To the Editor:
I write in response to Terry Teachout’s article on the New York City Opera [“Not the Metropolitan Opera,” December 1996], of which I was chairman for twelve years and on whose board I still sit. City Opera has sold more than 200,000 tickets almost every year during the last few decades, no matter who was in charge or what nonstandard repertory was favored. Though this is a third as many tickets as the Metropolitan Opera, it is more than any other American opera company and more than many of the major European companies.
It seems that very few people attend both the City Opera and the Met and thus it would appear that City Opera’s patrons are still those envisaged by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia: people who love opera but are unable to afford Met tickets.
So there are absolutely no grounds for Mr. Teachout’s questioning the City Opera’s existence. And whether or not it performs more American operas, as he proposes, will probably have nothing to do with the company’s box-office or its long-term health.
Robert W. Wilson
New York City
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Terry Teachout writes:
Robert W. Wilson’s pivotal role in keeping City Opera afloat is well known and much admired—by me among many others—and his letter points up an essential distinction between the roles of the critic and what, for want of a better word, I shall call the insider.
The conductor George Szell summed it up neatly (if one-sidedly) when he said, “For the kibitzer, no stakes are too high.” Every critic is in this sense a kibitzer: he has no personal stake in the institutions about which he writes. Hence, he is free to hold those institutions to standards which are not always relevant to the practical problem of getting the curtain up every night—a problem with which insiders like Mr. Wilson are by definition mainly concerned.
Having worked in the world of music, I think I have a better grasp of the practical side of things than do many other critics, and I try consciously to write criticism that is informed by my professional experience: I would never recommend that an institution adopt artistic policies which, however pleasing to me personally, would inevitably bring about its demise. But I also believe that, in the end, it is my job to side with ideals, not institutions, which means I sometimes find myself complaining about performances that give pleasure to large numbers of other people.
I notice that Mr. Wilson says nothing in his letter about the merits of City Opera’s artistic policies during his tenure as chairman. Instead, he states flatly that the fact that the company sells more than 200,000 tickets a year means I have “absolutely no grounds” for questioning its existence. If this means he is applying a market test to the “success” of City Opera, I can only say I am applying a different test: in art, more may not necessarily mean worse, but neither does it necessarily mean better, and for me, City Opera’s existence can only be justified by the quality of the performances it gives. I do not think a low-priced opera performance that is artistically unsatisfactory does anybody any good, least of all a novice operagoer who does not know the difference. (I will pass over in silence the question of whether City Opera’s inability to sell enough tickets to put it on a sound financial footing negates the validity of a totally market-based analysis of its artistic policies.)
The fact that Mr. Wilson and I are ultimately talking about two different things is thrown into still sharper relief by his observation that “whether or not more American operas are performed . . . will probably have nothing to do with the company’s box-office or its long-term health.” No doubt he is right on the first count. But to me, the health of City Opera has at least as much to do with whether it is doing the right thing artistically—and I believe deeply that this means a repertory that includes American opera.
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