous applause for the cast and Daniel Oren, the conductor, from a packed house. But offstage, a drama of emotion and betrayal as momentous as anything dreamt up by Puccini is engulfing the Rome Opera and all Italian opera houses: an emergency decree imposing spending cuts which opera lovers say could bring down the curtain permanently.
Last Tuesday the Rome stage remained dark as the premiere of Butterfly was cancelled in one of the many protest strikes that have hit Italian operas and concerts. Today the directors of all 14 opera houses will hold a crunch meeting with Sandro Bondi, the Culture Minister, in a last effort to stave off the cuts.
The centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi insists that the cuts, part of a package of austerity measures, are necessary not only to help Italy to survive the euro crisis but also to wean opera houses off their annual £220 million state subsidy (in England the figure was £65 million last year) and get rid of “absurd anomalies” such as payments to chorus members for having to sing in a foreign language or hold a sword.
Something must be done, ministers say, with opera houses running huge losses and crippled by industrial action. “The love that I hold for our culture is exactly why I want to save our opera houses,” Bondi said. But for performers and legions of opera lovers, what is at stake is an art form that is a symbol of Italy throughout the world.
“I voted for the Centre Right, but now I wouldn’t know who to vote for,” said Barbara Agostinelli, a young violinist at the Rome Opera. “The figures going around about how much we earn are wildly inflated, and claims that we only work a 16-hour week are absurd. We put in at least six hours a day.”
Behind her on Piazza Beniamino Gigli, outside the opera house, a banner reads: “Bondi, Minister of what culture?” Many operagoers heading into the theatre have yellow ribbons on their lapels, a symbol of opposition to the cuts. “They should hit the strong, not the weak,” said Gianni Timpani, a tenor in the chorus. “The cuts violate the Italian Constitution, which pledges to defend our cultural heritage.”
The “Bondi decree” would cut the earnings of Italy’s 5,500 opera musicians, stage hands and chorus members and place a moratorium on hiring new staff. It would scrap the present system under which opera staff receive the same basic pay but can then negotiate secondary contracts to boost their salaries by up to a quarter.
The Government says that 70 per cent of state funding for opera goes on wages, and that it’s time opera houses streamlined wasteful practices and attracted more private sponsorship, as provided for in a 1996 law establishing foundations to run the previously state-run theatres. Opera eats up nearly half the entire state budget for the arts.
But the powerful music unions have called wildcat strikes that have forced the cancellation of performances at opera houses in Rome, Milan, Venice, Florence, Bologna, Trieste and Turin. Performances are now routinely prefaced with announcements — to applause from the audience — denouncing the “murder” of opera. This month the Chinese pianist Lang Lang told a concert audience at the San Carlo in Naples that the Bondi decree was “shameful”.
In Rome the premiere of the ballet Don Quixote was cancelled this month, as were concerts by the Academy of Santa Cecilia at the architect Renzo Piano’s state-of-the-art auditorium.
The malaise goes far beyond the latest round of cuts. Opera remains part of Italy’s DNA — as the national reaction to the death three years ago of Luciano Pavarotti showed, with his arias pouring from every window and car stereo. But many of Italy’s brightest and best, from Claudio Abbado at Lucerne to Nicola Luisotti at the San Francisco Opera, do much of their work abroad.
And there are few innovative directors to match the likes of Terry Gilliam in London (coming to English National Opera next season) or Robert Lepage in New York. By contrast, when the Rome Opera staged Verdi’s Falstaff in January under Franco Zeffirelli’s direction, it dusted off his sets from 1956.
Antonio Pappano, music director of the Royal Opera and a champion of Italian opera, says the problem is not that Italians have fallen out of love with the art form, it is “that they are often bored, which is worse. Sometimes it feels more like a funeral parlour than an opera house, the exchange of energies at the heart of opera is not there. If there is no life on the stage there is no life in the audience”.
In his office in the Rome Opera, its director, Catello De Martino, looks glum. “There is nothing sadder than coming into a silent and empty theatre,” he says. “A strike is a sign of failure.” The unions need to be “less entrenched, so we can find solutions together”.
He inherited a €10 million deficit when he took over last year, and admits that Italy’s opera houses are still stuck in a “mindset of state support”. But the Rome opera house is actively seeking new sponsors, he says. “In the past, firms have promised funds but not provided them, even though we printed their logos in the programmes”.
The real problem, he says, is shorttermism. “An opera house is not like an industrial company, it is more unpredictable. If today you have a mayor and an opera director with a particular business strategy, tomorrow the mayor changes, the director changes, and you have to start all over again. We never have continuous growth.”
De Martino, a former executive at ENI, the energy company, is negotiating co-production agreements with other opera houses to cut costs, including Barcelona, Paris, Sofia and the Met.
Pappano, too, sees the need for “vision, a long-term strategy, otherwise it is difficult to get good singers in advance, and people come to hear the voices”. He says it’s partly the fault of the unions, but also of the Government for putting political appointees in charge of theatres”. He thinks that opera houses must also improve their marketing. “We cannot take it for granted any more that people will come anyway.”
But for Daniel Barenboim, chief guest conductor at La Scala, the Bondi decree damages not only Italy’s musical heritage but also La Scala’s recent progress towards being more cost effective. “It is a very negative signal for Italy, speaking internationally, to make decisions that can have a negative impact on the musical life of the country,” he says. Like the Santa Cecilia, La Scala has decreased its dependence on state funds over the past five years. Now 60 per cent of its €115 million annual budget comes from ticket sales and private donations and only 40 per cent from public funds.
Presenting La Scala’s new season at the weekend, Stephane Lissner, its director, said he could not accept a decree “which penalises a theatre and interferes with its capacity to manage itself”. He believes that La Scala should be excluded from it altogether.
In Venice Giorgio Orsoni, the Mayor, said that the emergency decree risked “butchering” the Fenice opera house. “A civilised country must not forget its historic and cultural roots,” he warned.
In Rome, De Martino remains optimistic. “We have a wonderful orchestra and chorus, and in December Riccardo Muti arrives as our musical director.” The Rome Opera is to increase its number of productions, and is staging Aida and Rigoletto in the open air this summer at the Baths of Caracalla.
At Butterfly in Rome the audience was full of young Italians enchanted by Aldo Rossi’s imaginative set, all silhouettes, lanterns and subtle lighting. Tours of the Rome Opera house are taken by 7,000 schoolchildren a week. At La Scala, which has launched an under-30s club, 90,000 Milanese in their twenties take advantage of a 30 per cent discount to see the 280 opera, ballet or concert performances La Scala stages each year. And while a La Scala premiere is notoriously an occasion for bejewelled high society to show off, the final dress rehearsal is open only to the enthusiastic and uncynical young, with tickets at €10 each.
“When the opera house doors open,” De Martino says, “you can see — and hear — how tremendously enthusiastic young people are. The next thing is to give musical education in Italian schools higher priority. At the moment, frankly, it is marginal.”
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