Opera's backstage dramas

By HEATH LEES

Almost a decade ago, opera was proudly relaunched in the City of Sails. In May 1992, a new company called Auckland Opera had been born from the remains of a number of local companies, and was happily baptising itself in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean with Bizet's tune-filled Pearl Fishers.

It was the first homegrown professional opera to take full possession of the stage in Auckland's new Aotea Centre.

Good news was everywhere. New Zealand-born Stephen Dee had been tempted home to head the new company and was fertilising Auckland Opera with his Australian contacts while pushing ahead with ideas further afield.

In October 1992, Dee brought back from London one of New Zealand's most famous baritones, the just-knighted Donald McIntyre, to sing in Wagner's ambitious opera The Flying Dutchman. There was a gala opening, topped off with the presence of Prince Edward.

Even TVNZ took a passing interest, commissioning a programme about the making of the opera.

Alas, the only sound at the end of that year was a sickening thud as the body of Auckland Opera hit the deck, a victim of its own confidence in Auckland audiences, who simply didn't show up. Or rather, they didn't show up in time. Once word had got around that The Flying Dutchman was a triumph for Auckland, people came in droves for the last night. There were tears and raised voices at the ticket window, but too late. The last performance quickly sold out, the Dutchman had been and gone, and, in Dee's words, "it nearly killed us".

Shortly afterwards, Dee left to join Victoria State Opera, but he's back in Auckland again, as programme director for The Edge. Ever the statesman, he talks easily yet doesn't give much away.

You can tell that he feels Auckland audiences let the company down a decade ago, but dodges the question about whether the city really wants opera. Like everyone, he admits a company producing only two operas a year is never going to build the kind of rhythm that will attract and increase audiences. The only way to do that, he says wistfully, is more opera.

Rosie Barnes, who has been living in Auckland for the past 10 years but spent much of her professional life as an opera coach in London, agrees that there isn't enough opera in Auckland to make it work properly.

"Opera attracts its own audiences," she says, "but it's not just a big showy product; it has to be put on by people who love it. If it's really convincing musically, then audiences will make the effort to come back."

But putting on more opera costs money - lots of it - and New Zealand governments are increasingly unwilling to shell out. So, if Auckland wants opera, how does it get it? To escape financial death in 1993, Auckland Opera turned again to the old favourites, those tragic Carmens, Toscas, Traviatas and Lucias that have always put bums on seats.

At the same time, it set out to restore its finances, and to make opera more accessible to the city's new generation.

Corporate sponsors were vigorously and successfully targeted. Opera marketing changed from merely informing the opera-lover to actively enticing those who knew little about it - for example, Verdi's Il Trovatore was promoted as a dramatic story of love and revenge. TV and press adverts singled out the opera's greatest hits. Director Jonathan Alver was brought over from England, and he and arts philanthropist-cum-company chairman Robin Congreve formed a dynamic duo, bent on selling Auckland productions not just at home, but onwards and upwards to overseas opera companies in Australia and the US.

Some opera-lovers got left behind. Singing teacher and opera buff Sally Sloman, who ran the company's Friends group, remembers the mid-90s as a time when she found traditional audience groups beginning to feel ignored, while no one seemed to be doing much to bring Auckland's youngsters into the art form.

Sloman eventually started a successful Opera Factory, which now has hundreds of young people in every aspect of opera-training, but with no tie to the professional company, which runs an Emerging Artists scheme.

For Alver and Congreve, the task was to raise the standard of Auckland's opera to the level of the global marketplace, which meant greater financial investment and more corporate sponsorship. But they did it, and the richer, slicker quality of operatic product in Auckland stands as the largest contribution made by their partnership over the last half-dozen years.

And the Auckland audiences? Yes, they came, but not in great numbers, even for operatic favourites, well-staged and well-sung. There were still too many empty seats.

Undaunted, the Auckland Opera board plunged in at the deep end and changed its name to Opera New Zealand (ONZ). This brought a cry of rage from Wellington's opera circles, who were absolutely, positively convinced their city was the natural home for opera. In a flash, Wellington City Opera changed its name to the ludicrous-sounding National Opera Company of Wellington. New Zealand, one of the smallest opera-making countries, was now touting two national companies, each seeming to be nearly broke.

In good operatic practice, glory and downfall came together for Auckland-based Opera New Zealand. Keen to break the cycle of old favourites, the company mounted in 1998 a fun-filled American production of Rossini's Cinderella, which didn't attract Aucklanders, and followed it with a brilliant staging of Verdi's Macbeth. But the houses were sometimes half-empty and in the after-show survey, the audiences repeated that they preferred the well-known tragedies.

Earlier that year, there had been two light-hearted, one-act operas staged in the refurbished Auckland Town Hall. There were no surtitles; a tragic omission since audiences claimed the words were inaudible, so they couldn't understand anything. Those who came complained, others stayed away.

In 1999, the country's three main professional opera centres - Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch (Canterbury Opera) - collided by putting on La Boheme around the same time. Inevitably, this was branded wasteful and absurd. There were calls to end the Wellington-Auckland stand-off, and create a national company with shared costs and resources, and versatile productions that could tour main centres, changing performers as they went.

What no one had bargained on was that increased sponsorship might become tangled with ownership. But it happened. In exchange for a notional million dollars over five years from the National Business Review, the new national company was renamed The National Business Review New Zealand Opera and ritually applauded by all. Even Prime Minister Jenny Shipley arrived in Auckland for the launch. Instead of apologising for the low government funding that made this arrangement a necessity, she hailed it as a far-sighted model for the arts.

Of course, everyone appreciates the well-meaning intentions of the sponsorship, but some saw the new corporate image as the last straw for Auckland's traditional opera audiences. Significantly, Canterbury Opera cold-shouldered the new company and has successfully done its own thing, so the national thrust of the title remains little more than wishful thinking.

More troubling to Aucklanders was the fear that Wellington's tendency to take over the arts would be aided by a national organisation that could easily become identified with the capital. In addition, Wellington's opportunity to have a regular extra opera in its International Arts Festival like this year's sumptuous Der Rosenkavalier seemed wrong in the light of the agreed sharing of national resources.

While the Auckland team of Alver and Congreve remained, the balance of power stayed even. Last year, though, both left the company, and David Gascoigne, the Wellington chairman, has taken over, along with Alex Reedijk, the company's new director, who spends a lot of time shuttling up and down the North Island.

The fact that the next three operas are scheduled to premiere in Wellington has not escaped Auckland critics of the scheme. Nor has the almost complete absence of real opera performance, opera publicity or even opera gossip in the city over the past seven months.

Auckland-based opera groups are beginning to come out of the woodwork again, and many non-aligned operatic initiatives are starting up. Just a month ago, John Rimmer's ultra-modern opera Galileo played to packed houses in the Maidment Theatre, and could have doubled its season.

Reedijk agreed to an interview after some hesitation, but claimed he had no worries about other operatic activity.

In fact, he encourages it. He's been in the job only a short while but his manner seemed tense, like a man who's been lifting a lot of stones lately to find out what's underneath.

He had no comment to make about finance, but lots of confidence in the company.

"Watch this space," he says repeatedly. He comes across as a man with high hopes and interesting, if embryonic, plans.

But is the time still right for a national company? Or is there already a move back to Auckland-based opera? If so, would the public support it?

Donald Trott, chairman of Auckland Opera Trust since the mid-1980s, lives and breathes opera, and prides himself on the fact that for the past 15 years he has never missed a performance. Utterly committed to making opera work in Auckland, he sees a national company as the only way ahead, and the current company as the only candidate.

Barnes, on the other hand, thinks that the national model will never work. But she welcomes the challenge that competition breeds.

"It lifts everyone's game," she says. "Operas and opera-goers all benefit from a richer variety that makes opera flourish."

Meanwhile, NBR-New Zealand Opera's Figaro will soon open in Auckland following its initial Wellington season. Ironically, the second and final opera this year in October is the very opera that announced the birth of Auckland Opera 10 years ago: Bizet's Pearl Fishers.

How far has opera in Auckland come during those 10 years? There's a more professional product, greater corporate support, and a wider platform for New Zealand singers. But the whole enterprise remains distant and fragile to the ordinary Aucklander, and the company is not really national but only a twin city, North Island grouping, and only able to mount two operas a year in Auckland, at least for now.

Maybe when Figaro arrives here, audiences will decide this track record is not good enough after a decade. Maybe they'll feel dispossessed and forgotten after the recent seven months' near-silence. Who knows? Maybe they'll troop off to see it in large numbers.

For its part, the company will feel that if Auckland audiences had supported its operas more over the years, things would be different now.

Whoever's right, one thing's for sure: If the national model for opera in New Zealand can't be made to work soon, it's unlikely to get the opportunity again.