I could be wrong but besides the production, spectacle, stars, etc. I thought people go to the opera for the voice, the emotions, and the music/drama.

Unless these content issues are addressed your going to need a lot of advertising.

Phil Fried

The Washington, D.C. region, unfortunately, lacks major cultural patrons willing to donate tax-preferred funding to the Washington NATIONAL Opera for purposes of new operas. Thus, it was unusual when, a few years back, the Washington Opera petitioned Congress for permission to rename itself the Washington NATIONAL Opera, in exchange for its explicit promise — now held in balance since the company has announced no American opera for next season, and some Board members are reported to be clammoring to abrogate the promise to Congress — to produce one American opera each and every season. [That was a promise to produce 10 American operas every decade; 100 every century...]

I recall that the MET Opera still receives major funding from the Texas-based Don and Sybil B. Harrington Foundation, which is made with the provision that the funding support traditional productions and no modern or new operas. Ms. Harrington, who passed away a decade ago, provided underwriting support for the exemplary, though conservative, Met productions — almost all televised — of ”Don Carlo,” ”Manon Lescaut,” ”La Boheme,” ”Francesca da Rimini,” ”Die Fledermaus,” ”Turandot,” ”Das Rheingold,” ”Aida,” ”Don Giovanni,” ”La Fanciulla del West,” ”Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg” and ”Otello.”

This content-specific marketing strategy would be ideal, I believe, for many dance companies. Too often dance is promoted to traditional dance audiences. Little or no effort is devoted to what I’ll call the Sanskrit question: With whom would this work resonate whether or not they had seen much, little or any dance?

I recall that the March 2002 revival of Alban Berg’s Lulu — with Christine Schafer in the title role — was not well attended. And there was the earlier production of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice — I can’t recall the season off-hand — that was not well promoted or attended.

I’d also be curious as to whether Samuel Ramey’s and Jessye Norman’s names assured respectable-sized crowds for the double-bill of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Schoenberg’s Erwartung in 1989. I vaguely recall that at one point Peter Sellars was slated for this evening, and that it originally was to have closed with Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero. [I was unfortunately too preoccupied, and had already attended the NYCO's stunning Achim Freyer Bonn Opera production of Moses und Aron, to have attended in person the MET premiere of that work, under today's birthday boy James Levine.]

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Will the Gelb [and Maazel] eras see MET Opera premieres of such operas as Dallapiccola’s Ulisse, Sessions’s Montezuma, Messiaen’s Saint-Francois d’Assis, Saariaho’s L’amour de Loin, Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, and Wallace’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter — as well as Shostakovich’s The Nose and Janacek’s From the House of the Dead?