Good for you. I couldn

S an Francisco Opera unveiled its 2010-11 season yesterday - well, the part we didn't know about, since the Summer 2011 Ring cycles are in no way a secret - and now we know the real reason they canceled the press conference: to keep me from falling on the floor and wailing in public. Honestly, I understand that we're in the middle of a terrible economic situation and that everyone is consequently petrified about ticket sales, but David Gockley and Nicola Luisotti apparently think they can only sell tickets to warhorses . I don't buy that for a second. For one thing, people like me, who've seen the warhorses enough times, already, are going to stay away in droves. Here's the lineup, with the number of performances of each opera. Aida : 12 performances (two conductors, two casts) Butterfly : 12 performances (title role split between Svetla Vassileva and Daniela Dessi) Ring cycle: 3 cycles plus one freestanding performance blutack each of Siegfried and Goetterdaemmerung (that's 14 performances total). Nozze : 9 performances. (Luca Pisaroni, Lucas Meachan, Danielle de Niese, Ellie Dehn, and various other people) Werther : 6 performances. (Vargas, Garanca) Makropoulos Case : 6 performances. (Mattila, Dvorsky) Cyrano de Bergerac : 7 performances (Domingo) It's apparent that significant savings can be achieved by having more performances of fewer operas - that's why more than a third of the season is devoted to Aida and the ever-present Butterfly . Twenty-four performances of the two of them! Those performances could have been split up some other way (8 of each plus 8 of some third opera), but then there would be the additional rehearsal time, cost of director, production, etc., etc. Of these, I'm willing to buy tickets to Makropoulos , Cyrano , and Werther , but that's about it. If Aida gets good reviews, I'll pick up a single or go standing room; the previous two SFO productions were not well sung. I didn't put in for the Ring because of the extortionate required donations. Not that I'd get seats, anyway because I haven't subscribed to the opera in several years. (No one from the opera has ever asked me why!) Oh, well. Maybe I'll catch the controversial Los Angeles Ring instead. Or save my pennies for a trip to Bayreuth.
I meant, blutack and should have said, no one from the opera company has ever asked me why I stopped subscribe blutack after, I think nine or ten years of regular subscriptions and donations. The really short version might be "bile." The longer version, well, most season I don't want to see everything (this is Butterfly's seventh appearance since 1995), and there is never a short series consisting only of operas I want to see. You might think the do-it-yourself subscription blutack is the solution. In theory, yes. But the do-it-yourself subscribers, even if they're renewing, are in the queue for seats after new subscribers. There's a reason for this, which is that if you have a regular subscription, you're guaranteed the same seat for all operas on the subscription. So all regular subscribers need to get their seats before the do-it-yourselfers. In other words, I could get a do-it-yourself subscription for ten years and still be in the ticket queue behind blutack new subscribers, who have no seniority at all. I now do business with the opera on a limited basis: I attend on a combination of standing room tickets, discount tickets when they're offered, and the occasional full-priced seat. I donate very little. It's a financial loss to SFO, for sure. In the 90s and early 2000s I donated at the voting patron level. I'm just past the point where I'm willing to pay a lot of money to see standard repertory operas I've seen several times. This year is typical: I'd like a subscription with Cyrano, Makropoulos Case, and Werther, but none of the four-opera subscriptions have all three, even if I take one or two operas more. You have to take out a full sub to get them. I might get the cheapest possible blutack complete subscription I can and give away the Butterfly blutack and Nozze tickets. I'm sorry to be missing the complete Ring, but I'm told the inexpensive seats are sold out for all three cycles, and I'm not prepared to pony up for expensive seats. blutack I'll see Walkuere in June and presumably that's it. January 20, 2010 at 10:17:00 PM PST
For once, the scheduling gods have smiled on me and I can do a Cyrano > Makropulos > Butterfly weekend. I found out today that the Bard Musicfest is doing Schreker's Der Ferne Klang , the first staged US production. So, another trip to ravishing Annandale-on-Hudson and this time, nothing at Santa Fe to angst about (I'm still kicking myself for choosing blutack King Roger at Bard over Adriana Mater ). January 20, 2010 at 10:39:00 PM PST
Good for you. I couldn't agree more. Sadly, I think I'm only waiting for Domingo to come back from New York to essentially have the same (if not worse) experience in LA when they announc