Anne Midgette's Professional Writing Services

REUNIFICATION BLUES

ANNE MIDGETTE looks at the chaotic state of opera in the new Germany 

PART ONE

OPERA NEWS, June, 1993

Long operas, loud music, lots of theaters: the German opera tradition is on a grand scale. It can afford to be. German theaters have a combined budget of over $1.2 billion, more than half of which goes to producing opera. But flexibility is not a part of any German tradition. Even faced with the likelihood that their budgets will be slashed in the country's impending recession, most opera administrators are at a loss to adapt or alter the extant theater system. Struggling to maintain the status quo with less and less money, bemoaning the Philistinism of budget-cutting politicians, they stand petrified like rabbits in the blinding headlights of the social and financial changes bearing down on them.

Not that German opera is exactly hurting by the standards of any other country. In its eighty-odd state-supported theaters, Germany produces more opera on a given night than all the rest of the world combined. The theater system supports thousands of employees, all of them -- artists and administrators alike -- civic officials with comfortable union contracts, full medical coverage and four- to six-week paid vacations. Between 75 and 90 percent of the budget of these German houses is derived from government subsidies; in 1990­91, this was equivalent to a national average of roughly $76 of public money behind every ticket sold. Try putting that one over on an American budget committee.

It's natural that the financial burden of five new states, which Germany has suddenly had to shoulder, be reflected in cuts in cultural funding. And it's not as if culture were being singled out: cutbacks are also affecting such "essential" areas as social security, government housing and defense, to name a few. The consequences of reunification -- lower revenue from taxes, a heavier burden on social services -- combined with the effects of new European Economic Community fiscal policies are already manifest in a $4.8 billion rise in the country's projected budget deficit for 1993 -- an increase of some 20 percent over 1992. Income from taxes, meanwhile, is expected to fall by $2.4 billion.

Yet the people running the opera system don't want to recognize these unpleasant realities. They're far readier to blame politicians for making cutbacks. An often heard cry is "When will politicians realize that opera is as important a social service as schools and hospitals?" -- schools and hospitals being services that German states are legally obliged to support, while cultural funding, massive as it is, remains voluntary. Rather than overhauling and streamlining theater infrastructures (to avoid having to pay three complete separate shifts of technical staff, for instance), or putting a wholehearted effort into finding alternative sources of funding, many opera administrators are adopting a victim posture. And no one has attempted to join forces and reform the system.

There are two kinds of opera companies in Germany: those of theaters that stage only opera and ballet (Munich, Hamburg, Karlsruhe) and those of the "multi-category" houses, which present opera, musicals and spoken theater on the same stage. The first step in cutbacks will be to get rid of the "opera" category in these latter theaters; a handful of companies, mainly in the former East Germany, already have been disbanded.

There are also, in effect, two countries in Germany: like a phantom limb, the Wall is still present. In the last three years, East Germany's theaters have had to make major changes in structure and staff, trying to conform to the artistic standards and generous pay scales of the West. Despite massive transfusions of money from the federal government, these houses are still financially anemic. The situation isn't likely to improve when the government withdraws its temporary emergency funding, as it probably will do by 1995, and the theaters return to their own insolvent states. To defend themselves against the threat of closure, Eastern opera companies are trying to prove that their houses are making an essential artistic contribution to society, harnessing the euphoria of their newfound freedom to draw in new international artists, new productions, new works, new energy. As a result, major theaters in the East, like Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden, are the houses to watch in Germany right now.

If Eastern theaters have nowhere to go but up (or out), Western theaters have to try, under the current threat of frozen or decreased operating budgets, to maintain standards created during a period of notable prosperity. Major houses like Munich or Hamburg aren't feeling the pinch as much as smaller ones like Hannover, Freiburg or Bonn. Slowly, however, everyone is coming to see that a new image and new strategies will be necessary.

German cultural funding is supplied primarily at the state and city level, rather than the federal. There is in fact no German Ministry of Culture; such federal cultural funding as exists is administered by the Ministry of the Interior. But there is a cultural ministry in each of the sixteen states, and states prefer to retain their autonomy in cultural matters. The more affluent a state, the better off its theaters, which means that the houses in Hamburg (a state unto itself) and Munich (in wealthy Bavaria) are doing just fine.

"In Germany," says Peter Jonas, incoming intendant of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, "the debates about the function of and need for art took place early in this century, when democracy was being implemented. This doesn't mean there aren't financial pressures -- it's just that the importance of the arts has already been established, while in England or the United States it's still being debated." It also means that Jonas' new theater has an annual budget of $66.3 million.

Jonas is leaving English National Opera for one of the most established of Germany's opera institutions. The Bavarian State Opera is a bastion of tradition, known for its devotion to Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss. The house's directorship traditionally has been German, from Hans Knappertsbusch to Wolfgang Sawallisch, so it was something of a shock when the Bavarian Cultural Ministry announced in 1991 that a forty-six-year-old Englishman was to become the new intendant. The Bavarian State Opera is a fine example of a wealthy West German house realizing it's time to do something about its image. It's also a fine example of how much money a theater can swallow. Internationally, the house has attracted much attention recently by having had to close for two full seasons in the last five years for renovations to its hydraulic stage machinery, each time at a cost of about $24 million over and above the annual operating budget. The failure of the hydraulic system could be a metaphor for many productions in wealthy West German theaters: lots of money poured in, little quality control. Hamburg's intendant, Peter Ruzicka, recently said he regretted that people tended to focus on weak productions and ignore good ones. A retort might be that when a house is spending so much on a production, there's no excuse for the musical and visual mediocrity that critics found in the 1992­/93 Die Walküre.

Munich too had its fair share of expensive and uninspired new productions last season -- Luca Ronconi's Il Trovatore, Tony Palmer's Dmitrij, Lina Wertmüller's Carmen. Part of the problem has been lack of firm leadership. This has plagued the house since August Everding became general intendant of all Bavaria's State Theaters in 1983, leaving Wolfgang Sawallisch as the National Theater's opera director and Everding's unofficial sparring partner. Sawallisch's departure for the Philadelphia Orchestra clears the stage for Jonas, a savvy administrator who works with one eye to artistic innovation and the other to the public. He has brought in a lot of ideas from outside the German theater system, where a budget is something that has to be raised every year, rather than automatically handed over. It's telling of the German attitude toward the arts that many people worry that Jonas' advent will mean a break with the house's precious tradition, when to an outside observer it's patently obvious that change is exactly what the theater desperately needs in order to attain a truly international standard.

Jonas is nonetheless eager to allay the fears of his new public. "There are centuries of tradition here," he says, "and you have to come into this tradition and learn from it, and bring in new traditions to join it. After all, to break with tradition in Munich would mean to stop singing Mozart, Wagner and Strauss, and then there'd be nothing left to have a tradition of."

One of the house traditions he cites, however, is that "of composers working in-house, actually producing works for the theater." Five new works have been commissioned for the next five seasons, from such German composers as Hans Werner Henze and Hans-Jürgen von Bose. New works were also an ENO tradition: one of them, Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek, actually had its debut in Munich, although not at the Bavarian State Opera.

Another of ENO's contributions has been a campaign to raise public awareness of opera. In Munich, this awareness is far higher than in Britain, Jonas says. Still, "It's important to make the Munich house accessible, to change its marketing approach. I could go to the Bavarian State Senate and say 'We need a different marketing strategy,' and they could say 'Why? The house is regularly sold out.' But that's a false argument. It's the image that needs work. People have to be aware that opera is exciting, theatrical, challenging."

If Munich and Hamburg are fairly stable financially, they're the exception today among German houses, both East and West. The state of Baden­Württemberg, with thirteen theaters, used to be second only to Bavaria in its generosity with subsidies. Today, rumors abound of cutbacks and possible closures of opera houses such as Ulm, Freiburg and Pforzheim. Pforzheim recently suffered a midyear budget cut that will mean a 25 percent reduction in sets and costumes for the last two premieres of the 1992­93 season; and the call to disband the opera company has been taken up across the political spectrum. A January 1 budget cut, meanwhile, forced Freiburg to cancel altogether its final premiere, Granville Walker's Svengali, and the incoming administration is reducing the ensemble of solo singers from twenty-six to sixteen.

"Once a house closes, it doesn't reopen" is a refrain commonly heard from audiences, artists and administrators. It's generally recognized that there's going to have to be a lot of closure, particularly in the East, if the system is to survive at all; but with the 1994 general elections approaching, politicians are reluctant to alienate their constituents. One result is that money that governments really can't spare in the long run is being conjured up to keep theaters alive. In Hannover this season, when the city came up $30 million short for its annual budget, the state of Lower Saxony had the choice of either shouldering full financial responsibility for Hannover's 1,200-seat opera house (which it previously had shared with the city) or watching it fold. By opting for the former, the state raised its cultural budget by 12 percent. In Chemnitz, once known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, the opera house reopened with a production of Parsifal in December 1992 after four years of reconstruction. There was much debate along the way about whether to complete the project, in light of the city's severe financial difficulties. Similarly, a decision was recently taken to rebuild the theater in Magdeburg, which burned down in 1990.

Where's the money to come from? The answer is given unanimously by Germany's opera administrators: the state. "The government should not be released from its obligations," says Klaus Schultz, intendant in Mannheim. "It's like renovating Cologne Cathedral -- you have to preserve your traditions so they'll still be around 100 years from now." He could be speaking for a dozen other intendants, all of whom stress that opera is necessary to the well-being of a society and therefore must be subsidized as a social service.

As for private sponsorship, "It's a big topic right now," says Schultz, "because nobody here understands a thing about it." A valid argument against private sponsorship, as practiced in the U.S., would be that such sources alone never could support German opera in the style and on the scale to which it's become accustomed. Still, it's surprising that most intendants dismiss the notion as a serious possibility for alleviating their current financial duress. Even Leipzig's Udo Zimmermann, who successfully applied to French industries to help finance his forthcoming cycle of Rameau operas, and who has amassed 4 or 5 million marks of private funding for this season, says, "I don't think German opera can finance itself privately." Zimmermann's approach exemplifies the German notion of sponsorship: funding on a per-project basis, whereby the local bank, for example, helps back performances of Parsifal (on May 22 and 31). This practice is summed up by Schultz: "Private sponsorship makes sense when it's used for special events, but it's dangerous when used to pay for regular operating costs."

"Artistic freedom is bought with government subsidies" is the opinion of Götz Friedrich, stage director and intendant of Deutsche Oper Berlin. "What subsidies give is freedom, not comfort." If Germany were to privatize its theater system, in his view, the result would be lots of musicals; it's subsidies that pay for artistic ventures, such as world premieres. In contrast, he points to the example of the Metropolitan Opera, bound primarily to the standard repertory by public taste -- though it did stage two world premieres in its last two seasons, both notable successes.

Jonas believes government subsidies create a greater responsibility for the theater to have integrity: "When you take money from a taxpayer, you have to give something in return." What Germany's taxpayers get is an awful lot of opera. Whether they want it or not is another question. The weekly newspaper Die Welt recently observed that while city and state subsidies for theaters (spoken theater as well as opera) increased by over $1.2 billion between 1959 and 1990, audiences during the same period fell by 5.5 million. Even accounting for inflation, that's quite a discrepancy. And when Friedrich defends subsidies on the grounds that they give him artistic freedom, what he's saying is that he's producing operas the public doesn't really want to see, which "should" be staged for the sake of some abstract cultural ideal. Since the Met itself has proven that new opera can have a broad public, and houses like Leipzig are proving that there's interest enough in Germany, if it's tapped, one could conclude that, rather than wrap themselves in a cocoon of opera of questionable merit staged in the name of "artistic freedom" for large sums of public money, Germany's opera administrators are going to have to give more thought to just what it is that the public wants from its artists. "For more problematic aspects of German operatic life," says Mannheim's Schultz, "the current crisis could mean escape from a vicious cycle. It's a motivation to take a closer look at certain ways in which we've grown too comfortable. Things can't go on like this forever."

The only alternative that houses do seem to be exploring is that of mounting productions with other houses. "Before, coproductions were practical," says Schultz; "now they're necessary." Dresden is talking to Vienna, Mannheim to Prague. They're making it across the Atlantic, too: Bill T. Jones' The Mother of Three Sons was a coproduction of Aachen, the Munich Biennale and New York City Opera. "Something came into being that wasn't there before and wouldn't otherwise have been possible," says Schultz. Again, he's echoed by others, such as Georg Quander, intendant of Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden, who mentions a Wozzeck planned with Chicago and Paris' Châtelet, or the April 1993 premiere of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi with Chicago. "Coproductions can be difficult, because the two theaters' operations are completely different," he says. "It's worth doing only for productions you want to stage for a limited time." It's also helpful for covering the extra costs of a newly commissioned work, such as Siegfried Matthus' Desdemona and Her Sisters, presented in May 1992, coproduced by Berlin's Komische Oper, the Schwetzingen Festival and Deutsche Oper Berlin.

One reason that the commitment of intendants to finding alternative sources of funding is so halfhearted is that the politicians haven't yet given them enough definite "no"s. As long as Bremen's intendant, Hansgünther Heyme, can editorialize in a leading newspaper against politicians who are "avoiding their responsibility to subsidize art," he's not going to face the fact that the money is simply running out. Politicians too are afraid of implementing change, but their reluctance to "just say no" can drag down the theater system.

"I recognize that Saxony's financial problems are so great that no one knows where to begin," said Dresden intendant Christoph Albrecht in an interview with Opern Welt magazine. "But I do ask that the government decide what's to become of Saxony's cultural institutions. Either you decide, hoping for better times ahead, to keep this rich cultural heritage alive across the board, but at a minimum level -- which precludes the possibility of first-rate achievement -- or you set priorities. But a definite decision has got to be made, and those responsible can't avoid it." Albrecht runs a house in one of the "new German states" (as former East Germany is known), where such decisions, as well as a complete restructuring of the theaters over the past three years, have been necessary for houses to have even a chance of survival.

Over thirty theaters in the former East Germany produced opera, whether exclusively or in addition to other theater. As East Germany had one-third the population of the "old" Federal Republic, with its fifty-odd opera-producing houses, that's a lot of opera, even by German standards. People speak of the "theater chain" in Thuringia, where there's a theater every 20 kilometers. The old regime kept its theaters going to demonstrate its cultural enlightenment, regardless of actual public demand.

Currency unification was a shock to the country's economy; it's difficult to comprehend what the overnight implementation of an entirely different economic standard involves in practice. In the opera, it meant that tickets no longer could be sold for 3 marks ($1.80); employees no longer could be paid at their former salaries; old budgets no longer could cover fixed operating costs. Meanwhile, prices were skyrocketing. Between the 1990­91 and '91­92 seasons, the budgets of Western theaters went up by about 5 percent as a result of the usual cost-of-living increase specified by union contracts. In the East, the rise was more on the order of 60 percent. Subsidies for the eight theaters in the state of Thuringia went from $54 million in 1991 to a projected $144.65 million in 1993. Yet theaters in the East still can afford to pay soloists only about 60 percent of what they earn in the West. The contracts of permanent employees (from stage technicians to members of the chorus) were slated to go up to 80 percent of Western contracts on January 1, 1993; these workers are likely to earn Western salaries sooner than guest artists at the same theaters.

Finances are only part of the structural problem. Ensembles were laden with singers past their prime who still had fixed contracts, and a house could draw only on singers from East Bloc countries, whose talent pool wasn't big enough to furnish over thirty houses with singers of international caliber. Since 1990, early retirement has been heavily implemented, and many singers and staff have been switched from fixed to free-lance contracts (often at their own request; under the old regime, it was difficult for a singer to get permission to travel to other houses, and singers from East Germany are just beginning to sample the joys of freelancing). Some staff who retired simply were not replaced, but this also means that work that used to be performed by three shifts of employees is now covered by only two. Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden cut down from 1,300 employees in 1989 to about 900 in 1992 (although over 100 of these were transferred from fixed to free-lance contracts).

Another result of the political changes of 1989­90 was a sharp drop in East German public interest in the theater. Suddenly, undreamed-of leisure opportunities were available -- television, Western movies, package tours, running shoes. Suddenly, too, the population was introduced to such Western innovations as unemployment and recession. With so much to do, and so little money to do it with, the average man on the street didn't have much time or interest left over for opera. Because East Germany used to pad its statistics, it's hard to say just how far the public actually shrank immediately after 1989. Official figures have it that over 10 million East Germans went to the theater in 1989, as against some 5 million in 1990­91. It's certain that recent seasons saw theaters from Leipzig to Erfurt playing to 40 and 50 percent houses.

In the face of such public apathy, the idea of marketing a house, newly important in the West, is doubly so in the East. The Leipzig house is a leader in this trend, with everything from special bus services to far-off corners of the city (in response to the rising crime rate, which -- according to press officer Michael Ernst -- keeps people from venturing out at night) to an active campaign of publications to educate and draw in the public (teaching them such things as the names of Western singers and conductors they'd never heard of before) to the "gift" Udo Zimmermann had given the city, on three or four occasions, of simply distributing all the tickets for a given performance free of charge. "The lines went around the block," he says of this last move. "The desire for opera is there, but people can't afford it."

Duress has led to an increase of family feeling in many theaters. In Annaberg, Saxony, the 144 fixed employees of the Winterstein theater voluntarily forewent a 1993 raise in the interests of keeping the theater open, and soloists from around the world are agreeing to sing in Eastern houses for reduced fees. A December 1992 premiere of La Cenerentola in the Eastern city of Halle followed upon the heels of a city council discussion about closing the theater; the dire nature of the situation no doubt lent an extra spark to the overwhelming public and critical acclaim given the witty, entertaining production of the house's new intendant, Klaus Froeboese. "No one could seriously want to do without such evenings of opera," wrote reviewer Matthias Frede in Opern Welt. "The public clearly voted to keep the house," chimed in another leading opera publication, Das Opern Glas.

Extra subsidies to East German theaters (nearly $400 million for 1992­93) probably will be terminated by the '95­96 season, hypothesizes Knut Lennert of the German Theater Association. At that point, the states themselves will have to step in and continue funding on their own; and that's when the real trouble begins. To maintain current standards, postulates Opern Welt, you'd have to raise prices 100 percent; meanwhile, Thuringia's prime minister, Bernhard Vogel, already has spoken of cutting that state's theater budget, which certainly would mean cutting at least a few links from the "Thuringian theater chain." "I'm afraid," says Unter den Linden's Quander, "that a whole string of opera companies in the East will have to close."

Nowhere is the relationship between Eastern and Western Germany more vividly illustrated than in Berlin, where Götz Friedrich is sitting in a precarious position. Before 1989, his Deutsche Oper was a flagship of culture on the island of West Berlin. When Friedrich took over in 1981, West Berlin had "an artistic euphoria," he says. "There was a great energy in the 1980s. The city imagined itself as a link between East and West, a European hub, a showcase for Western culture." Today, all eyes are turned East, waiting to see how the other half of the city will define itself. The wealthy Western house suddenly seems tired, as does Friedrich, in the twelfth year of a job that conventional wisdom (and such experienced hands as Jonas) says wears people out after a decade. "Berlin has to learn what its new role is," Friedrich adds; so does Deutsche Oper.

Berlin's three opera houses are engaged -- depending on one's source, or mood -- in either productive cooperation to enrich the city's cultural life or a battle to the death. When the Wall went up in 1961, the city's older, traditional theater, Unter den Linden, was on the "wrong" side of it, but the Westerners had nearly completed a brand-new home for the "other" opera, variously known throughout its history as the Charlottenburg Oper and the Städtische Oper, today Deutsche Oper Berlin. Then there's Komische Oper, founded in East Berlin by the legendary director Walter Felsenstein in 1947, today associated with Harry Kupfer, a Felsenstein disciple.

Reunification meant that all three houses suddenly were being funded out of the same city/state budget, and naturally it's been questioned how long the city can keep all three afloat. The dispute has descended to the level of whether the two larger houses should have equal budgets, or whether Deutsche Oper should continue to get more because it's bigger (1,885 seats, as opposed to 1,400 at Unter den Linden across town). The Komische Oper (1,200 seats), which generally stages smaller-scale works (though it tried to get into the act by opening this season with Rienzi) with predominantly ensemble singers, is "at a severe disadvantage in comparison to the other two houses," says its press spokeswoman, Erika Rossner.

It's often asked whether the city needs three opera houses of international caliber. "In my opinion, this question is falsely worded," the Staatsoper's Daniel Barenboim told Opern Welt. "It should be, can Berlin afford three first-rate houses? If the answer is yes, then it needs them as well!" But if the answer is no, it's the Deutsche Oper, some (including Friedrich) fear, that would be threatened. Unter den Linden has tradition on its side; the Komische Oper a distinct house character; Deutsche Oper is, well, big.

Quander has an advantage at the Staatsoper, because Barenboim, his biggest international star (and, some say, the de facto intendant), is working as a magnet to draw many others, from Hvorostovsky to Boulez to Giulini. And like all the opera houses of former East Germany, the Staatsoper can only improve. The repertory is being overhauled, new productions staged at the rate of eight to ten a season -- by Harry Kupfer and Jonathan Miller, among others. The general mood is one of change, activity and innovation. The Deutsche Oper can only attempt to uphold its tradition of expensive, star-studded productions on a budget that probably is not going to be increased at the same rate as the contract-determined salaries of its permanent staff.

Friedrich demonstrates his sensitivity to the mechanics of theater with his ability to find, and play up, the melodramatic aspects of the situation. His scenario, in brief, is that the Staatsoper is distracting the state, winning more money and forcing the end of a golden age of Berlin opera by causing the Deutsche Oper's decline. "We have to be careful not to lose what the West had before," he says. "The competition has changed. There's too much talk about money, about eliminating positions. It's shifted some people's focus away from an artistic competition" (not least, one might add, his own). "I don't have the answer."

Neither, evidently, does anyone else. Members of the opera community are far more adept at locating and expounding upon the nature of the problem than at solving it. "We could cut down the number of performances," offers Schultz, "or have simpler stagings. We'll have to be more inventive."

Such small-scale measures won't appreciably reduce the erosion of the country's opera tradition as small theaters disappear and larger ones stand still. The hope for survival of Germany's present opera system is that houses mount enough new, exciting productions for the system to pick up momentum again. Some houses are following this route. Still, it's likely that by 1995­96 there will be considerably fewer opera companies in the German Federal Republic.

MS. MIDGETTE , who writes on the arts and travel for a variety of publications, is managing editor of Munich Found.

This is the first of a two-part article.

OPERA NEWS, June, 1993 Copyright ©1993 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc. 

REUNIFICATION BLUES

Is opera in Germany doomed? In the conclusion of a two-part article, ANNE MIDGETTE digs for answers. 

PART TWO

OPERA NEWS, August, 1993

Opera in Germany is in trouble. The country's huge state-supported theater system is threatened by the financial burden that reunification and its consequences have placed upon federal and state governments. It's also threatened from within, undermined by inflated budgets, excessive costs, the salaries of too many employees.

Foreign singers come to Germany seeking exposure to a rich musical tradition and experience in one of the country's eighty-odd opera-producing houses. To someone from the outside, it appears that all this quantity must reflect a certain quality. But all too often, productions seem to be a case of quantity for its own sake. Germany's days of producing opera in bulk may be numbered, so it remains to be seen whether the musical standards and principles -- of singing, stage direction, new works -- that the system theoretically exists to promote are in and of themselves strong enough to weather the change.

A 1980s estimate had it that some 2,000 American singers come to Germany to audition every fall. Aside from the fact that there's more opera performed in Germany than anywhere else, one reason the system has been so accessible to foreigners is that Germany's opera agents are legally obligated to hold regular open auditions for all singers. Monday is traditionally "audition day," which sees the waiting rooms of the Stoll agency in Munich or ZBF in Frankfurt packed with an assortment of hopefuls. If the agent hears a voice he likes and knows of a house with a vacancy in that particular vocal category (there are twenty-two of these categories, or "Fachs," in the German system, from "hochdramatische Sopran" to "seriöse Bass"), he sends the singer to the house to audition again, this time for an actual contract. Tenor Joseph Cercy had been working as an English teacher in Munich for two years when a 1990 audition for Stoll landed him a two-year contract in Freiburg, where he went on to sing Hoffmann, Carlo, Idomeneo and a few other choice roles.

Americans have special reason to hope, because there's a general perception that they are better prepared for stage careers than their German counterparts. "American training is more oriented toward actual practice," says Klaus Schultz, intendant of the theater in Mannheim, "and it's much harder. There's a preselection process that takes place before singers even enter the German system, because they've had to work so much harder in America. That doesn't exist in Germany." The agencies concur. "Young Germans write in and say 'I can sing five arias,' " says an employee of the Germinal Hilbert agency in Munich. "What can I do with that? The Americans write in and say 'I can sing fifteen roles.' "

Yet as more and more singers arrive in Germany -- and a course or two of German auditions has become virtually a required part of an American singer's training -- the chances of an unknown landing a job by singing for an agent have grown increasingly slim. "When I came over in 1968," says Frederic Mayer, a tenor at Munich's "second" opera house, the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, "if you could sing very competently and spoke virtually no German, you probably could get a job. Nowadays that's simply not true. Unless you have an absolutely world-astounding voice, you'd better be able to speak some German, and you'd better be able to move onstage. They've filled a lot of holes."

And they're hearing fewer and fewer people. "There hasn't been an audition department here for over a year," says the Hilbert employee. "Getting a beginner started is a lot of work. The houses don't want to accept an unknown." Hilbert still holds auditions, but on the order of one every month or so, rather than weekly. Another reason? "There are fewer vacancies," declares the Stoll agency's Renate Rief.

"I call it the hunting season," says soprano Helen Bickers, who is leaving the Freiburg theater to move to Dessau for the coming season. "The time between October 15, when the theater tells you whether or not they're renewing your contract, and October 30, when you tell them whether or not you'll take it. Everyone's out looking. And this year, there was just nothing to be had. It was one of the worst years ever."

In Dessau, as in Freiburg, Bickers has a fixed contract: she sings a certain number of roles in return for a regular salary and full benefits, including health insurance, a pension plan and paid vacations. The fact that German houses employ about 7,000 solo and chorus singers on this basis is another powerful draw for many American singers. "If you're a family man who has any degree of responsibility," according to Mayer, "you say, 'Well, let's see, where can I sing, be paid for it and know that my family is secure, with a hospital plan and that sort of thing?' We're paid on a twelve-month basis as civic employees. In the U.S., we have no opera companies that run twelve months a year. The Met comes the closest, about seven and a half."

As an established soloist, Bickers has the luxury of a contract that requires her to sing only two roles. Most fixed contracts demand much more. The flip side of all this security is the real danger that the system will destroy the singer, obliging him to sing too many roles too often, or pushing him too quickly into heavy roles. "A young colleague of mine came into the house and did seven major roles in one year," says baritone Wolfgang Brendel. "He was gone after two years. Never heard of him again."

Guest contracts supposedly are more prestigious, make one better known and pay more per performance, but they don't include benefits and paid vacations. Recently they've begun to lose some of their allure. As the fiscal belt tightens, many houses aren't offering fixed contracts; they're saving money by hiring guests on a per-performance basis or by cutting back on their ensembles. Singers who have fixed contracts are aware of their value. "There's less fluctuation in the theaters," says Mannheim's Schultz. "Anyone who has a job tends to keep it."

Irish soprano Frances Lucey would concur. After two years in Munich's Opera Studio (a training program for young artists), she signed a fixed contract with the house in 1989. In Munich she has built up experience doing a variety of roles; elsewhere, her reputation has been steadily growing, from Dresden to Dublin to Wexford in 1992, where critic Andrew Porter hailed her as "the discovery of the festival." Similarly, American bass-baritone Monte Pederson is under contract to the Vienna State Opera, where he appears (as a bewigged and mustachioed Donner in Adolf Dresen's new Das Rheingold, for example) between guestings in Cologne, Leipzig, San Francisco (Dutchman) and La Scala (Klingsor). Yet both of these singers, like so many others, are holding onto fixed contracts. Security has a new appeal.

Another advantage of a fixed contract is that it allows the singer to work in an ensemble, which, at least in theory, is more rewarding than star theater, from both an artistic and an educational standpoint. "An ensemble," says Schultz, "is both cheaper and better. By training young artists, small and midsized houses look after the next generation and ensure the continuation of tradition." Although in practice there are plenty of disadvantages, from provincialism to personality clashes, ensemble singers are still able to develop a group identity, working together and with a director for a significant time in order to create real drama onstage. "You know what the other singers are going to do -- you're coordinated," says Bickers. "And you take that and make better art with it." In a large house, by contrast, it's not uncommon for a singer to go onstage for a repertory performance without a single rehearsal.

The advantages of an ensemble are often palpable from the audience's perspective.
A clear illustration: two consecutive-night performances in Berlin this January. In Ruth Berghaus' production of Pelléas et Mélisande at Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden,
an ensemble of young, talented singers gave a consistently gripping, dramatically and musically effective performance. In Luca Ronconi's staging of Macbeth at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, on the other hand, the singers (Silvano Carroli substituting, admittedly, for an ailing Simon Estes, who had rehearsed the piece) often seemed to occupy the same stage by a mere accident of geography.

Even major houses geared to star productions realize the advantage of staging performances with singers who are well-rehearsed and familiar with each other. These houses try to find ways to bring ensemble advantages to star productions. "One of Munich's strengths is that the house has had a group of regular star singers -- people who like to sing here, and like the city -- as well as the permanent ensemble," says the theater's intendant, Peter Jonas. This is the hope of other houses as well. "Why not form an ensemble for certain pieces, and have the ensemble associated with the piece, rather than the house?" asks Daniel Barenboim, general music director of Berlin's Unter den Linden, in an interview with the magazine Opern Welt. "The singer's tie should be to the art, not to the house's structure."

For houses concerned about keeping up standards while saving money, this kind of per-production "ensemble" is a middle road between straight repertory theater and the serial (stagione) system, as practiced in most Italian houses, whereby a house rehearses, then stages, one work at a time. Lately, the repertory-versus-stagione debate has been aired a lot as politicians point to the latter as a way to cut costs, and it becomes clear that the German system of performing a different production every night has disadvantages in terms of cost, manpower and all too often quality.

Few want to change, though. When the general secretary of the Vienna State Opera, Georg Springer, told a newspaper in a November interview that "Repertory theater is not administrable in the long run," it unleashed a storm of protest, and he hastily toned down the statement at the house's next press conference, assuring everyone that Vienna would continue on the repertory system. The idea remains that stagione theater is less expensive than repertory. To get around this, houses like Unter den Linden are adopting what they call a "semi-serial" principle, meaning that a piece is rehearsed, then performed four or five times within a few weeks, then retired for a while. In practical terms, this is still repertory theater: a different production is still being staged every night. At best, it's an effort to overcome repertory's artistic, if not its financial, disadvantages.

Repertory suffers most from the lack of commitment of star artists, because the conception of German repertory opera is based on the idea of a fixed ensemble, and it is not well served by artists who are at the house only for a limited time. Brendel, one of the "regulars" Jonas refers to in Munich, had a fixed contract there for years before spinning off into the world of international guestings. He speaks of the value of the ensemble/repertory principle as he experienced it in the 1970s in Munich, a house led by an intendant who has a sense of responsibility to young singers. "I was lucky," he says, mentioning the help he received from such people as Günther Rennert. "I had directors who stood by their ensemble. There was someone to watch out for you. But I don't know who cares about young singers like that today. Some music directors are in the house only a few months a year. A real director should be there all the time."

Barenboim, who combines Unter den Linden with the music directorship of the Chicago Symphony, both full-time jobs, asserts that the five months he spends in Berlin each season are perfectly adequate. Certainly he's gone about implementing positive change and elevating company morale since he and Georg Quander took over the house in December 1991, but he's likely to come under critical fire for his absence, particularly in light of his notably high salary. Another conductor whose star is rising is Donald Runnicles, officially general music director of Freiburg's opera company until the end of the '92­93 season. At the beginning of his tenure, four years ago, he put a lot of time into building up the house, but in recent years he's been seen more in San Francisco (where he's music director), at the Met and in Vienna than in Freiburg, where he puts in a token appearance from time to time.

These cases illustrate the star syndrome that has permeated most facets of international -- not just German -- opera life. It takes its toll on the German system, because so much of that system is built around the notion of artists and performers who are both established and settled down. Still, many feel, it's the stars rather than the ensembles that the public really wants and pays to see. Some defend Germany's high government subsidies on the grounds that they enable ensemble theater to exist at all. "Pure star theater would be able to support itself," said Helga Schuchhardt, Lower Saxony's minister of science and culture, in a recent interview.

As the fixed operating costs of running a theater rise, the portion of the budget left over for artistic costs shrinks steadily, to the point where administrators fear that they won't have enough money actually to stage opera. These artistic costs include the exorbitant salaries of international guest artists. "I think all our salaries are too high," says Brendel. "But I'm not going to be the one to say O.K., I'll take less." Some worry that financial woes will mean that fewer of these stars show up on German stages. Proportionally speaking, however, the salary of a Brendel or even a Pavarotti is a drop in the bucket of a theater's overall operating costs. And houses certainly profit by being associated with big names. As long as Unter den Linden can proffer Barenboim as a kind of calling card to the international community, they'll continue to pay him his millions.

The sheer volume of opera in Germany makes it easy to reduce discussion purely to business terms. More than 7,000 opera performances were given in Germany's theaters in the 1990­91 season. The burden on singers within the system is tremendous. "I've sung over thirty roles since I've been here," says baritone Alan Titus, who moved to Munich with his family in 1988. "In the next two years, I'm doing twenty-three different roles, twelve of them new to me." What the German market will bear, often, is Strauss and Wagner. Among Titus' new roles are Die Frau ohne Schatten's Barak, in Munich, and Hans Sachs, which he introduced in Frankfurt this June -- a significant change from the repertory he used to be associated with in the U.S.

Whether in an ensemble or as guest artists, singers begin the rehearsal period in a German theater by attending a "conception discussion," the cast's first exposure to the director's idea of the piece. "Aida as a cleaning woman -- that's going too far!" Margaret Price is supposed to have exclaimed about Hans Neuenfels' Frankfurt staging. Yet regular operagoers no longer raise an eyebrow at unusual or radical stagings. Harry Kupfer's 1993 Les Contes d'Hoffmann at Berlin's Komische Oper, which cast a baritone as an evil genius of a Nicklausse; the black-leather-clad cancan line of Valkyries in the Munich Ring staged by Nikolaus Lehnhoff; Manrico as a Harley-Davidson-riding motorcycle thug in Leipzig and Karlsruhe -- all this is pretty much routine in Germany. Hence the term Regietheater (stage directors' theater) and the tendency (today international) to speak of Giancarlo del Monaco's Trovatore rather than Verdi's. Freiburg's 1993 production of La Bohème introduced a group of polar bears into Act II. "First they were supposed to be a symbol of the masculine," according to the production's Rodolfo, Joseph Cercy. "Then someone said no, polar bears are actually a symbol of the feminine. What I want to know is, what are they doing onstage?"

It's a disputed term, and a disputed concept. A lot of today's Regietheater grew out of the work of Walter Felsenstein, who founded Berlin's Komische Oper in 1947. Rejecting cliché, reluctant even to differentiate opera from other forms of theater, he sought to develop the drama in theatrical rather than musical terms. "The music has to grow out of the dramatic situation," he said. "Singing should be an intensified, indispensable form of expression, rather than something on the side." He also emphasized fidelity to the work's original conception and text. His approach placed heavy demands on the acting ability of his ensemble. The result, at its best, was a kind of dramatic effectiveness and unity seldom previously seen on the opera stage.

As must any figure who has exerted a profound influence, Felsenstein has come in for his share of criticism. Aside from objections to his willingness to work with the East German government, the charge most often leveled against him is disregard for musical or vocal quality. "His ensemble sang terribly, horribly, and he just didn't notice," says Brendel, yet he too is respectful of Felsenstein's achievement.

Götz Friedrich, Joachim Herz, Harry Kupfer and other Felsenstein students and followers went on to make their own mark on opera direction. Whether later directors followed Felsenstein's teachings or departed from them, the idea of making a piece "modern" in dramatic terms (and the related, fallacious idea that this aim is best served with a radical or shocking new interpretation) has become indelibly incorporated into the concept of Regietheater.

The tradition tends toward the domination of visual over musical elements. "In Germany, directors have their own energy," comments Klaus Schultz, "which sometimes threatens to push the music into the background." Another unfortunate current trend is that, in the search for a fresh, "dramatic" approach, outside directors are brought in (often from film) who have little or no connection with music. "People find this original," says Schultz. "The director's name goes up like a flare to draw in the public, and then the house is stuck with the production for the next ten years."

The broad range of attitudes and ideas encompassed by the term Regietheater are variously misunderstood, criticized or praised on far too facile a level. "There's a real critical intellectual debate to be had on the subject of 'straight' versus Regie theater," says Peter Jonas, "but it hasn't happened yet. People tend to dismiss it by saying, well, some straight productions are good, some Regie productions are good." Himself firmly in the Regie tradition, he's aware of its risks, such as falling into "a glib postmodernism that becomes cliché." Götz Friedrich sees a certain heaviness: "German directors have a hard time finding things beautiful. They're all busy looking for Meaning, like little Fausts."

Today there's an active Regietheater tradition in English-speaking countries, with such directors as David Pountney, David Alden, Jonathan Miller and Peter Sellars. Many of these are ENO names, and Jonas could well be instrumental in returning this branch of the Regie heritage to Germany now that he is in Munich. (Eastern Berlin's Staatsoper is also doing its bit, having brought Jonathan Miller to stage Capriccio last May.) But there are exciting German directors as well among the Felsenstein "grandchildren." Notable among the "thirty-somethings" is Andreas Homoki, a former Kupfer student, who had a great season in 1992­93, winning raves for Die Frau ohne Schatten in Geneva and Cavalleria/Pagliacci in Mainz, both characterized by invention, abstraction and, yes, beauty. Negotiations are currently underway for a Rigoletto in Hamburg.

"Ideally, you hear what you see and see what you hear," says Udo Zimmermann. "In a bad production, you see something you don't hear. But opera isn't just spoken drama with music. What distinguishes opera is the way scene and music fit together." In his exploration of the possibilities of opera, about the only thing Zimmermann hasn't done is get up onstage and sing himself. All the composer's five operas have been performed extensively (especially Die Weisse Rose, which the Leipzig company even took to Jerusalem last spring), while conducting activities have taken him around the world. In March 1990 he put aside creative activities to assume the office of intendant in Leipzig. "Opera is not in crisis," he says. "From an artistic standpoint, not at all. Some years ago, everyone despaired of its survival. Today, every composer wants to write an opera."

And a lot of them want to write for Leipzig. The theater is becoming known as a center for contemporary opera. This has meant eighteen modern works in three years, from Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre to the world premiere of Bianca by Rene Hirschfeld. Leipzig's 300th-anniversary festival schedule (May 1­July 3, 1993) includes two world premieres, Jörg Herchert's Nachtwache (staged by Ruth Berghaus) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Dienstag, from the seven-part cycle-in-progress Licht. This is the first time a German house has staged a Stockhausen premiere. The other completed parts of Licht have bowed at La Scala, a co-producer of this new installment.

Attempts to educate the public about contemporary music are usually couched in the sort of tentative, bright language used to convince children of the advantages of eating liver. At the Biennale, Hans Werner Henze's independent festival of new music theater in Munich, the organizers spend a lot of time devising programs that won't scare people away. Their trump cards are puppet-theater productions, which present new music in small, sugar-coated doses. The idea that the public won't pay to see new music is what Friedrich uses to justify government subsidies, without which Berlin would never have been able to stage its premieres. Zimmermann himself says of Leipzig's contemporary schedule, "I'm driving away my public. I didn't take them into consideration. I don't know if I can go on like this."

Still, new works are cropping up everywhere, and intendants and general music directors are eager to assign more. "We have to take a stand for new opera," says Barenboim. His Berlin theater is putting on a new opera by Manfred Trojahn in 1993­94 and plans to add one by Boulez. Last September, Deutsche Oper Berlin staged Aribert Reimann's Das Schloss, which the house had commissioned. Munich's Jonas is also talking about commissions, and Munich's premiere of Penderecki's Ubu Rex at the city's 1991 opera festival was a hit with much of its German public (although -- or perhaps because -- it was staged inside a large intestine). Trojahn's Enrico, which had its premiere as a Munich­Schwetzingen coproduction in 1991, is back in Munich this season before going on to Dresden, Kassel and Santa Fe. Hamburg, which maintains a composer-in-residence program, premiered Wolfgang Rihm's The Conquest of Mexico in May 1992; the work is being staged in Ulm this season. Are people staying away? When Zimmermann took over, performances were filled to an average of 40 percent capacity; today, an advertising push and eighteen modern operas later, the average is more like 70 percent. Whether this increase is because of or in spite of the modern works remains a moot point.

Advocates of traditional opera overlook the fact that the theaters with the greatest traditions have those traditions because they were centers for the performance of new operas. Jonas notes that Munich once took chances on contemporary works called Idomeneo and Tristan und Isolde. Dresden, under the leadership of Ernst von Schuch, staged the first German Tosca and the world premieres of nine of Richard Strauss' fifteen operas.

Leipzig's tradition, while long, is not quite so exalted as Munich's or Dresden's. Today, however, it is the only other German house to go comparably far out on a limb. With 1,600 seats to fill -- it's the fourth largest house in Germany, after Munich, Berlin and Hamburg -- this may be a financially dangerous route. Yet "Zimmermann is doing exactly the right thing," says Dresden's intendant, Christoph Albrecht, in an interview with Opern Welt. "He's faced with the fact that his house is clearly too large for Leipzig, so he's putting on modern opera and keeping his theater in the international picture. In light of this, it would be hard for any city councilor to suggest that the house be closed."

"In Germany," according to Zimmermann, "the attitude of opera administrators tends to be 'I have the money -- now what am I going to do with it?' when the question should be 'I want to make art -- now how will I finance it?' To define ourselves by what we have, rather than by who we are, would be the end of civilization. But that's also bureaucracy.

"I'm still 2,000,000 marks short for the anniversary festival," he adds cheerfully. "All the contracts are signed, but I don't have the money. I have to continue the fight for private funds. I'm not dependent on this job. But I believe I have a task to fulfill here. I'm trying to bring my Utopia to opera administration. Only artists can save opera from the bureaucrats. It's important to understand that art is not just a metaphor for Utopia, it's an actual life aid. It protects our inner world. It's a part of our culture, a part of human life."

Zimmermann's optimism is unusual in Germany, as is his sense of proportion in matters financial ("We should be very happy with the current situation, because it won't stay like this. And with children starving in Somalia, you can't complain about money"). Rather than focusing on the lack of funds, he's continued to explore and innovate, making Leipzig one of the most interesting houses in Germany today.

In his notion of what it means to be an artist, however, he voices an attitude that is a cornerstone of the inflated system of government subsidies -- the idea that an artist is an exalted being who deserves money simply by virtue of being himself. It's a nice concept. But postwar Germany is the only society that ever actually has realized this principle in every area of culture on such a scale, and for such a length of time.

Now that the financial underpinnings of the German system are threatened, it seems that one thing the system has created is a large community of artists-cum-officials, ready to squeal at the first hint of risk to their considerable material comfort. Yet as the current situation is not going to be able to continue, the "artists" in the opera system may have to relearn the maxim that one has to struggle to make art, finding a better way to express themselves than the repetition of plaints about their financial woes. Streamlining a system supposedly based on the glorification of the arts could well lead to a confrontation, and rediscovery, of what art in general, and opera in particular, are all about.

This is the conclusion of a two-part article.

OPERA NEWS, August, 1993 Copyright ©1993 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.